Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Seth Schermerhorn presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) held Nov. 22 – 26 in Baltimore.
Schermerhorn presented “Of Pilgrimage and Parody: Don Bahr’s Principle of ‘Parody’ and Tohono O’odham Methods and Theories of Writing History and Mapping Territory.” The paper examined Tohono O’odham pilgrimages to Magdalena in Sonora, Mexico, and divergent senses of history in which the pilgrimage is understood as either a pre-contact indigenous tradition or a post-contact Christian imposition.
The paper was presented in two panels – one discussing the theme “Exhibiting Identity/Narrating History” in the Native Traditions in the Americas Group session, and the other on theories of religion that have emerged from the American West in a session on the Initiative for Religion in the American West.
