Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells
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Critical modes
Smith’s work intersects with anthropological theory, but it intersects with more work as well. It also addresses issues of interest to various modes of critique that became common in the 1970s and 1980s. These modes – postmodern, post-structural, post-colonial, feminist – are most closely associated with literary and cultural studies. A number of French thinkers from the late 1960s were influential in their development, among whom the most famous are Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and Michel Foucault (1926–1984). In some quarters these approaches are quite controversial.
The postmodern
Derrida’s work is notoriously difficult, but perhaps one may say that it explores the limits of human speech and, implicitly, human conceptualization. For Derrida, human attempts to make definite utterances always ultimately fail; indeterminacy is implicit within them. If the goal of one kind of academic discourse is to construct meaningful accounts – or in Smith’s terms, to translate the unknown into the known – the goal of an alternative kind of discourse is to deconstruct such accounts, to show that, ultimately and irredeemably, they miss out. This can often be done through creative rhetorical means that call into question the pretensions of the discourse at hand, for example, by responding to earnest attempts at precise definition by deliberately playing with words, blurring their boundaries and obscuring their meanings. Although Derrida’s brilliance at such deconstruction is readily acknowledged, it is not clear that some of his epigones have not devolved into silliness.
The major impact of postmodernism has been not so much on the study of religion in the narrow sense as on theology. This makes sense, both because postmodernism rejects the ‘modernist’ project that an ‘objective’ study of religions would seem to presume, and because contemporary naturalist discourse often seems entirely at odds with theological claims. (Recently theologians and scientists have begun to explore a possible merger of the two.) In vulgar terms, if God can no longer be found in rational accounts, as in the days when philosophers of religion claimed to be able to prove God’s existence by reason alone, perhaps intimations of God can be found in the inevitable limitations of naturalist discourse. Leading post-modern theologians include John D. Caputo, John Milbank, and Mark C. Taylor. Within the study of religions more narrowly, perhaps the best representative of this approach is Tomoko Masuzawa (1993, 2005), who has reread the history of the study of religion from a postmodern perspective.
Post-structural, post-colonial, and feminist currents
Many postmodern thinkers have tended to concentrate on language. For some of them, language in fact creates the world, and there is no world outside language. Such an orientation does not necessarily preclude social and ethical reflection, but other critical modes, poststructural, post-colonial, and feminist, arose with a more distinct orientation toward social criticism. Perhaps the leading thinker for this line of thought was Michel Foucault.
Among other concerns, Foucault examined the manner in which knowledge and power are mutually implicated. Powerful institutions and persons create knowledge in such a way that it perpetuates and extends their power. At the same time, those who possess knowledge also possess power. Power-knowledge exercises its governance through defining the marginal
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and controlling it in a number of ways. Foucault pursues the theme through the examination of institutions such as psychiatric treatment, hospitals, and prisons, as well as by looking at how what counts as knowledge, the various conditions for knowledge, have changed over the centuries. Although Foucault himself did little with religion per se, it should be fairly apparent that these ideas provide a rich set of possible themes for the study of religions to explore. Parallel currents of thought particularly important for the study of religion were post-colonialism and feminism.
Derrida and Foucault largely thought within the horizons of Europe. In her well-known article, ‘Can the Sub-Altern Speak?’, the Indian thinker and translator of Derrida, Gayatri Spivak (1988), famously re-directed his line of thinking in a post-colonial direction to talk about the marginalization of colonized people, especially women. Even larger was the impact of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which in some ways extended Foucault’s project beyond the European frontier. The book examines the various ways in which Orientalism as a discourse, including the academic field known by that name, has imagined the people of the Middle East. According to Said, these imaginations are not accurate representations so much as the creation of images of an ‘other’ to the European self that serves the European self’s own ideological purposes. Simultaneously, many women, who had largely been excluded from higher education prior to the twentieth century, began to examine the many ways in which academic discourse, including academic discourse about religions, had been narrowly centred on men. Once identified, such discourse easily appears as an instrument of control. Linking all of these approaches together is a perspective on human activity that emphasizes the social construction of reality and identity, political dominance and cultural hegemony, and society as a location for suppression, appropriation, and exploitation.
Post-structural, postcolonial, and feminist thought each had enormous impact upon the study of religion. It is fairly obvious that religion has served to subordinate and exclude women. For examples, one need only consider the hiring practices of almost all churches prior to the feminist critique or of the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox synagogues still today. Many early feminist thinkers addressed issues of religion directly. Many of them also worked within Christian institutions or in explicit rejection of those institutions, and they were often theologians as much as scholars of religions. Among other names one may note Rosemary Radford Ruether (1983, 1992), Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (1983), and, on the more radical side, Mary Daly (1973, 1978). Feminism has not, however, been limited to Christianity, and in many religious communities important women thinkers, such as Rita Gross (1993) in Buddhism and Judith Plaskow (1990) in Judaism, have emerged to criticize androcentrism and patriarchal authority, to re-read inherited traditions, and to reformulate their communities’ teachings and practices. Their work has also had a salutary impact on the study of religions. If at the beginning of the period under consideration it was acceptable to equate men’s religious activity with the religious activity of the entire community, it is no longer so today. A large number of publications have appeared devoted to women’s religious lives. In addition, steps have been taken to encourage women’s full participation in the academic community. One example is the Women Scholars Network of the International Association for the History of Religions, organized by Rosalind Hackett and Morny Joy.
Like feminism, post-colonial thought has had a major impact upon the study of religion. Said’s Orientalism unleashed a reconsideration and critique of traditional representations not only of Arabs, Islam, and the Ancient Near East but also of people in Asia more generally. Similar dynamics can be found in writing about religions throughout the world. Writing on Islam and Christianity, Talal Asad (1993) famously critiqued Clifford Geertz’s notion of
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religion as a cultural system as being too rooted in a particular historical context to be useful cross-culturally. Others have examined the ways in which colonial administrators in South Asia allied with certain elements of the Indian population to construct a religion known as Hinduism. Donald Lopez (1998), as well as others, has talked about the ideological needs which the Western imagination of Buddhism fulfils. Bernard Faure (1991, 1993) has made much use of Foucault in the study of East Asian Buddhism. The American scholar Sam Gill (1987) suggested that the notion that Native Americans worshipped Mother Earth was largely an academic creation.
In one way or another, all of these moves represent the introduction of the realm of the political into the study of religions. The Chicago scholar Bruce Lincoln (1989, 1994, 2007), influenced as much by Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci as by post-structural, post-colonial, and feminist thinkers, has produced a body of work interrogating, among other topics, authority, power, politics, and ideology in both religion and the study of religion, including the work of Mircea Eliade. Beginning with Ivan Strenski in 1987, it has become common to criticize Eliade on political as much as on theoretical grounds. A host of scholars, among them Adriana Berger, Steven Wasserstrom, Daniel Dubuisson (1993; Eng. trans. 2006; 2005), and Russell McCutcheon (1997) have not only criticized the political implications of Eliade’s theory but have attempted to link that criticism to Eliade’s activities on behalf of the fascist Iron Guard in 1930s Romania. Furthermore, in something of a continuation of the claims of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the very category of ‘religion’ itself has also come in for intense scrutiny, and some, including Timothy Fitzgerald (2000, 2007), Daniel Dubuisson (1998; Eng. trans. 2003), and Russell McCutcheon, have advocated abandoning the category altogether. Others, including Jonathan Z. Smith and Bruce Lincoln, have maintained that it continues to have limited utility. Although scholars in other parts of the world, such as Southeast Asia and China, have weighed in on these issues, their voices have not yet been incorporated into discussions by European and North American theorists. The major exception has been S. N. Balagangadhara, but he teaches at the University of Ghent, Belgium.
New fields of study
In a review of the work of Bruce Lincoln, Brian Pennington (2005: 1) has written, ‘The declining hegemony of phenomenology and theology in the study of religion and the rise of critical methodologies in the wake of post-structuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism have contributed to a discipline that is far more attuned to the production of knowledge and the authorization of power’. True enough. These movements have also had at least two other major effects on the study of religions: the opening of new fields of study and of new methods of representation.
The present chapter is probably not the best place to discuss new fields of study. These are represented by the rest of the chapters in this book. Nevertheless, it is important to note that as a result of various modes of criticism that became common during the 1970s, the study of religions has changed tremendously. Some important shifts have already been noted, such as the move to include women’s experiences and voices within the study of religions. Another shift concerned sources and methods. As it had developed in Europe, the study of religions was heavily oriented to the examination of texts, especially texts that somehow counted as ‘classic’, and their historical contexts. Today scholars of religions are as likely, if not more likely, to give significant attention to many other data sources, including many contemporary media of communication, such as radio, television, the internet, and even comic books.
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Furthermore, scholars previously operated, and often still do operate, with the notion that there is an ‘authoritative’ or ‘correct’ version of a given religion, whether that religion be Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, or some other. In one sense, scholarship was an effort to discover the ‘correct’ form of the various religions. Today there is a widespread recognition that such ‘correct’ forms only represent plays for power and domination. For example, ordinary Buddhists may practise Buddhism in quite different ways from what one would expect from authoritative texts and teachings, and their ideas and practices need equally to be taken into account. Such recognition of plurality has led some to speak in the plural of Christianities, Judaisms, and Buddhisms. It has also led some to focus on individual performances rather than normative structures for any given ritual.
Finally, during the course of the last fifty years scholars have begun to examine topics connected with alternative conceptions of religion. One important source of such topics is dissatisfaction with a Cartesian style dualism that makes religion a matter for the mind or spirit. Scholars have explored ways in which religion involves the human body as well as the human mind – corporality, sexuality, food, and so on—and material reality as well as thought. In Japan, Europe, and North America there has also been considerable interest in studying not just religions in their classical definitions but in new religious movements.
Representations: crisis and response
If the new critical modes opened the doors to new topics, they also sparked a crisis of representation. If a scholar wishes to write, but writing in the scholar’s field is inevitably an exercise either in meaninglessness or in cultural appropriation, imperialism, and on the most radical views, violence, what is a scholar to do? This crisis was by no means limited to the study of religion. The term ‘crisis of representation’ is taken from the anthropologists George Marcus and Michael Fisher (1986: 7), who wrote about a ‘crisis of representation in the human sciences’.
Scholars in religious studies have responded in at least two ways that might be mentioned here, interreligious dialogue and autobiographical narrative. Both have the effect of inserting the scholar into the narrative and so undercutting an us/them dichotomy between the writer and the person being written about.
Strictly speaking, neither interreligious dialogue nor autobiographical narrative is simply a response to the crisis of representation in religious studies. Interreligious dialogue arose for a variety of reasons. In some sense it continues the work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, but its current is both deeper and wider. Its recent precedents include the 1893 Parliament and less well-known efforts by Rudolf Otto to create an ‘interreligious League’ in the 1920s, but it can look back to discussions in the Mughal emperor Akbar’s Ibādat-khāna and before that to discussions in medieval Spain between Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Furthermore, interreligious dialogue is not simply an academic activity but one in which religious bodies themselves engage. For example, the Vatican II document, Nostra Aetate, recommended dialogue as the most appropriate way of dealing with people who practise other religions, and there is now in the Vatican a Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, once headed by the important African cardinal Francis Arinze. Among scholars of religion in the narrow sense active in interreligious dialogue is the Harvard professor of comparative religion, Diana Eck (1993).
Despite being represented among academics who study religion, interreligious dialogue is most closely associated with theologians. Another strategy which scholars have employed
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to negotiate the crisis of representation is to write not about others, or only about others, but to write about themselves. Again, autobiographical reflection is hardly new to scholars of religions. Religious autobiography has a history that goes back, at least in the Christian context, to Augustine’s Confessions. It is also a topic on which scholars of religions have done considerable work. Before television made experiences overseas more visibly accessible, scholars, including theologians and scholars of religions, often recounted their experiences abroad to a wider audience. In addition, a scholar as influential as Mircea Eliade wrote his autobiography at some length (Eliade 1981, 1988).
Nevertheless, under the impact of the crisis of representation, some scholars have abandoned the once standard divide between their scholarly work and their autobiographies. They have used autobiography as a presentational mode within their academic writings to a variety of rhetorical effects, one of them being to interrogate the authoritative gaze of the academic expert. In her study of Mama Lola, a Vodou priestess in New York, the American scholar, Karen McCarthy Brown (1991) provided an account not only of her own conversion experiences but also a fictionalized account of her subject’s biography. While not exactly a work in religious studies, Amitav Ghosh’s semi-autobiographical In an Antique Land (1992) contains much reflection on religion while reconstructing the geography of the Indian Ocean in medieval times. Robert Orsi, a recent president of the American Academy of Religion, has written an account that interweaves personal autobiography and family narrative with reflections on his situation as a scholar of religions studying the Catholicism in which he grew up (Orsi 2005). Autobiographical and other narrative forms have proven extremely useful for elucidating ‘lived religion’.
Science returns
From their beginnings the social sciences have studied religions, but their interest in religion has waxed and waned. Perhaps twenty years ago psychologists found many other topics much more interesting than religion. Today there is considerable work being done on the psychology of religion from a variety of perspectives. Such work, however, is usually housed in other academic units than religious studies. It often does not make its way into the ‘study of religions’ narrowly conceived.
Within the study of religions more narrowly, science has occupied a tenuous place, in part because to some extent the field grew from theological roots. A standard trope, which received much impetus from Mircea Eliade, was the insistence that the study of religions should be hermeneutical, that is, an attempt at understanding other people’s meanings, not explanatory, that is, engaged in providing reductive causal explanations of religion. Nevertheless, throughout much of the period under discussion, a few voices have championed the need for reductive explanations. They include Hans Penner and Edward Yonan in an important article from 1972, Robert Segal (1992) in an open debate with Daniel Pals, and Don Wiebe (1981, 1998).
Beginning in the 1990s, two scientific currents have begun to grow within the study of religions. The first seeks to explain religion in the terms of rational decision making, especially as employed in economic thinking. Bearing some resemblance to Adam Smith’s discussion of religion in The Wealth of Nations, this direction began theoretically with Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge’s A Theory of Religion (1987). It is most widely associated with the work of Rodney Stark and younger colleagues such as Laurence Iannaccone and Roger Finke (Stark and Finke 2000). Stark et al. tend to address sociological topics, such as