Charles Houston Long (August 23, 1926 – February 12, 2020) was an African-American cultural historian, religious studies scholar, and essayist in the areas of religion, theology, philosophy and studies of modernity. He was a faculty member at the University of Chicago, UNC Chapel Hill, Syracuse University, Duke University, and UC Santa Barbara. His work built on Ferdinand de Saussure's semiotics. Significations in particular is about how the West gets to make meaning about other cultures, but those cultures don't get the opportunity to make meaning about themselves.
Life, education, and teaching career Long was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on August 23, 1926, to Samuel Preston Long and Geneva (Thompson) Long. He grew up as the seventh of nine children with his father being an ordained Baptist minister. He graduated from Dunbar Junior College in 1947 after spending almost two years in the United States Army Air Force. He then continued to the University of Chicago where he received a Bachelor of Divinity in 1953 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1962. He was named Doctor of Humane Letters by Dickinson College in 1971.Bloesch, Sarah J., Minister, Meredith, "Signifying Religion in the Modern World: Charles H. Long", Cultural Approaches to Studying Religion (London and New York, 2019), pp. 93–94
Long served as an assistant dean at the University of Chicago while completing his doctorate. After completing his doctorate, he was officially appointed as a faculty member of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. He subsequently served as chair of the History of Religions Field and of the Committee on African Studies at the University of Chicago. After his time at the University of Chicago, Long went on to teach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Syracuse University.Bloesch, Sarah J., Minister, Meredith, "Signifying Religion in the Modern World: Charles H. Long", Cultural Approaches to Studying Religion (London and New York, 2019), pp. 93–109
He died in North Carolina on February 12, 2020.
Achievement and accolades President of the American Academy of Religion (1973) President of the Society for the Study of Black Religion (1986-1989) University of Chicago Divinity School's Alumni of the Year (1984) Guggenheim Fellow (1997)
Significations In his work, Significations: Signs, Symbols and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, Long points out two issues regarding the ambiguity of religion in the modern United States. First, the Enlightenment in Europe prioritized universal, hierarchical and communal ways to understand the world. Second, the Western conception of religion, born in the Enlightenment, has been shaped and reinforced by colonialism, conquest, and the idea of a non-Western "Other". Considering this, Long raises the question of whether religion can be defined universally, given the diversity of observed religious phenomena around the world.
According to Long, the Enlightenment, while attempting to be objective, had some glaring blind spots. Long states, "While the reformist structure of the Enlightenment had mounted a polemic against the divisive meaning of religion in Western culture and set forth alternate meanings for the understanding of the human, the same ideological structures through various intellectual strategies paved the ground for historical evolutionary thinking, racial theories, and forms of color symbolism that made the economic and military conquest of various cultures and peoples justifiable and defensible".Long, Charles H. Significations: Signs, Symbols and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. (Aurora, 1999), p. 4. Accessed August 25, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central. Religious scholars attempted empirical methodology based on Enlightenment principles of rationality but worked from upper-class, white, cisgender, heterosexual, male assumptions, which also implicitly located other peoples and religions as inferior. Humanistic religious studies were a double-edged sword–they allowed for new ways of understanding religious traditions that had been a controlling and violent force in Europe, but they also provided a framework for thinking which justified the racist exploitation of colonialism.Long, Charles H. Significations: Signs, Symbols and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. (Aurora, 1999), pp. 4–8. Accessed August 25, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Long also explores the role of symbols in religious life and the process of signification. He begins with two epigraphs: first, Ferdinand de Saussure's statement that the "bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary"; and second, an "Afro-American colloquial expression: Signifying is worse than lying". The epigraphs bring together central themes in Long's work: the power relationship between those who control language; and the negotiations between those who are signified and those who signify. "For the majority culture of this country, blacks have always been signified". A "sign" in linguistics is something that communicates meaning outside of the sign itself. For example, when a red octagon communicates the meaning "stop," the signifier is the object (red octagon), and the signified is the meaning (stop). Long points to black communities as an example of how minoritized communities can work to "form new and different relationships within a discourse that was already taking place". At the same time, Long points out that his community, the black community, "was a community signified by another community," and that this reinforced a "subordinate relationship of power". Religious symbols, Long argues, have an arbitrary bond to their meaning. This means that these symbols must be studied at the level of signification. It is not enough to study the surface level of religion–the study of religion should exist on a level that takes into account how the religion becomes a sign (literally, sign-ification). Long points to the Enlightenment as the time in which "religion and cultures and peoples throughout the world were created anew through academic disciplinary orientations–they were signified".
Long also uses Black communities in the United States as an example of the effects of Enlightenment and colonial religious definition. Long distinguishes between those who have the power to shape signification about others, and those who are the objects of that signification" (the "signified"). He suggests that black people in the US have been subject to "the same structures of cultural categories that create the categories of the primitives and colonized people of the contemporary world."Long, Charles H. Significations: Signs, Symbols and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. (Aurora, 1999), p. 8. Accessed August 25, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central. Such communities have an "extensive literature… about them, most of it written and presided over by others". Such language functions to uphold the status quo and the primacy of white Western culture: "it exists primarily to keep the others in their place." He describes how Black communities' criticism of the United States cultural system reflects both an internalizing and rejection of Western Enlightenment ideas. In one sense, they are criticizing it for not living up to its own ideals, which shows that they have internalized its ideals as something to be valued. But on the other hand, because the power systems of the United States have been built to oppress Black people, they have a uniquely critical position of radical Otherness. Ultimately, colonialism is baked into the language and knowledge of the enlightenment era, making knowledge and colonialism interdependent. This makes it difficult for participants in a colonized culture to denatualize colonial sentiments. In other words, they must deconstruct their own thought structure to reveal colonial thought, which is required to reconstruct it.Long, Charles H. Significations: Signs, Symbols and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. (Aurora, 1999), p. 9. Accessed August 25, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central. Long states, "The situation of the cultures of black peoples in the United States afforded a religious experience of radical otherness, a resourceful and critical moment that allowed these communities to undertake radical internal criticisms of themselves, their situation, and the situation of the majority culture."Long, Charles H. Significations: Signs, Symbols and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. (Aurora, 1999), p. 9. Accessed August 25, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Long continues to discuss signification in how "primitive" cultures are referenced. "Other terms have been forthcoming to replace the term "primitive" - non civilized, non literate, cold cultures, and so on. These changes will not suffice, for the cultural language of civilization that brought forth the structure of the primitive has not changed." Since relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, changing the term used in reference to a culture that has been "othered" doesn't change the implied inferiority from the point of view of the group in power.
Role of colonization The category of "religion" was invented during the Enlightenment. Long claims that the creation of the category of religion was a result of colonization in efforts to deem the "other" people and culture as inferior outsiders. Long believes that this provides a new way to label and identify people and provides another way to reinforce the idea that the West is superior. In order to create these labels, "forms of evolutionary thinking… re-named and re-created 'others' within languages and categories that the colonizers could understand in a nefarious process of translation".Rolsky, Louis B., "Charles H. Long and the Re-Orientation of American Religious History", Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80.3 (2012), p. 753. This additionally "signaled the beginning of a 'necessary lie' that framed Europeans as superior in relation to a primitive 'other'.Rolsky, Louis B., "Charles H. Long and the Re-Orientation of American Religious History", Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80.3 (2012), p. 755. According to the West, the "primitives" are understood as both religious and empirical "others" as their actions differ from those in the West and are thus seen as deviating from the normal. Long explains how describing the "primitives" as "others" provides a significance to the West by offering a civilization that can be contrasted to Western norms. These differences reinforce the idea that "the primitives operate as a negative structure of concreteness that allows civilization to define itself as a structure superior to this ill-defined and inferior 'other'."Long, Charles H. Significations: Signs, Symbols and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. (Aurora, 1999), p. 101. Accessed August 25, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central. These perceptions of non-Western cultures and religion as "primitive" were normalized in European society not only among academics, but the general populous as well. To this effect, a change in nomenclature when referring to such groups, Long explains, is ineffective unless it uproots the normalized view of such cultures.
Cargo cults