Mr Smith's Cabinet of Wonders: On Data, Examples, and Scale in the Scholarly Imagination of Religion

«There is no data for religion», Jonathan Z. Smith famously claimed in his programmatic introduction to Imagining Religion (1982) – but what kind of imagination is required to make data out of religion? This paper seeks to revisit Smith’s provocation by comparing his scholarly project to the logic of the Wunderkammer, the early modern cabinet of curiosity where naturalia and artificialia were assembled, juxtaposed, and classified in ways that were both idiosyncratic and generative. As in those cabinets, the scholarly imagination of religion, for Smith, does not discover but actively produces its objects, through the scholar’s «imaginative acts of comparison and generalization». A telling illustration is offered by the two microexperiments proposed by Smith in his essay «Fences and Neighbors», where discussion of the taxonomic value of male circumcision serves as a testing ground for evaluating both academic and normative definitions of early Judaism. What emerges is a sharp critique of any monothetic definition of religion, whether formulated at a generic or specific level, and a compelling argument in favour of polythetic, data-driven models in the analysis of religious «species». At the heart of this effort, however, lies not only a disciplined play of scale, but also an understanding of scholarly translation not as a search for congruence, but as a construction of difference – a difference that, for Smith, simply marks our shift from territory to map, from a language that is intelligible, yet not of our own making, to another language that is more intelligible because we have made it ourselves.