by Emy Pinto
On Wednesday, November 11th, 2024, I had the honor of interviewing Dr. Tony Keddie, an Associate Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions and Fellow of the Ronald Nelson Smith Chair in Classics and Christian Origins, in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a social historian whose interests stretch from the New Testament, Christian origins, Second Temple Judaism, the Archaeology of Religion, and ancient Jewish-Christian relations, to the Bible in US politics. The below interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Welcome, Dr Keddie. Your biography on our department website says that you have a BA in Religion. I would like to know how you started in religion. How did you know this would be your major?
Like the majority of folks I’ve met who have become academics in Religious Studies, I did not go into my undergraduate studies expecting to do that. This is a somewhat different situation from other Humanities fields, like Classics, where it’s more common that you enter with an interest in learning Greek and Roman history and literature. I went in as pre-med, but realized I could never deal with that much blood! I switched to architectural engineering and liked the combination of drawing and science, but it still didn’t feel right for me. Then I took a course in Humanities to fulfill a college core requirement. It happened to be with a really terrific early Christianity scholar, Dr. Vasiliki Limberis, and she just blew my mind! I didn’t know that you could study the New Testament in the way that she introduced it. I know I was not alone in my reaction to her course.
It’s why I think our ‘Introduction to New Testament’ and ‘Rise of Christianity’ classes are so important at UT, because for someone who grew up in a Christian context, the only people you know who speak with authority about the scriptures and Christian history are religious functionaries. I had never met a career “academic” before college, and certainly not a historian of religion. During that semester’s awakening, I kept asking Dr. Limberis and other Religious Studies faculty questions about the field, then I started taking more classes, and eventually I realized that I could make an actual career out of this. I decided to go at least one step further by pursuing a Master’s degree at a divinity school to see if I had the drive to continue studying ancient Judaism and Christianity. After about one semester at Yale Divinity School, I was confident that the field had a strong grip on me and I wanted to be a professional historian. That’s the practical side of my trajectory.
There’s also a more personal side, right? The classes lined up, the stars aligned, and I realized that it was the right field for me. But in hindsight I see that there were already some predispositions there—namely, a great deal of curiosity about how religion works based on my experiences from a young age. I went to a Catholic school and was heavily connected through my mom’s side of the family to an Italian-American Catholic community; my dad’s side was Southern Baptist and included ministers and missionaries. Just the contrast between the two sides of my family, expressed politically as a liberal/conservative divide as well, led me to be very interested and confused about how the two versions of Christianity coexist and why I so often overheard those on one side ridiculing those on the other. The real curveball was that I have a Jewish aunt and recall being at family parties as a kid asking my parents questions because I could never make sense of why my Catholic family treated her so differently, often with prejudice. With the advantage of hindsight, I think my child’s-eye observations about religious difference, conflict, and prejudice in my own family were the seeds of what has become a lifetime commitment to studying religion, and particularly Jewish-Christian relations from antiquity to today’s world.
I would like to ask about the theoretical approaches that you were being introduced to at the undergraduate level. What were they? What did you take with you to postgraduate level and beyond?
A great deal, and so for starter’s I would just say that I take very seriously how much of an impression undergraduate courses in Religious Studies can make on students’ entire orientation toward the topic of religion, to say nothing of its expression in different contexts.
At Temple University, some of my professors just did not really use theory. The folks that taught Bible, for instance, didn’t use theory all that much but were very welcome to it. The other classes I took in the Religion department were theory heavy. I think I took three ‘Theory and Method’ classes when I was an undergraduate. The trending theorist of religion among faculty when I was at Temple University was Talal Asad. He came to campus at one point to give some lectures on his then-new book, ‘On Suicide Bombing’, and his lectures were quite controversial and caused a bit of a ruckus. The commotion around Asad’s book was fascinating, but I was far more interested in hearing more from him along the lines of his back and forth with Geertz in ‘Genealogies of Religion.’ I never really got that from his visit. To this day, there are things in Asad’s works that I appreciate, but I never fully embraced his approach.
Besides Asad, Marx was a bit of a standout, in part because of the strong activist culture at Temple University and in part because the most senior faculty member in the department was John Raines—one of my absolute favorite professors! He was one of the faculty who started the department in the early 1960s, making it one of the first official Religious Studies departments at a state-supported university in the United States—an early attempt at fostering a secular or academic study of religion at an institution of higher education that was explicitly not theology. Professor Raines was a really interesting character: a major civil rights and antiwar activist, former minister, and an advocate for Marx as a resource for the critical study of religion. He actually wrote the textbook on this topic, named ‘Marx on Religion’. Thanks to John Raines and other classes at Temple, I’ve always had an interest in the Marxist tradition. I never did – and I still don’t – find Marx fully satisfying as a theory of religion, however, and to be fair, that really wasn’t his focus.
The other kind of thinker that was floating around a lot that I found myself clinging onto a lot more was Pierre Bourdieu (Prof. Terry Rey was the Chair of my undergraduate department and a doctoral student of Raines; Rey, in turn, wrote a terrific textbook on ‘Bourdieu on Religion’ that I devoured when I first got my hands on it!). It’s easy to see Bourdieu as influenced by both Marx and Weber. I have argued in a few different publications, however, that I find Marx and Weber to be far more oppositional than I think most people do, and I have some serious issues with the imperialist and capitalist underpinnings of Weber’s theories. I’ve tended to read and apply Bourdieu’s theory in ways that align him much more with Marxian and post-Marxian traditions of social analysis than Weberian sociology. What I love about Bourdieu is how he traces the misrecognition of inequalities of power in embodied habits, in a certain sense reinvigorating the theories of ideology and interpellation by the post-Marxist Louis Althusser, one of Bourdieu’s teachers. The habitus, for our purposes, allows for much more flexibility and subtlety with regard to how religion is learned and practiced in ways the reproduce systems of domination and inequality than Althusser’s ideology and its institutional apparatuses.
You’ve mentioned Asad, Marx, and Bourdieu as theorists you encountered as an undergraduate. How did they shape your view of a theorist like Geertz, or not at all?
I will say that I think the way that my earliest theoretical encounters shaped me most is that they moved me from an initial interest in exploring religion through texts alone to finding value in more holistic approaches to texts and material culture as well as texts as material culture. The materialist aspects of each of their theories helped to anticipate and stimulate the so-called material turn in Religious Studies, which has been fundamental for my own scholarly contributions. These theorists pushed me toward thinking more with material culture—with humans as they interact with one another, spaces, places, and objects. Traditional scholarship on the Jewish and Christian scriptural texts relies heavily on notions of metaphor and symbol. Engaging with materialist theorists early on primed me to read religious texts more for social history—for practices, legitimation strategies, competition, power dynamics, and discrepant experiences. Thinking with symbols is something that I have just never liked.
You probably don’t like Lévi-Strauss.
Not especially. I’ve just never found symbols and the symbolic to be very useful for the questions that I’m interested in exploring about religion. In part, because I think attempts at parsing symbols or totems to understand social structures often rely too much on our own subjective assumptions about meaning and meaning-making, not to mention how societies function. Working on the ancient world, we can’t quite be ethnographers in the traditional sense. We can’t ask people, “How do you understand this symbol?” And thus when we try to figure out what such-and-such symbol meant, we end up depending on literary texts, which usually present the biases of elite freeborn male citizens as though they are natural and representative of a much wider demographic. Trying to parse symbols in ancient Mediterranean contexts based on textual records can therefore be a fraught and very misleading enterprise.
I’ve always had a bit of an aversion to symbols, but I’ll say it isn’t an aversion to Geertz, per se, and I agree with people who’ve said that Asad has overread Geertz. So, Asad makes Geertz a symbol reductionist. And Geertz makes Asad a power reductionist. I think they’re both more complicated. When I’ve read some of Geertz’s more technical discussions, like his work on exchange and social integration among the Javanese, I’ve found him far more interesting and useful. But when he is talking about symbols, I always want power dynamics to be a more overt target of analysis than he allows.
What do you think about Caroline Walker Bynum?
It’s been a while since I’ve read anything by Carolyn Walker Bynum. I remember really liking her ‘Holy Feast and Holy Fast’ because of its focus on the materiality of food and the body. As a social historian, I share her interest in religious practices involving material culture and embodied experiences. Where I have used Marxist and Bourdieusian approaches, it has often been to bring together text and material culture. And the more I’ve taken material culture seriously both as an archaeologist and a historian, the more I’ve found myself gravitating toward attention to micropractices. To some degree I think Bourdieu is like Weber when it comes to the level of resolution of his social analysis. I mean, both of them sort of default to a meso level of analysis, not a macro level like Marx – with his concern for base and superstructure – nor a super micro level like ethnographers. In my earlier scholarship, I followed Bourdieu and worked mainly from this meso level, but since then my archaeological work in particular has helped me to find renewed significance in the most quotidian of objects, spaces, and practices. That has meant drawing more on ethnographers and engaging with scholarship on lived religion, and its ancient counterpart “lived ancient religion.” I’ve developed my own take on a Bourdieusian approach, thinking about practices, the actions of human agents within structures, because that’s often where I can most clearly see religion working. In the interplay of structure and agency, religion is imbricated with power in different ways—there’s the power of agency and the power of expression, but also the power of regulation, repression, and exploitation.
In my recent research on the everyday religious practices of ancient artisans, I’ve been moving farther into the domain of lived religion. I particularly appreciate lived religion because it focuses our attention on aspects of non-elite religion: on religious practices that would scarcely afford a mention in elite literary texts. A goal of much of my research has been to try to understand how the people who aren’t discussed in texts, or who are elided, ignored, caricatured, or romanticized by texts, practice religion, which is to say, the majority of people in antiquity. But I’ve found that using Marxist theories is to imagine that ordinary folks are all consenting to ideology, which is far too reductive. Bourdieu’s habitus helps to complicate that some, but not sufficiently. I’ve never loved the critique of Bourdieu that he kind of just views individuals as cultural puppets, which is an extension of a common critique of Marx. That doesn’t give Bourdieu enough credit. But I admit that he doesn’t take individual experiences, affects, and everyday tactics of resistance seriously enough. So, I’ve been working on developing a synthesizing approach that allows for considerations of individual experience without losing sight of how practices are structured, reproduced, and regulated by various institutions.
I guess I’m saying I love meso-level theories because they let you have the best of both worlds—they allow you to shift between analysis of the micro and the macro. Still, meso-level analysts often haven’t thought seriously enough about how micropractices can and should complicate our understanding of social relations at the meso and macro levels—at the levels of institutions, systems, and ideologies—namely, by taking discrepant experiences into account. Especially if you try to apply a theory of society to the ancient world, where slavery is so complex and so different than the modern capitalist contexts in which our prevalent social theories have been generated, you can really misunderstand how a number of people experience religion in the ancient world. Scholars have said similar things about gender, and that certainly applies to antiquity too. I think enslavement is that which most complicates how we understand many things about ancient society, including religion. As soon as you start talking about applying modern theories of economics to ancient Mediterranean societies, for instance, you quickly discover that wide access to enslaved labor dramatically qualifies any discussions about free market, free exchange, growth, interconnectivity, and so on. Attempting to reconstruct enslaved persons’ experiences gets you on the ground and dealing with material culture, but it also requires a kind of historical imagination. This is, admittedly, a somewhat subjective historical enterprise, but I think it’s one that’s not only ethically crucial but also helps us address some of the gaps and shortcomings of our data-driven social theories.
What is it like being a Religious Studies scholar? Do you try to keep your personal convictions and theoretical interests separate or do they overlap?
I don’t think anyone really studies anything without being on their own personal journey to try to figure out something about themselves. This is nothing to be ashamed of, but something to embrace with transparency. It is when we recognize that we’re not fully objective and alert our interlocutors to the constraints we’ve tried to place on our predispositions that we open ourselves up to the very methodological critiques and difficult dialogues that can be most generative for the field.
Do you feel that the work you’re doing is valuable? Do you feel happy doing the work that you do?
What an important and challenging question! I would say that the aspects of my work that are most meaningful to me, and I can only hope to others, too, are probably the ones that are the least visible. I do a lot of organizational work and editorial work. I’ve co-edited several volumes of essays and journal issues. I’ve got a couple more underway. I’ve been active on a few different SBL programming committees. Most recently, I chaired the Social-Scientific Criticism of the New Testament committee for the last few years. It’s through these types of often thankless roles that I’ve found I can do the type of work that I find most meaningful—where I can do work that brings people together to start new conversations, ideally more inclusive conversations. I like to help shape new research directions by introducing different theoretical models and different interlocutors, but most importantly by bringing together diverse groups of scholars who don’t normally talk to each other due to the artificial yet imposing structures of our fields. This is the work I care most about, which is why I put a lot of time and energy into it.
Are there any people working in the field whose work that you find very interesting?
Stanley Stowers is one of the biggest influences on my work. In my experience, he is an extremely modest scholar of incredible intellect and creativity. His works are so creative and conversation-changing. He’s not really some flashy big-named influencer or provocateur. Yet over the course of his career, he has instituted a lot of changes in the field in subtle ways, having to do with shifting our theories and bringing together sources that have rarely been considered together before. For example, his ‘A Rereading of Romans’ remains one of my favorite books on the New Testament in large part because of the way that he so compellingly contextualizes Paul among other Hellenistic Jewish authors like Philo, Josephus, and the authors of Fourth Maccabees and the Wisdom of Solomon, leading to radical revisions of traditional understandings of Paul’s theology.
There are so many scholars whose work I admire. One who comes first to mind is Laura Nasrallah of Yale University. She does for me what I hope to do for others—that is, she changes the way that I think about things, she makes me want to engage in a conversation that I wasn’t engaging in quite the same way or that I haven’t engaged in yet. I often find that I’m interested in some of the same questions and avenues to answering them through a careful combination of texts, material culture, and theory. At the same time, we prefer different theories and sometimes answer the same questions differently. My admiration for her isn’t, therefore, about total agreement, but because I see her as doing really creative work that has methodological, conceptual, and ethical impacts on the field that I value.
I have one final question. In another world, would you be doing the same thing? Would you be working as an Associate Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions?
Oh, I don’t have a clue what it would be in like in another life! On my most cynical days, I think I would just go back to being a bartender. It wasn’t easy, but it was fun. But for a day job, I probably would have found my way to some sort of public writing. The path I was starting to consider as my next jump at the point when I switched my undergraduate major to Religious Studies was investigative journalism. I still think that would be very exciting for me because I love research, but I also love being creative with how I share my research with others, both in my writing and in the classroom. So if I didn’t end up in this particular field, in this particular way, I suspect I would be doing something that similarly checks my boxes for research and creativity.
Thank you so much for speaking with me today, Dr. Keddie.
Thank you for the conversation, Emy!
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Emy Pinto is a first-year PhD student in the Ancient Mediterranean Religions program in UT’s Religious Studies Department. She completed her BA (Hons) in Ancient Greek at Stellenbosch University.
