Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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First, gender ideology includes sex as a mythologized discourse. The foundational quality of myth – its apparent rootedness in nature – means that the social, historical, and political aspects of gender and sex are elided. As I have indicated, both gender and sex, as dialectically related categories, must be submitted to a thoroughgoing social and historical analysis. Second, what is at stake in gender ideology is power. Although this would seem evident, evidently it is not. ‘I am a man’ or ‘I am a woman’ seem not to be political statements that mark power. But indeed they do; such terms mark social power. Therefore to analytically engage gender/sex is to understand a significant aspect of the complexity of human signing systems mapped through that which we call religion.

Note

1First-wave feminism refers to women’s political and social action to provide women with both political and civil rights in the Eurowest during the mid-1800s and early 1900s. Second-wave feminism refers to women’s political, social, cultural, and legal activities and analyses, beginning in the late 1950s and continuing to the present, toward addressing the oppression on women. Both firstand second-wave feminisms are terms used to designate the rise and resurgence of Eurowestern feminism and do not refer to the rise and resurgence of feminisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in, for example, India, the Middle East, or Latin and South America. Third-wave feminism is a current term that is used to reflect a shift toward representation, technology, globalization, and international feminisms that began in the mid-1990s.

Bibliography

Bell, Diane (1993 [1983]). Daughters of the Dreaming. 2nd edn. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Bell’s comprehensive and thoughtful text is an ethnographic study of Australian Aboriginal women’s rites, symbols, and myths. What Bell makes apparent is the importance of Australian Aboriginal women’s ritual work toward the development and maintenance of the Dreamtime.

Blackwood, Evelyn and Saskia E. Wieringa (eds) (1999). Same Sex Relations and Female Desires: Transgender Practices Across Cultures. New York: Columbia University Press.

This text is a fine collection of historical, sociological and ethnographic studies of transgendered practices. Focused upon women’s same-sex desire, the category of gender is shown to be intimately connected with and foundational for the category of sex, while sexuality intersects with both sex and gender in a definitive fashion.

Brown, Peter (1988). The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christian Society. New York: Columbia University Press.

Brown’s text is a wonderful engagement with the category of gender/sex in the formative years of Christianity. Under the influence of theorists such as John Winkler, Brown makes apparent the historicity of the categories of gender and sex, and how these categories, understood differently in the ancient world, were central to the ideological formation of a ‘normative’ Christianity.

Butler, Judith (1999 [1990]). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge.

This is a formative and pivotal text that is understood to be one of the founding texts of queer theory. This text engages the feminist category of gender, pointing to the short-comings of the theorizing of the category of gender and underscoring the heterosexism that is prevalent in this theorizing.

Delphy, Christine (1996 [1993]). ‘Rethinking Sex and Gender.’ In Diana Leonard and Lisa Adkins (eds), Sex in Question: French Materialist Feminism, 30–41. London: Taylor & Francis.

Delphy’s article is a logical and coherent analysis of the category of gender as it has operated in feminist theorizing from 1970 until 1990. She engages the concept of gender and demonstrates the limited nature of ignoring sex as a social and historical category.

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Foucault, Michel (1990 [1978–1984]). The History of Sexuality. 3 vols. Robert Hurley (trans.). New York: Vintage.

Foucault’s published trilogy intersects with the category of sexuality toward historicizing and politicizing it. Beginning with seventeenth-century Europe in volume one, he then interrogates sexuality and erotic literature in volume two and ends by interrogating sexuality in relation to Greco-Roman philosophy in the third.

Hardacre, Helen (1994). ‘Japanese New Religions: Profiles in Gender.’ In John Stratton Hawley (ed.), Fundamentalism and Gender, 111–133. New York: Oxford University Press.

This article is an interesting and well-documented discussion of the category of gender/sex and how it is used to limit the political and social power of women in Buddhist RisshōKōseikai.

Herdt, Gilbert (ed.) (1994). Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. New York: Zone Books.

This anthology of articles is a marvellous delineation of the multiplicity of the categories of gender, sex, and sexuality. Linking all three categories in an effort to make apparent how each is reliant upon the other, this anthology is a cross-cultural and multi-historical analysis of human systems of meaning and social organization.

Jeffrey, Patricia and Amrita Basu (eds) (1998). Appropriating Gender: Women’s Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia. New York and London: Routledge.

This is a nicely developed anthology of articles that examine the political aspects of both gender/sex and religion. In these articles authors note, for example, how the state and women’s groups employ the categories of gender/sex, linked to religious beliefs, for political purposes.

Laqueur, Thomas L. (1990). Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.

Laqueur’s text engages the categories of gender and sex and examines how their understanding shifted in the period of the 1800s in medical discourses. He links this shift to political change in Europe during this time period and changes in the conceptualization of the human under the influence of enlightenment philosophy.

Lincoln, Bruce (1989). Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual and Classification. New York: Oxford University Press.

A pivotal text that engages ritual, myth, and classification demonstrating their historicity, their political potency, and their importance toward constructing social bodies that subsequently impact on individual bodies.

Nicholson, Linda (1994). Interpreting Gender. Signs, 20, 1: 79–105.

A well-developed analysis of the use of the category of gender in the work of second-wave feminists. Nicholson makes apparent the unexamined idea of the immutability of sex as a biological category which resides beneath the concept of gender as a socialized category.

Sered, Susan Starr (1994). Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister: Religions Dominated by Women. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sered’s cross-cultural examination through ethnographic literature of women’s religiosity is a wellinformed and thoughtful text. Her clear description of the multiplicity of women’s religions and the rituals, symbols, and myths developed and utilized by women, allows her to speculate on common threads that link these variegated practices toward answering the question of how gender/sex intersects with and shapes religious beliefs.

Vance, Laura L. (1999). Seventh-day Adventism in Crisis: Gender and Sectarian Change in an Emerging Religion. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.

This study, based on official and unofficial publications and interviews, examines gender, sex, and sexuality and their relations to the worldview of Seventh-day Adventists. In line with this, the author examines concepts of femininity, masculinity, and sexuality and their relation to social practices.

Watkins, Joan (1996). Spirited Women: Gender, Religion and Cultural Identity in the Nepal Himalaya. New York: Columbia University Press.

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This interesting ethnographic study examines the changing gender ideology among the Nyeshangte, a Tibetan Buddhism group found in the Himalayan Highlands. The author theorizes upon the intersection of modernism and capitalism with the cultural of the Nyeshangte and the subsequent

changes in their understanding of gender and sex.

Suggested reading

Alsop, Rachel, Annette Fitzsimons, and Kathleen Lennon (2002). Theorizing Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Butler, Judith (2004). Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.

Goheen, Miriam (1996). Men Own the Fields, Women Own the Crops: Gender and Power in the Cameroon Grassfields. Madison, Wisconsin: Wisconsin University Press.

Joyce, Rosemary A. (2000). Gender and Power in Prehistoric Mesoamerica. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge.

Ortner, Sherry B. (1996). Making Gender: the Politics and Erotics of Culture. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Penner, Todd and Caroline Vander Stichele (eds.), (2006). Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses. Biblical Interpretation Series 84. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers.

Stratton, Kimberley (2007) Naming the Witch: Magic, Ideology and Stereotype in the Ancient World. New York: Columbia University Press.

Chapter 15

Insider/outsider perspectives

Kim Knott

Some years ago students who came to study religions at my university were introduced to the subject through a course called ‘Religious Lives’. The purpose of the course was to develop an understanding of religions and their study by means of an examination of the autobiographies and biographies of a variety of religious people – what we might here call ‘religious insiders’. The students came as ‘outsiders’ to these stories; but they also had their own stories, their own subjective experiences which they were asked to reflect on and write about. They were the ‘insiders’ in these accounts. The process of thinking about other people’s religious lives as well as their own raised many critical questions and issues for discussion (Comstock 1995). Can we ever fully understand someone else’s experience? What is the difference between an account of a religion by an insider and one by an outsider? Does translation from one language to another bridge a gap or create a barrier between the person telling the story and the one reading it? Additionally, we find ourselves considering the nature and limits of objectivity and subjectivity, ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ positions, ‘experience-near’ and ‘experiencedistant’ concepts, empathy and critical analysis, the effect of personal standpoint, and the process of reflexivity. We even find that some of the lives we read about make us ask whether it is actually helpful to distinguish between insider and outsider perspectives. We will come to these matters in more detail shortly, but my purpose in listing them here is to show the range of concerns that are related to the insider/outsider debate, many of which have been at the heart of the study of religions since its inception as a discipline distinct from theology (Knott 2008). The debate challenges us by raising questions about the extent and limits of our knowledge and understanding. It invites us to consider whether or not our field of study is scientific. It is central to our methodology. It has an ethical dimension, and a political one.

Insider/outsider perspectives in the history of the study of religions

These questions came to the fore from the mid-1980s in a highly charged debate about the nature of Sikh studies and the contribution and motivation of particular scholars writing on Sikh religion (Grewal 1998; McLeod 2000; Shackle et al 2001). Who could understand and represent Sikh traditions? What were the personal motivations, epistemological standpoints and ideological interests of those who studied Sikh history and theology (King 1999)? As we shall see towards the end of this chapter, the issues in this debate eventually extended beyond the problem of the insider/outsider, but the problem was certainly of central importance early on. For example, in 1986, a collection of papers entitled Perspectives on the Sikh Tradition was

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published. Several of its authors strongly criticised Western scholarship on Sikhism, focusing particularly on the work of W. H. McLeod, who was held to have undermined the Sikh faith as a result of his historical and critical-textual approach to Sikh traditions (Singh 1986: 10; Grewal 1998: 126–31). Then, in 1991, in a review of the work of several Western scholars, including McLeod, Darshan Singh raised a key issue:

The Western writers’ attempt to interpret and understand Sikhism is an outsider’s or non-participant’s endeavour … Primarily, religion is an area which is not easily accessible to the outsider, foreigner or non-participant. The inner meaning of a religion unfolds only through participation; by following the prescribed path and discipline.

(1991: 3)

As we see from this case, the question of who can reliably understand and present a religion is contested. Darshan Singh and the authors of Perspectives, while accepting that Western outsiders have played a significant role in the development of Sikh studies, are suspicious of their motives (whether Christian or secular in origin), critical of their academic methods, and favour – by extension – the contribution of insiders to such studies. The strengths and weaknesses of participation and non-participation by scholars in the religions they study is a subject I shall return to shortly, but first I shall consider how, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Western scholars of the kind criticised above tackled the question of studying religions – both their own and those of others.

Emerging in the West as a field of enquiry with different objectives and methods to theology, the proponents of the early study of religions (also known as Religionswissenschaft and the history of religions) drew attention to its scientific, objective and comparative character (Waardenburg 1973; Sharpe 1975; Whaling 1995). They stressed the value of impartial scholarly accounts, and the development of appropriate conceptual tools, theories and methods. Writing in 1873, Max Müller stated that, as the object of study, religion should be shown reverence, but that it should also be subjected to critical scholarship.. Twenty years later Cornelius Tiele, stressing the need among scientists of religion for objectivity but not judgement about the forms of religion, considered whether such scholarship was best done by believers or non-believers, concluding that, ‘It is an error to suppose that one cannot take up such an impartial scientific position without being a sceptic; that one is disqualified for an impartial investigation if one possesses fixed and earnest religious convictions of one’s own’ (Tiele from Elements of the Science of Religion (1897–9), in Waardenburg 1973: 99). He distinguished between the private religious subjectivity of the individual and his or her outward impartiality as a scholar of religion. Tiele was not asserting that only sceptical nonbelievers or outsiders could study religions; rather, he was suggesting that those who were themselves religious were fully able to be impartial in their studies. This view, that those studying religion should set to one side their subjective experience and cultural baggage, and take an objective position with regard to the other, prevailed for nearly a century.

These issues were given consideration by other scholars, especially those associated with the phenomenology of religion, particularly Kristensen, van der Leeuw and Otto in Northern Europe, and later Eliade and Cantwell Smith in North America and Ninian Smart in Britain. They held the view, to quote Kristensen, that all religious phenomena were ‘unique, autonomous and incomparable’, yet capable of understanding by means of empathy, that is, by reliving in one’s own experience that which appears to be alien (Kristensen from The Meaning of Religion in Waardenburg 1973: 391). While it was impossible to apprehend