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

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by insiders encounters fewer problems. What are the characteristics of this stance? What difference does it make to the research if the participating observer owns up to being an outsider?

In neutral: the observer-as-participant

––––––––––––––––––– Observer asâ–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– participant

From the start of her investigation, Eileen Barker rejected the possibility of undertaking covert research on the Unification Church on both practical and ethical grounds: ‘It was known that I was not a Moonie. I never pretended that I was, or that I was likely to become one’ (1984: 20; see Lauder (2003) for a defence of covert research).

I usually found my time with the movement interesting, and I grew genuinely fond of several individual Moonies, but at no time could I believe in the Unification version of reality. On the other hand, I could not accept the picture of the movement that outsiders kept telling me I ought to be finding.

(1984: 21)

Barker’s purpose in investigating the Unification Church, or ‘Moonies’ as they were frequently called, was to answer the question, ‘Why should – how could – anyone become a Moonie?’ (1). Little was known about them in the mid-1970s (despite the fact that the movement had been founded in 1954, in Korea), except for what was gleaned from negative media coverage about the leader and the conversion strategies of the movement which tended to stimulate fear and fascination rather than a desire to learn or to be informed. Sceptical of both the movement’s self-image and the media account, Barker became an authorised observer whose research method was one of engaged participation. She lived in Unification centres, attended workshops, listened to members, engaged in conversations, asked questions and interviewed ex-members. Her stance, by her own admittance, had its strengths and weaknesses.

Being known to be a non-member had its disadvantages, but by talking to people who had left the movement I was able to check that I was not missing any of the internal information which was available to rank-and-file members. At the same time, being an outsider who was ‘inside’ had enormous advantages. I was allowed (even, on certain occasions, expected) to ask questions that no member would have presumed to ask either his leaders or his peers.

(21)

Barker borrowed a term from the work of Max Weber to identify her approach to understanding why people became Moonies: ‘Verstehen is a process of inquiry during which the researcher tries to put himself in other people’s shoes or … to see the world through their glasses’ (20). Although she contextualised this with reference to the social sciences, it had much in common with the empathetic approach favoured by the phenomenologists of religion reviewed earlier in this account: Kristensen, van der Leeuw and, latterly, Ninian

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Smart. It was Smart who first used the term ‘methodological agnosticism’ to signal the need for neutrality and the bracketing-out of truth claims and judgements in research on religion. Barker shared this view, believing that ‘passing value judgements should be an enterprise that is separate from social science’ (36). Rather, she hoped to bring together what she saw as ‘an objective factual account of the history and beliefs of the movement’ (10) with diverse voices from within and outside it.

Barker’s etic account, interspersed with the experiences of Moonies, ex-Moonies, nonMoonies and anti-Moonies, represented a conscious attempt to translate Moonie reality and values for those unfamiliar with them. She found that she was able to stay in touch with outsiders’ often unsympathetic and quizzical attitudes while becoming engrossed in Moonie reality by regularly re-reading her research diary. She was reminded of her own journey from ignorance to knowledge about the movement. She believed in the attempt to bridge the divergent perpectives of insiders and outsiders, and saw this as an appropriate scholarly task. Furthermore, she held that it was ‘perfectly possible to see things from other people’s points of view without necessarily agreeing that they are right’ (35). At the same time, she recognised that there were those on both sides who believed that neutrality was impossible, even immoral.

The methodological agnosticism identified by Smart – and pursued by Barker – dominated the study of religion in the 1970s and 1980s. It upheld the dichotomy between inside and outside, positing the need for a value-free translator who would bridge the two perspectives. Barker exemplified the role of observer-as-participating translator. But could an outsider ever fulfil this role? Could such a scholar really be agnostic, or would his or her act of observation necessarily call such a stance into question?

The participant-as- observer comes of age

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––Participantâ––––––––––––––––––––– as observer

As we saw in the 1890s with Tiele and in the 1980s with Barker, many scholars of religion

– with personal religious convictions or with none – have held that an impartial stance is possible. Indeed, many religious people have sought to research and write about their own religion as if they were observers, with objectivity and critical distance. It has often been the aim of such participants-as-observers to provide an entrée into their religion, its beliefs and practices, for outsiders; to make comprehensible, often through the use of ‘experiencedistant’ concepts and commonly accepted scientific methods, the esoteric world from which they come. They have often shared this aim with observers-as-participants (like Barker), and have sought to exercise a bridge-building role with the purpose of communicating what is thought or practised within the religion to those outside it.

Many participants-as-observers have commented sensitively on their own position and purpose in writing as believers and practitioners. This has been especially true since the 1990s, with the impact of a critical postmodernist and reflexive stance. Several examples which exemplify this will be considered later in the section. First, we will look at an example from the 1980s in which orthodox religiosity and modernist sociology met in an autobiographical account by Samuel Heilman, The Gate Behind the Wall (1984, partially reproduced in Comstock 1995).

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I live in two worlds … In one, I am attached to an eternal yesterday – a timeless faith and ritual, an ancient system of behavior. In that world, I am an Orthodox Jew. In my other world, there is little if any attachment to the enchantment of religion or sacred practice, and what is happening today or tomorrow matters far more than the verities embedded in the past. In that domain, I am a university professor of sociology.

(Comstock 1995: 214)

Heilman describes this as ‘a double life’ in which the two aspects are compartmentalised, and which is generally maintained by forgetting one aspect while living out the other. He proceeds, though, to describe the attempt he made ‘to collapse the boundaries between these two worlds and find a way to make myself whole’ (214).

Starting out as a modern Orthodox Jewish sociologist, Heilman undertook a Âsociological study of his own synagogue community,

believing that as an insider I could supply, through both introspection and a sense of the relevant questions to ask, information about dimensions of inner life not readily available to other researchers … I would be able to give a fuller picture of the synagogue than could any outsider, however well prepared and trained he might be.

(218)

Reflecting back on this exercise, he discovered that he had ‘found my way back into the traditional synagogue from my new home in the University via the tools of my social science’ (218). However, he harboured a further ambition, to fulfil his sacred duty to engage in lernen, the Yiddish term for the Orthodox Jewish practice of reviewing the sacred texts with devotion and awe (216). On the advice of his rabbi, he further utilised his professional skills as a participant observer in seeking out and participating in a traditional study circle or chavruse in Jerusalem. We see in this a desire both to fulfil personal religious commitments and to describe and explain the world of the chavruse to outsiders. What is of interest in Heilman’s powerful account is, first, the way in which his position as participant-as-observer is demonstrated through the use of spatial imagery and specialist concepts, and, second, the way in which he reflects upon that position.

Heilman’s title, The Gate Behind the Wall, in addition to situating us in Jewish Jerusalem at or near the Wailing Wall, promises us entry into a traditional and esoteric world from which, as outsiders, we are normally excluded, but to which, as an insider/outsider Jew, he was powerfully attracted. Further, he uses the imagery of walls, gates, rooms and doors to describe his modernist journey: ‘Old walls made new through a process of uncovering seemed the right metaphor for my own quest’ (221). In distinguishing between the compartmentalisation from which he was trying to escape and the wholeness he sought, he used the metaphor of rooms: in the former, ‘one simply learns to dim the lights in one room while passing into the other’; in the chavruse, ‘compartments collapse, and rooms open into one another’ (229). Despite his most fervent efforts, though, as a modernist Jew, he felt unable to transcend his sense of distance; unable to escape ‘the barriers of biography’ (230).

Heilman’s two purposes (and two worlds) are mirrored in his use of both ‘experience-near’ and ‘experience-distant’ concepts. He does not shy away from using Yiddish and Hebrew terms, but he also uses the language of religious studies and the social sciences in order to move his account beyond the descriptive and ethnographic to the analytical and theoretical. Repeatedly, he uses terms such as tradition, culture, liturgy and sacred text (rather than

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equivalent terms from Orthodox Judaism), and also introduces social scientific concepts such as liminality (227), authenticity (225) and organising principle (228). As autobiographical scholarship, Heilman’s account is subjective in character. However, it goes beyond description of the participant’s experience by offering an examination of the limits of Heilman’s role as a modernist Orthodox Jewish sociologist. He suggests that the process of observation – of others and the self – by one who is an insider produces a feeling of separation. His repeated references to walls, borders, gates, barriers, doors and limits demonstrate this seemingly unalterable affliction: ‘As if by some sort of biological rejection process, the strangeness in me was forcing me out (of the chavruse)’ (230).

How have participants-as-observers since Heilman found this role? Have their purposes in writing from the inside out been comparable to his? Have their experiences of observation and the practice of writing about it been similar? Two authors, writing in a recent book on the insider/outsider problem, reveal the way in which the understanding of this role is changing. Both authors are critical of the juxtaposition of insiders and outsiders, and see the value of the critical insider stance. However, the first asserts the benefits of the both/and principle; the second commends the dissolution of the distinction between the two positions.

Jo Pearson (2002), whose study of British Wicca is entitled ‘Going native in reverse’, notes that there are some religions, requiring initiation, which are largely inaccessible to outsiders. For an understanding of these, we are dependent upon insiders who act as a bridge between the inside and outside, and facilitate the two aspects of involvement and distance. Such an insider-researcher acts as both insider and outsider, and the movement back and forth opens him or her up to a range of types of information: that which is available to outsiders, that which is only available to those within the researched community (insiders), and that which becomes available to the researcher through his or her reflexive participation in the research process.

At the end of an ethnographic account of his own Quaker meeting, Peter Collins (2002) disputes the notions of self and society which underlie the dualism of insider and outsider. He uses imagery similar to Heilman’s to invoke the modernist perspective which sees society ‘as a series of buildings each with a single door which serves both as entrance and exit: either one is in or one is out, and if one is in one building then one cannot at the same time be in another’ (93). Collins’s view, of a more processual society and a more dynamic self, in which worlds are overlapping and interactive rather than isolated and separate, makes the distinction between insider and outsider largely redundant. All participants create social meaning through the common practice of story telling, and this, in turn, dissolves the boundaries between inside and out.

Heilman writes of the unresolved tension of being between two worlds as a Jew who is also a sociologist. Pearson suggests that, whatever its difficulties, the both/and position of the insider-scholar is productive, the reflexive nature of its stance giving it the edge over outsider scholarship. Collins concludes that the distinction between insider and outsider becomes irrelevant when we recognise that all those who participate, whether of the faith or not, contribute to the co-construction of the story. The insider/outsider dichotomy is an unhelpful consequence of a modernist view of self and society.

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Where does the problem lie, and what is the way forward?

This last view is similar to one expressed by Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair, a participant in the Sikh studies debate with which I began. In an attempt to understand its ideological contours, Mandair (2001) locates the problem in ‘the current intellectual and methodological crisis or rupture in the human and social sciences’ (49) in which ‘secular reason has been placed in a position of supervision in respect of any possible inquiry into religion’ (50). As he sees it, the Sikh studies debate is not so much a function of the insider/outsider problem (as suggested by Darshan Singh) as of the modernist turn from religious to secular thinking. In the case of Sikh studies, this has had the effect of making insider critiques of Western scholarship look like traditionalist, even fundamentalist, attacks.

Mandair is not merely being defensive here; there is a case to answer. Most twentiethcentury studies of religions – whether they be historical, in the case of Sikh studies, phenomenological or sociological, in the case of our other examples – were rooted in the discourse of secular reason and scientific enquiry. Their authors spoke the language of neutrality, impartiality, objectivity, observation, reductionism, methodological agnosticism and atheism (Hufford 1995). Both outsiders and scholarly insiders sought to articulate their positions in these terms. With the latter, as we saw with Heilman, this led to a sense of tension, the result of being an insider subjectively caught up in an experience while endeavouring to maintain the appropriate level of critical distance required by the scholarly establishment.

Both Collins and Mandair invite us to step away from the imprisonment of this modernist position, but their diagnoses are different. Collins offers a postmodern response: the abandonment of dichotomous views of insider/outsider in favour of a more dynamic view in which everyone is a co-participant in the formulation of a narrative about religion. Mandair favours the move to a study of religion (Sikhism) that ‘is at once a form of self-discovery, no less spiritual than political, no less therapeutic than classificatory’ (68–9), in short, an antidote to the dominant objectivist, secularist approach.

Collins and Mandair invite us in different ways to reconceptualise the terms of our discipline in such a way that we are no longer compelled to compartmentalise the world of faith and the world of scholarship. For some scholars this would be a step too far, one which undermines the distinction between those doing religion and those observing it, between theology and the study of religions, indeed the very raison d’être of the latter as a field of study with its own terms of reference (Flood 1999; Fitzgerald 2000; McCutcheon 2003). In his attempt to think ‘beyond phenomenology’, however, Gavin Flood offers a strategy for reconfiguring critical distance, ‘outsideness’ and situated observation in the study of religions which depends not upon modernist notions of objectivity and the phenomenological assertion of non-confessionalism, but rather upon a dialogical and reflexive engagement between scholars and the religious people they study. My own view, formed in the context of developing a spatial methodology for the study of religion, is that all interlocutors – whether secular observers, religious participants, or those who strategically move between the two positions – are actors within a single knowledge-power field (Knott 2005). Despite their differing goals and interests, they have together defined, constituted and criticised ‘religion’ in general, particular ‘religions’ and their beliefs and practices, and the secular or nonreligious domain beyond religion. The ‘secular’ (which has constituted the ‘outside’ in this discussion about scholarly positioning on religion) is indeed within the same field of action and discourse as the ‘religious’, and, although the field contains operational boundaries, groups and factions, all those within it are in one sense ‘insiders’, although as they go about