Religion and Cultural Studies

Susan L. Mizruchi

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691005034, 9780691005027
• eBook ISBN: 9780691224046
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Americans have never been more religious than they are now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century. By all reports, attendance rates at traditional places of worship are high and rising; the influx of new immigrant religions has revitalized standard faiths and drawn in those who had strayed from them. Popular television shows like "The Simpsons" feature characters who go to church every Sunday and speak to God; special events, like the 1998 outdoor mass in Worcester, Massachusetts, for a comatose girl believed to have miraculous powers, attract thousands of people.


This collection is both part of this ferment and an intellectual reflection upon it. Religion and Cultural Studies features essays by major scholars from the fields of anthropology, history, literary criticism, and religion in order to enrich critical discourse about religion and culture. Despite the variety of disciplines represented by this group of scholars and the variety of cultures explored in their essays--from fifteenth-century Flemish asceticism and nineteenth-century African-American spiritualism to Russian blood-libel trials and Alien Abduction Reports in the twentieth century--their common ground is the question of religion's place in current American academic analysis, and more broadly in American life today. The volume's range of vocabulary and subject matter is aimed at vitalizing scholarly interest in the field of religion and cultural studies and deepening intellectual inquiry in the contemporary academy.


The contributors are Eytan Bercovitch, Karen McCarthy Brown, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Richard Wightman Fox, Jenny Franchot, Giles Gunn, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Bruce B. Lawrence, Jack Miles, Susan L. Mizruchi, and Jonathan Z. Smith.

1

Close Encounters of Diverse Kinds

JONATHAN Z. SMITH

Noah sail’d round the Mediterranean in Ten Years, and divided the World into Asia, Afric and Europe, Portions for his three Sons. America then, it seems, was left to be his that could catch it.

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1698), Treatise One, ch. XI, par. 142.

I

To signal at the outset, as Steven Spielberg has done, the indebtedness of my title, I remind you of the labors of the late Chicago-area professor, J. Allen Hynek, to put the study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) on a scientific basis.¹ In Hynek’s typology, “close encounters of the first kind” are where alien ships are sighted; in the “second kind,” the UFOs leave some physical mark of their presence; “close encounters of the third kind” are where contacts with the occupants of a UFO are made.² It will be with a variant of the latter “kind” with which we shall initially be concerned, considered, recently, by some to be a distinctive new type, “close encounters of the fourth kind.”³

Since the fall of 1957, when a Brazilian farmer, Antonio Villas Boas, reported that a spaceship had landed on his farm, the occupants taking him aboard and performing a variety of physical acts on him,⁴ a specific mode of American UFO tale has emerged, and found a secure, iconic place in popular culture: the Abduction Report.⁵

The first North American version was that of Betty and Barney Hill in the White Mountains of New Hampshire on the evening of September 19, 1961; it was widely disseminated through the television movie, The UFO Incident, and more recently reconfigured in a characteristically ingenious fashion in the late, lamented TV series, Dark Skies.⁶ The Travis Walton narrative (Arizona, November 1975), recounting his five-day capture, the subject of the Paramount film, Fire in the Sky, is, perhaps, best known, having received nationwide media attention.⁷ The most developed, all but canonical report, is the Betty Andreasson narrative.⁸ The most popular account remains Whitley Strieber’s best seller, Communion (1987), presented as an autobiographical recounting of a series of experiences undergone by this well-known writer of horror stories.⁹

In all, by 1987, some 1200 North American abductions were filed under the name of the abductee; 600 to 700 narratives had been collected; 300 of these were carefully studied by the folklorist, Thomas E. Bullard, with 103 considered by Bullard to be “high information cases.”¹⁰ Bullard’s comparative studies suggest that there is a persistent structure to Abduction Reports, with the same episodes recurring in invariant order in 80% of the “high information” narratives.¹¹ “A single deviation accounts for failure of sequence in almost all of the remainder.”¹² Bullard distinguishes eight episodes.¹³ By his own statistics, I would reduce the number to seven.

1. Capture. The aliens take the individual aboard a UFO.¹⁴

2. Examination. The aliens subject the individual to both physical and mental tests.¹⁵ The first two episodes, capture and examination, are the most developed segments of the Abduction Reports. With the obvious addition of the penultimate episode, the return, they recur most frequently and contain the highest degree of repetitive elements.

To elaborate on the examination episode: once aboard, the human is taken to the examination room, a central, circular location, with a dome, dominated by an examination table, and usually lacking all other furniture. The placement of the room suggests that the ship was constructed with examination as its primary purpose. The abductee is stripped, cleaned, and placed on the table where she or he is subjected to a searching physical examination. The first stage is manual; the second, scanning with a mechanical device. Next, various needle-like instruments probe beneath the skin, with specimens of various sorts, especially bodily fluids, being taken. Either the ovaries or the testicles are probed in what seems to be the preoccupation of the examination with the reproductive system. (In one report, a male’s examination was terminated and he was abruptly released because he had had a vasectomy). Finally, neurological tests are administered, at times climaxed by the insertion of some sort of miniaturized electronic device in the brain.

Significantly, it is most often in the context of the examination episode that we are given the fullest physical description of the aliens. While more than one hundred types of alien beings have been described in UFO reports and classified in taxonomic studies by Jadar U. Pereira, Eric Zurcher, David Chance, Patrick Huyghe, Kevin Randle, and Russ Estes,¹⁶ most commonly, in North American abduction narratives, they are represented as humanoids, three to five feet tall, with soft gray skin. Popularly referred to as “the Grays,” they have large hairless heads with tapering chins. Their eyes are large, extending around the sides of their heads like wraparound sunglasses. Their ears are tiny or absent, the nose and mouth are small holes. Their limbs are thin, with arms that reach to their knees. Their fingers are elongated, with less than five visible digits. Their legs are often short and oddly jointed, producing an awkward gait. They are most often represented as clothed in a neutrally colored, close-fitting garment which appears to be a uniform, at times belted or with a hood. There are usually no visual sexual characteristics. One alien, in some reports taller than the others, in other reports indistinguishable from the rest, serves as leader and liaison, both directing the examination and communicating with the human, frequently in a reassuring manner.¹⁷

3. Conference. The effects of the examination on the abductee are often described in terms ranging from discomfort and embarrassment to pain and terror consistent with its nature as a rape-like violation of a helpless subject. However, following the examination, the next reported episode is a conference between the aliens and the human, usually by means of telepathic communication, which, without supplying the reasons, claims a shift in attitude by the abductee towards the aliens from fear and hostility to friendly, positive feelings.¹⁸

Beginning in the mid-1980s, a different sort of narrative has emerged which describes the examination as sexual abuse, often related to an alien project of producing human-alien hybrids. This focus brings about a concomitant decline in the number of reports of a positive conference, the conference often being replaced by a horrified viewing of the hybrid embryos or children.¹⁹

4. Tour. The conference is usually followed by an escorted tour of the ship.²⁰

5. Journey. The ship then leaves its landing site and conveys the human to a “strange place,” usually not identified as the aliens’ home base. In a very few cases, a “divine” figure is encountered.²¹

6. Return. A necessary part of the narrative structure of the Abduction Report, the return tale is usually quite brief, often reversing the capture sequence. The human is escorted out of the ship, frequently to the place of initial contact, and watches the UFO’s departure.²²

7. Aftermath. A distinctive feature of Abduction Reports is that they do not conclude with the reintegration of the abductee into society or the resumption of ordinary life. She or he remains strongly marked by the experience, exhibiting a variety of often puzzling symptoms.²³ Acute thirst and the need to bathe are the most immediate. Later, there will be nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety attacks, and noticeable personality changes, often relieved by remembering the experience under hypnosis. Others report further paranormal experiences, incidents of extrasensory perception, or visions of “men in black,” a subtype, studied by Peter M. Rojcewicz, which seems to be one of a number of subordinate elements which interpret the abduction experience as demonic. (Note that the recent Columbia-Amblin film, Men in Black, has quite inverted the significance of these figures).²⁴ In a few cases, further abductions, or recollections of previous abductions, are reported.

It will serve little purpose, here, to pause over the question of the truth of these reports, or to rehearse the various theories, from the psychoanalytic to the folkloristic, that have been brought to their interpretation.²⁵ For our reflections, their nature as narratives allow them to be linked with Mark Rose’s “paradigm” for science fiction: texts that “are composed within the semantic space created by the opposition of human . . . and non-human,”²⁶ and our attention is directed to their most elaborated episode and theme, the examination.

It may seem a simple conclusion to assert, with Bullard, that in these narratives, “the examination appears to be the real purpose of the encounter,”²⁷ and yet, this is quite remarkable. When one reads in the wider UFO literature, and, most particularly, in the alien contact or encounter literature produced by the stunning variety of UFO religions,²⁸ a variety of other motivations prevail: they are from a superior culture and bring us wisdom; they are from a threatened culture and bring us warning; they are from a dying planet or species which needs something from us; they come to lead; they come to share; they come to give; they come to exploit; they come to punish; they come to replace; they come to destroy. Whatever the scenario, there are interests at stake, be they ours, theirs, or mutual. By contrast, in the Abduction Reports, there are rarely explicit motivations.²⁹ Rather than interests, there seems only to be interest, or, better, disinterested observation, a curiosity often felt to be prurient by the abductee.

At one level, the Abduction Reports seem to be a modernist version of the literary subgenre, reverse anthropology, well known through texts such as Gulliver's Travels. Americans are captured as specimens. They are helpless. They are manipulated (literally) without regard to their feelings as if they were not of the same order as their examiners. The humans are stripped, cleaned, and probed for incomprehensible reasons. Their only acknowledged function is that of providing data. And yet, faithful to the all but pornographic male fantasy of the ethnographic enterprise, the abductees’ own emotions at being violated begin with fear and hostility and end with good will. It is only the concluding episode, the aftermath, which challenges this dominant scientific romance as the narratives go on to record the aftershocks, the posttraumatic effects of the encounter. Once examined, nothing is (or will be) ever the same again.

While it is tempting to develop these themes into a contemporary fable, one which would invoke a host of images from discipline and panopticons to the ambivalences of post-colonial discourses, something does not fit. Above all, it is the silence—not a lack of communication, but a lack of interrogation.³⁰ The aliens betray no interest in human culture, and impart nothing of their own. There is no trace of the interspecific, interlocutory agendum of cultural encounter which informs ethnographically sophisticated science fiction novels such as Chad Oliver’s Unearthly Neighbors (New York, 1960); which underlies the recent essay by Jonathan vos Post, “How to Talk to an Extraterrestrial”³¹; or which was raised at the 1970 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in their symposium, “The Role of Anthropology in Outer Space.”³² Indeed, as has been noted, while not the explicit subject of the reports, there is a silent, mutual examination of bodies, ours and thei...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Close Encounters of Diverse Kinds
• Chapter 2: Telling a Life through Haitian Vodou: An Essay Concerning Race, Gender, Memory, and Historical Consciousness
• Chapter 3: Unseemly Commemoration: Religion, Fragments, and the Icon
• Chapter 4: The Place of Ritual in Our Time
• Chapter 5: Human Solidarity and the Problem of Otherness
• Chapter 6: Ascetics, Aesthetics, and the Management of Desire
• Chapter 7: New Baptized: The Culture of Love in America, 1830s to 1950s
• Chapter 8: “The Mystery of Life in All Its Forms”: Religious Dimensions of Culture in Early American Anthropology
• Chapter 9: Global Requiem: The Apocalyptic Moment in Religion, Science, and Art
• Chapter 10: The Altar of Sin: Social Multiplicity and Christian Conversion among a New Guinea People
• Chapter 11: God On Line: Locating the Pagan/Asian Soul of America in Cyberspace
• Selected Bibliography
• Index of Names