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SSSR Presidential Address, 2004: Putting an End to Ancestor Worship
Author(s) -
STARK RODNEY
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
journal for the scientific study of religion
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.941
H-Index - 71
eISSN - 1468-5906
pISSN - 0021-8294
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2004.00249.x
Subject(s) - ancestor , presidential system , presidential address , worship , genealogy , history , political science , sociology , ethnology , law , politics , public administration
Several years ago a well-known member of this organization asked a young Ph.D. candidate at the start of his oral examination whether he was a Durkheimian, Weberian, or a Marxist. When the candidate said that none of those terms really fit him, he was told that he couldn't qualify as a mature scholar until he had made a choice. Now, suppose that this young scholar had been a neophyte astronomer. Is it conceivable that he would have been asked whether he was a disciple of Ptolemy or of Copernicus? Surely not, if for no other reason than virtually everything these famous historical figures had to say about the universe is known to have been absolutely wrong! Ptolemy believed that the heavenly bodies circled the earth, having elaborate loops in their orbits. Copernicus put the sun in the center, but kept the loops in the orbits of the planets. Only the scientifically illiterate editors of the Great Books series think anyone ought to be reading Copernicus today. In similar fashion, you can look in every university catalogue and fail to find even one physics course devoted to the thought of Isaac Newton, or even to that of Albert Einstein. Sciences honor their great figures, but they do not study them, knowing that their work is very out of date. In what follows I will demonstrate that the "big three" in the sociology of religion are as out of date as Ptolemy and Copernicus and that their work is filled with social scientific equivalents of loops in their orbits. Thirty years ago I would have needed to address the "big four," but fortunately since then Freud has been recognized for the charlatan that he was. I am mindful of the fact that many of you have been so well socialized into ancestor worship that you will not grasp my message and will leave this session confiding in one another that Stark is a philistine, sadly unable to appreciate the classics. But I do appreciate Weber, Durkheim, and Marx. I have even read them. What I don't do is believe in them, and I will attempt to convince you not to believe in them either.