‘Religion natural for Marxist” ran a headline in the Cape Times when Phillip Dexter received his master’s degree in religious studies in 1997. At the time Dexter was on the ANC’s national executive committee and in the leadership of the South African Communist Party.
Despite changes in the political landscape, which find him 13 years later as an MP and national spokesperson for Cope, Dexter has pursued the academic study of religion. His PhD in religious studies was awarded by the University of Cape Town (UCT) on December 20 last year.
Politicians sometimes receive honorary degrees. In this case a politician went through the rigorous process of supervision and international examination to earn his doctorate.
Dexter’s PhD is the culmination of many years of research into the sacred dynamics of society. His thesis, “Towards a Political Economy of the Sacred”, is a fresh look at religion, economics and politics. Returning to primary Marxist texts, Dexter develops a materialist theory of the sacred.
He shows how the sacred is produced through symbolic labour, through religious work. He analyses how sacred value, from the fetish to money, circulates through society but inevitably becomes symbolic property as people fight over its ownership. Politics, like religion, deals in the sacred.
In recent years an increasing number of professionals have been studying for advanced degrees in the humanities at UCT. They are proving that lifelong learning can be more than just a slogan. Learning can expand professional capacity, but it can also enrich our engagement with the world.
This year UCT will also award the PhD in religious studies to Varun Soni, dean of religious life at the University of Southern California. In his thesis, “Music, Media and Mysticism”, Soni develops an original comparative framework for understanding two great musicians, Bob Marley and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, as prophetic mediators of religion, politics and popular culture. As a result of Soni’s research, we can hear the music in new ways as sacred politics.
Karl Jechoutek, economic analyst and former economist with the World Bank, earned the PhD in religious studies for a thesis that examines the relation between religious competition and economic activity in Cape Town between 1820 and 1850. His doctoral thesis, “Religious Competition, Creole Identities and Economic Development”, helps us understand the history of an individualism that is directed towards achieving short-term gains. In Jechoutek’s thesis we can see the deep religious background of economic individualism in Cape Town.
Likewise, Raffaella Delle Donne, an independent journalist and film-maker, earned the PhD in religious studies for a thesis titled “Vanishing Primitives, Shaking Shamans and Trance Dancers”, which explores how North American enthusiasts of New Age spirituality have identified with the religious life of the San of Southern Africa. Some, like American author Bradford Keeney, even claim to be a “Bushman shaman”. In Delle Donne’s thesis, we see the global exchanges in spirituality in which Southern African resources have been exploited.
These professionals in the fields of politics, university administration, economics and creative arts have all found value in pursuing advanced research in the academic study of religion. Religious studies, at first glance, might seem a strange field of study for them. After all, they do not want to be professional priests, ministers, mystics or shamans.
But the study of religion, as pursued in the faculty of humanities at UCT, encompasses the entire range of what it means to be human in relation to the transcendent, the sacred or the ultimate concerns of human life. Religion, in this sense, might refer to the more than human, but it is at least human. As a human phenomenon, religion is a fruitful field of study for a humanities faculty.
For better or worse, religious myths and doctrines, rituals and ethics percolate through personal and social life. Religious studies analyses these dynamics, not religiously, but with all the tools developed in the human and social sciences. To study religion as something important that human beings do, we need to draw upon psychology and sociology, history and politics, arts and literature. If we can learn to think about religion, we can learn to think about anything.
As these new PhDs have shown, religion is not confined to churches, mosques, temples or synagogues. It is not defined by census-takers or controlled by the state. Their doctoral research finds religious consensus and conflict in political mobilisation, religious vision in popular music, religious ethics in economic activity and religious entrepreneurship in global spirituality.
Of course, it remains to be seen how their research will enhance their professional lives. Will they be better filmmakers, economists, administrators or even politicians, whether in power or in opposition?
As their supervisor, I would like to think that the research of these new PhDs is valuable in its own right by making an original contribution to human knowledge. That is what a university should be about. However, even if I like to think of myself as a useless academic, I am happy that these professionals have found the academic study of religion to be useful.
There is a joke about degrees in the humanities: an undergraduate degree prepares you for honours, honours prepares you for master’s, master’s prepares you for a PhD and a PhD prepares you for unemployment. Not funny, not true. A survey of PhD graduates in religious studies, for example, finds everyone working, with roughly one-third in academic positions, one-third in community work and one-third in professions such as teaching, public health, government service and international market research.
A PhD in the humanities is not idle speculation or a ticket to enter an ivory tower. The professionals receiving PhDs from UCT in 2010 disprove such stereotypes and prove that a PhD in the humanities is good for the real world.
David Chidester is professor of religious studies at the University of Cape Town
