Intriguing supposition
Is the title JZ Smith's article I am a Parrot (Red)
explicitly modelled on those of the supposedly pornographic Swedish films I am Curious (Yellow) and I am Curious (Blue)? It seems nearly impossible that it should not be so, but confirmation by me may not be possible—I don't think he uses email.
I would mention what the article is about but I don't believe I've ever actually read it and can no longer find it. It's not in Relating Religion, which means I must at some point have made a photocopy of it and misplaced it. Alas! Presumably it has something to do with some tribe whose members claimed that they were parrots and the interpretation of this claim by anthropologists and students of religion. (I recall his in class having said that the mythological identifications of some tribes were labelled Urdummheit by their first German cataloguers, and that, given that they don't actually treat one another as if they really were parrots or whatever, this identification and straight-faced acceptance of the claims proffered could be construed as evidence of a yet Urer Dummheit.)
An update: it occurred to me that, given the fact that Smith once titled an essay "Manna, Mana Everywhere and /˘/˘/" (pronounced "manna, mana everywhere and BUM bum BUM bum BUM"), it is virtually impossible that the parrot essay not have been titled after the named Swedish films. This is perhaps also a worthy place in which to reproduce the footnote from the "bio-bibliographical essay", "When the Chips are Down", that leads off Relating Religion, in which he explains his research methodology (p37n27):
It was during this period of 'playing in the stacks', supported by a Yale Junior Sterling Fellowship, that, having read John Livingstone Lowes' description of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's reading habits (Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of Imagination [1927; reprint, New York, 1959], 30–36), I developed a set of reading rules I have followed ever since. These include: always read the entire chapter of a book in which a reference you are looking for occurs, then read at least the first and last chapters; always skim the entire volume of a journal in which you are seeking a particular article, then read the tables of contents for the entire run of the journal; after locating a particular volume on the shelves, always skim five volumes to the left and to the right of it; always trace citations in a footnote back to their original sources. (For one surprising result of the latter rule, see Smith, "Always Read the Fine Print", Signs and Times of the Yale Divinity School 3.6 [1963]: 5–8). Later, I added: do not teach or discuss a figure unless you have read the total corpus of their work available to you.
He related some of these rules in his class on Durkheim's Elementary Forms, if I remember correctly. Remarkably, his claims regarding these practices inspire, in me at least, not the least skepticism. Note, however, the inconsistency in citation styles in the note: citing Lowes he uses a comma following the right bracket; citing himself, a colon. One for the errata slip.
Comments
on 2007-12-15 5:58:07.0, abc commented:
he must have had a lot of free time to exercise that peculiar reading habit what is 'proffered'- a german word?
and, further, on 2007-12-15 6:02:29.0, abc commented:
it was 'offer', aaAAha, should have checked wiktionary first