June
11, 1963, in Saigon, Vietnam, a Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc
immolated himself in a busy intersection. The following is an excerpt
taken from my Manufacturing Religion, pp. 167-177, which discusses this incident.
Representing Vietnamese "Self-Immolations"
The
often-occluded relations among power, imperial politics, and the
specific portrayals of religious issues is perhaps no more apparent than
in the case of the interpretations American media and intellectuals
gave to the much-publicized actions of several Vietnamese Buddhists who,
beginning in mid-June of 1963, died by publicly setting themselves on
fire. The first of these deaths occurred at a busy downtown intersection
in Saigon, on 11 June 1963, and was widely reported in American
newspapers the following day, although the New York Times, along
with many other newspapers, declined to print Malcolm Browne's famous,
or rather infamous, photograph of the lone monk burning (Moeller 1989:
404). The monk, seventy-three-year-old Thich Quang Duc, sat at a busy
downtown intersection and had gasoline poured over him by two fellow
monks. As a large crowd of Buddhists and reporters watched, he lit a
match and, over the course of a few moments, burned to death while he
remained seated in the lotus position. In the words of' David
Halberstam, who was at that time filing daily reports on the war with
the New York Times,
I
was to see that sight again, but once was enough. Flames were coming
from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his
head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning
flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear
the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked
to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to
even think.... As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a
sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people
around him. (1965: 211)
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After
his funeral, where his remains were finally reduced to ashes, Quang
Duc's heart, which had not burned, was retrieved, enshrined, and treated
as a sacred relic (Schecter 1967: 179).
In
spite of the fact that this event took place during the same busy news
week as the civil rights movement in the United States was reaching a
peak (with the enrollment of the first two black students at the
University of Alabama and in the same week as the murder, in Jackson,
Mississippi, of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers), as the week
progressed, Quang Duc's death and the subsequent demonstrations
associated with his funeral were covered by the American media in
greater detail. From the small initial article on page three of the New York Times on
12 June that reported the death accompanied only by a photograph of a
nearby protest that prevented a fire truck from reaching the scene, the
story was briefly summarized and updated on page five the next day and
then was moved to the lead story, on page one on 14 June 1963,
accompanied by the following headline: "U.S. Warns South Vietnam on
Demands of Buddhists: [South Vietnamese President] Diem is told he faces
censure if he fails to satisfy religious grievances, many o which are
called just." The story, no longer simply involving the actions of a
lone Buddhist monk but now concerned with the official U.S. reaction,
remained on page one for the following days, was reported in greater
detail by Halberstam in the Sunday edition (16 June 1963), and was
mentioned for the first time in an editorial column on 17 June 1963, one
week after it occurred. By the autumn o that year, the images of either
protesting or burning monks had appeared in a number of popular
magazines, most notably Life Magazine (June, August, September, and November issues).
In
spite of the wide coverage this event received in newspapers and the
popular presses, it seems puzzling that it received relatively little or
no treatment by scholars of religion. Apart from a few brief
descriptions of these events in an assortment of books on world
religions in general (such as Ninian Smart's World's Religions,
where it is interpreted as an "ethical" act [1989: 4471) or on Buddhism
in Southeast Asia, only one detailed article was published at that time,
in History of Religions, written by Jan Yiin-Hua (1965). This
article was concerned with examining the medieval Chinese Buddhist
precedents for Quang Duc's death, a death that quickly came to be
interpreted in the media as an instance of self-immolation, or
selfsacrifice, to protest religious persecution of the Buddhists in
South Vietnam by the politically and militarily powerful Vietnamese
Roman Catholics. According to such accounts, the origin of the protests
and, eventually, Quang Duc's death, was a previous demonstration, on 8
May 1963, in which government troops aggressively broke up a Buddhist
gathering in the old imperial city of Hue that was demonstrating for,
among other things, the right to fly the Buddhist flag along with the
national flag. The government, however, took no responsibility for the
nine Buddhists who died in the ensuing violence at that time, blaming
their deaths instead on Communists. Accordingly, outrage for what the
Buddhists considered to be the unusually violent actions of the
government troops at Hue was fueled over the following weeks,
culminating, according to this interpretation, in Quang Duc's
sacrificial death.
Given
that the event was generally acknowledged by most interpreters to be a
sacrifice, an essentially religious issue, it is no surprise that the
central concern of Jan was to determine how such actions could be
considered Buddhist, given their usually strict rules against killing in
general, and suicide in particular. In his own words, these actions
"posed a serious problem of academic interest, namely, what is the place
of religious suicide in religious history and what is its
justification?" (243). The reader is told that the monks' motivations
were "spiritual" and that their self-inflicted deaths were "religious
suicides," because "self-immolation signifies something deeper than
merely the legal concept of suicide or the physical action of
self-destruction" (243). Given that the event is self-evidently
religious (an interpretation that is based on an assumption that is
undefended), the question of greatest interest has little to do with the
possible political origins or overtones of the event but rather
"whether such a violent action is justifiable according to religious
doctrine" (243). It seems clear that for this historian of religions,
the action can only be properly understood-and eventually justified-once
it is placed in the context of texts written by Chinese Buddhist
specialists from the fifth century C.E. onward (e.g., theBiographies of Eminent Monks by Hui-chiao [497-554 C.E.] and the Sung Collection of Biographies of Eminent Monks by
Tsan-ning [919-1001 C.E.]). Jan's concern, then, is to determine
whether these actions were justifiable (something not properly the
concern of scholars of religion) exclusively on the basis of devotee
accounts, some of which were written over one thousand years before the
Vietnam War.
After
a survey of these texts, the article concludes that these actions are
indeed justifiable. Basing his argument on changing Chinese Buddhist
interpretations of self-inflicted suffering and death, Jan finds a "more
concrete emphasis upon the practical action needed to actualize the
spiritual aim" (265). Accordingly, these actions largely result from the
desire of elite devotees, inspired by scriptures (255), to demonstrate
great acts of selflessness (acts whose paradigms are to be found in
stories of the unbounded compassion and mercy of assorted bodhisattvas).
The closest Jan comes to offering a political interpretation of any of
these reported deaths is that the "politico-religious reasons" for some
scriptural instances of self-immolation are "protest against the
political oppression and persecution of their religion" (252).
In
terms of the dominance of the discourse on sui generis religion, this
article constitutes a fine example of how an interpretive framework can
effectively manage and control an event. Relying exclusively on
authoritative Chinese Buddhist texts and, through the use of these
texts, interpreting such acts exclusively in terms of doctrines and
beliefs (e.g., self-immolation, much like an extreme renunciant might
abstain from food until dying, could be an example of disdain for the
body in favor of the life of the mind and wisdom) rather than in terms
of their socio-political and historical context, the article allows its
readers to interpret these deaths as acts that refer only to a distinct
set of beliefs that happen to be foreign to the non-Buddhist. And when
politics is acknowledged to be a factor, it is portrayed as essentially
oppressive to a self-evidently pure realm of religious motivation and
action. In other words, religion is the victim of politics, because the
former is a priori known to be pure. And precisely because the action
and belief systems were foreign and exotic to the vast majority of
Americans, these actions needed to be mediated by trained textual
specialists who could utilize the authoritative texts of elite devotees
to interpret such actions. The message of such an article, then, is that
this act on the part of a monk can be fully understood only if it is
placed within the context of ancient Buddhist documents and precedents
rather than in the context of contemporary geopolitical debates. (And
further, that the ancient occurrences of such deaths can themselves be
fully understood only from the point of view of the intellectual
devotees [i.e., Buddhist historians].) That the changing geopolitical
landscape of South Asia in the early 1960s might assist in this
interpretation is not entertained. It is but another instance of the
general proscription against reductionism.
Such an idealist and conservative interpretation is also offered by several contributors to theEncyclopedia of Religion.
Marilyn Harran, writing the article on suicide (Eliade 1987: vol. 14,
125-131), agrees with Jan's emphasis on the need to interpret these
events in light of doctrine and in the light of spiritual elites. She
writes that although religiously motivated suicide (an ill-defined
category that prejudges the act) "may be appropriate for the person who
is an arhat, one who has attained enlightenment, it is still very
much the exception to the rule" (129). And Carl-Martin Edsman, writing
the article on fire (Eliade 1987: vol. 5, 340-346), maintains that
although death by fire can be associated with "moral, devotional, or
political reasons," it can also be "regarded as promoting rebirth into a
higher existence as a bodhisattva, an incipient Buddha, or
admittance to 'the paradise' of the Buddha Amitabha" (344). In a fashion
similar to the exclusive emphasis on the insider's perspective, and
having isolated such acts in the purer realm of religious doctrine and
belief, Edsman immediately goes on to assert that the "Buddhist suicides
in Vietnam in the 1960s were enacted against a similar background; for
this reason-unlike the suicides of their Western imitators-they do not
constitute purely political protest actions" (344). The "similar
background" of which he writes is the set of beliefs in a pure land,
compassion, selflessness, and so on, all of which enable Edsman to
isolate the Vietnamese deaths from issues of power and politics. Because
similar deaths in the United States took place' without the benefit of,
for example, a cyclical worldview and notions of rebirth, and the like,
he is able to conclude that the U.S. deaths by fire may have been
political. For Edsman, the doctrinal system of Buddhism provides a
useful mechanism for interpreting these acts as essentially ahistorical
and religious.
Some
will no doubt argue that, if indeed the discourse on sui generis
religion was at one time dominant, it no longer is. Even if one at least
acknowledges that the study of supposedly disembodied ideas and beliefs
is interconnected with material issues or power and privilege, it is
easy to banish and isolate such involvements to the field's prehistory,
its European, colonial past, in an attempt to protect the contemporary
field from such charges (recall Strenski's attempt to isolate interwar
European scholarship as a means of protecting the modern profession). To
rebut such isolationist arguments, one need look no further than
Charles Orzech's 1994 article, "Provoked Suicide," to find this
discourse in its contemporary forma form virtually unchanged since jan's
article was published some thirty years ago. Like Jan, Orzech attempts
to overcome the "huge cultural gulf that separated the observer from
those involved" (155) by placing Quang Duc’s tradition of what Orzech
terms the "self-immolation paradigms" (149) as well as the many other
stories of selfless action one finds throughout the mythic history of
Buddhism (e.g., from the jataka tales, the story of the bodhisattva who
willingly gives up his life to feed the hungry tigress). Also like Jan,
Orzech is concerned to answer one of the questions often asked about
these apparently puzzling Vietnamese Buddhists' actions: "whether
'religious suicide' was not a violation of Buddhist precepts condemning
violence" (145). Using Rene Girard's theory of sacrificial violence,
Orzech answers this question by recovering a distinction he believes to
be often lost in the study of Buddhism: its sacred violence as well as
its much emphasized nonviolent aspect (for a modern example of the
latter emphasis, see the essays collected by Kraft [1992]).
For
our purpose, what is most important to observe about both Jan's and
Orzech's reading of Quang Duc's action is that in neither case are
historical and political context of any relevance. In both cases, it is
as if the burning monk is situated in an almost Eliadean ritual time,
removed from the terrors of historical, linear time-a place of no place,
where the symbolism of fire is far more profound than the heat of the
fire itself. For example, in his interpretation of the early
selfimmolation tales, Orzech explicitly acknowledges that "(al)though little context information is available to us,
it is clear that in each case the sacrifice is performed as a remedy
for an intolerable situation" (154, emphasis added)--clearly, social and
political contexts are of little relevance for authoritatively
interpreting timeless ritual or religious actions. Several lines later,
when he addresses Quang Duc's death directly, Orzech effectively
secludes and packages this particular event within its insider,
doctrinal, and mythic context, by noting that the "politics are complex,
and I will not comment on them now" (154). At no point in his article
does he return in any detail to the geopolitics of mid-twentieth-century
Vietnam; instead, Quang Duc's actions are exclusively understood as
"sanctioned by myth and example in Buddhist history" and as reworked,
reenacted Vedic sacrificial patterns (156). Assuming that mythic history
communicated through elite insider documents provides the necessary
context for ultimately interpreting such actions, Orzech is able to draw
a conclusion concerning the actor's motivations and intentions:
"Quang Duc was seeking to preach the Dharma to enlighten both Diem and
his followers and John Kennedy and the American people" (156); "As an
actualization of mythic patterns of sacrifice it [the self-immolation]
was meant as a creative, constructive and salvific act, an act which
intended to remake the world for the better of everyone in it" (158).
Simply put, Quang Duc's death is an issue of soteriology.
In
both Jan's and Orzech's readings, as well as those of Harran and Edsman
cited earlier, the death of Quang Duc has nothing necessarily to do
with contemporary politics. In fact, it appears from the scholarship
examined here that to understand this death fully requires no
information from outside of elite Buddhist doctrine whatsoever. In all
four cases-much as in the case of the comparative religion textbooks
examined earlier-the discourse on sui generis religion effectively
operates to seclude so-called religious events within a mythic, symbolic
world all their own, where their adequate interpretation needs "little
contextual information." For example, in all these studies, Quang Duc is
never identified as a citizen of South Vietnam but is understood only
as a Buddhist monk, a choice of designation that already suggests the
discursive conflict I have documented. In other words, from the outset,
the parameters of the interpretive frame of reference are narrowly
restricted. Quang Duc is hardly a man acting in a complex sociopolitical
world, in which intentions, implications, and interpretations often fly
past each other. Instead, he is exclusively conceptualized as a
transhistorical, purely religious agent, virtually homologous with his
specifically religious forebears and ancestors. It is almost as if Thich
Quang Duc--the historical agent who died on 11 June 1963, by setting
himself on fire at a busy downtown intersection in Saigon--has, through
the strategies deployed by scholars of sui generis religion, been
transformed into a hierophany that is of scholarly interest only
insomuch as his actions can be understood as historical instances of
timeless origin and meaning.
However,
it is just as conceivable that for other scholars, the death of Thich
Quang Duc constitutes not simply "spiritually inspired engagement" but a
graphic example of an overtly political act directed not simply against
politically dominant Roman Catholics in his country but also at the
American-sponsored government of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh
Diem. This alternative framework, one that recognizes the power implicit
in efforts to represent human actions, is best captured by Catherine
Lutz and Jane Collins:
Coming
to political consciousness through the period of the Vietnam War, we
were acutely aware of the power of photographic images to evoke both
ethnocentric recoil and agonizing identification. Malcolm Browne's
famous photo of a Buddhist monk's self-immolation in Saigon was
profoundly disturbing to Western viewers, who could not fathom the
communicative intent of such an act. (1993: 4)
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According
to Paul Siegel, this event constituted an act of protest against the
Vietnamese government "which was carrying on a war of which they [the
Buddhists] were profoundly weary" (1986: 162). The distance between
these two readings is great indeed. On the one hand, one finds
representations varying from the Diem government's own press release
that, according to the New York Times, maintained that the event
was an example of "extremist and truth-concealing propaganda that sowed
doubt about the goodwill of the Government" (12 June 1963), to the Times' and Orzech's (1994: 154) portrayal of the protest as being against the specifically religious persecution
of the Buddhists by the powerful Roman Catholics. On the other hand,
however, one can question the relations between the presence of
Christianity in South Vietnam and European political, cultural,
military, and economic imperialism in the first place as well as
question the relations between Diem's government and his U.S. economic
and military backers. To concentrate only on the specifically religious
nature and origins of this protest, then, serves either to ignore or, in
the least, to minimalize a number of material and social factors
evident from other points of view using other scales of analysis.
Concerning
the links between Christianity and European imperialism in Southeast
Asia, it should be clear that much is at stake depending on how one
portrays the associations among European cultures, politics, religion,
and the ever increasing search for new trading markets. For example, one
can obscure the issue by simply discussing an almost generic "encounter
with the West," where "the West" stands in place of essentially
religious systems, such as Judaism and Christianity (for an example, see
Eller 1992). Or one can place these belief and practice systems within
their historical, social, and political contexts-a move that admittedly
complicates but also improves one's analysis. For instance, in practice,
the presence of Christianity was often indistinguishable from European
culture and trade. This point is made by Thich Nhat Hanh, in his attempt
to communicate the significance of Quang Duc's death for his American
readers. Much of his small book, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire (1967), is concerned with contextualizing this event by placing it not simply in a religious but also in
its wider historical, social, and political framework. Accordingly, of
great importance for him is not simply to identify elements of Buddhist
doctrine for his reader but to clarify early on that, since its first
appearance in Vietnam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Roman
Catholicism has always been "closely associated with white explorers,
with merchants, and ruling classes"-specifically with the explorers,
traders, and cultural and political elites of France between the years
1860 and 1945 (1967: 15). Whether intentional or not, the exportation of
Christianity throughout the world brought with it new people, new
architecture, new languages, new legal and ethical systems, new styles
of dress, new economic arrangements, new trading goods, and so on, all
based on the standards of large, powerful, and distant European
countries. Because of these interrelated issues, it is inaccurate and
misleading to understand Christian missionaries exclusively in terms of
what may very well have been their good intentions. Such missionaries
were part of a complex and interrelated system or bloc of power
relations, all of which presupposed that the other was in desperate need
of European-style education, economies, technologies, trade, wisdom,
and, ultimately, salvation. To understand missionaries as somehow
removed from this system of power would be to inscribe and protect them
by means of the sui generis strategy. Without the benefit of such a
protective strategy, however, it is easily understood how, at least in
the case of Vietnam, the popular belief arose that Christianity was the
religion of the West and "was introduced by them to facilitate their
conquest of Vietnam." As Thich Nhat goes on to conclude, this belief "is
a political fact of the greatest importance, even though [it] may be
based on suspicion alone" (20).
It
is completely understandable, therefore, that Thich Nhat takes issue
with circumscribing these provocative actions that took place in Vietnam
in the early 1960s as essentially sacrificial, suicidal, and religious.
In his words,
I
wouldn't want to describe these acts as suicide or even as sacrifice.
Maybe they [i.e., the actors themselves] didn't think of it as a
sacrifice. Maybe they did. They may have thought of their act as a very
natural thing to do, like breathing. The problem [however,] is to
understand the situation and the context in which they acted. (Berrigan
and Thich Nhat Hanh 1975: 61)
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The
context of which Thich Nhat writes is not simply the context of mythic
self-immolation paradigms so important to other scholars but the context
of Vietnamese meeting Euro-American history over the past several
centuries. Emphasizing this context, Thich Nhat's remarks make it plain
that insomuch as sui generis religion plays a powerful role in
dehistoricizing and decontextualizing human events, the very label by
which we commonly distinguish just these deaths from countless others
that took place during the Vietnam War-for example, "religious
suicide"--is itself implicated in the aestheticization and
depoliticization of human actions. What is perhaps most astounding about
Thich Nhat's comments is that, despite the discourse on sui generis
religion's tendency to limit scholarship to the terms set by religious
insiders (recall Cantwell Smith's methodological rule), Thich Nhat-most
obviously himself an insider to Vietnamese Buddhism-is the only scholar
surveyed in this chapter whose remarks take into account the utter
complexity of human action as well as the many scales of analysis
on which participants and nonparticipants describe, interpret,
understand, and explain these actions.
That
the death of Quang Duc had a powerful influence on the events of 1963
in South Vietnam is not in need of debate. It has been reported that
Browne's photograph of Quang Duc burning, which ran in thePhiladelphia Inquirer on
12 June 1963, was on President Kennedy's desk the next morning (Moeller
1989: 355). And virtually all commentators acknowledge that the
imminent fall of the Diem government was in many ways linked to the
Buddhist protests and their popular support among the South Vietnamese.
In the least, most commentators would agree that the deaths had what
they might term unforeseen or indirect political implications. The
question to be asked, however, is just what is at stake for secluding
politics to the margins of these otherwise self-evidently religious
events.
As
should be evident, depending on how one portrays this historical event,
one thing that is at stake is whether it could be construed as having
possible causes or direct implications for American political and
military involvement in the escalating war or whether, as many
commentators seem to assume, it was: (1) a localized Vietnamese issue,
Of (2) an essentially religious nature, which (3), due in large part to
the Diem government's mishandling of the protest and its unwillingness
to reach a compromise with the Buddhists, only eventually grew from a
local religious incident into an international political issue. The
event is thereby domesticated and managed. As the children's literary
critic Herbert Kohl has convincingly demonstrated, in the case of the
surprisingly homogeneous and depoliticized school textbook
representations of the events surrounding the 19551956 Montgomery,
Alabama, bus boycott, the story is truncated, presented completely out
of context, and portrayed
as
the single act of a person who was tired and angry. intelligent and
passionate opposition to racism is simply not part of the story. [In
fact, often] there is no mention of racism at all. Instead the problem
is unfairness, a more generic and softer form of abuse that avoids
dealing with the fact that the great majority of White people in
Montgomery were racist and capable of being violent and cruel to
maintain segregation. Thus [in the dominant textbook account of this
event] we have an adequate picture of neither the courage of Rosa Parks
nor the intelligence and resolve of the African American community in
the face of racism. (1995: 35)
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The
very act of representation, in both the cases of the Buddhist death and
the bus boycott, acts to defuse what might otherwise be understood as
the tremendous sociopolitical power of the events and acts in question.
In the case of the self-immolations, the image of the monk burning has
by now become so decontextualized that it has been commodified; it is
now a consumer item in popular culture. For example, the photograph
appears on the cover of a compact disk for the alternative rock music
group Rage Against the Machine.
Although
both the example of the Montgomery bus boycott and the Vietnamese
deaths arise from dramatically different historical and social contexts,
both actions are clearly part of an oppositional discourse that is
today communicated to us through, and therefore managed by, the means of
dominant discourses school textbooks in one case, and as a mechanism
for selling both scholarly privilege and expertise as well as a Sony
Music product in another. Therefore, it should not be surprising that,
in both cases, we find strategies that effectively package these actions
in a decontextualized and delimited fashion. It is in this precise
manner that the strategies of representation that constitute the
discourse on sui generis religion are complicit with such larger issues
of cultural, economic, and political power and privilege. One way to
support this thesis further would be to examine carefully media,
government, and scholarly interpretations of other specific historical
episodes and demonstrate the ways in which it may have been
economically, socially, or politically beneficial for a specifiable
group to portray events as essentially and exclusively religious rather
than, say, political or military. The example of what was widely termed
the self-immolation-a term that from the outset does much to isolate the
event as being exclusively concerned with issues of religious
sacrifice--of Vietnamese Buddhists is a particularly useful example,
because it seems that there was, and may yet be, a great deal at stake,
economically, politically, and militarily, in the interpretation and
representation of these events.
Another
example well worth study would be the interpretations given to the
practice of suttee or, the practice of a woman following her deceased
husband to his funeral pyre, for only within an interpretive system
founded on sui generis religion and which privileges the insider's
account could such a practice evade contemporary feminist analysis. As
van den Bosch has recently argued, the "question whether the custom [of
suttee] should be regarded as religious depends upon the definition of
religion within this context" (1990: 193 n. 76). In other words, one of
the primary differences between the frameworks that represent this
practice as, on the one hand, an example of pious female religious duty
that embodies lofty motives (as suggested by Tikku 1967: 108) and, on
the other, an instance of institutionalized misogyny is primarily the
assumption of the autonomy of religious life from social and, in this
case, specifically gendered ideology (van den Bosch 1990: 185). As
already suggested, the deaths of the Buddhists could be seen as a
statement either against American-backed imperialism and war or simply
against the localized persecution of one religious group by another, all
depending on the scale of the analysis. If the former, then the
repercussions of the event strike deeply not only in Vietnam but in the
United States as well. If only the latter, then the problem is isolated,
it remains in Saigon, and it is up to the decision makers in Washington
simply to distance themselves from Diem's mishandling of the episode.
Washington's decisions are then based on reasons varying from declining
public opinion in the United States, once the images reach the popular
media, to the realization that in fact Diem did not represent the
majority of South Vietnamese and therefore was the wrong leader to back
in the war against the North (this is the dominant theme of the Times editorial
on 17 June 1963). Clearly, there are practical and political advantages
and disadvantages depending on which of the two above intellectual
interpretations is favored. Furthermore, it is intriguing that there
exists a general correspondence between the interpretations offered in
the New York Times and those offered by scholars of religion.
Although differing in many ways, it appears that both are part of a
complex system of power and control, specializing in the deployment of
interpretive strategies-the politics of representation.
Source: http: //www.smsu.edu/relst/
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