How theory is like metaphor

I was sitting on the bus today, listening to The Mekons' Rock 'n' Roll and reading Catherine Bell's densely-theoretical but much-heralded book Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, which I read for the first time as a first-year seminarian back in 2004 and did not understand in the slightest. I'm rereading it now because I discovered my class notes from the day that we discussed it, and frankly I was disgusted by the fact that I didn't even know enough to take any decent notes on the book. No work of religious studies theory is going to call me a chump.

I didn't get too far because I got to thinking about how The Mekons construct a whole ideology around rock 'n' roll on the album I was listening to, and that (somehow) got me to thinking about the purpose of theory. Here at UW Madison's Dept of Hebrew and Semitic Studies, we are hesitant about theory. There are good reasons for this: theory often causes sloppy, uninformed scholars to think that, by applying a theoretical model to a phenomenon they otherwise do not understand, they can say something radical about it.

My favorite example of this is the "peasant revolt" model for the Israelite conquest of Canaan. Recall that, according to the Book of Joshua, the Israelites came up from Egypt and massacred the whole population of the Promised Land, sans a few tricky hangers-on. Judges, by contrast, depicts a more piecemeal settlement. Neither model accords perfectly with the extant historical evidence, and this led some scholars to use a mixture of Marxist political theories and 60s-era Zeitgeist to posit that the "conquest" of Canaan was actually a peasant uprising, spurred by a ragtag bunch of renegade Egyptian Yahwists, that led to the overthrow of the local Canaanite despots and the creation of an egalitarian commonwealth that became the political model for later Israelite covenant ideology.

There is no direct evidence that overtly contradicts this theory, though the Bible certainly does not present it in this way. But there is also scant evidence that supports it. The main reason it caught on was because it had theoretical underpinings and a connection to the fashionable contemporaneous political ideologies of the late 60s.

This is not how theory should work. Theory, on a cognative level, seems to operate in the same way that metaphor does. Metaphor works by allowing you to "map" your knowledge of something you actually do know onto something that you do not know. Take death, for instance. Death is the cessation of all life. But since we have no direct experience of that, we understand death in terms of other things: it is a journey from which you do not return, or a sleep from which you do not wake, or a thief that comes upon you suddenly and takes your most valuable possession (your life).

Theory ought to work in the same way in biblical studies. One of the most persistent problems in studying ancient texts is the lack of evidence. We have the texts themselves, we have some extant inscriptions, and we have some physical evidence. This does not, in itself, add up to a systematic understanding of the ancient world. Theory becomes useful because it allows us to observe human communities and political structures that are available to us, abstract certain general principles from them, and apply these principles to what evidence we do have from the ancient world.

Coming up: a review of Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice.