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