Sad News: Benson Saler
March 17, 2021
Dear Colleagues:
I am sad to share that Benson Saler, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, passed away recently at the age of 90. He leaves behind his wife Joyce, and his children Michael, Judith, and Bethel. The Saler family is planning a memorial service in Fall 2021.
Born in Pennsylvania in 1930, Benson received his BA in 1952 from Princeton University in Public and International Affairs. He attended the University of Pennsylvania to earn his MA (1957) and PhD (1960) in anthropology, arriving at Brandeis in 1963 and teaching here until his retirement in 2000. Benson conducted fieldwork in Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela, and the United States, and cultivated expertise in the anthropology of religion, cognitive and evolutionary anthropology, and (in the USA) the “alien abduction” phenomenon. Benson’s books include the classic 1993 volume (re-issued in 2000) titled Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories; a 1997 volume on myth-making around the UFO Crash at Roswell; and a collection of his selected essays, Understanding Religion (2009). He was the recipient of several major grants in the discipline, including an ACLS, NSF, and Wenner-Gren, and in 1978 he spent a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as the Sir Isaac Wolfson Visiting Professor. In the late 1990s, Benson served as the President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, as well as Vice-President of the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology of Religion Section.
Benson managed to carry off an unusual stance in anthropology. He simultaneously appreciated the excitement of species-wide questions (why, after all, do religious representations occur across all societies?), while sounding caveats and critiques of sweeping explanations or theories. He was critical of one-size-fits-all definitions of religion, for instance, and leery of pitfalls that could come from unwittingly generalizing western approaches to the concept. Several members of the Anthropology Department have continued to teach using Benson’s flexible and sophisticated definition of religion in terms of a cluster of features that loosely tend to go together (but sometimes come apart). In a related spirit, Benson contended that cognitive theories of cultural phenomena have been “insufficiently polychromatic” in their understanding of their objects. Benson managed to bring together localized interpretive approaches with big cross-cultural questions, suggesting productive ways of combining these ways of thinking.
With startling productivity, Benson continued to issue articles year by year after his putative retirement, with titles such as “Constraints on Theory Building in the Science of Religion.” This year, Bloomsbury Press will publish his final book, The Supernatural and Other Essays. One of the chapters within it is titled “Something Nice About Vampires”—apparently, they are rule-abiding.
It seems fitting that Benson would find something nice to say about everybody, for Benson was not only brilliant and original but also kindly and genial. One former colleague describes Benson as “very smart (but very humble about it) and very funny (in a droll sort of way).” Words like “erudite,” “friendly,” and “entertaining” recur. Two people who worked with him used the same phrase: “a gentleman and a scholar.” Benson was genuinely interested in others’ work and thoughts, and his students could tell. His World Religions class filled with enrollments of around 75 to 100 enthusiastic students every year. One former student reports she has never been able to part with her notes from all of the courses she took with him.
Upon his official retirement, the Anthropology Department began to honor Benson with a series of “Saler Lectures” on the anthropology of religion. To date, nineteen events have been held and information about future lectures will be posted on the Anthropology Department website.
My thanks to Janet McIntosh and colleagues in the Anthropology Department who contributed to this memoriam.
Sincerely,
Carol Fierke
Provost