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From Heritage to Neurodiversity A Quest through Popular Culture

Jorge, David (2023) From Heritage to Neurodiversity A Quest through Popular Culture. Master thesis, M Religion and Cultural Heritage.

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Abstract

In our modern Western civilization we see new religious movements emerging out of topics issued from popular culture such as ‘The Church of Jediism’ (n.d.), a religious movement founded by Daniel Morgan Jones, and his brother in 2007, that follows a philosophy based on the teachings from George Lucas’ Star Wars universe. ‘The Forecastle of Isaluntë Valion’ (n.d.), and their gnostic approach to the work of J.R.R Tolkien is another such example, or searching in more recent years, and turning towards the podcast world, we find shows such as Harry Potter and the Sacred Text which illustrates well the deep link shared by religion and popular culture. Indeed, Carole M. Cusack investigates how the authors of the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast series uses mediaeval Christian techniques of reading sacred texts such as lectio divina, as well as using extract compilation method to form ‘florilegium’, but she also notes the presence of Jewish techniques of reading the sacred texts such as ‘havruta’, and the interpretative textual method ‘PaRDeS’ (Cusack 2019). Therefore, it seems evident that, as a student of religious studies, one should keep an eye out for development in popular culture, however this is far from being true. Popular culture studies is a relatively recent field of study, often understudied and/or underappreciated compared to more established areas of academic endeavour, and academics and journals have been trying in recent decades to overcome this stigma. The Journal of Popular Culture, founded in the 1960s, is such a platform which tries to fill in the gap left by this lack of studies, and ‘break down the barriers between so-called “low” and “high” culture’ (The Journal of Popular Culture n.d.). To ignore this area within religious studies is to ignore to a large degree how a lot of people interact, invent, re-invent, and share around religious topics. Santana and Erickson remark, looking at Americans and American popular culture, that the decline in the knowledge of the religious text, namely the Bible, meant that more and more of the framework associated with it to interpret religion, but also one’s own life problems, was replaced by the prism offered by popular culture rather than the religious text itself. They label this phenomenon as popular culture ‘rescripting the sacred texts’ (Santana and Erickson 2008, 25). Maybe more importantly, Santana and Erickson see popular culture as offering a nuanced version of religion (Ibid, 203-204) which only reinforces the place that popular culture studies should play within the religious studies if we truly endeavour to comprehend this phenomenon in our modern times. Indeed, Terry Ray Clark remarks that religious events happen within a specific cultural context and are thus interrelated with these events (Clark 2023, 10). Therefore, popular culture can be seen as a platform that vehicles, influences, and is influenced by modern ideological and religious currents, it acts as a platform for social and religious debates among other things. The highly receptive nature of popular culture to social issues is what make it an interesting, and relevant topic to study with scholars such as Sophia Rose Arjana covering subjects in Veiled Superheroes: Islam, Feminism, and Popular Culture (2018) intersecting gender studies, religious studies, and popular culture studies, and she notes that ‘popular culture is a powerful tool that helps to form personal identity, ideals of nationhood, and beliefs about cultures and communities outside our own’ (Ibid, xvii). This characteristic of popular culture is not only recognised by individuals and groups of scholars but also by European institutions when starting the project Invisible Lines which is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and that tackle the task of representing invisible notions, such as the ‘sense of belonging’ or ‘spirituality’, through the use of comics, graphic novels, and illustrations. While this project aimed at promoting the circulation of the medium itself in Europe, it also endeavoured to ‘safeguard and promote European cultural diversity through the medium of Comics and Illustration’ (Invisible Lines n.d.). Moreover, popular culture, and specifically genres often linked to it such as fantasy, are becoming more relevant to study each year because of the rise in popularity it is experiencing in recent times with movies such as The Lord of the Rings directed by Peter Jackson (2001-2003), and books such as George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire (1996-present) becoming immensely popular which prompts the question why? While tracking the exact reasons behind this rise in popularity of products that were considered for a long time, and by many, as ‘low’ culture is outside of the scope of this paper, Maria Sachiko Cecire offer the beginning of an answer in what she calls the ‘Oxford School of Children’s fantasy literature’ (Cecire 2019, 4) which includes J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, Susan Cooper, Diana Wynne Jones, and Kevin Crossley-Holland. These are twentieth century authors who contributed greatly to the genre of children's fantasy and who were influenced by the evolution of fantasy as a genre in the earlier eighteenth and nineteenth century, a time that sees a ‘golden age of children's fantasy’ in Victorian England alongside the intolerant reception towards the genre in adult literature (Wolfe 2012, 14), thus leaving childhood and children's literature as the last refuge of fantasy (Cecire 2019, 16-17). In Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century, Cecire ‘argue[s] that the growing cultural significance of childhood throughout the twentieth century, particularly the widely accepted role of one’s own childhood in the formation of the self, has been crucial to the growing acceptability of medievalist fantasy in adult discourse by the start of the twenty-first century’ (Ibid, 24-25). Moreover, she also points towards the counter-nature that Tolkien’s and Lewis’ children’s fantasy represented in the face of growing secularism in Western societies in the early twentieth century. It seems that fantasy has had an intrinsic nature to oppose norms, and present differences as early as the foundational texts of our modern fantasy literature. However, this status also exacerbates intrinsic discriminatory behaviours of our Western societies because of the ‘inequalities built into its structures as a result of its emergence from white, imperial, masculinist, ableist, heteronormative institutions’ (Ibid, 261). Therefore, and because I am personally interested and invested in both heritage studies and the potential of popular culture to represent non-normative discourses in its various media, I have chosen to centre my research around a specific representation of a minority group, namely people with neurodivergent traits. What interests me most is to understand how popular culture represents neurodiversity through its appropriation and re-imagination of ancient myths? As it is a rather large area of inquiry, I will focus on one specific case study, namely The Lightning Thief (Riordan 2006), for the role it played and still is playing in the fields of popular culture, fantasy, and neurodiversity through the extended work of Riordan but also because of the plethora of adaptations as movies and series, as well as the ever growing and active communities of fans that his works has. Moreover, I will break out my research into subtopics. What parts of ancient myths are transcribed and what is left out? What is modified and why? Does the appropriation of these myths constitute ‘fake’ heritage or is it in itself a heritage practice? How is neurodiversity dealt with within this narrative? What is the public reception of this depiction of neurodiversity? My goal is to understand how, today, popular culture can be used as a tool to reach out to marginalised groups of people through a common religious heritage. To be more specific, I wish to explore how the story of Percy Jackson, The Lightning Thief, pictures neurodiversity throughout its narrative. I would like to look into how the integration of popular culture within our understanding of our cultural heritage can be used as a motor to vehicle topical ideas surrounding broader social issues. In short, my primary objective is to understand not only how popular culture represents neurodiversity but how it makes use of the religious heritage landscape to convey a specific depiction of neurodiversity. The idea is to nuance the debate surrounding popular culture, to move away from a binary understanding of the topic as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. It is a continuum, and a lot can be said about it in any direction, however I would like to show the intrinsic potential it has if willing to use it. It should be seen as a tool, neutral in nature, the outcome entirely dependent on how one wields it. Thus, popular culture, and genres associated with it such as fantasy, are far from being ‘low’ culture, or for that matter, ‘high’ culture but rather just culture and heritage in the making. In Chapter 1, I will go over the important theoretical background necessary to understand the world of Rick Riordan, and his use of fantasy as a tool to talk about heritage and neurodiversity. Moreover, the structure of Campbell’s ‘monomyth’ (Campbell 1972) will be used as a handy tool to separate the different worldviews depicted in The Lightning Thief, and how the narrative’s hero moves from one to the other. Theories on the concepts of neurodiversity and the neurodiversity paradigm will be introduced. In Chapter 2, I will briefly introduce the story of The Lightning Thief as well as applying the structure of the monomyth to it. It will become clear that Riordan’s narrative fits to a large degree to what is expected from a myth-narrative but also that the mythical world travelled by our hero Percy Jackson can be viewed as a world where the neurodiversity paradigm has replaced our current pathology paradigm. In Chapter 3, I will investigate a specific aspect of ancient Greek mythology, namely the Underworld’s representation, used by Riordan in his narrative. While showing obvious discrepancies between the ‘original’ narrative and The Lightning Thief, I will show that it can still be understood as quite conservative in nature. Indeed, by looking at heritage as a process, as intangible in the first place, I argue that Riordan’s use of Greek heritage inscribed itself in the ever moving process of heritagisation, and that notion such as ‘original’ and ‘authentic’ represent more an external and materialistic understanding of the object or narrative. In Chapter 4, I will focus on the neurodiversity representation within The Lightning Thief and show, through the various concepts explored so far, that this narrative can be used as a powerful tool to discuss this complex subject. Exploring briefly the reception of Riordan’s work by its fanbase will show that positive and negative effects are produced which can be explained by the various representations that traits such as ADHD and dyslexia can take in the life of someone. Moreover, links between our understanding of heritage in the Western world and the problems it raises for minorities will be paralleled to those experienced by the neurodivergent communities. However, before starting with Chapter 1, I would like first to take the time to explain my use of references and names in the parts that follow. Given that I am using translations of older texts in Chapter 3, I will incorporate in the usual form of these references an extra element which indicates the original text and verse where it can be found on top of the source I am using. I hope that in this way readers can either use the same source of translation or find the verses themselves in any book or translation of their choice. Moreover, regarding names issued from ancient Greek or Roman mythologies, I made the decision to use their Greek forms throughout this paper in order to homogenise the use I make of them. One will remark that Riordan, in his novels, does not pretend to do such a thing, but rather mixes and matches names spelling from both ancient Greek and Roman mythology.

Type: Thesis (Master)
Supervisors (RUG):
SupervisorE-mailTutor organizationTutor email
Dijk, M. vanFaculteit RCS, Christendom en IdeeengeschiedenisMathilde.van.Dijk@rug.nl
Kwiatkowski, F.K.Faculteit RCSf.kwiatkowski@rug.nl
Degree programme: M Religion and Cultural Heritage
Academic year: 2023-2024
Date of delivery: 01 Feb 2024 09:27
Last modified: 01 Feb 2024 09:27
URI: https://rcs.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/793
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