Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture.
Morgan, David
Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture. By David
Chidester. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. xii + 294 pp.
$50.00 cloth; $19.95 paper.
There are several schools in the study of popular culture. One, the
monographic approach, produces articles and books that focus on the
careers of institutions, on ad campaigns, product designs,
entrepreneurs, and on the ubiquitous commodities that take on a life of
their own. The second school deals in qualitative or quantitative
studies of social patterns, attitudes, consumer behavior, and uses and
preferences, rational or otherwise. Whether ethnographic or sociological
in nature, this approach tends to focus on the things people do or say,
and is better able to assess reception than the production-orientation
of the monographic school. A third school, what may be called the
"riff" school of popular culture studies, avoids the
microhistory of the first and the number-crunching audience research of
the second. The riff school deals in metaphor, relying on rhetorical
analysis to leap from the particular to the universal, or at least to
the really big. To do so, riffers rely on theory. They are propelled to
craft their ambitious interpretations by the same motive that drives
conspiracy theorists: the sense that nothing is what it seems, and that
everything is littered with clues to its "real," underlying
meaning. When riffers are at their best, the results are exhilarating;
at their worst, ludicrous.
Riffers must have a personality to impart to the whirling energy of
thematic variations that constitutes their intellectual performance.
Without it, they produce flat, uncompelling accounts. Happily, David
Chidester combines a sympathetic ear with a taste for the outlandish,
and a touch as bold as it can be delicate. And he has a great sense of
humor, reflected in the many anecdotes that enrich his discussion. If
the rifling pulls thin here and there, the reader is compensated by the
author's feel for the constructive work of popular religion, which
Chidester discerns in the ways that even the kookiest practices and
narratives enable people to negotiate "what it is to be human"
(18). An American abroad, living in South Africa, Chidester sees the
nation on a global stage and consistently delivers a big picture,
reflecting a current initiative to internationalize the study of the
United States, to see the nation's culture and history through the
eyes of the several billion other inhabitants of the planet.
Chidester's book offers several things that will be very
useful for current studies of American popular culture and religion.
First, as mentioned, he globalizes the study of his topic by showing how
the United States has been regarded by others in religious terms--as
demon, as hero, as savior--and how porous the national boundaries are in
the history of transatlantic and global migration to the States as well
as imperial exploits of American foreign policy and of the commercial
equivalent of religious missionaries, corporate giants like Coca-Cola,
Disney, and McDonalds, who go forth with a zeal to conquer in the name
of the profit. Second, he situates the more conventional study of
religious institutions within the company of studies of symbolic systems
geared to the fetish and studies of the gift. Church, fetish, and gift
designate three models of religion that Chidester proves work very well
to examine the varying ways in which religion happens within popular
culture. The latter two, fetish and gift, have obvious relevance to
commodity and commerce, and Chidester offers very perceptive readings.
Another virtue of the book is the effective way in which it calls
attention to the subtle but powerful ways in which religion takes shape
in popular culture. A witty chapter on plastics explores the religious
nature of Tupperware. One on "virtual religion" extends the
history of testing for fakery to the internet in a riff on the
book's central theme of the authentic religious work that fakes
perform. Religion, like America, is up for grabs; belief and the nation
are fundamentally protean. That is the nation's strength--it can be
made into whatever people want; but that also means its culture is full
of things that will inevitably appear blatant concoctions to others. A
chapter on "embodied religion" calls for the need to attend to
the tactile dimension of religion, which has been overshadowed by
interest in the aural and ocular features of religious culture.
Chidester plays on tactile tropes that pepper religious discourse,
demonstrating how pervasive the body is as an overlooked register for
religious experience. Chidester's point about aurality is
underscored by the primacy of the spoken and written word in Judaism,
Christianity, Islam, and the "cult" of Enlightenment
rationalism, all of which authorize the sermon (or lecture) and the
reading of sacred texts as the primary medium of worship. He attributes
the preponderance of ocularity to the oppressive, even tyrannical theory
of the gaze found in Lacan, Foucault, and those theorists of cultural
studies who regard vision in terms of a heavy-handed system of
surveillance. On both counts, Chidester's argument for recovering
tactility is laudable.
But shall the task be to replace the study of seeing and hearing
with the study of tactile feeling in religion? A robust approach would
integrate to one degree or another all sensoria into the study of
religion, especially popular religion, because that is how lived
religion happens. Human beings are more than a pair of eyes or ears or
hands. They are a dense intermingling of all of those (and more) since
mapping one sense over another affords richer sensation and more
generative meaning-making. After all, for many Americans to see a Coke
ad is to want to be "saved" from thirst by gulping the
beverage; to hear the national anthem is to feel a rush of totemic
pride; to be touched by the small gift of a greeting card is to want to
behold the loved one who sent it. Chidester's book is a call for
integrative thinking. His clear prose, large scope, amusing anecdotes,
theoretical sophistication, and broad reading will make this book a hit
in the classroom as well as a singular contribution to the scholarly
literature on popular religion and the religions of the United States.
David Morgan
Valparaiso University
