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"Yelle, Robert A"
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Semiotics of religion : signs of the sacred in history
Following the heyday of Lévi-Straussian structuralism in the 1970s-80s, little attention has been paid by scholars of religion to semiotics. Semiotics of Religion reassesses key semiotic theories in the light of religious data. Yelle examines the semiotics of religion from structural and historical perspectives, drawing on Peircean linguistic anthropology, Jakobsonian poetics, comparative religion and several theological traditions. This book pays particular attention to the transformation of religious symbolism under modernization and the rise of a culture of the printed book. Among the topics addressed are: - ritual repetition and the poetics of ritual performance
- magic and the belief in a natural (iconic) language
- Protestant literalism and iconoclasm
- disenchantment and secularization
- Holiness, arbitrariness, and agency
Building from the legacy of structuralism while interrogating several key doctrines of that movement, Semiotics of Religion both introduces the field to a new generation and charts a course for future research.
eBook
Was Aśoka really a secularist avant-la-lettre? Ancient Indian pluralism and toleration in historical perspective
Focusing on Rajeev Bhargava's claim that Aśoka was a secularist avant-la-lettre, I dispute the common understanding of secularism as the separation of religion and politics, and argue instead that such separation, to the extent that it existed, was characteristic of traditional religious societies. I then offer an alternative history of secularism as the demise of the traditional balance of power between church and state, and the rise of a unitary state which incorporated a civil religion that excluded competing forms of religiosity within its domain. This model of secularism, exemplified by the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, fits Aśoka's Dhamma better than the separationist model does.
Journal Article
Explaining Mantras
First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Robert A. Yelle has a Ph.D. in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago. He spent a year as a Fulbright-Hays Fellow researching Tantric ritual in Calcutta, India, and has published articles in Numen , Religion , and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion .
eBook
Chastening and Disciplining Comparison: Bruce Lincoln and Oliver Freiberger on the Comparative Method in the Study of Religion
Abstract
The article reviews two recent books on comparison in the study of religion authored by prominent scholars. Long out of vogue, comparison now must be defended as a or even the central methodology for religious studies. Both philology and critical theory have collaborated to undermine the universalist assumptions on which earlier grand comparisons in the study of religion based themselves. The question is whether the two books considered here manage to rescue comparison from its critics. My reading here suggests that a more robust defense may be needed.
Journal Article
Comparative Religion as Cultural Combat: Occidentalism and Relativism in Rajiv Malhotra's \Being Different\
Rajiv Malhotra's book, Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism (2011), serves as a barometer of the current culture wars. It is evidence of the success of postcolonial studies in shifting the topic away from Europeans defining Hinduism and other formerly colonized traditions to members of those other traditions defining both themselves and the West. It also highlights some of the problems that may arise when postcolonial ressentiment and cultural relativism are allowed to overrule scholarly judgment. An examination of Malhotra's Being Different is offered, focusing on the themes of occidentalism and relativism contained in the book.
Journal Article
The Hindu Moses: Christian Polemics Against Jewish Ritual and the Secularization of Hindu Law under Colonialism
Gil Anidjar argues that the paradigm for hierarchical opposition between secularism and religion was, first, that between Christianity and Judaism and, subsequently, and no less dramatically, that between Christianity and Islam. Here, Yelle illustrates one case in which Anidjar's insight holds true, defines secularization more precisely, and examines Jewish rituals. He also provides colonial accounts of Hindu law or dharmasastra and highlights the manner in which that tradition ostensibly confounded religion with law especially with ritual.
Journal Article
After Secular Law
Many today place great hope in law as a vehicle for the transformation of society and accept that law is autonomous, universal, and above all, secular. Yet recent scholarship has called into question the simplistic narrative of a separation between law and religion and blurred the boundaries between these two categories, enabling new accounts of their relation that do not necessarily either collapse them together or return law to a religious foundation.
This work gives special attention to the secularism of law, exploring how law became secular, the phenomenology of the legal secular, and the challenges that lingering religious formations and other aspects of globalization pose for modern law's self-understanding. Bringing together scholars with a variety of perspectives and orientations, it provides a deeper understanding of the interconnections between law and religion and the unexpected histories and anthropologies of legal secularism in a globalizing modernity.
eBook
The ends of sacrifice: Mel Gibson's Apocalypto as a Christian apology for colonialism
The article argues that Mel Gibson's film Apocalypto (2006) offers a Christian defence of European colonialism as the agency that ends the brutality of Mayan sacrifice. In doing so, the director deploys symbols and techniques borrowed from Christian typology, which depicted the Crucifixion as the end of Jewish sacrifice. A comparison of Apocalypto with Gibson's earlier film The Passion of the Christ (2004) suggests that the former is actually a sequel to the latter. Apocalypto extends Gibson's robust defence of traditional Christianity to the New World, and is a counterargument to protests against Columbus Day.
Journal Article