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Andrea Rota: Hello, everyone, and welcome to a new episode of the IKOS Religion and Politics podcast. I am Andrea Rota, and joining me today over Zoom is David Atwood. David is a professor of religion in the public sphere at the University of Zurich and the director of the Swiss Inter-University Center for Religion, Economy and Politics. His research encompasses a wide range of topics, including the religious history of mountaineering, the use of religious metaphors in technological discourses, and the relationship between religion and law. A unifying theme in his work is his keen focus on how knowledge is produced and organized. Our conversation today will be devoted to the politics of time, and we'll explore how we, scholars and the general public alike, structure and order history itself, and how this structuring gives rise to new myths. David, it's a pleasure to have you here.
David Atwood: Thank you for having me.
Andrea Rota: So I sense that this might become a theory-heavy conversation. So let me begin with a lighter question grounded in current events. We are recording this podcast a few days after Donald Trump's second inauguration. In his speech, Trump stated that the golden age of America begins right now. While such rhetoric is not unusual for US presidents, could you explain to us the role of these metaphors in political discourse?
David Atwood: Thank you, Andrea. I'll try to. I really like the pick of the metaphor of the golden age that you took from his speech. The metaphor of the golden age of America is probably one of the most commonly used metaphors. It suggests that there is a bright future, that there is a new start ahead that just begins now. And it really makes the moment where this statement is made one of a new beginning. So it is kind of a promise. It's a promise that is made with this saying of the Golden Age. Of course, we all have to wait and see what this age really brings. That's another question there. But regarding the rhetoric, this is a very common trope in political discourse.
Andrea Rota: Yeah, what I find fascinating in your research is that you show that this kind of metaphors are not limited to the political sphere, but that they are ubiquitous in the way history is written, including in academic historiography. More specifically, you speak of watershed narratives, Schwellenerzählungen in German. Can you unpack this concept for us and tell us how you got interested in this kind of narratives?
David Atwood: Sure. And what got me interested in these narratives, these watershed narratives, or as I also call them, liminal threshold narratives, is Thomas Kuhn, the scholar who was well known for his work on scientific revolutions and the term paradigm. So he was a science scholar. who worked on how progress in science is made or is crafted through the scientific community. And what he came up with was his idea that science works in some kinds of paradigmatic clusters that we all maybe around one or two generations do live to a certain degree in the same universe in the same world view and develop more or less the same views on specific scientific problems and those more or less similar world views get more and more crackles and when enough crackles are disturbing a scientific paradigm then there is slowly starting to get a new paradigm which then usually announces itself through what i call a watershed narrative or a threshold narrative because we always have the the need to fix something new to a specific event That's probably one of the core ideas in these threshold narratives. And what Kuhn wrote and what brought me to the whole idea is he compared scientific revolutions to conversion stories. And of course, as we both are scholars in the study of religion, this is something that really attracts our brain when we read something like this. So what I wanted to study after I read this little part in Kuhn's Scientific Revolution book was, well, if he as a science scholar compares a scientific revolution to a religious conversion, What are the real structural analogies or differences and comparable aspects between different kinds of threshold narratives, be it in science, be it in a religious biography, or be it in history, in historiography?
Andrea Rota:So if we stick now to historiography for a moment, can you provide an example of such threshold narrative in historiography?
David Atwood: Mm-hmm. Well, you just gave a wonderful example when you started with the Golden Age, but maybe move a little bit back into the 20th century, when Germany started to rebuild the nation after the Second World War. There was a lot of talk about the hour zero. And this metaphor is the exact same thing that Trump did. He used a metaphor to indicate that now we're starting anew. We let the past rest and start anew into a golden age or whatever. And of course, the rhetoric was a little bit less optimistic and euphoric in Germany in 1946. But the narrative of the hour zero was used by both Germans and French or English parties that were then in Germany. Because everybody wanted to make a full stop, turn the back onto the Nazi past and start anew in a democratic future for the then two Germanys. So that's one example. We could also use others. We could use for example 9-11. 9-11 was to my generation was one of these events that we experienced live on television but very soon it was the talk of okay now we have entered a new era and the problem with these postulations with these claims that there is a new era is that Historians will easily come to criticize such a use by saying, well, hold on. One event might be the culmination of different factors, but no one event is the reason for turning into a new epoch, a new paradigm or a new age. This already had traces in the years before that and the turn, if there is any, also takes much longer. So there's always this ambivalence between an event mysticism and an event skepticism. The event mysticism is what we all try to do when we use such metaphors like Trump did, like the hour zero in Germany, or like when we heard people talk about 9-11 as the event that turned history into a new direction. And historians will always be at hand to show us, well, take it easy here. Take it a bit slower and look at all the factors that count, that came before this event, and that also play a role after this event.
Andrea Rota: I want to emphasize some of the language that you used. You spoke about event mysticism. You spoke about the analogy with conversion. There are many terms in your analysis that evoke a religious landscape. You also describe watershed narratives as mythopoetic, that is roughly myth-producing. What does this mean and why do you believe that drawing an analogy with religious narratives can help us better understand how history is written and perceived?
David Atwood: Now we are probably moving from the mainly historiographically based questions to closer to our field of the study of religion. And here we probably have to consider that the way we talk about religion is of course also framed through the way we perceive our present, our past, how it is, how they both are linked together and to give you a quick example we come back to 9-11 a lot of people who diagnosed the new era in which we lived then were quick to say that well with 9-11 religion has come back to world politics and here the threshold watershed narrative is very closely linked to the way we position religion in the world and of course when we say religion came back there was the assumption that it has been gone before. It was away. So this is the 90s worldview probably influenced by people like Francis Fukuyama and the end of history that we all now live in another golden age of liberal democracy and everything is going to be very easy and accessible and hunger in the war is going to be a past thing. Of course, we now know better. But... That was the the assumption. And then there came these events with and around 9-11. What was interesting for me is the way that an event is used to style the way in which we see religion in relation to politics, to law, to war and to other areas of our modern world. So what I try to analyze is to show how the field of religion is always newly crafted through those threshold narratives. For example, when we're looking back on 9-11, people were saying now we have to deal with religion in a new way because this event has shown us that we just can't consider religion not to be an important factor anymore. So these events have a suggestive effect on the way we consider religion to be in the world and how it interacts with other fields of society
Andrea Rota: I think that in your book you call this work on religion, Arbeit an der Religion. So shifting religion around before and after the watershed. Is this a political thing or is this a common practice also for academic historiography?
David Atwood: I would say it is both. Of course it is a political thing, as we have just discussed with many examples, but it's also a historian's thing. I would say it is always a potential, a potentiality in our work. The way we, our generation, works on religion in history is not going to be the same, of course, as when the next generations, our PhD students and their successors, are talking about religion. So we're always crafting in and around the discourse on religion. So we're always taking part somehow in the way that religion is positioned in history. For example, you asked before about my usage of religious language, even in the way I speak about historiography. And I would say this is of course deliberate, this is a strategy, because history itself can become a new myth. This is not my invention. This is something that, for example, Michel de Certeau, the French scholar, wrote lengthy about. Also, Elida and Jan Assmann, the German cultural historians, have said that in modernity, history has become one, not the only, but one of the myths on which we do depend. Meaning, when we establish our identities as communities, as nations, even as individuals, we do position ourselves in the past to then, in the present form, a possible wishful future for the community we are in. Therefore, history is one of our myths in which we live. where we do find a certain identity.
Andrea Rota: I find this part very fascinating. Could I ask you to unpack a little more the relationship between watershed or threshold narratives and this role of history as myth in modernity? How do these things combine?
David Atwood: Well, when history is part of our modern landscape of myths and mythologies that we have. A good myth is always one which we can memorize well, which we can account well. And an event such as a watershed event or threshold narrative is always one which has a high suggestibility and a high plausibility. Because it is very orderly, we can say. It crafts a very plausible and clear order in a chaotic timeline. Because it says, well, there was a time before, then there is the event, and then there's the time after. So two parts differentiated by an event. And this is such a high plausibility in this specific narrative, which is for me the explanation why we always use them so easily. Like, even in our private life, how do you explain to a friend or colleague at a party how you became what you are? You usually try to pick one or two events where you can plausibilize with a certain illustration and a colorful image why you became the person you are, why you became a professor in the study of religion, why you chose the study of religion, for example, as a topic in university. Of course, our inner historian will then very fast come and say, well, there's probably some more factors to account, but that's not the thing that you tell at the party.
Andrea Rota: I see. But can we explore some of the possible ramifications of this way of telling history? Should we, for example, conclude that there is no innocent way of narrating history, that every narration of history has always something to do with identity, politics, organization of the world, so it has some normative potential?
David Atwood: Yes the way you put it i would i would um i would say yes to that question of course a lot of people are scared that in such a perspective there is no historiography at all anymore which i wouldn't say is the fact because Maybe we have to get rid of the idea of a innocent historiography and just see that there is the trend to be skeptical, precise, open in our ways we explain history, we analyze history and not be solely based on one event. But of course there's still historiography. Like there's still a lot of legitimacy in history and historiography in the way we work on historical events, on the connection between historical events. That doesn't really bother historiography as a discipline at all. I would say if we're not naive, then we all already know that there is no innocent history. History is always a simplification and a choosing between different factors.There's always a selection and different people will take different selections.So even our usage of history, it's always a selection. But I wouldn't say that only because there is the potential that when we are doing historiographical work, that there is always a mythical dimension to it, that this is the only aspect of it. For me, it's kind of comparable with Max Weber's objectivity article, making objectivity not something that we do achieve, but something where we strive towards. Where we strive to be aware of our inner normative orders that we all take with us and not just let them innocently guide our research because then we would be closer to a political discourse as you introduced us with Trump's inaugurational speech.
Andrea Rota: I see. Thank you, David, for sharing with us these provocative thoughts.
I'm certain that our listener will come away with a new perspective, a more nuanced perspective on history, historiography and the myths that lie within all this.
David Atwood: Thank you, Andrea.
Andrea Rota: This concludes today's episode of the ICOS Religion and Politics podcast. Our guest was David Atwood, Professor of Religion in the Public Sphere at the University of Zurich. You can find more information about his work in the podcast description, including a link to his book, Schwellenzeiten, and to a shorter contribution in English to the same topic. Thank you for listening and goodbye.