Carole M. Cusack

In the twenty-first century the performance of selfhood is a given in Western society and is rapidly manifesting around the world. Identity politics, individuation, psychology, digital selves, and life writing testify to the primacy of the self as a spiritual and religious goal. Is this a new phenomenon? This lecture brings together Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1938) and Erving Goffman’s sociological study The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (1956) and argues these two pioneering scholars inadvertently offered a model of the origins of religions that is still not fully integrated into Religious Studies after more than half a century. I argue that play is crucial to the origin of religion, and the performance of self and community offers a model of the maintenance of the religious institution, in that religions are primarily sites of identity. It is concluded that embodied experience (rather than orthodoxy of belief) is the core of religious and spiritual identity and thus is an ignored or neglected factor in the cultural complex that is commonly identified as religion.

Biographical Note

Carole M. Cusack is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Sydney. She trained as a medievalist and her doctorate was published as Conversion Among the Germanic Peoples (Cassell, 1998). She now researches primarily in contemporary religious trends and Western esotericism. Her books include (with Katharine Buljan) Anime, Religion and Spirituality: Profane and Sacred Worlds in Contemporary Japan (Equinox, 2015), Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith (Ashgate, 2010), and The Sacred Tree: Ancient and Medieval Manifestations (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). She edited (with Pavol Kosnáč), Fiction, Invention and Hyper-reality: From Popular Culture to Religion (Routledge, 2017) and (with M. Afzal Upal) Handbook of Islamic Sects and Movements (Brill, 2021). She edits the journals Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review (PDC, USA), Journal of Daesoon Thought and the Religions of East Asia (Daejin University, South Korea), and Literature & Aesthetics (journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics).