Spiritual Capital, Academic Capital and the Politics of Scholarship: A Response to Bradford Verter (original) (raw)
2005, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion
I would first like to thank Dr. Verter for taking the trouble to read and comment on my article, "Sacred Capital: Pierre Bourdieu and the Study of Religion" (Urban 2003) in his piece for Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (Verter 2004). His critique contains several good points and has forced me to take a second look at my own interpretation of Bourdieu's work and its relevance for the study of religion. However, I must say that I was frustrated to see that Verter misrepresented many parts of my article, and I am somewhat annoyed to have to reiterate several basic points here. While Verter suggests that I have misunder stood Bourdieu in my article, I can only conclude that Verter has fun damentally misread and distorted my argument in certain key respects. I found it rather telling and also ironic that Verter begins his arti cle with an anecdote about our first conversation on Bourdieu during his campus interview for a position at OSU. One piece of that story that Verter neglected to include was that he was not offered the job, in part because his work so closely overlapped the work I had already done using Bourdieu's concept of symbolic capital to interpret religion and religious secrecy (Urban 1998, 2001). Verter does, however, make sure to alert the reader to his own article on Bourdieu and religion (2003), published at roughly the same time as mine with a very simi lar title. If one were to apply a strict Bourdieuan interpretation to Verter's critique, one would have to assume that all academic discourse is politically "interested," that is, concerned with the pursuit of status, recognition, prestige and other forms of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1988);1
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