Some oddities from the Arab-American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. They had a case of relics from the life of Edward Said, the famous scholar whose fame has perhaps not done much good (for my essay on Orientalism see here).
Why in the world we should be interested in his last tin of tobacco I don’t know, but saints have the power to sanctify all things, I suppose. There is something macabre about it as well: “This is the last tin of potentially lethal chemicals he put into his body right before he died.” It’s always said that academia is merely the Catholic Church without God, and here you have a good example of the results of a canonization process.
Below is the kind of victimology that seems to be his legacy. We’ll see what happens, but I’m not certain this victim-mindset leads to anything good – even for people who have really been victimized.
The above placard is a good example of the whole problem of combating negativity with negativity. I can’t claim to know how it will all work, but I have a guess that if we find a solution to human problems, it will not involve thinking a la Mr. Said.
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This actually begs the question, how is the “canonization” and general whitewashing process of an academic star any different from that of his counterparts in politics (but to think of it, acting, music, and sports as well) these days, if at all? You know, there is a museum dedicated to Dan Quayle in Indiana… Lots of different “Catholic Churches without God” out there…
Probably so, and this is of course a traditional comparison I am leaning on, but the correspondence in academia is unusually strong. Academia is a closed group, unlike politics or acting or music – you’re not an academic until a group of academics say you are. Like the church. And you have seminaries (grad school), titles (which have to be conferred by others with titles), a hierarchy with multiple levels, excommunication (“So-and-so does not do scholarly work and really should not be quoted here”), apostolic succession (people still talk about which professor has that Cambridge professorship Isaac Newton had as being ipso facto the world’s greatest physicist), here canonization, even special clothing. All this makes sense of course because in fact academia very literally evolved out of Catholic universities. This is all a side point of course and is not quite the point of this post, although it’s an interesting enough correspondence.
Yes, it was a side observation. Another side observation, European academia evolved out of Catholic universities. Academia in other parts of the world, while today are definitely influenced by their European counterparts, have other roots as well. But you are right in that most do have religious ties (ie, Islam, Confucianism if we stretch it a bit and call it a religion).