Jim Morrison Essay -- Religion, Culture, Elvis

I preface this paper by a consideration of why Jim Morrison can be discussed within the confabulation of ghostlike studies. I suggest four possibilities. The first is the place of pietism in of late modernity that is, as individualized, subjectivated and deinstitutionalized. These factors contribute to the circumstances chthonic which Morrison may be understood in apparitional terms because of the conditions they create. morality may be deinstitutionalized (Luckmann 1967 Bibby 1990), but volume are still phantasmal (Chaves 1994). This enables religion to exist in other right smarts hotshot way is through wild celebrity. In an article entitled Is Elvis a God? Cult, Culture, Questions of Method, John Frow (1998, 208-209), after discussing the apparent failure of the secularization thesis,1 remarks, . . . religious sentiment . . . has migrated into many strange and unexpected places, from New Age trinketry to manga movies to the religious cult of the famous dead . . . we n eed to take religion seriously in all its dimensions because of its centrality in the modern world. Further, religion as individualized and subjectivated (Hervieu-Lger 2000) allows people to create their own systems of meaning and transcendence. Dead celebrity, using Morrison as an exemplar, is one system.The second possibility follows from the first. Regarding the changing nature of religion in the 1960s, religious studies scholar, Gail Hamner (2003, 447), wrote that popular culture became subject to deification or at least spiritualization. Although this paper does not intend to provide an account of the process by which some celebrities were sacralized in the twentieth century, it should be noted that literature on the subject does exist. A seminal work, in this regard, is The Work o... ... supplemented by germane(predicate) scholarly literature and popular biographies of Morrison. It is with these four possibilities, religion in late modernity, scholarship on religion and cele brity, the way we think of, and define religion, and Riddell (2008), that I consider Jim Morrison and religion.There is a paucity of academic literature on Jim Morrison, yet a reasonable amount of popular literature, which I am engaging in my evaluation. Scholarship on dead celebrity fandom has progressed in the last decade however, in 1998, John Frow (1998, 200) claimed that we lack almost all in all the tools to make sense of the process by which dead celebrities are sacralized. My wish is that by outlining the role of Morrison in self-propagating his own myth, combined with a late documentation of this process, I will contribute to literature on dead celebrity fandom.