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

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their business they variously constitute themselves and others as ‘insiders’ or ‘outsiders’ in accordance with their ideological and social purposes.

The scholars discussed in this chapter have not only shown us the centrality of the insider/ outsider problem in the study of religions, they have also highlighted the complex issues of subjectivity and objectivity, emic and etic perspectives, the politics and ethics of researching and writing about religion (whether as an outsider or an insider), the epistemological and methodological implications of the problem, and its ideological location within Western secular modernism. These are profound matters for anyone studying religions. What more recent perspectives show is that the problem of the insider and outsider is as vital now for understanding the theory and method of religious studies as it was when the latter first emerged as a discipline separate from theology more than a century ago.

Bibliography

Barker, Eileen, 1984, The Making of a Moonie: Brainwashing or Choice?, Oxford, Blackwell. Beit-Hallahmi, B. and Argyle, Michael, 1996, The Social Psychology of Religion, London, Routledge. Brown, Karen McCarthy, 1991, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, Berkeley CA, University of

California Press.

Collins, Peter J., 2002, ‘Connecting anthropology and Quakerism’, in Elisabeth Arweck and Martin Stringer, eds, Theorising Faith: The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Ritual, Birmingham, Birmingham University Press, pp. 77–95.

Comstock, Gary L., 1995, Religious Autobiographies, Belmont CA, Wadsworth.

Davies, Charlotte Aull, 1999, Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others, London, Routledge.

Donaldson, Laura E. and Pui-lan, Kwok, eds, 2002, Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse, New York and London, Routledge.

Festinger, Leon, Riecken, Henry W. and Schachter, Stanley, 1956, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World, New York, Harper & Row (reprinted 1964).

Fitzgerald, Timothy, 2000, The Ideology of Religious Studies, New York, Oxford University Press. Flood, Gavin, 1999, Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion, London, Cassell.

Geertz, Clifford, 1974, ‘“From the native’s point of view”: on the nature of anthropological understanding’, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 28: 1.

Gold, Raymond L., 1958, ‘Roles in sociological field observations’, Social Forces, 36, 217–23. Grewal, J. S., 1998, Contesting Interpretations of the Sikh Tradition, New Delhi, Manohar. Heilman, Samuel, 1984, The Gate Behind the Wall, Georges Bourchardt.

Hufford, David J., 1995, ‘The scholarly voice and the personal voice: reflexivity in belief studies’,

Western Folklore, 54, 57–76.

King, Richard, 1999, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and the Mystic East, London, Routledge.

King, Ursula, ed., 1995, Religion and Gender, Oxford, Blackwell.

Knott, Kim, 2005, The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis, London, Equinox.

—— 2008, ‘A spatial analysis of the relationship between theology and religious studies: Knowledgepower strategies and metaphors of containment and separation, insider and outsider’, in Darlene Bird and Simon Smith, eds, Theology and Religious Studies in Higher Education: Global Perspectives, London, Continuum, pp. 117–38.

Kristensen, William Brede, 1960, The Meaning of Religion, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff.

Lauder, M. A, 2003, ‘Covert participant observation of a deviant community: Justifying the use of deception’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 18:2, pp. 185–96.

272â Key topics in the study of religions

McCutcheon, Russell T., 1997, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse of Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press.

——ed., 1999, The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: A Reader, London and New York, Cassell.

——2003, The Discipline of Religion, London and New York, Routledge.

McLeod, W. H., 2000, Exploring Sikhism: Aspects of Sikh Identity, Culture and Thought, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Mandair, Arvind-Pal Singh, 2001, ‘Thinking differently about religion and history: issues for Sikh Studies’, in Christopher Shackle, Gurharpal Singh and Arvind-Pal Mandair, eds, Sikh Religion, Culture and Ethnicity, Richmond, Curzon, pp. 47–71.

Mernissi, Fatima, 1991, Women and Islam: An Historical and Theological Enquiry, Oxford, Blackwell [1987].

Müller, Max F., 1873, Introduction to the Science of Religion, London, Longmans, Green & Co.

Pearson, Jo, 2002, ‘“Going native in reverse”: the insider as researcher in British Wicca’, in Elisabeth Arweck and Martin Stringer, eds, Theorising Faith: The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Ritual, Birmingham, Birmingham University Press, pp. 97–113.

Pike, Kenneth, 1967, Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behaviour, 2nd edn, The Hague, Mouton.

Segal, Robert A., 1983, ‘In defense of reductionism’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 51, 97–124.

Shackle, Christopher, Singh, Gurharpal and Mandair, Arvind-Pal, eds, 2001, Sikh Religion, Culture and Ethnicity, Richmond, Curzon.

Sharpe, Eric, 1975, Comparative Religion: A History, London, Duckworth.

Shaw, Rosalind, 1995, ‘Feminist anthropology and the gendering of religious studies’, in Ursula King, ed., Religion and Gender, Oxford, Blackwell, pp. 65–76.

Singh, Darshan, 1991, Western Perspective on the Sikh Religion, New Delhi, Sehgal Publishers Service. Singh, Gurdev, ed., 1986, Perspectives on the Sikh Tradition, Patiala, Siddharth Publications.

Smart, Ninian, 1973, The Science of Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge: Some Methodological Questions, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Stringer, Martin D., 2002, ‘Introduction: Theorizing faith’, in Elisabeth Arweck and Martin Stringer, eds, Theorising Faith: The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Ritual, Birmingham, Birmingham University Press, pp. 1–20.

Tiele, Cornelius P., 1897–9, Elements of the Science of Religion, 2 vols, Edinburgh/London, Blackwood and Sons.

van der Leeuw, Gerardus, 1963, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, 2 vols, New York, Harper Torchbooks [1938].

Waardenburg, Jacques, 1973, Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion, The Hague, Mouton. Whaling, Frank, ed., 1995, Theory and Methods in Religious Studies: Contemporary Approaches to the

Study of Religions, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter.

Wiebe, Donald, 1985, ‘Does understanding religion require religious understanding?’, in Witold Tyloch, ed., Current Progress in the Methodology of the Science of Religions, Warsaw, Polish Scientific Publishers.

Suggested reading

Arweck, Elisabeth and Stringer, Martin, eds, Theorising Faith: The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Ritual, Birmingham, Birmingham University Press.

Useful introduction and collection of essays on insider/outsider issues which includes cited articles by scholarly insiders, Collins and Pearson.

Davies, Charlotte Aull, 1999, Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others, London, Routledge.

Major work from the methodological literature on insider/outsider issues and reflexivity.

Insider/outsider perspectivesâ 273â

Flood, Gavin, 1999, Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion, London, Cassell. Important study which questions the adequacy of the phenomenology of religion and suggests that insiders and outsiders are dialogical partners in the study of religion.

Hufford, David J., 1995, ‘The scholarly voice and the personal voice: reflexivity in belief studies’,

Western Folklore, 54, 57–76.

Article on insider/outsider issues and reflexivity.

McCutcheon, Russell T., ed., 1999, The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: A Reader, London and New York, Cassell.

Key text for understanding the issues involved in the insider/outsider problem; includes readings on all aspects of the problem and an excellent introduction.

Chapter 16

Post-structuralism and the study of religion

Jeremy Carrette

The study of religion is shaped by successive waves of critical and theoretical thought that redefine the subject and its practice in each historical period. The waves of phenomenology, feminism, structuralism and social construction have all shaped thinking about religion through the twentieth century. Some of these theoretical shifts cause threats to any desire to hold a simple correspondence theory of truth, where observation of the object of study is assumed to be neutral, direct and immediate – a form of rationalism. It is because of this radical questioning that many scholars of religion have shown ambivalence to theory and many wish to avoid the implications of the various waves of thinking. Theory, however, provides the unavoidable epistemological ground of any discipline. The situation is made even more complex in the study of religion because theoretical questions emerge through the multi-disciplinary formation of the subject. This means that theoretical shifts are embraced through the various changes in philosophy, sociology, psychology and anthropology, to mention a few areas, rather than through any coherent engagement within the study of religion.

The emergence of post-structuralist thinking in the 1960s, and its critical developments since that time, is not linked to any one method, but has implications for all methods in the study of religion and its central categories of knowledge. Post-structuralism is a transdisciplinary critical examination of how we represent the world through language and ways of thinking. It is a diverse set of techniques for questioning the assumptions behind our thinking. Post-structuralism is therefore important as an intellectual development because it takes the subject back to the central problem of knowledge and intellectual practice. It presents a challenge to how we formulate truth and understanding in the study of religion. It raises questions about the very foundations of the subject. Post-structuralism takes us back to the history of philosophy and the question of how we know and what determines or shapes the categories of our knowledge. Whether one agrees or disagrees with post-structuralism, it poses important questions about the nature of language, representation, culture and history. It engages scholars of religion to think about how they make their knowledge claims and it presents a direct challenge to empiricism, rationalism and positivism within the field of study. If scholars of religion are concerned with presenting their work with accuracy and precision then post-structuralism cannot be ignored, because it demands consideration of the very language and concepts we use to make empirical claims.

The impact of post-structuralist theory on the study of religion – or rather the work of the people associated with the term – can be seen as one of the key critical horizons that emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It is, as Antes, Geertz and Warne’s

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(2008: 1) contemporary survey suggests, one of the ‘new approaches’ in the study of religion after the preoccupation with phenomenological and social science methods; although in Antes, Geertz and Warne’s work many of the potential insights are restricted to the domain of literary theory, as a separate ‘approach’ rather than integrated in all forms of knowledge (see McCance 2008). After the separation of the study of religion from theology, the domination of phenomenology and the marking of social scientific methods, post-structuralism displaces the field of knowledge by taking knowledge back to how we use signs in language and the politics of knowledge. It emerges in the epistemic and linguistic revolution following the reception of the Swiss linguistic Ferdinand de Saussure’s posthumously published Cours de Linguistique Générale (Course in General Linguistics) in 1916 and the political development of related ideas in France in the 1960s (Saussure [1916] 1974). It subsequently transforms thinking in every field of knowledge and starts to have an impact on scholarship in the study of religion from the 1980s onwards.

The influence of post-structuralist thinking can now be seen in every area of the study of religion. To give some examples, by no means exhaustive, we can see post-structuralist ideas in biblical studies (Moore 1994; Sherwood 2004); the study of Buddhism (Coward 1990; Faure 1998); feminist theory and religion (Jantzen 1998; Joy 2006); the study of Hinduism (Urban 2003; King 1999a); the study of Islam (Almond 2004; Mahmood 2005); the study of Judaism (Boyarin 1996, 1997); the study of mysticism (Jantzen 1995; King 1999a; Hollywood 2002); the psychology of religion (Carrette 2007; Jonte-Pace 2001); Sikh studies (Mandair et al. 2001; Bhogal 2007); the sociology of religion (Turner 1991; Lehmann 1993); studies of the category of religion (McCutcheon 1997; King 1999a); theory and method (Taylor 1998; Flood 1999; Braun and McCutcheon 2000) and in theology (Caputo 1997; Ward 2000). It is perhaps more accurate to say that these scholars of religion use the works of thinkers associated with post-structuralism rather than outwardly deploy the sign of poststructuralism, which itself tells us something about the problem of capturing thought under fixed categories. They, as Hugh Urban (2003: 2) suggests in relation to his use of Foucault, are ‘[b]orrowing insights from’ post-structuralist literature. Arvind Mandair (2006: 658) also uses the term ‘borrow’ in his use of ideas from the French post-structuralist thinker Jacques Lacan to make sense of Sikh texts. In both cases, this ‘borrowing’ is combined with all sorts of other strands of critical thinking from feminism, post-colonial theory, social theory and a range of other continental philosophers. Post-structuralism is therefore one critical discourse among many and becomes part of a longer critical tradition of thinking from the Enlightenment. The sense of ‘borrowing’ reflects the fact that ideas from post-structuralism serve a critical function. They are deployed to illuminate something concealed in normative modes of the study of religion. The post-structuralist hermeneutic appreciates text, context, history and power and provides critical strategies to disrupt the certainties of knowledge and reveal the values behind such thinking. The other sense of ‘borrowing’ is that the ideas are often isolated and extracted from the wider work of post-structuralist writers; although there have been detailed studies of individual post-structuralists and their use of religious ideas (see Anderson 1989; Carrette 2000; Hollywood 2002).

Following the work of Barthes (1963), I will argue that what holds the group of scholars of religion using post-structuralist ideas together is not a systematic approach, or a new method of post-structuralism, but the deployment of a new lexicon – a new vocabulary or set of expressions – in the study of religion and that this vocabulary brings us back to the problems of epistemology (the nature of knowledge), semiotics (the nature of signs) and ideology (the nature of power). I will first explore the key theoretical aspects of the term post-structuralism