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

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religion or the sacred in and of itself, it was possible to understand its manifestations or appearances (van der Leeuw 1963). The underlying aim of the phenomenological approach was to understand – by empathetic and imaginative re-experience – the insider position while refraining from forming a judgement about its truth or falsity (that being the domain of the theologian or philosopher).

The contemporary form of the insider/outsider debate, which has focused on the limits and desirability of such an approach, has raised different issues. A number of critics have argued that the phenomenology of religion has been implicitly theological (Segal 1983; Wiebe 1985), even a spiritual technique in its own right (McCutcheon 1997). Its assumptions about the essential, fundamental and totalising nature of the sacred, and its frequent adoption of Christian categories and types for the theorisation of religion have been deemed to be problematic (Fitzgerald 2000). Critics have questioned the rhetoric of impartiality and critical distance associated with phenomenology (Flood 1999).

Two rather different approaches to the study of religions have emerged in the West in recent decades. One is avowedly secular and scientific (Segal 1983; Wiebe 1985; McCutcheon 1997). It values an objective, outsider stance. It starts from the view that we cannot assume a common human nature across which categories such as religion and experiences of the sacred are shared. Instead, the social nature of religion and its capacity to be studied like other ideologies and institutions must be acknowledged. The aim of the scholar of religion should not be to get inside the experience and meaning of religious phenomena, but to build upon the benefits of critical distance to explain religion from the outside. The second approach focuses upon reflexivity (Brown 1991; Hufford 1995; King 1995; Flood 1999). Rather than requiring greater objectivity, as the previous approach does, it requires greater awareness on the part of the scholar about the dialogical nature of scholarship. While not being necessarily opposed to phenomenology, its criticism of that approach has been that the exponents of the latter were insufficiently aware of their intellectual and personal standpoint vis-à-vis others. They failed to take sufficient account of the effect of their position – either as individuals, often themselves religious, or as members of privileged groups of scholars, often Western and male – on their understanding of religion. Critics of this take a reflexive stance which requires that, as scholars, they research and write consciously from within their context and standpoint, whether as insiders or outsiders. Some couch this criticism in terms of post-colonialism, stressing the importance of a scholarly engagement with issues of identity, power and status (Shaw 1995; Flood 1999; King 1999; Donaldson and Pui-Lan 2002).

In his sourcebook on the insider/outsider problem – which may be consulted in association with this chapter – McCutcheon (1999) sought to categorise responses to the problem as follows: (i) the autonomy of religious experience, which he associated with the phenomenological approach; (ii) reductionism, exemplified by those taking a scientific, objective outsider stance; (iii) neutrality and methodological agnosticism, as adopted by those such as Ninian Smart who relied on insider accounts without evaluating their truth or falsity; and (iv) reflexivity. McCutcheon’s presentation and discussion of these responses was introduced with reference to two terms which derive from the work of the linguist, Kenneth Pike. The emic perspective arises ‘from studying behaviour as from inside the system’ (Pike 1967: 37); the etic perspective, as from the outside. The former, then, is an attempt,

to produce as faithfully as possible – in a word, to describe – the informant’s own descriptions … The etic perspective is the observer’s subsequent attempt to take the

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descriptive information they have already gathered and to organize, systematize, compare

– in a word redescribe – that information in terms of a system of their own making … (McCutcheon 1999: 17)

These terms are of central importance for understanding the perspectives of insider and outsider scholars.

Researching religious groups: insider/outsider perspectives and participant observation

Having dealt briefly with how some of the issues relating to the insider/outsider debate have been theorised, I shall turn now to a range of examples in order to investigate how these issues have been dealt with in practice. Our focus moves, then, from the theoretical to the methodological. For this purpose, I have developed a diagram to portray insider and outsider positions based on a model of participant/observer roles from the social sciences. The term ‘participant observation’ has commonly been used in anthropology to refer to the process of conducting research by living within a community over a period of time, participating in its life and observing its activities and use of symbols in order to develop an understanding of its meaning and structures (Davies 1999). This anthropological strategy need not detain us here. Rather, it is the four role conceptions of complete participant, participant-as-observer, observer-as-participant, and complete observer – first identified by two sociologists called Junker and Gold in the 1950s – that we shall consider here with reference to insider and outsider perspectives (Gold 1958: 217). They may be plotted on a continuum as follows:

OUTSIDER INSIDER

Completeâ––––––––––– Observer asâ––––––––––––––Participantâ–––––––––––––Complete observer participant as observer participant

If we take this diagram as illustrating the roles of those involved in researching religious groups, we can see that a number of positions are possible (though Gold’s view was somewhat different as he took all researchers to be outsiders by default). I shall take the polar opposites first, followed by the two mid-way positions. At one end are those who are fully involved in religious activity as participants. They write about religion as insiders. Objectivity is not their purpose; critical distance is not their aim. They are scholars who write about their religion, with the benefit of an insider’s faith and knowledge, as engaged participants (see Stringer 2002). They are unapologetic about this position, often believing that insiders like themselves provide the most informed and reliable accounts of their religion. I will look to the work of Fatima Mernissi, a Muslim scholar, for an example of this. Mernissi (1991) does not make a general case for the value of participant insider accounts, but rather shows how such accounts arise from particular standpoints and motivations. There is no single, uncontested view of what constitutes a religion like Islam; there are many differing participant accounts.

Moving to the far left of the diagram, we will turn to the role of the complete observer. Here we might expect to find a scholar who researches and writes about religion from the outside, eschewing any kind of participation. This is a position often associated with the psychology and sociology of religion, particularly with studies in which the researcher observes by means of the scientific use and analysis of questionnaires or structured interviews. My example is the fascinating study by Festinger, Riecken and Schachter carried out in the mid-1950s that

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revealed what happened to a religious group when its prophecy failed. We shall see how the researchers attempted to reproduce the complete observer stance in a situation where participation turned out to be unavoidable.

The role of the observer-as-participant will be examined in relation to Eileen Barker’s stance in The Making of a Moonie (1984). From this we will discern a line of continuity with the phenomenological approach outlined earlier, particularly with the strategy of ‘methodological agnosticism’ commonly associated with the work of Ninian Smart (1973).

We will turn finally to those scholarly participants who adopt the role of observer in the midst of their own religious communities. They generally adopt a more critical stance than those who are complete participants, while remaining of the faith and sharing in the benefits of an insider’s knowledge of the beliefs and practices of the community. For an understanding of this role we will examine the reflections of Samuel Heilman, a modernist Jew and sociologist writing in the 1980s before turning to those scholarly participants who have developed a reflexive and postmodernist critique of the insider/outsider problem (Pearson 2002; Collins 2002; Mandair 2001).

Fatima Mernissi: a complete but contentious participant?

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––Complete participant

The majority of books written about religions are written by those who participate in them. There are numerous publishing houses associated with religious institutions; many groups have in-house newsletters and journals. In all of these, people of faith share with their coreligionists accounts of religious experience, religious ideas, responses to scripture, and thoughts about religious behaviour, ethics and the public demonstration of their faith. In addition, most religions have a class of scholars who reflect on, speak and write about their doctrinal, philosophical, legal or textual traditions, and may interpret them according to the needs of the time, or codify them so that they may be remembered and used in the future. Those who comprise such classes of scholars (theologians, rabbis, muftis, pandits and so on), often men, are by definition participants and insiders.

I have chosen Fatima Mernissi to illustrate the complete participant role, notably the stance she takes in Women and Islam: An Historical and Theological Enquiry (1991). As a Muslim feminist sociologist, she is hardly the obvious choice. Mernissi herself cites a case where she was denounced, by the editor of an Islamic journal, as a liar and misrepresentative of Islamic tradition. She is certainly not an authorised Islamic leader nor a trained theologian, but, as one who writes as a Muslim with the deliberate intention of recovering the Islamic past in order to understand women’s rights, she evidently counts herself as an insider. What is more, she has a clear sense that this is not just a matter of private belief, but of legal requirement and communal identity:

It is time to define what I mean when I say ‘we Muslims’. The expression does not refer to Islam in terms of an individual choice, a personal option. I define being Muslim as belonging to a theocratic state … Being Muslim is a civil matter, a national identity, a passport, a family code of laws, a code of public rights.

(20–1)

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It is the denial of such rights to women in Muslim states that is of concern to Mernissi and that passionately engages her as a Muslim, a feminist and a scholar, as a result of which she turns her intellectual powers and scholarly training to the Hadith, the collections by later scholars of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. She is a critical religious insider tackling an issue of significance to contemporary Muslim women by recovering the foundational stories of the women around Muhammad and interrogating the misogynism of later interpretative accounts. In the preface to the English edition to her book, she writes:

We Muslim women can walk into the modern world with pride, knowing that the quest for dignity, democracy, and human rights, for full participation in the political and social affairs of our country, stems from no imported Western values, but is a true part of the Muslim tradition.

(viii)

Mernissi’s is an emic, but not uncritical perspective. Rather than using the ‘experiencedistant’ language of either comparative religion or sociology, she uses the ‘experience-near’ language of Islam (Geertz 1974), stressing, in particular, the centrality of the concept of hijab for an understanding of Muslim civilisation. Although she has not received the training associated with the ulama, she draws on the same sources of authority, though emphasising different stories and offering variant readings.

Although her book is not directed explicitly at a non-Muslim audience, Mernissi is clearly aware of the dominant Western critique, which has tended to see Islam as undemocratic and oppressive of women, and is keen to show that, in its foundational stories, there are ‘matters dangerous to the establishment, of human dignity and equal rights’ (Mernissi 1991: ix). She wishes to make clear to other Muslims that taking up the cause of women’s rights does not place her outside Islamic tradition or Muslim society. She eschews the role of the secular feminist outsider and embraces that of participant in the narration of Islamic memory (10).

Can a single example, like that of Mernissi, point to a plurality of cases? I believe so. In choosing Mernissi – an insider who cites and disputes the views of many other Muslim insiders – I have indicated the complexity of insider perspectives. Choosing a feminist insider as an example has raised the issue of contestation between different insider-scholars within a single religion.

The struggle to be the complete observer

Completeâ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– observer

From an emic account in which experience-near concepts are to the fore, we now move to an etic one in which the language of social science is used to explain psychological behaviour resulting from religious belief. In the final part of their study of what happens to a messianic group when prophecy fails, Festinger, Riecken and Schachter (1956) examined the methodological difficulties that arose when trying to sustain the stance of the complete observer in a qualitative study of a dynamic religious community. At the time when they conducted their study, the key principles of social scientific research were objectivity,

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neutrality, the ability to repeat experiments, to demonstrate the validity of their results and to generalise from them. Many sociologists and psychologists used a quantitative approach, for example, by developing and administering a questionnaire (Beit-Hallahmi and Argyle 1996). Festinger and his co-researchers decided that such an approach was inappropriate for examining the cognitive and behavioural responses of a group of believers to ‘undeniable disconfirmatory evidence’ (1956: 4). Rather, it was essential to observe a group closely during such a process. Had it been possible to set up an experiment of this kind in a laboratory, behind glass, the researchers would no doubt have done so.

In fact, what they did was to await signs (in the media) of prophetic group activity, gain covert admittance to a group, and then observe the behaviour of its members from the inside. They adopted insider roles, as seekers who were ‘non-directive, sympathetic listeners, passive participants who were inquisitive and eager to learn whatever others might want to tell us’ (234). Such undercover work was deemed necessary to avoid alerting the group to the fact that it was being researched, and thus to avoid influencing the very beliefs, attitudes and responses they wished to observe.

Although the researchers were scientific outsiders, to the prophet, Mrs Keech, and her followers, they appeared to be complete participants. They were, however, students and staff from a variety of university psychology and sociology departments trained in observational methods. As such, they were conscious of the need to satisfy social scientific conditions, though they found themselves departing from ‘the orthodoxy of social science in a number of respects’, notably, in being unable ‘to subject the members of the group to any standardised measuring instrument, such as a Âquestionnaire or structured interview’ (249). Further, they unintentionally reinforced members’ beliefs, e.g. by seeming to confirm the view that they had been sent to join the group for a special purpose. They found it impossible to avoid discussing the belief system with members, answering calls from enquirers, and being seen by the movement’s leaders as messengers from the Guardians (supernatural beings thought by members to be guiding the movement). All of these put them in a position of influencing those people they were supposed to be observing.

Despite these difficulties, When Prophecy Fails is an etic account as its purpose, hypothesis, methods, analysis, reporting and audience are evidently social scientific and not religious. While the researchers took seriously members’ beliefs and responses, they did so only in so far as these were data to be collected and evaluated. The issue of their truth or falsity was not mentioned. Neither did the authors formally reflect on whether they accepted any of the beliefs of the group. Rather, they pretended ‘to be merely interested individuals who had been persuaded of the correctness of the belief system’ (249). Their pretence as insiders raises ethical questions about whether and in what ways the subjects of research should be informed and involved in decisions about the research process. The use in the book of terms such as ‘covert’, ‘detective’ and ‘surveillance’ heightens the distinction between the outsiderobserver on the one side (in control, invisible, investigating), and the insider-observed on the other (passive, highly visible, exposed to detailed investigation), thereby raising the issue of power in the scholarly study and presentation of religious groups.

Arguably, this case fails to do full justice to the observer role because the demands of the research required the scholars involved to compromise their position as outsiders (by necessitating that they pretend to be participants). Nevertheless, we have been able to see how difficult it is for even the most determined observers to remain uninvolved, impartial and scientific when examining the subject of religious belief at close quarters. In the next section, we will consider whether an observer-as-participant who is known to and accepted