Departmental Papers (Religious Studies)
As experienced researchers in archives, in museums, and in the field, our faculty are well-suited to lead serious students in intensive research in several areas of Religious Studies.
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Publication A Drum Speaks: Partnership to Create a Digital Archive Based on Traditional Ojibwe Systems of Knowledge(2007-01-01) Powell, Timothy BI want to take back, as an ambassador to my people [the Ojibwe], that new lesson I learned [at the Penn Museum (UPM)], we no longer have to be afraid of having pictures taken because they don’t steal the spirit of what’s being taken. They can invigorate and enliven and inspire knowledge and wisdom and learning … Digital imaging is a new thing … that can [bring to life these Ojibwe artifacts] for our kids and our generation … We’re going to digitally image some of the things and take them back to our people … All of these things . . .Publication Digital Repatriation in the Field of Indigenous Anthropology(2011-10-01) Powell, Timothy BAs the term “digital repatriation” gains wider circulation, it has come under increased scrutiny and criticism. At the 2010 AAA Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Kim Christen convened an Executive Program Committee session entitled “After the Return: Digital Repatriation and the Circulation of Indigenous Knowledge.” Despite abundant examples of how digital technology creates opportunities for working in partnership with indigenous communities, questions focused on the inadequacies of the term “digital repatriation.” Panelist Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh (Denver Museum of Nature and Science) stated the problem most succinctly by recounting that the Native communities he worked with always wanted to know if “digital repatriation” meant that they were going to get the original materials back. The answer, of course, was no.Publication Steering a Course Set by Thomas Jefferson: New Developments in the Native American Collections at the American Philosophical Society(2015-09-01) Powell, Timothy BAs the director of Native American projects for the past 7 years, I have been watching distinguished scholars give talks like this one from the back row of the upper balcony. One of the things I noticed is that almost everyone, from Nobel Prize winners to astrophysicists, begins his or her talk by admitting how intimidating it is to speak to such a distinguished audience. And I can certainly second that emotion here today. So as I was writing the talk, I was trying to imagine a way to calm my anxiety and I came up with a highly questionable solution. What if, I imagined, I were talking to Thomas Jefferson? It would, no offense, make the American Philosophical Society (APS) audience seem tame by comparison. So I began by asking: How would I explain myself to Jefferson, who started the Native American collection in the late 18th century when he served simultaneously as the president of the United States and the president of the APS? Oh, yeah—I’m feeling calmer now!Publication How to Buy a Continent: The Protocols of Indian Treaties as Developed by Benjamin Franklin and Other Members of the American Philosophical Society(2015-09-01) Wallace, Anthony F C; Powell, Timothy BIn 1743, when Benjamin Franklin announced the formation of an American Philosophical Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge, it was important for the citizens of Pennsylvania to know more about their American Indian neighbors. Beyond a slice of land around Philadelphia, three quarters of the province were still occupied by the Delaware and several other Indian tribes, loosely gathered under the wing of an Indian confederacy known as the Six Nations. Relations with the Six Nations and their allies were being peacefully conducted in a series of so-called “Indian Treaties” that dealt with the fur trade, threats of war with France, settlement of grievances, and the purchase of land.Publication The American Philosophical Society Protocols for the Treatment of Indigenous Materials(2014-12-01) Powell, Timothy BThe APS Protocols have played an important role in helping the Society build stronger ties to the indigenous communities whose cultural materials are housed in the library. Beginning in 2008, the APS implemented a Digital Knowledge Sharing (DKS) initiative that established partnerships with four indigenous communities in the United States and Canada. The DKS program brought teams of Native American elders, teachers, and scholars to the APS. The teams selected materials for digitization that would strengthen ongoing language preservation and cultural revitalization projects in their communities. During the course of this process, indigenous community members helpfully identified archival materials considered to be culturally sensitive. Although the APS will keep with its tradition of allowing open access to collections (except for those accepted into the collection with restrictions), material designated by indigenous communities as culturally sensitive may not be photographed or otherwise reproduced without express permission from the communities of origin, a policy especially designed to keep sensitive material from circulating on the Internet. It is a compromise that respects the traditions of the APS and our current and future Native American partners.Publication Building Bridges Between Archives and Indian Communities(2010-01-01) Powell, Timothy BThe APS has a long, distinguished history of preserving Native American languages. It began when Thomas Jefferson was the President of the Society in the late eighteenth century. A new chapter in this history was written this past May at the “Building Bridges between Archives and Indian Communities” conference—the first time in more than two hundred years that a large number of Native Americans have been invited to the Library to reconnect with their heritage. It was my great privilege to organize the conference. As Larry Aitken, tribal historian from the Leech Lake band of Ojibwe, who performed the Sacred Pipe ceremony that began the conference, said, “It is good that the APS invited us here, opened their doors and their books so that we can bring these things back to life.”Publication Can “Law” Be Private? The Mixed Message of Rabbinic Oral Law(2015-01-01) Dohrmann, Natalie BA great deal of ink has been spilled on the question of early rabbinic literary culture and the rabbinic dedication to the development of an explicitly oral legal tradition. In this essay I will argue that given that the manifest content of early rabbinic discourse is law, it is productive to look to the very public practices of communication inscribed, literally and figuratively, in the Roman legal culture of the east. Within this context, the rabbinic legal project makes sense as a form of provincial shadowing of a dominant Roman legal culture. This paper will explore the paradoxical rabbinic deployment of the most public of Roman genres, law, in a manner explicitly coded as private. How does one make sense of the public aspirations of rabbinic law with its choice to remain unwritten and therefore largely invisible in the imperial landscape of the rabbinic city?Publication Introduction to The Singing Bird: A Cherokee Novel(2007-01-01) Powell, Timothy BJohn Milton Oskison was a mixed-blood Cherokee known for his writing and his activism on behalf of Indian causes. The Singing Bird, never before published, is quite possibly the first historical novel written by a Cherokee. Set in the 1840s and '50s, when conflict erupted between the Eastern and Western Cherokees after their removal to Indian Territory, The Singing Bird relates the adventures and tangled relationships of missionaries to the Cherokees, including the promiscuous, selfish Ellen, the "Singing Bird" of the title. The fictional characters mingle with such historical figures as Sequoyah and Sam Houston, embedding the novel in actual events. The Singing Bird is a vivid account of the Cherokees' genius for survival and celebrates Native American cultural complexity and revitalization. Jace Weaver is the author of Other Words: American Indian Literature, Law, and Culture and That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community. Timothy B. Powell is author of Ruthless Democracy: A Multicultural Interpretation of the American Renaissance. John Milton Oskison (1874-1947) was a distinguished New York editor and published five books, including Tecumseh and His Times. Melinda Smith Mullikin is a former media editor for The New Georgia Encyclopedia. (Key Words: Cherokee Indians, American Indians, Native Americans, Fiction, John Milton Oskison, Melinda Smith Mullikin, Timothy B. Powell, Jace Weaver).Publication Manumission and Transformation in Jewish and Roman Law(2013-01-01) Dohrmann, Natalie BIn Roman and rabbinic legal and literary sources from the first centuries of the Common Era, the institution of slavery exhibits a double nature. For both Jews and Romans, slavery is a dreaded state of denigrated non-personhood, and yet in both legal worlds, slavery can be a site of acculturation, even conversion, to the dominant status and ideals of rabbinic and Roman civilization. Initial research into key symbols and ideas on this topic reveal some suggestive similarities--structural and conceptual homologies between Roman and rabbinic constructions of slavery and the modes and cultural valuations of the manumission of slaves. The slave marks the outer boundary of the person and yet, at the same time, provides an exemplum that facilitates a transformation of the slave-self and an opportunity for movement from periphery to center, from thing to citizen, from Gentile to Jew. I will compare ta few aspects of Roman and rabbinic legal thinking on slaves in the first centuries C.E. as a way to think more broadly about rabbinic legal/exegetical self-fashioning in the Roman Near East. In this essay I want to map the narratives of integration that are encoded in Roman and rabbinic slave law. The common features of the legal itinerary from slave to free are several. It is important to note from the beginning that the notion of slavery as paideia that leads to enfranchisement is largely a legal and cultural fiction. For most freedmen in both cultures, past slavery seems to have stigmatized them their entire lives. However, the fact that a part of each culture imagines that its slaves could become them provokes many questions. What does this ideal transformation tell us about the fact of Jewishness or Romanness; and, how, if at all, is the figural "enslavement" of the Jews under Roman power reflected in the Jewish slave laws (or more pointedly, in the rabbinic interpretation and recasting of biblical slave laws)?Publication The Boundaries of the Law and the Problem of Jurisdiction in an Early Palestinian Midrash(2003-01-01) Dohrmann, Natalie BIn this paper I look at one particular exegetical complex through which, I will argue, the rabbis grapple with the question of legal jurisdiction and the status of revelation in the shadow of Roman legal hegemony. I will try to show that rabbinic midrash in its literariness (that is, as a source for the history of ideas, rather than a repository of more or less viable data for reporting history on the ground) is a valuable site for mining the mentalité of tannaitic culture (to the extent that we can posit such a thing), and specifically of tannaitic constructions of the idea of the law from the perspective of the subaltern.