Events at Reed

Does religion still offer any explanatory value in interpreting human realities? Or should we think of it only as a kind of collective mythopoesis, and a socially problematic one at that? The first-world obsession with selfhood, individuality, social construction, and the overdetermined notion of "identity" is at odds with surprising new genetic research: childbirth does not separate mother and offspring, but instead leaves them in some sense enchained through fetal cell exchange. We live on in our mothers' bones, brains, and blood, and they in ours, literally part of one another. And this is only the start of what cellular biology calls "microchimerism." By the lights of Strathern's "dividual," we are not bounded, fixed, and impermeable social entities, but rather, osmotic, divisible, and recombinant ones, linked and yet also fluid. We are implicated in one another. What are the implications of this? Here the study of religion can offer deep exegetical wisdom: sacred histories and wonder tales have always represented the mother-child bond as extraordinary, even pathological, blurring the lines of individualism throughout the lives of both. It may be time to take a fresh look at the religious imagination as more than a source of psychosocial constraint. It may also be a meta-commentary that has always pointed to a complex truth about ourselves only now coming to light, but in a language that, in our suspicion, we have forgotten how to respect, or even to hear. Kimberley Patton, professor of the Comparative and Historical Study of Religion at Harvard Divinity School, specializes in ancient Greek religion and archaeology, with research interests in archaic sanctuaries and in the iconography of sacrifice. She also teaches in the history of world religions, offering courses in cross-cultural religious phenomenology.