Dismantling classification: Jonathan Z. Smith

Culianu’s initial turn to science to bypass phenomenological sterility was certainly remarkable, but not unprecedented. A similar interest in natural classification prompted Jonathan Z.

Inspired by an ongoing interdisciplinary Marxist reconciliation with Kantian philosophy and Freudian psychoanalysis, impressed by German philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s (1874-1945) article ‘Structuralism in Modern Linguistics’ (1945), and critical of the phenomenology of religion since his structuralist BA thesis entitled ‘A Prolegomenon to a General Phenomenology of Myth’ (Haverford College, 1960), Smith earned his PhD at Yale Divinity School in 1969, discussing a dissertation on ‘The Glory, Jest and Riddle: James George Frazer and The Golden Bough’ (Smith 2004: 3, 7, 29 n. 38). While working on his PhD project, Smith was employed first at Dartmouth College (1965-1966) and then at the University of Santa Barbara, California (1966­1968), where he met Eliade for the first time when Eliade was serving as Visiting Professor, while Smith had just returned from an interview at the University of Chicago. In 1968, Smith became assistant professor at the Divinity School of Chicago, and later full professor from 1975 until his retirement in 2013, resigning from his Divinity school affiliation in 1977 (Smith 2004: 4-12).

Depite these humanistic interests, the methodological roots of Smith’s ideas were deeply embedded in the fertile humus of natural history. From his youth, Smith had a keen interest in biology. His first scholarly paper publication was a quantitative study about the ‘average number of milkweed plants (Asclepias sp.) per acre, undertaken in support of the Royal Ontario Museum’s monarch butterfly migration project’ (Smith 2004: 2).

Comparison was the trait d’union between his botanical and taxonomic interests and religions: ‘I think that’s what got me interested in grass - how many kinds of grass there are. I’m fascinated by how many kinds of religions there are, how many kinds of Bibles there are. Linnaeus gave us a way of talking about the diversity of grasses’ (Sinhababu 2008; cf. Smith 2004: 19). However, the most important taxonomic influence for Smith’s subsequent theoretical works on religion was not Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae but modern quantitative taxonomic classifications which, starting from the 1960s, marked a paradigm shift in the biological sciences (Smith 2004: 22).

The two major innovations in the field of biological classification, at that time still stuck in an unresolved tension between progressive, evolutionary, Darwinian and static, non-evolutionary, Linnean concepts of taxa, were phenetics and cladistics, promptly acknowledged by Smith (1990: 47-8 n. 25; Smith 2000). Phenetics, also known as numerical taxonomy, was a ‘phenomenological approach to systematics’ in which classification renounced phylogeny (i.e. historical relationships) and focused on natural similarity in order to create a theory-free model and avoid preconceived ideas about ranking and clustering (Rieppel 2008: 296). In a word, phenetics avoided interpretation, which had been instead reputed the key to order organisms by previous evolutionary systematists (Stuessy 2009: 71).

Betraying, like Culianu, the influence of ahistorical morphology, Smith focused on synchronic phenetics for the analysis of a historical case study (in Smith’s case, circumcision in early Judaism) (Smith 1982: 4, a paper originally delivered in 1978). In his article, Smith pleaded for the adoption of numerical taxonomy in the HoR to cluster religious taxa within the same tradition according to a polythetic classification. However, as Benson Saler has noted, there was no attempt to use phenetics p ractically in Smith’s essay, it was merely exploited as a tool with which to think (Saler 2000: 180). Limiting his foray into taxonomy as a preliminary theoretical effort, Smith recognized that it was ‘premature to suppose a proper polythetic classification of Judaism [although] it is possible to be clear about what it would entail’ (Smith 1982: 8). And yet, subsequent research by Smith did indeed retreat from such a practical attempt to an increasingly theoretical corner, possibly because disillusioned by the increasing criticism faced by phenetics, especially by its main competitor and eventual defeater, cladistics, or phylogenetic systematics (Saler 2000: 180-96).

Notwithstanding this setback, Smith’s interest in theoretical taxonomy, fuelled by his passion in natural sciences, was to lead him to outshine his peers and colleagues. It is impossible to provide here a comprehensive account of Smith’s career (e.g. McCutcheon 2008), but I reproduce below a single excerpt, published in 1982 as an introduction to the same volume that included his reflections on numerical taxonomy:

while there is a staggering amount of data, phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religious - there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy. For this reason, the student of religion, [...] must be relentlessly self-conscious. Indeed, this self-consciousness constitutes his primary expertise, his foremost object of study.

Smith 1982: 11; original emphasis

This is, by far, the most ground-breaking statement in the whole modern HoR, the one that enjoyed the most outstanding popularity, the one which attracted the most visceral attacks, and the first to endorse a transition from HoR to RS, creating from the inside a disciplinary niche to pursue such a postmodern, critical study. We will come back to Smith's statements and his relationships with phenetics later in this chapter.