American Academy of Religion

Warren G. Frisina
Associate Executive Director, AAR

From the beginning, the American Academy of Religion (AAR) has seen itself as a North American organization and is therefore, to that limited degree, international in scope. Our membership includes a considerable number of Canadians, and our 10 regional organizations encompass all Canadian provinces as well as all U.S. states and possessions. At least two regional organizations (the Pacific Northwest and the Eastern International) hold annual meetings in Canada on a regular basis. While we have some members who live in Mexico, the AAR has not had any organizational activity in that country.

Though the focus of our activities has been largely limited to North America, our members conduct their research throughout the world. For that reason, the AAR has been concerned to enhance its contacts with scholars from other parts of the world. To that end, the AAR has gradually expanded the scope of existing programs and recently undertook a number of new initiatives.

The AAR’s research grant program and its program of annual meeting plenary lecturers are two examples of existing activities that have been expanded to take on an international dimension. The research grant program awards approximately two dozen individual and collaborative grants annually. At this point, the majority of AAR research grants support field work and research that is carried out in other countries. In 1994, for example, 70 percent of the grants awarded will support international research by AAR members.

The AAR’s recent capital campaign established an endowment to support a plenary speaker program at our annual meeting with an emphasis on international scholars. Funds from this endowment had an immediate impact on the 1994 annual meeting program which included major addresses by two international scholars.

In addition to expanding current activities to include an international dimension, the AAR has increasingly begun exploring ways to foster our “international connections” through new initiatives.

In 1992, the AAR was one of the principal sponsors of an international scholarly meeting held in Melbourne. Together with nine scholarly organizations based in either Australia or New Zealand, the AAR and the Society of Biblical Literature conducted a five-day meeting which attracted several hundred scholars. This was the first such consortial gathering of all the major scholarly organizations in the region and the first time the AAR co-sponsored a meeting outside North America.

As plans for the Melbourne meeting were developing, the AAR Board of Directors determined that the AAR ought to be intentional about the ways in which it develops future international activities. A proposal was made to establish an ad hoc committee that would consider the feasibility of creating an international organization dedicated to the academic study of religion, an organization whose mission would mirror the AAR’s but which would be structured so as to attract a worldwide membership.

The proposal to establish a “World Academy of Religion” was greeted by Board members with a great deal of skepticism and some genuine alarm. At the conclusion of the discussion the AAR Board determined that while there was no doubt that the AAR needed to continue expanding its international activities and that it needed to be intentional in the ways it went about doing so, it should not be involved in efforts to create a world-encompassing organization. The arguments marshaled against the proposal ranged from worries that efforts to establish such an organization might undermine the work of existing scholarly organizations in other regions to concerns about U.S. hegemonies. What counts as the academic study of religion throughout the world is quite disparate. Simply by virtue of size and organizational sophistication, would we be exporting our versions of scholarship in the field, without adequately engaging in genuine conversation with our colleagues abroad?

As an alternative, the Board established an ad hoc Committee on International Connections. The term “connections” was chosen to signal the Board’s desire to enhance the AAR’s linkages with other organizations involved in the study of religion without presuming anything in particular about how those linkages would develop. The committee was charged to “explore means of communication and association with scholars and groups outside North America involved in the study of religion.” The hope was that the committee could initiate contacts that would be beneficial to AAR members, international scholars, and the field.

Established in 1991, the AAR ad hoc Committee on International Connections has already undertaken a number of projects to fulfill its charge. Its first project has been to inventory the international work that is already going on programmatically within the academy and to make contact with the academy’s international members. In 1993 the committee convened a colloquium of international scholars at the AAR’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. With funds from the Henry Luce Foundation, 20 scholars from throughout the world were invited to participate in four days of conversation about the challenges and opportunities for the study of religion internationally in the twenty-first century. The invited guests were asked to report on the academic study of religion in their own countries and to begin exploring how best to foster scholarly interchange across regional and national boundaries.

The colloquium helped surface significant differences in the way religion is studied in different parts of the world. For the AAR, it was a first step toward uncovering how the academy could best establish fruitful and mutually beneficial linkages with scholars and scholarly organizations outside of North America.

Building upon what was learned at the colloquium, the committee is currently involved in a number of additional projects. For example, committee members intend to create a database of international organizations dedicated to the academic study of religion. It is hoped that such a resource will make it easier to establish scholarly connections at the organizational level. They also plan to survey other professional organizations and learned societies to discover how internationalization is being dealt with by scholars in other fields or disciplines. Additionally, the Committee is sponsoring a series of special sessions at our annual meeting that address the growing internationalization of the academic study of religion.

Apart from the committee’s work, the AAR’s administrative offices manage a small book distribution program that contributes a single copy of each book on the AAR’s publication list to institutions that do not have the resources to purchase them. The AAR also participates in the scholarly journal distribution programs organized through the ACLS.

Looking toward the future, the same technological transformations effecting other fields are being brought to bear on the academic study of religion. The AAR will have a page on a World Wide Web (WWW) site established at the Scholars Press Consortium. Our WWW site will be a significant resource for scholars from around the world who are seeking information about the study of religion both within North America and elsewhere.

The AAR has recently contracted with scholarly institutions in Asia to distribute a CD-ROM edition of the Pali Canon as well as a Japanese Cultural Dictionary on CD-ROM. Increasingly, electronic communication is transforming the way scholars in our field gather and analyze information.