A couple of quotes from the Coleman pieces got me thinking about the similarities between the anthropology project of the kind Coleman criticizes, and the discussion of pluralism. The discourse of pluralism seems to have its own set of frames that guide the discourse along certain lines and which make for certain exclusions. People come to the table with certain assumptions already in place, namely that pluralism is a good, and that it is inherently inclusive. However, in order to have many religions in a particular nation, these religions have to function a certain way. They cannot presume to influence political discourse, and they cannot be interfering in the public sphere. The religious beliefs must be held privately and individually in order to affect this. However, an understanding of religion as something only held privately, and uninvolved in the public sphere is a particular understanding of religion. The problem comes when this position masquerades as a universal understanding of religion. The pluralist understanding of the interaction between the religious and civic spheres are constructing a certain kind of reality as much as they are describing it, and this dynamic was also reflected in the quote describing the effect of anthropological descriptions on reality, “anthropological writings do not merely describe evangelicals, they often compete with them in attempts to define and describe religious and even apparently secular realities” (Coleman 43 Abominations).
The selectivity that pluralism requires to propagate the seamless interaction of religion and the public sphere, means that religions which do not fit into the private sphere will either be seen as a defective form of religiosity or disregarded altogether as inauthentic. Thus while pluralism makes room for many religious traditions, it is making room for many particular forms of religion, namely, ones that fit together without overstepping proscribed boundaries. Pluralism thus operates on a selective basis, giving voice to certain forms of religiosity while silencing others. Likewise, “liberal Christians and anthropologists share a desire to promote pluralism with a certain predilection to seek sources of virtue and identity in the disadvantaged (those who can be deemed to require the voice of a human representative of a privileged class” (84-85). These anthropologists are looking for subjects who have no voice, so that they can have one assigned to them. However the silenced subject is not present everywhere, and must be selected from other kinds of subjects. This is not an inclusionary project, otherwise pluralism as a discourse would not function as effectively. Were some subjects to speak with their own voice, rather than being voiced for by the privileged class, there might be a dissonance. By selecting only those subjects who are voiceless, and then speaking for them, the discourse of pluralism is harmonious, homogeneous and therefore self-authorizing.
Is it possible to conceive of a manner of speaking that doesn’t exclude certain groups? In the case of religion, (or of anthropology) there is a certain dominant discourse that depends to a certain extent on the homogeneity of the influences informing it. In order to say anything general, one must exclude particularities that undermine the general pattern. So, unless we have a discourse that acknowledges all disparateness at once, we run the risk of silencing the anomalies that would throw a cog into our big wheel of generalities. Yet, perhaps on the more specific level, the discourse of pluralism is still useful if we re-learn it. This is to say that it is important to re-learn the assumptions that go into constructing pluralism, and along the same lines, we must re-learn the attitudes that make up the anthropologist project of representing the other. In the anthropologist project, the effort to describe, to represent is tied up with the project of renegotiating reality, and this is a project that works much better when the subject whose reality you are trying to re-create, doesn´t have a voice. Coleman’s experience with the evangelicals undermined the traditional anthropological project by speaking back (with the same discourse, even!) thus causing him to rethink the whole premise. What would it mean for the project of pluralism were the religions neatly categorized as ‘private’ to speak back, and assert themselves as part of the public sphere, with a political agency? Would that description be accepted as an equally valid discourse that could participate in the identity making sphere, or would it be dismissed?
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Commentary on the Course
Looking over my blog, my knee jerk reaction is to say that I have become more indecisive, less sure about terms and discourses that I might have used with confidence before. However, perhaps that’s a necessary outcome, too much certainty about “givens” is something that Derrida would critique, since nothing is a given if we take his view that logocentrism is misplaced. In becoming more uncertain about the terms we use, and the discourses and assumptions that are attached to them, we are paving the way, not for a future where we cease to use those terms, but a future where we think twice about our usage of them. In deconstructing the terms that we use to talk about religion, we are deconstructing ourselves, our own presuppositions, our own ‘situatedness’ that dictates the way we speak about and interact with religion. As Ricoeur said, in interpreting text, we are interpreting ourselves, because there is nothing ‘behind’ the text other than the reader herself. In the same way, when we speak about “religious experience” or “emotion” or any of the other bywords that are used to for the ‘essence’ of religion, our deconstruction of those terms reveals more about the interpreters than it does about the ‘true meaning’ of these terms.
The majority of our discussions maybe ended inconclusively, but we were generally all involved in a post-modern project of re-evaluation. For every term we examined, we began by problematizing the givens, and opening the discourse to other possibilities of meaning. The methodological change that I see in myself is a tendency towards looking more at the institutions and social processes as shapers of the individual, rather than an individual agency being the motivator behind social change. I think that this has already affected my research plan. I hope to study the institutions of religion that shape the character and experience of the immigrant community. I suppose another way I could have studied the phenomenon of immigrant religion would be to study the individual members of a congregation - their beliefs, their values- and looked at those as being constitutive of the immigrant experience. However, whether from this course, or from other readings, I choose not to look at the individual actor as an agent of social change, but rather the individual as shaped by social processes, and institutions.
While I think the idea of proceeding with this course on the basis of examinations of terms is a valuable way to go about the course, I also think that discussion on religion could have been saved for the end. Emotion, performance, tradition, ritual, from our discussion, as I mentioned earlier, these terms all seem to be bywords for ‘religion’. I think there is still a latent tendency in the study of religion to mark off religion as a distinct phenomenon, not reducible to sociological or psychological explanations. One can’t explain away emotion, it’s a phenomenon that exists, and yet one that escapes definition. “Performance”, we couldn’t really come to a conclusion about whether all religion/ritual was performance or not. Likewise tradition was not easily definable; where do we draw the line between contemporary rituals/performance, and ‘tradition’? Is it simple a matter of age? In that case, wouldn’t a scale be more appropriate than a black and white definition? None of these terms are self-explanatory, at first glance we think we understand them, and we think we are all on the same page. However, it soon becomes apparent as we begin to disagree that these terms are not clearly defined, and yet they are used frequently to address some kind of phenomena. These discussions were all forerunners (or derivative) of the discussion of the overarching term ‘religion’. At first we think we are all referring to the same thing, but from discussion the impression arises that thing designated by the term ‘religion’ is elusive, ethereal, perhaps even imaginary.
Perhaps we all participate in an imagined community as a religious studies faculty. If the definition “religion” is fraught with Western-centric biases that prevent us from understanding the “other” (another term fraught with problems), yet it continues to be a term that has currency, perhaps we are wilfully engaging with an imagined phenomenon that doesn’t actually exist in the coherent, cohesive, essentialized way that the term implies. Like the Flew-Wisdom parable, if we can’t agree on a definition for the term “religion,”- if it isn’t essential, if it doesn’t exist across social-cultural boundaries, if it is an individual rather than a social phenomenon, if it isn’t a psychological or sociological phenomenon, if it is “ineffable”- perhaps it doesn’t really exist at all. What I mean to say, is that if the term religion can never be described without qualifications, doesn’t it suffer “death by a thousand qualifications” and become meaningless?
However, despite the above rant, I will continue to use the term, because of its amazing flexibility to mean almost anything. It gives one a lot more academic freedom in terms of subject matter and methodology than other, more heavily defined fields might. In the end, perhaps ‘religion’s evasiveness is key to its survival. If religion could not be deconstructed, and argued as we did in this class, it would become stagnant and irrelevant: “Something that is insulated from deconstruction is not protected but petrified, having hardened over into a dogma, like a law that could never be reformed or repealed” (Caputo on Derrida). Thus its in-essentiality is key to its futurity. Because it can never be pinned down, it will never be discarded.
The majority of our discussions maybe ended inconclusively, but we were generally all involved in a post-modern project of re-evaluation. For every term we examined, we began by problematizing the givens, and opening the discourse to other possibilities of meaning. The methodological change that I see in myself is a tendency towards looking more at the institutions and social processes as shapers of the individual, rather than an individual agency being the motivator behind social change. I think that this has already affected my research plan. I hope to study the institutions of religion that shape the character and experience of the immigrant community. I suppose another way I could have studied the phenomenon of immigrant religion would be to study the individual members of a congregation - their beliefs, their values- and looked at those as being constitutive of the immigrant experience. However, whether from this course, or from other readings, I choose not to look at the individual actor as an agent of social change, but rather the individual as shaped by social processes, and institutions.
While I think the idea of proceeding with this course on the basis of examinations of terms is a valuable way to go about the course, I also think that discussion on religion could have been saved for the end. Emotion, performance, tradition, ritual, from our discussion, as I mentioned earlier, these terms all seem to be bywords for ‘religion’. I think there is still a latent tendency in the study of religion to mark off religion as a distinct phenomenon, not reducible to sociological or psychological explanations. One can’t explain away emotion, it’s a phenomenon that exists, and yet one that escapes definition. “Performance”, we couldn’t really come to a conclusion about whether all religion/ritual was performance or not. Likewise tradition was not easily definable; where do we draw the line between contemporary rituals/performance, and ‘tradition’? Is it simple a matter of age? In that case, wouldn’t a scale be more appropriate than a black and white definition? None of these terms are self-explanatory, at first glance we think we understand them, and we think we are all on the same page. However, it soon becomes apparent as we begin to disagree that these terms are not clearly defined, and yet they are used frequently to address some kind of phenomena. These discussions were all forerunners (or derivative) of the discussion of the overarching term ‘religion’. At first we think we are all referring to the same thing, but from discussion the impression arises that thing designated by the term ‘religion’ is elusive, ethereal, perhaps even imaginary.
Perhaps we all participate in an imagined community as a religious studies faculty. If the definition “religion” is fraught with Western-centric biases that prevent us from understanding the “other” (another term fraught with problems), yet it continues to be a term that has currency, perhaps we are wilfully engaging with an imagined phenomenon that doesn’t actually exist in the coherent, cohesive, essentialized way that the term implies. Like the Flew-Wisdom parable, if we can’t agree on a definition for the term “religion,”- if it isn’t essential, if it doesn’t exist across social-cultural boundaries, if it is an individual rather than a social phenomenon, if it isn’t a psychological or sociological phenomenon, if it is “ineffable”- perhaps it doesn’t really exist at all. What I mean to say, is that if the term religion can never be described without qualifications, doesn’t it suffer “death by a thousand qualifications” and become meaningless?
However, despite the above rant, I will continue to use the term, because of its amazing flexibility to mean almost anything. It gives one a lot more academic freedom in terms of subject matter and methodology than other, more heavily defined fields might. In the end, perhaps ‘religion’s evasiveness is key to its survival. If religion could not be deconstructed, and argued as we did in this class, it would become stagnant and irrelevant: “Something that is insulated from deconstruction is not protected but petrified, having hardened over into a dogma, like a law that could never be reformed or repealed” (Caputo on Derrida). Thus its in-essentiality is key to its futurity. Because it can never be pinned down, it will never be discarded.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
The Process of Identity Creation
I would like to address this week’s readings by presenting several aspects of looking at the way identity is shaped during this process of opposition that Thomas touches on.
I think I’ll sequeway into this with an example, in one of my classes on Islam, we’re always talking about the way that Islamic identity was shaped and changed by encounters with modernity and the processes of colonization. One member of the class didn’t like using colonization as the primary lens through which we look at Islam, because it creates a false “before and after” duality of Islam. This implies it is a static thing that was changed by white people rather than a tradition evolving in its own right with reference to changes that were happening internal to the tradition.
On the one hand I agree with him, but I also agree that communities are created in reaction to externalities. The topic of the elaboration of identity, as either a positive or a negative thing is very interesting. For one thing, it is a common phenomenon, Calvinsim developed its own identity in reaction to Anabaptists and Catholics. In the same way, other cultures were forced to define themselves in reaction to the incursion of Western Christian anthropologists in the 19th century. While this can be good because it encourages the production of a stable identity which will safeguard the tradition from disparagement or assimilation, it can also have a negative effect. The culture defending itself is nonetheless participating in the proliferation of Western terms and discourses. The term “religion” as a singular object is not one that comes naturally to all cultures, Hinduism and Buddhism for example. It is one that they must use and fit their practices into, in order to be understood by the West. In this way it could be seen as negative: having cultures define themselves in terms that are alien to that culture.
Yet, to problematizes my own schema, could that also be seen as an act of subversion? Taking a latin word, which was once the sole province of Christianity, and applying it oneself, thereby in effect, forcing the West to accept one’s tradition as equal and on par with its own Western-Christocentric worldview?
I do like the author’s take on the construction of identity as a diacritical, oppositional process wherein both groups participate in the construction of identity. I feel that the general view of this is that the group under threat is the one who is constructing its identity in reaction to the incursion of the dominant group, but here Thomas contends: “a variety of dominant and dominated groups reify the attributes of both others and themselves in a self-fashioning process” ( 215). That is to say, it is not simply the dominated group who identify a few traits within their group and then crystallize them into a neat manifesto that can then be presented to the dominant group as a justification, but rather, each group reducing the other to set of crystallized attributes that can be used to understand both themselves and the other.
The process of dual identity construction also problematizes the simple hierarchy of dominant/dominated, for the dominated can use or invert a label applied to them by the dominant group, thereby forging themselves a new, valorized identity. Overall, Thomas’s article was very interesting, and caused me to rethink a lot of ideas I hold about identity construction.
I think I’ll sequeway into this with an example, in one of my classes on Islam, we’re always talking about the way that Islamic identity was shaped and changed by encounters with modernity and the processes of colonization. One member of the class didn’t like using colonization as the primary lens through which we look at Islam, because it creates a false “before and after” duality of Islam. This implies it is a static thing that was changed by white people rather than a tradition evolving in its own right with reference to changes that were happening internal to the tradition.
On the one hand I agree with him, but I also agree that communities are created in reaction to externalities. The topic of the elaboration of identity, as either a positive or a negative thing is very interesting. For one thing, it is a common phenomenon, Calvinsim developed its own identity in reaction to Anabaptists and Catholics. In the same way, other cultures were forced to define themselves in reaction to the incursion of Western Christian anthropologists in the 19th century. While this can be good because it encourages the production of a stable identity which will safeguard the tradition from disparagement or assimilation, it can also have a negative effect. The culture defending itself is nonetheless participating in the proliferation of Western terms and discourses. The term “religion” as a singular object is not one that comes naturally to all cultures, Hinduism and Buddhism for example. It is one that they must use and fit their practices into, in order to be understood by the West. In this way it could be seen as negative: having cultures define themselves in terms that are alien to that culture.
Yet, to problematizes my own schema, could that also be seen as an act of subversion? Taking a latin word, which was once the sole province of Christianity, and applying it oneself, thereby in effect, forcing the West to accept one’s tradition as equal and on par with its own Western-Christocentric worldview?
I do like the author’s take on the construction of identity as a diacritical, oppositional process wherein both groups participate in the construction of identity. I feel that the general view of this is that the group under threat is the one who is constructing its identity in reaction to the incursion of the dominant group, but here Thomas contends: “a variety of dominant and dominated groups reify the attributes of both others and themselves in a self-fashioning process” ( 215). That is to say, it is not simply the dominated group who identify a few traits within their group and then crystallize them into a neat manifesto that can then be presented to the dominant group as a justification, but rather, each group reducing the other to set of crystallized attributes that can be used to understand both themselves and the other.
The process of dual identity construction also problematizes the simple hierarchy of dominant/dominated, for the dominated can use or invert a label applied to them by the dominant group, thereby forging themselves a new, valorized identity. Overall, Thomas’s article was very interesting, and caused me to rethink a lot of ideas I hold about identity construction.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Emotion
This week’s readings on emotion tie in two previous themes, that of the question of the reducibility or irreducibility of religion, and the question of performance/emotion. Religious Studies has been under pressure to define their discipline in such a way as to make it unique, thereby protecting it from the encroachment of other disciplines. If religion can be reduced to social-scientific, psychological, or neurological factors, then there is a risk that religious studies will become obsolete as a faculty as neurologists, anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists step will step in, in our places. I think this tension is at the root of the many disagreements about the definition of religion. At its base, this conflict is generally between non-reductionist and reductionist definitions of religion. Corrigan sees the category of emotion as one that is a component in the study of religion as non-reductionist. This category is useful for protecting the non-reductionist discourse of the study of religion because it fulfills the role of the ineffable essence of religion which sets it apart from other disciplines.
Thus “emotion” takes the place of “religion” when it comes to debates about the viability of reduction or non-reduction. Corrigan defines two major ways of looking at emotion, as either universalistic, or as culturally constructed. The study of emotion as a universal phenomenon involves comparing and contrasting among different cultures things like: emotional lexicons, emotion as performance, emotion as a product of philosophical/theological background. If one performs this sort of analysis, one is looking for a common thread that shows that emotion is a universal phenomenon, common to all cultures. On the other hand, one could look at emotion as something that is culturally constructed. This would entail looking at emotion as a way of adhering to social codes. or Emotions as “socially dictated performances, social scripts” (11). This latter view ties in with the idea that physical performance and emotion are related and affect one another, discussed in a previous blog entry.
Emotion is a component of my area of research on religion and immigrant integration in Canada. For the purposes of my analysis I would like to look at emotion as a phenomenon that is articulated differently in different religious groups. Emotion, eg. the feeling of compassion for one’s fellow group members, and even members outside one’s group, is encouraged in many religious traditions. These religious traditions than encourage or prescribe certain behaviours based on these emotions. I am interested in religion as a provider of social capital for immigrant groups in Canada, thus, I would like to look at the emotions that fuel the activities that provide the social capital. I’m afraid this is all a bit general, but basically, I believe that the formation of social capital though activities like community outreach programs in religious institutions is driven by practices which capitalize on emotions like compassion, which in turn are sanctioned by religious discourse. An example of this in the Christian worldview might be the encouragement of compassion as exemplified in the Good Samaritan parable. This is often drawn upon by members of Christian churches to explain their involvement in food and clothing drives, or the provision of language services for new immigrants who are a part of their religious community.
I am interested in the emotions behind the provision of social capital, and the interaction between emotion and religious values. Are certain emotions encouraged more in certain religious traditions than in others? Would this encouragement lead to the proliferation of social welfare programs? Are religious values the main driver of these kinds of activities, or are secular values? If one speaks of emotion as something that is culturally constructed, is emotion constructed differently in a secular world view as opposed to a religious worldview? Would these different emotional constructs mean that secular community outreach programs function differently than religiously motivated programs?
Thus, despite the fact that I have more questions than answers I do believe that a study of emotion would be beneficial to my understanding of the field of religion and immigration.
Thus “emotion” takes the place of “religion” when it comes to debates about the viability of reduction or non-reduction. Corrigan defines two major ways of looking at emotion, as either universalistic, or as culturally constructed. The study of emotion as a universal phenomenon involves comparing and contrasting among different cultures things like: emotional lexicons, emotion as performance, emotion as a product of philosophical/theological background. If one performs this sort of analysis, one is looking for a common thread that shows that emotion is a universal phenomenon, common to all cultures. On the other hand, one could look at emotion as something that is culturally constructed. This would entail looking at emotion as a way of adhering to social codes. or Emotions as “socially dictated performances, social scripts” (11). This latter view ties in with the idea that physical performance and emotion are related and affect one another, discussed in a previous blog entry.
Emotion is a component of my area of research on religion and immigrant integration in Canada. For the purposes of my analysis I would like to look at emotion as a phenomenon that is articulated differently in different religious groups. Emotion, eg. the feeling of compassion for one’s fellow group members, and even members outside one’s group, is encouraged in many religious traditions. These religious traditions than encourage or prescribe certain behaviours based on these emotions. I am interested in religion as a provider of social capital for immigrant groups in Canada, thus, I would like to look at the emotions that fuel the activities that provide the social capital. I’m afraid this is all a bit general, but basically, I believe that the formation of social capital though activities like community outreach programs in religious institutions is driven by practices which capitalize on emotions like compassion, which in turn are sanctioned by religious discourse. An example of this in the Christian worldview might be the encouragement of compassion as exemplified in the Good Samaritan parable. This is often drawn upon by members of Christian churches to explain their involvement in food and clothing drives, or the provision of language services for new immigrants who are a part of their religious community.
I am interested in the emotions behind the provision of social capital, and the interaction between emotion and religious values. Are certain emotions encouraged more in certain religious traditions than in others? Would this encouragement lead to the proliferation of social welfare programs? Are religious values the main driver of these kinds of activities, or are secular values? If one speaks of emotion as something that is culturally constructed, is emotion constructed differently in a secular world view as opposed to a religious worldview? Would these different emotional constructs mean that secular community outreach programs function differently than religiously motivated programs?
Thus, despite the fact that I have more questions than answers I do believe that a study of emotion would be beneficial to my understanding of the field of religion and immigration.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Ritual vs. Mundane action
I am convinced by Mahmood’s distinction between ritual action and mundane action. I have read previous pieces of her work and she always causes me to rethink things I had taken for granted. The distinction we are accustomed to making between ritual action and mundane action is based on our Western distinction between sacred and non sacred. However, as the women’s piety movement shows, this is not a distinction taken for granted, and that, on the contrary, living with piety in all the mundane acts of one’s life is both the method and the goal of piety. I think we are much more results-focussed, in that traditional Christian viewpoints see the mundane life and the holy life as anti-thetical and our everyday lives are actually an obstacle to be overcome.
The women’s piety movement on the other hand doesn’t seem to create this duality, every daily activity is saturated with an awareness of the divine, and it is this constant vigilance which then makes ritual acts easy to perform. It is a subtle, but important distinction; the Western-liberal conception of piety would entail, first rising to prayer, and this ritual action then permeating one’s consciousness, and second having this holy disposition affect one’s daily activities so that one lives a more fully pious life. The women’s movement first go about their daily activities with the pious mindset that then enables them to perform ritual activity.
This distinction then leads to the broader question of how do ritual and interpretation relate? In Islam, it is the daily activities which are responsible for the construction of the pious self, whereas in Western thought, one’s pious thought and understanding of the self is the cause for one’s action eg. In one tradition action comes first, and in the other, reflection. This is an overly simplistic division, and I evoke it in order to problematizes, and to draw attention to the relation between bodily practices and interpretation that I think is at the root of Mahmood’s article. In fact, this is an area she has engaged with before, criticizing Bourdieu’s notion of bodily hexis: the process wherein any ideology: political mythology, cosmology, an ethic, a metaphysic, or political philosophy, is em-bodied into a permanent disposition, thereby affecting one’s way of moving, speaking, thinking and feeling. Of course this is a problematic method to apply to Islam, because it implies that Islam is not self-reflective, which is patently not the case.
Mahmood is interested in the differences between traditions when it comes to the construction of the moral self; thus my question is; can a self be constructed by the physical actions it performs, or are the actions the self performs simply reflective of a self already constructed? I think Mahmood summarizes this well, when she says, “external behavioural forms and formal gestures are integral to the realization and expression of the self” as opposed to the idea that “external behaviour may serve as a means of disciplining the self, but as I have shown above remains inessential to that self” (836).
My initial instinct was always to go with what I had been taught, that one’s self determines one’s actions and one’s relations to the institutions around you. However, now I take a more Foucauldian view, and I think we are partially constructed by the institutions around us, and by the physical practices they force upon us. For example, the traditional classroom, rows of students facing one authority figure: being constantly socialized in this way, one becomes used to passivity and receptive of authority more easily than one might if a classroom was set up as a circle. Or, one looks at the way prisons are set up, based on the idea of the Panopticon: a central guardtower which looks into the cells of the various inmates. The inmates cannot see whether anyone is in the guardtower, but they have the feeling that they are constantly being watched. This awareness then affects their behaviour, which in turn affects their construction of the self, and its relation (passivity) to the world around it (dominant).
I don’t go as far as Foucault in seeing these physical practices constituting us to the exclusion of all else, but I also think it would be too optimistic of me to assume that I am the way I am because of self-conscious reflection and decision. To some extent I am sure I am formed by the institutions around me, and even by the bodily hexis that those institutions continue to impose on us.
The women’s piety movement on the other hand doesn’t seem to create this duality, every daily activity is saturated with an awareness of the divine, and it is this constant vigilance which then makes ritual acts easy to perform. It is a subtle, but important distinction; the Western-liberal conception of piety would entail, first rising to prayer, and this ritual action then permeating one’s consciousness, and second having this holy disposition affect one’s daily activities so that one lives a more fully pious life. The women’s movement first go about their daily activities with the pious mindset that then enables them to perform ritual activity.
This distinction then leads to the broader question of how do ritual and interpretation relate? In Islam, it is the daily activities which are responsible for the construction of the pious self, whereas in Western thought, one’s pious thought and understanding of the self is the cause for one’s action eg. In one tradition action comes first, and in the other, reflection. This is an overly simplistic division, and I evoke it in order to problematizes, and to draw attention to the relation between bodily practices and interpretation that I think is at the root of Mahmood’s article. In fact, this is an area she has engaged with before, criticizing Bourdieu’s notion of bodily hexis: the process wherein any ideology: political mythology, cosmology, an ethic, a metaphysic, or political philosophy, is em-bodied into a permanent disposition, thereby affecting one’s way of moving, speaking, thinking and feeling. Of course this is a problematic method to apply to Islam, because it implies that Islam is not self-reflective, which is patently not the case.
Mahmood is interested in the differences between traditions when it comes to the construction of the moral self; thus my question is; can a self be constructed by the physical actions it performs, or are the actions the self performs simply reflective of a self already constructed? I think Mahmood summarizes this well, when she says, “external behavioural forms and formal gestures are integral to the realization and expression of the self” as opposed to the idea that “external behaviour may serve as a means of disciplining the self, but as I have shown above remains inessential to that self” (836).
My initial instinct was always to go with what I had been taught, that one’s self determines one’s actions and one’s relations to the institutions around you. However, now I take a more Foucauldian view, and I think we are partially constructed by the institutions around us, and by the physical practices they force upon us. For example, the traditional classroom, rows of students facing one authority figure: being constantly socialized in this way, one becomes used to passivity and receptive of authority more easily than one might if a classroom was set up as a circle. Or, one looks at the way prisons are set up, based on the idea of the Panopticon: a central guardtower which looks into the cells of the various inmates. The inmates cannot see whether anyone is in the guardtower, but they have the feeling that they are constantly being watched. This awareness then affects their behaviour, which in turn affects their construction of the self, and its relation (passivity) to the world around it (dominant).
I don’t go as far as Foucault in seeing these physical practices constituting us to the exclusion of all else, but I also think it would be too optimistic of me to assume that I am the way I am because of self-conscious reflection and decision. To some extent I am sure I am formed by the institutions around me, and even by the bodily hexis that those institutions continue to impose on us.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Doniger
Doniger’s chapter about women’s voices in myths raised a number of questions for me about the role and effect of women’s voices in narrative, and whether a woman’s narrative can be said to exist.
Doniger begins by citing the tradition of ‘old wives’ tales’. These stories were often physically voiced by women, and the implication is also that they were told for women. Yet what genders a particular story? Is it the physical narrator, the subject, the content, or the subject matter? Does the physical telling of a story mean that a woman has a voice in that particular story, or must ‘voice’ be something that is written into the material, rather than an agent of transmission? H.M. and N.K. Chadwick believe that there is female content in the story of David, and this is what makes the story ‘by/for’ women (Doniger 112), yet Holbek says it’s the subject, and the subject’s predicament that genders the story. However, neither content nor subject are guarantors of the story’s female-ness, for as Doniger points out, many stories with powerful women or goddess end with the women being undercut, subverted or destroyed in some way.
“Often the stories told by women do not seem to express a woman’s point of view at all” (Doniger 117) for sometimes the female narrator presents male bias, and sometimes the male narrator speaks sympathetically about women’s position. Although there is a problem with gendering a story one way or another and speculating on whether one story is for women, and another against women. One runs into problems, essentializing women to certain traits, and the other, of ascribing them a political agenda as part of their essentiality. Doniger points this out when she says that not all stories that portray women in a bad light are the sole products of men and likewise, stories that portray women in a good light are the sole products of women. She mentions qualities such as class, age, beauty, and race that are factors by which women differentiate themselves and denigrate one another in their stories. There is not always a common interest shared by old wives’ tales.
Another point that I found interesting was Doniger’s assertion that women’s stories were also the result of a subaltern identity absorbing the cultural mores of the dominant group, thus “even women authors will share the dominant mythology of their clture; they learn and assimilate the images that men have of them, and express those images in their own storytelling” (Doniger 119). Doniger seems to be drawing on the Foucauldian notion of modern discipline wherein discipline works in and through people to the point where it becomes second nature, and ultimately, natural. Story-telling occupies this liminal territory wherein on the one hand the authors can absorb and express dominant hierarchies in their stories, and on the other hand, have the ability to subvert them. This potential of subversion is also expressed, “just as the dominated often reproduce the opinions of the dominators, so it is also true, though less so and less well known, that the dominators mirror the opinions of the dominated” (122). And yet, while I agree that this is part of the process of the interaction between dominant and dominated discourses, I don’t see it as a 50-50 exchange. While I understand that one culture can be influenced by the culture it suppressed, in the way the European subject is constructed by its production of the Other, I think that Doniger gives the sub-altern a stronger identity than it actually has. In Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak defines the subaltern as that “whose identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself” (324). The subaltern by virtue of being the subaltern exists on the fringes, because it is the Other, not the Subject. It never speaks for itself, but is spoken to or spoken for. The subaltern does not have access to language, which is the property of the Subject, they are historically mute. Spivak points to the double silencing discourse of androcentrism and colonialism that construe the subaltern as Other, thereby denying it participation in the discourse of subject-hood: “Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization” (Spivak 337).
This isn’t to say I agree with Spivak entirely either, for I think that Spivak exists at an extreme end of the spectrum, utterly denying the possibility of women’s vocality. However, it is useful for me to contrast Spivak with Doniger when it comes to the possibility of hearing women’s voices in the stories, whether they be old wives’ tales or otherwise. And after all that, I’m still undecided on the level of agency women’s voices possess in text…
Doniger begins by citing the tradition of ‘old wives’ tales’. These stories were often physically voiced by women, and the implication is also that they were told for women. Yet what genders a particular story? Is it the physical narrator, the subject, the content, or the subject matter? Does the physical telling of a story mean that a woman has a voice in that particular story, or must ‘voice’ be something that is written into the material, rather than an agent of transmission? H.M. and N.K. Chadwick believe that there is female content in the story of David, and this is what makes the story ‘by/for’ women (Doniger 112), yet Holbek says it’s the subject, and the subject’s predicament that genders the story. However, neither content nor subject are guarantors of the story’s female-ness, for as Doniger points out, many stories with powerful women or goddess end with the women being undercut, subverted or destroyed in some way.
“Often the stories told by women do not seem to express a woman’s point of view at all” (Doniger 117) for sometimes the female narrator presents male bias, and sometimes the male narrator speaks sympathetically about women’s position. Although there is a problem with gendering a story one way or another and speculating on whether one story is for women, and another against women. One runs into problems, essentializing women to certain traits, and the other, of ascribing them a political agenda as part of their essentiality. Doniger points this out when she says that not all stories that portray women in a bad light are the sole products of men and likewise, stories that portray women in a good light are the sole products of women. She mentions qualities such as class, age, beauty, and race that are factors by which women differentiate themselves and denigrate one another in their stories. There is not always a common interest shared by old wives’ tales.
Another point that I found interesting was Doniger’s assertion that women’s stories were also the result of a subaltern identity absorbing the cultural mores of the dominant group, thus “even women authors will share the dominant mythology of their clture; they learn and assimilate the images that men have of them, and express those images in their own storytelling” (Doniger 119). Doniger seems to be drawing on the Foucauldian notion of modern discipline wherein discipline works in and through people to the point where it becomes second nature, and ultimately, natural. Story-telling occupies this liminal territory wherein on the one hand the authors can absorb and express dominant hierarchies in their stories, and on the other hand, have the ability to subvert them. This potential of subversion is also expressed, “just as the dominated often reproduce the opinions of the dominators, so it is also true, though less so and less well known, that the dominators mirror the opinions of the dominated” (122). And yet, while I agree that this is part of the process of the interaction between dominant and dominated discourses, I don’t see it as a 50-50 exchange. While I understand that one culture can be influenced by the culture it suppressed, in the way the European subject is constructed by its production of the Other, I think that Doniger gives the sub-altern a stronger identity than it actually has. In Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak defines the subaltern as that “whose identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself” (324). The subaltern by virtue of being the subaltern exists on the fringes, because it is the Other, not the Subject. It never speaks for itself, but is spoken to or spoken for. The subaltern does not have access to language, which is the property of the Subject, they are historically mute. Spivak points to the double silencing discourse of androcentrism and colonialism that construe the subaltern as Other, thereby denying it participation in the discourse of subject-hood: “Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization” (Spivak 337).
This isn’t to say I agree with Spivak entirely either, for I think that Spivak exists at an extreme end of the spectrum, utterly denying the possibility of women’s vocality. However, it is useful for me to contrast Spivak with Doniger when it comes to the possibility of hearing women’s voices in the stories, whether they be old wives’ tales or otherwise. And after all that, I’m still undecided on the level of agency women’s voices possess in text…
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Feminism
The role of feminism in religious studies seems to act as a destabilizer in much the same that deconstruction does. Deconstruction is a mode of thinking that never allows a field to become content with the answers it has found. It questions ‘givens’; thus forcing the field of inquiry to re-examine and perhaps reformulate itself. Feminism questions the ‘givenness’ of the male centred bias at the heart of religious studies. Texts, symbols, and cultural descriptions were collected by predominantly male religious studies scholars during the 19th and 20th century and are thus permeated with a hierarchy that ignores the role and status of women in various religious traditions. Feminism aims to destabilize the hierarchy in order to rescue women from marginalized roles, and generally improve their status. It is far more politically oriented then deconstruction.
In Engendering Religion, Clarke makes a good point on page 227, wherein she questions the category of women’s experience. Generally I find ‘religious experience’ a problematic term on which to base the study of religions because it is an inherently individual experience which does not lend itself to empirical classification. Additionally, it is difficult to use experience as a basis for comparison as if it had some inherent objective reality of its own because, according to Proudfoot, experience is constituted by the norms and the language of the culture that produces it. If experience is created by language, and differs from culture to culture, it becomes more difficult to assert that experience has a core of meaning which all cultures share. On page 245 Clarke speaks about gender as an analytic/descriptive category that needs to be re-examnied in order to de-naturalize and de-familiarize ‘taken for granted beliefs’ in order to critique them.
On page 235 Clarke speaks about the change that social sciences are undergoing, from scientific to literary paradigms. I believe that religious studies has been undergoing the same kind of shift. From the 19th century “science” of the study of religions, better known as the History of Religions movement, we are now moving toward a field in which literary theory is as much a part of the study as social-scientific theory. Post-colonialism, feminism, and deconstructionism are viable lenses with which to look at religion, and these all take their cues from literary theory developments in the 20th century.
Another comment that struck me was the idea on page 247 that Foucault does not allow for agency within his power structures. I believe this is inaccurate because the fact that institutions of power have to be constantly re-asserting themselves speaks to the possibility of resistance which is forcing them to respond in such a manner. Thus the fact that many religious traditions feel the need to continually re-assert gender roles, means that gender roles are not inherently stable or given.
In the Kinsley article, what I found interesting was the comment on page 9 wherein Kinsley states that when men misinterpret female symbols as male symbols, they miss the essential nature. I find this a very modernist (as opposed to post-modern) understanding because this assume that symbols have an internal coherence, and an objective reality. Symbols are referents, and are therefore multi-valent. A symbol doesn’t refer to only one other thing, it can refer to many different types of things, and this tendency of a symbol to gesture outwards precludes essentiality in my view. I also found the comment on page 12 very interesting, Kinsley points to the tendency of most field of inquiries to fall into the trap of objectification. In this particular case Kinsley points to the objectification of non-western women by western women. This occurs when western women are presented with a cultural practice that they cannot understand, and therefore they react by explaining it away. Is it the nature of comparative religions to always see an “Other”? Can we really ever escape our own vantage point and speak of an “us” as opposed to a “them”?
In the Young article, there is mention made of feminists trying to remove the false consciousness that patriarchy has encouraged among people over the years. However, when one removes a ‘false consciousness’ what remains behind? Is it reasonable to assume that the opposite of a certain kind of consciousness means a neutral consciouness or all consciousnesses somehow politically motivated?
And finally, I will address the phrase “Facts are not facts at all”. The term facts connotes an objective neutrality that pertains directly to reality. A fact is a fact by virtue of its accurate representation of things as they really are in themselves. A feminist critiques the idea that there is an objective viewpoint from which these facts can be constructed. If reality is shaped by conceptions and webs of meaning, and not by any ‘real’ referent, then ‘fact’ participates in this cultural constructedness, and does not have any inherent reality or objectivity.
Happy Thanksgiving!
In Engendering Religion, Clarke makes a good point on page 227, wherein she questions the category of women’s experience. Generally I find ‘religious experience’ a problematic term on which to base the study of religions because it is an inherently individual experience which does not lend itself to empirical classification. Additionally, it is difficult to use experience as a basis for comparison as if it had some inherent objective reality of its own because, according to Proudfoot, experience is constituted by the norms and the language of the culture that produces it. If experience is created by language, and differs from culture to culture, it becomes more difficult to assert that experience has a core of meaning which all cultures share. On page 245 Clarke speaks about gender as an analytic/descriptive category that needs to be re-examnied in order to de-naturalize and de-familiarize ‘taken for granted beliefs’ in order to critique them.
On page 235 Clarke speaks about the change that social sciences are undergoing, from scientific to literary paradigms. I believe that religious studies has been undergoing the same kind of shift. From the 19th century “science” of the study of religions, better known as the History of Religions movement, we are now moving toward a field in which literary theory is as much a part of the study as social-scientific theory. Post-colonialism, feminism, and deconstructionism are viable lenses with which to look at religion, and these all take their cues from literary theory developments in the 20th century.
Another comment that struck me was the idea on page 247 that Foucault does not allow for agency within his power structures. I believe this is inaccurate because the fact that institutions of power have to be constantly re-asserting themselves speaks to the possibility of resistance which is forcing them to respond in such a manner. Thus the fact that many religious traditions feel the need to continually re-assert gender roles, means that gender roles are not inherently stable or given.
In the Kinsley article, what I found interesting was the comment on page 9 wherein Kinsley states that when men misinterpret female symbols as male symbols, they miss the essential nature. I find this a very modernist (as opposed to post-modern) understanding because this assume that symbols have an internal coherence, and an objective reality. Symbols are referents, and are therefore multi-valent. A symbol doesn’t refer to only one other thing, it can refer to many different types of things, and this tendency of a symbol to gesture outwards precludes essentiality in my view. I also found the comment on page 12 very interesting, Kinsley points to the tendency of most field of inquiries to fall into the trap of objectification. In this particular case Kinsley points to the objectification of non-western women by western women. This occurs when western women are presented with a cultural practice that they cannot understand, and therefore they react by explaining it away. Is it the nature of comparative religions to always see an “Other”? Can we really ever escape our own vantage point and speak of an “us” as opposed to a “them”?
In the Young article, there is mention made of feminists trying to remove the false consciousness that patriarchy has encouraged among people over the years. However, when one removes a ‘false consciousness’ what remains behind? Is it reasonable to assume that the opposite of a certain kind of consciousness means a neutral consciouness or all consciousnesses somehow politically motivated?
And finally, I will address the phrase “Facts are not facts at all”. The term facts connotes an objective neutrality that pertains directly to reality. A fact is a fact by virtue of its accurate representation of things as they really are in themselves. A feminist critiques the idea that there is an objective viewpoint from which these facts can be constructed. If reality is shaped by conceptions and webs of meaning, and not by any ‘real’ referent, then ‘fact’ participates in this cultural constructedness, and does not have any inherent reality or objectivity.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Friday, October 3, 2008
Clark, History, Theory, Text
Of all the literary critics mentioned in this piece I think that for the field of religious studies, Ricouer offers one of the most relevant way to critique texts. He is glossed over quite quickly in this survey, which is a pity, because he offers a way to read post-structurally without becoming too frustrated by some more post-structural critics like Barthes, who demand an “infinite deferral of meaning” when reading. I also find a description of Ricoeur resonates with my own feelings on the relationship between author-text.
Ricouer, along with many other theorists believed that it was impossible to try to recall the past, one can never hope to understand the conditions of existence in the author’s lifetime, or the lifetime of the text’s original readers; the best one can do is understand how that text can speak to you. The text bridges the existential gap when readers appropriate the texts and make them speak to their own existence through the hermeneutical act. The reader then creates new textual meaning in the act of appropriating the text to their own time and life-experience.
However, the frustrating part for any scholar is that this approach seems to validate every reading, no matter how absurd it is. However, Ricoeur allows for the restriction of meaning within a text: firstly, by the structure of the text itself, structures like events, or chronology which govern the possible interpretations to a certain extent. Secondly, the meanings are restricted by the life experiences, opinions and pre-suppositions of the readers themselves and finally restriction by a community of readers. This last one is a little problematic because in “What is a Text” Ricoeur just sort of tacks it on without much explanation. Despite the plurality of meanings, the individual reading is subject to a “majority” reading, which seems to go against the “constant capacity for renewal” that is inherent in the text.
Ricoeur is a religious thinker, and his literary theory reflects this. For Ricoeur, the ultimate purpose/function of text is the discovery of existential truth through self-critical acts as arrived at from an interpretation of text. Therefore, with every act of interpretation, the understanding that results because of it is a result of the reader’s life experience and presuppositions to the discourse of the text. Since our acts of interpretation are subjective, any meaning we find in a text must be reflected back onto us, as an expression of how we uniquely view the world and our being in it.
Ricouer’s thoughts on the truth about ourselves that reading offers resonates with me. Throughout this class we’ve been talking about bracketing our biases, and the need for us to thoroughly examine the context from which we read and write. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics are almost a celebration of our presuppositions’ effect upon the text, because they lead to a better self-understanding. Yet I don’t think that the entire goal of reading is to discover existential truth about ourselves, as Ricoeur’s program would have it; though understanding the text by what we bring to it is a valuable exercise in self-criticism. Secondly, I think it is important to have some restrictions on textual meaning: wikipedia functions because there is a panel of regulators, and in the same way, I think there need to be some checks within scholarship. Ricoeur walks a fine line, by encouraging this constant fluidity between the text and reader while at the same acknowledging that there is an end to this process. (Barthes would disagree, so would Derrida, for to them, this is closing the text and therefore rendering it irrelevant.) While I really appreciate Derrida, I find it hard to put into practice what he calls for, namely, this constant uncertainty, and this constant possibility. Therefore for me, Ricoeur’s thought presents a way to interact with texts in a post-structuralist, semi-post-modern way, yet with the comfort of being able to settle on a particular interpretation.
In regards to the question about context, I do think there is a place for context in literary theory although I disagree with using context as a way of digging into the text in the search for one, monolithic meaning or truth. However, context, in a variety of forms, both the historical context (although we must be careful to explain how we chose the particular historical context that we think is authoritative) and the other texts with which this particular text participates can inform the reader as they construct their own text in the process of reading. Context is not the beyond-all, end-all, but it can leave traces which the reader then appropriates in their own discourse.
Ricouer, along with many other theorists believed that it was impossible to try to recall the past, one can never hope to understand the conditions of existence in the author’s lifetime, or the lifetime of the text’s original readers; the best one can do is understand how that text can speak to you. The text bridges the existential gap when readers appropriate the texts and make them speak to their own existence through the hermeneutical act. The reader then creates new textual meaning in the act of appropriating the text to their own time and life-experience.
However, the frustrating part for any scholar is that this approach seems to validate every reading, no matter how absurd it is. However, Ricoeur allows for the restriction of meaning within a text: firstly, by the structure of the text itself, structures like events, or chronology which govern the possible interpretations to a certain extent. Secondly, the meanings are restricted by the life experiences, opinions and pre-suppositions of the readers themselves and finally restriction by a community of readers. This last one is a little problematic because in “What is a Text” Ricoeur just sort of tacks it on without much explanation. Despite the plurality of meanings, the individual reading is subject to a “majority” reading, which seems to go against the “constant capacity for renewal” that is inherent in the text.
Ricoeur is a religious thinker, and his literary theory reflects this. For Ricoeur, the ultimate purpose/function of text is the discovery of existential truth through self-critical acts as arrived at from an interpretation of text. Therefore, with every act of interpretation, the understanding that results because of it is a result of the reader’s life experience and presuppositions to the discourse of the text. Since our acts of interpretation are subjective, any meaning we find in a text must be reflected back onto us, as an expression of how we uniquely view the world and our being in it.
Ricouer’s thoughts on the truth about ourselves that reading offers resonates with me. Throughout this class we’ve been talking about bracketing our biases, and the need for us to thoroughly examine the context from which we read and write. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics are almost a celebration of our presuppositions’ effect upon the text, because they lead to a better self-understanding. Yet I don’t think that the entire goal of reading is to discover existential truth about ourselves, as Ricoeur’s program would have it; though understanding the text by what we bring to it is a valuable exercise in self-criticism. Secondly, I think it is important to have some restrictions on textual meaning: wikipedia functions because there is a panel of regulators, and in the same way, I think there need to be some checks within scholarship. Ricoeur walks a fine line, by encouraging this constant fluidity between the text and reader while at the same acknowledging that there is an end to this process. (Barthes would disagree, so would Derrida, for to them, this is closing the text and therefore rendering it irrelevant.) While I really appreciate Derrida, I find it hard to put into practice what he calls for, namely, this constant uncertainty, and this constant possibility. Therefore for me, Ricoeur’s thought presents a way to interact with texts in a post-structuralist, semi-post-modern way, yet with the comfort of being able to settle on a particular interpretation.
In regards to the question about context, I do think there is a place for context in literary theory although I disagree with using context as a way of digging into the text in the search for one, monolithic meaning or truth. However, context, in a variety of forms, both the historical context (although we must be careful to explain how we chose the particular historical context that we think is authoritative) and the other texts with which this particular text participates can inform the reader as they construct their own text in the process of reading. Context is not the beyond-all, end-all, but it can leave traces which the reader then appropriates in their own discourse.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
OGS Statement of Interest
My name is Ada Chidichimo Jeffrey and I am enrolled in a 2 year Master’s program at the University of Toronto in order to have sufficient time to complete my research project which includes large numbers of interviews as well as data analysis. I would like to research the role that religious institutions play in the integration of immigrants into Canada. Specifically the questions I would to address are as follows: Do religious institutions in Canada provide resources for integration that immigrants might not otherwise have access to as readily? Or, do religious institutions in Canada actually work against the process of integration by encouraging immigrants to identify themselves first as members of a particular community, and secondly, as Canadians?
Traditionally, scholarship on religion and immigration has maintained that religious institutions play a positive role in the integration of immigrants. They serve as community centres which put recent immigrants in touch with resources for housing, employment and social services while offering a support network of people with similar language and culture. Nancy Foner and Richard Alba in their article “Immigrant Religion: Bridge or Barrier to Integration?” (2008) state that this is primarily the case for immigrants integrating into the United States. Alternatively, some of the literature on the subject takes the opposite view, that religion and religious institutions are a barrier to integration. These scholars are mostly writing with regards to the Western European case wherein the government is typically more secular, and primary religion of immigrants is Islam. These authors, such as Buijs and Rath (2002) suggest that religious institutions (specifically Islamic religious Institutions) encourage “cultural isolationism”, and can lead to acts of violence and terrorism.
While much literature has been written about the role of religion on immigration in the United States and Western Europe, there has not been much work on the topic in Canada. The research being undertaken by Prof. Jeffrey Reitz at the University of Toronto is unique in this regard because it examines the Canadian experience of immigration with recourse to role of religion (Reitz 2008). I believe I am well situated to benefit from and hopefully contribute to his research due to my experience in the field of comparative religion and my involvement in his
collaborative program Ethnicity and Pluralism Studies. This program, when combined with my courses in the Study of Religion will enable me to address issues of race, gender and ethnicity in collaboration with my previous background in religious studies. Additionally, my fluency in both French and Spanish will allow me to access materials in other languages, including research done on the Quebec situation.
In order to answer the aforementioned questions I will use both quantitative and qualitative sources in my methodology, while also referring to some background literature in order to contextualize my findings. Quantitatively, I shall use data from the 2002 Ethnic Diversity Survey in order to provide background on the number of immigrants who declare a strong religious affiliation, and of whom, the percentage who feel accepted by Canadian society. Also Canadian census data will provide information on the degree to which these immigrants are structurally integrated into Canadian society vis-à-vis employment, education and housing levels. To obtain qualitative field data, I shall conduct interviews with several prominent religious institutions in the GTA whose congregation is primarily new Canadians. Some of these institutions include: The New Life Church on Queen St. E, and the Jafari Mosque. Finally, authors such as Jeffrey Reitz, Nancy Foner and Richard Alba, and Charles Hirschman provide relevant, contemporary articles that I can use to situate my own findings.
I am confident that my previous training, and skill-set, when combined with the resources of the University of Toronto, will allow me to undertake original research on the role of religious institutions on the integration of immigrants which will ultimately benefit Canada in the area of immigration policy and social service improvements. I hope to provide an answer to the question: Should Canada be supporting religious institutions as an intermediary way of providing access to services to new immigrants, or should Canada attempt to provide these services itself?
Works Cited
Jeffrey G. Reitz, Rupa Banerjee, Mai Phan, and Jordan Thompson. "Race, Religion, and the Social Integration of New Immigrant Minorities in Canada," September 2008;
Foner, Nancy and Richard Alba. “Immigrant Religion: Bridge or Barrier to Inclusion?” International Migration Review. 42.2 (Summer 2008): 360-392.
Hirschman, Charles. “The Role of Religion in the Origins and Adaptations of Immigrant Groups in the United States.” International Migration Review. 38.3 (Fall 2004): 1206-1233.
Buijs, F. J., and J. Rath. “Muslims in Europe: The State of Research.” IMISCOE Working Paper. (2006).
Traditionally, scholarship on religion and immigration has maintained that religious institutions play a positive role in the integration of immigrants. They serve as community centres which put recent immigrants in touch with resources for housing, employment and social services while offering a support network of people with similar language and culture. Nancy Foner and Richard Alba in their article “Immigrant Religion: Bridge or Barrier to Integration?” (2008) state that this is primarily the case for immigrants integrating into the United States. Alternatively, some of the literature on the subject takes the opposite view, that religion and religious institutions are a barrier to integration. These scholars are mostly writing with regards to the Western European case wherein the government is typically more secular, and primary religion of immigrants is Islam. These authors, such as Buijs and Rath (2002) suggest that religious institutions (specifically Islamic religious Institutions) encourage “cultural isolationism”, and can lead to acts of violence and terrorism.
While much literature has been written about the role of religion on immigration in the United States and Western Europe, there has not been much work on the topic in Canada. The research being undertaken by Prof. Jeffrey Reitz at the University of Toronto is unique in this regard because it examines the Canadian experience of immigration with recourse to role of religion (Reitz 2008). I believe I am well situated to benefit from and hopefully contribute to his research due to my experience in the field of comparative religion and my involvement in his
collaborative program Ethnicity and Pluralism Studies. This program, when combined with my courses in the Study of Religion will enable me to address issues of race, gender and ethnicity in collaboration with my previous background in religious studies. Additionally, my fluency in both French and Spanish will allow me to access materials in other languages, including research done on the Quebec situation.
In order to answer the aforementioned questions I will use both quantitative and qualitative sources in my methodology, while also referring to some background literature in order to contextualize my findings. Quantitatively, I shall use data from the 2002 Ethnic Diversity Survey in order to provide background on the number of immigrants who declare a strong religious affiliation, and of whom, the percentage who feel accepted by Canadian society. Also Canadian census data will provide information on the degree to which these immigrants are structurally integrated into Canadian society vis-à-vis employment, education and housing levels. To obtain qualitative field data, I shall conduct interviews with several prominent religious institutions in the GTA whose congregation is primarily new Canadians. Some of these institutions include: The New Life Church on Queen St. E, and the Jafari Mosque. Finally, authors such as Jeffrey Reitz, Nancy Foner and Richard Alba, and Charles Hirschman provide relevant, contemporary articles that I can use to situate my own findings.
I am confident that my previous training, and skill-set, when combined with the resources of the University of Toronto, will allow me to undertake original research on the role of religious institutions on the integration of immigrants which will ultimately benefit Canada in the area of immigration policy and social service improvements. I hope to provide an answer to the question: Should Canada be supporting religious institutions as an intermediary way of providing access to services to new immigrants, or should Canada attempt to provide these services itself?
Works Cited
Jeffrey G. Reitz, Rupa Banerjee, Mai Phan, and Jordan Thompson. "Race, Religion, and the Social Integration of New Immigrant Minorities in Canada," September 2008;
Foner, Nancy and Richard Alba. “Immigrant Religion: Bridge or Barrier to Inclusion?” International Migration Review. 42.2 (Summer 2008): 360-392.
Hirschman, Charles. “The Role of Religion in the Origins and Adaptations of Immigrant Groups in the United States.” International Migration Review. 38.3 (Fall 2004): 1206-1233.
Buijs, F. J., and J. Rath. “Muslims in Europe: The State of Research.” IMISCOE Working Paper. (2006).
Thursday, September 18, 2008
On Smith, Van Voorst and Masuzawa
In general, this week’s readings all addressed the idea of the relation between the concept and the object of study. In the field of religious studies especially, the concept of an object changes the object, or in fact constructs the object altogether. We have examples like Edward Said’s discussion of Orientalism, wherein he points out that the “Orient” is a discursive tradition created by the West in order to justify their imperialism, and to serve as a backdrop against which the West looks better in comparison. This idea is very much carried on in the Invention of World Religions, and I will return to it later.
Smith opens with the idea of the problematic construction of the category of religion. As many of us may have experienced, most classes begin with a discussion of this category (or they ought to!). In fact, much of the Western tradition of the study of religion can be understood as the effort to come to an understanding of the proper object of our study, namely, what is religion in and of itself? If we cannot agree on the province of the word itself, scholars will not be able to engage in debate. Instead the field degenerates into taking pot-shots at each other’s inadequate definitions. On page 3, Smith draws attention to how, even within Christian circles, agreement on the nature of religion does not come easily.
On pg. 273 Hume correctly points out that religion as an anthropological category must reflect all the contradictions and particularities that exist among people. I find it interesting how Hume does not mention the experience of the supernatural or the sacred, yet this aspect becomes part of the definitions in the 20th century. He also shows how the study of religion gradually changes its perspective, from being a critique of religions from without, to an attempt to understand the religion from within, beginning notably with Geertz.
In the Van Voorst article on page 3, Van Voorst mentions how Cantwell Smith wanted to study scripture as it was actually used in religious practices. But what if the study of scripture itself, and the literature published about it, affects the way is scripture is seen and used? Can scholars really study a phenomenon without affecting it? Their “objects of study” can read what is written about them and are often moved to write apologetics. Indeed many religions are defined by their reactions to perceived misunderstandings about them. Protestantism did not come to a clear doctrine until Calvin defended Protestantism against the claims and criticisms of the Roman Catholics and the Anabaptists.
On page 4 the comment about ‘scipturalness’ being a category that is subjective, and often constructed in retrospect, is bang on. English Literature deals with the same question: whom do we canonize? The same questions arise in most aesthetic disciplines.
Van Voorst makes clear that the value/authority/sacredness of the scripture does not reside solely in its words. The object of the text, including its outward form and binding becomes an object of worship that can bring good fortune and ward off evil. In English literature, there is a strain of criticism called “book history” wherein the outward form of the book is studied as having a critical impact upon the way a book is absorbed and understood.
I take issue with Masuzawa’s introduction on page 2 in The Invention of World Religions: I don’t think that the term ‘religion’ is still a category that is resistant, essentialized, or unhistoricized. That happens when you postulate essences, and the idea of an essence of religion does not have the same currency as it once had in Eliade’s time. This is not to say that the desire to continue to do so is not still pervasive in Religious Studies dept. but there have been critiques, and there are ways of historizing religion.
On page 11, it is an interesting point that ‘world religions’ is a term without a history. It begins to appear and is taken for granted from the get-go. Later on in the book, Masuzawa points out that at the attitude of being a ‘sympathetic insider’ is de rigeur for any religion scholar, and yet, to date, this attitude has not been properly critiqued. Simply because the word sounds like a good idea should not exempt it from being examined and quantified. On this point, on page 13 also, there is the critique that ‘pluralism’ has become a dominant idea and yet remains only vaguely defined. Again, just because the notion sounds like a good idea is no reason to analytically ignore it.
The idea of speaking about other religions and later on, the field of comparative religion, arose in a period of insecurity and upheaval for the West. Masuzawa remarks that this has marked western scholars with a tendency towards protectionism and towards an aggressive outlook towards the Other (pg.20). In a sense, much of the early discourse about other religions arose not as a way to better understand them, but as a way to better understand how we were NOT them. The vast catalogues of the Other’s ceremonies, religion and culture are there for ridicule, or for disparaging comparison with the West’s innate superiority. As Said said in his book Orientalism: “Orientalism is- and does not simply represent- a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world” (12). Substitute the Other, for Orientalism, and we have the gist of the argument in Masuzawa’s book. The comparative study of religions arose not from a desire to objectively understand the Other, but to enshrine the Other as Other, and thereby justify our high estimation of our own cultural and religious practices.
Smith opens with the idea of the problematic construction of the category of religion. As many of us may have experienced, most classes begin with a discussion of this category (or they ought to!). In fact, much of the Western tradition of the study of religion can be understood as the effort to come to an understanding of the proper object of our study, namely, what is religion in and of itself? If we cannot agree on the province of the word itself, scholars will not be able to engage in debate. Instead the field degenerates into taking pot-shots at each other’s inadequate definitions. On page 3, Smith draws attention to how, even within Christian circles, agreement on the nature of religion does not come easily.
On pg. 273 Hume correctly points out that religion as an anthropological category must reflect all the contradictions and particularities that exist among people. I find it interesting how Hume does not mention the experience of the supernatural or the sacred, yet this aspect becomes part of the definitions in the 20th century. He also shows how the study of religion gradually changes its perspective, from being a critique of religions from without, to an attempt to understand the religion from within, beginning notably with Geertz.
In the Van Voorst article on page 3, Van Voorst mentions how Cantwell Smith wanted to study scripture as it was actually used in religious practices. But what if the study of scripture itself, and the literature published about it, affects the way is scripture is seen and used? Can scholars really study a phenomenon without affecting it? Their “objects of study” can read what is written about them and are often moved to write apologetics. Indeed many religions are defined by their reactions to perceived misunderstandings about them. Protestantism did not come to a clear doctrine until Calvin defended Protestantism against the claims and criticisms of the Roman Catholics and the Anabaptists.
On page 4 the comment about ‘scipturalness’ being a category that is subjective, and often constructed in retrospect, is bang on. English Literature deals with the same question: whom do we canonize? The same questions arise in most aesthetic disciplines.
Van Voorst makes clear that the value/authority/sacredness of the scripture does not reside solely in its words. The object of the text, including its outward form and binding becomes an object of worship that can bring good fortune and ward off evil. In English literature, there is a strain of criticism called “book history” wherein the outward form of the book is studied as having a critical impact upon the way a book is absorbed and understood.
I take issue with Masuzawa’s introduction on page 2 in The Invention of World Religions: I don’t think that the term ‘religion’ is still a category that is resistant, essentialized, or unhistoricized. That happens when you postulate essences, and the idea of an essence of religion does not have the same currency as it once had in Eliade’s time. This is not to say that the desire to continue to do so is not still pervasive in Religious Studies dept. but there have been critiques, and there are ways of historizing religion.
On page 11, it is an interesting point that ‘world religions’ is a term without a history. It begins to appear and is taken for granted from the get-go. Later on in the book, Masuzawa points out that at the attitude of being a ‘sympathetic insider’ is de rigeur for any religion scholar, and yet, to date, this attitude has not been properly critiqued. Simply because the word sounds like a good idea should not exempt it from being examined and quantified. On this point, on page 13 also, there is the critique that ‘pluralism’ has become a dominant idea and yet remains only vaguely defined. Again, just because the notion sounds like a good idea is no reason to analytically ignore it.
The idea of speaking about other religions and later on, the field of comparative religion, arose in a period of insecurity and upheaval for the West. Masuzawa remarks that this has marked western scholars with a tendency towards protectionism and towards an aggressive outlook towards the Other (pg.20). In a sense, much of the early discourse about other religions arose not as a way to better understand them, but as a way to better understand how we were NOT them. The vast catalogues of the Other’s ceremonies, religion and culture are there for ridicule, or for disparaging comparison with the West’s innate superiority. As Said said in his book Orientalism: “Orientalism is- and does not simply represent- a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world” (12). Substitute the Other, for Orientalism, and we have the gist of the argument in Masuzawa’s book. The comparative study of religions arose not from a desire to objectively understand the Other, but to enshrine the Other as Other, and thereby justify our high estimation of our own cultural and religious practices.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Bynum and Huntington: In Praise of Fragments, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Methodological Considerations
Bynum: In Praise Of Fragments
Pg. 16: “All assume, with social scientists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau, that marginal and disadvantaged groups in a society appropriate that society’s dominant symbols and ideas in ways that revise and undercut them.”
I like the use of de Certeau, who claimed that the act of reading was an act of poaching on the territory of the dominant group who created the text. It also reminded me of another idea which perhaps is also implied in Bynum’s use of de Certeau: that, in order to have the repressed we must have the dominant. The master is constructed in the same breath as the slave. In a sense, the slave then has power over the master because they are relied upon to create the identity of the master. I’m paraphrasing here, but especially in her phrase that ‘the study of gender is a study of 100% of the human race, not 51% (pg.17), I think this idea applies. One comes to understand the female in its response to the male, and the male’s response to the female. However, I can’t remember who said that thing about the master/slave duality, was it Foucault? Maybe someone else can help me out on that one…
Pg. 23: One of Bynum’s methodological assumptions is the slightly, but by no means complete, post-modern leanings. Bynum rejects the idea of author’s intentionality yet regards as valid the information that context, historical period and concurrently written texts can give to the meaning of the text. Bynum picks and chooses from certain idea in literary criticism: a little bit of historicism, a little bit of deconstruction yet she herself has acknowledged this: “…I have not aligned myself with any current dispensation…my formulation of their significance has resonances with (although also differences from) such theoretical positions such as postmodern feminism, deconstruction, or post-structural symbolic anthropology” (22).
Pg. 25: The comic was an idea that gave me a little bit of trouble, but I think I have some understanding of what she means. The comic then is her stance by virtue of its self-awareness of its own contrivance, its self-conscious understanding that it is but one possible story. Texts can tell different stories (perhaps also depending on the role played by the reader in appropriating that text to their own use). The author believes that true history is inaccessible, it is a meta-history lying outside the realm of understanding. It is only poorly and partially attested to by texts. Thus, not taking oneself seriously is imperative to not ascribing intentionality to texts and events and authors whose “truth” does not exist in any objective way.
From what I gathered from Bynum’s first article, if one understands that there are multiple ways to tell the truth, and multiple voices that will tell a different truth, one is encouraged to listen to the marginalized voices, and hold them as equally valuable and in this way, come to a more complete (pluralistic) understanding of… history? Text? Everything?
Bynum: Holy Feast and Holy Fast
Pg. 3: Because Jesus had served apostles as both waiter and server (multiplier of food) and as the food itself, the verb eat came to mean assimilation, and to become God” This sort of intense sensual experience also reminds me of the mystics who used the imagery of a lover when it came to describing their assimilation into God. In particular, I remember reading one text of a female mystic (Kempe? I can’t remember) that portrayed Christ as a woman, and talked about His/Her breast milk as symbolic of saving grace. In the text’s following two examples on pages 3 and 4, these two modes of imagery, food and lover seem interchangeable, or conflated. Bynum’s thesis is interesting, that food deprivation was not a flight from the body, but the realizing of the body as possible tool, to be changed, both in physical appearance, and needs-composition to reflect the faith, religious persuasion etc. The body provided choices, instead of restricted them.
I do find interesting her siding with phenomenology in her study of history, as the Religious studies departments around Canada grapple with the proper way to study Religion. Eliade is often discredited, his ‘bracketing of biases’ is sometimes thought to be impossible, and even inadvisable for scholars to do, for it is presumptuous to imagine that one can think outside of one’s own presuppositions, time, and environment. She also seems to cite Clifford Geertz, which is perhaps problematic in the sense that if religion is seen as a collection of symbol systems, one risks not looking at the things themselves, or the texts, but looking beyond these tangibles for “the truth”. Furthermore, any overarching idea that one would arrive at, would be based not so much on observation of what material you have available to you, but to a secondary theory, that of what those materials ‘mean’. You run the risk of sacrificing what the texts say, for what the texts mean.
Huntington: Methodological Considerations
Pg. 6: Is it just me, or is he hating on the proselytic model? He has a lot in common with book historians of English literature who try to make book history into science, to the extent where they claim that words are just “symbols on a page” and you can find out the meaning and significance of a text without any recourse to them at all. However, this text-critical model, both in English Lit, and religious studies if accused of as, Huntington says ‘of being too abstract, and sterile in its refusal to give attention to the problem of meaning’ (pg. 7).
The Gadamer quote on page 7 is great, it echoes what I mentioned earlier in regards to Bynum, that phenomenology does not take sufficient account of the activity of the interpreter. The interpreter changes the phenomenon studied, just as post-modern literary criticism holds that the reader changes the text and makes it their own (Wolfgang Iser might be an example of this). On this point he differs from the previous author by better pointing out the flaws of this “objectivism” bias in phenomenology. (7)
(Top of) Pg.8: Bynum and Huntington both don’t like the modernist idea of authorial intentionality. Huntington seems to be rejecting the phenomenological preoccupation with essences as being illusory. He does seem more in line with Roland Barthes, that the meaning of the text does not really exist independent of the reader.
Pg. 9: ‘What we learn in these texts is in every way a function of the tools we bring to our study’. In this phrase, he appears much more ‘officially’ a post-modern deconstructioist type theorizer, in comparison to Bynum’s half-postmodern, half new historicism method. Incidentally, Huntington’s methodology seems appropriate for studying things like Nagarjuna’s writing who was constantly breaking down the meaning of language and questioning duality.
Pg. 13: I’m not sure that I agree with the idea that the historicizing of an object of study necessarily implies that one suspends its truth claim nor that the acknowledgement of the Other as other means that one cannot access their truths. It seem one would have to acknowledge any historical subject as other simply because in doing so one acknowledges one’s own position and the distance of time.
At the end of pg. 14 he more explicitly states how important it is to carry with one during research, an acknowledgement of one’s own presuppositions, I think this is less emphasized in Bynum’s two articles.
Pg. 16: “All assume, with social scientists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau, that marginal and disadvantaged groups in a society appropriate that society’s dominant symbols and ideas in ways that revise and undercut them.”
I like the use of de Certeau, who claimed that the act of reading was an act of poaching on the territory of the dominant group who created the text. It also reminded me of another idea which perhaps is also implied in Bynum’s use of de Certeau: that, in order to have the repressed we must have the dominant. The master is constructed in the same breath as the slave. In a sense, the slave then has power over the master because they are relied upon to create the identity of the master. I’m paraphrasing here, but especially in her phrase that ‘the study of gender is a study of 100% of the human race, not 51% (pg.17), I think this idea applies. One comes to understand the female in its response to the male, and the male’s response to the female. However, I can’t remember who said that thing about the master/slave duality, was it Foucault? Maybe someone else can help me out on that one…
Pg. 23: One of Bynum’s methodological assumptions is the slightly, but by no means complete, post-modern leanings. Bynum rejects the idea of author’s intentionality yet regards as valid the information that context, historical period and concurrently written texts can give to the meaning of the text. Bynum picks and chooses from certain idea in literary criticism: a little bit of historicism, a little bit of deconstruction yet she herself has acknowledged this: “…I have not aligned myself with any current dispensation…my formulation of their significance has resonances with (although also differences from) such theoretical positions such as postmodern feminism, deconstruction, or post-structural symbolic anthropology” (22).
Pg. 25: The comic was an idea that gave me a little bit of trouble, but I think I have some understanding of what she means. The comic then is her stance by virtue of its self-awareness of its own contrivance, its self-conscious understanding that it is but one possible story. Texts can tell different stories (perhaps also depending on the role played by the reader in appropriating that text to their own use). The author believes that true history is inaccessible, it is a meta-history lying outside the realm of understanding. It is only poorly and partially attested to by texts. Thus, not taking oneself seriously is imperative to not ascribing intentionality to texts and events and authors whose “truth” does not exist in any objective way.
From what I gathered from Bynum’s first article, if one understands that there are multiple ways to tell the truth, and multiple voices that will tell a different truth, one is encouraged to listen to the marginalized voices, and hold them as equally valuable and in this way, come to a more complete (pluralistic) understanding of… history? Text? Everything?
Bynum: Holy Feast and Holy Fast
Pg. 3: Because Jesus had served apostles as both waiter and server (multiplier of food) and as the food itself, the verb eat came to mean assimilation, and to become God” This sort of intense sensual experience also reminds me of the mystics who used the imagery of a lover when it came to describing their assimilation into God. In particular, I remember reading one text of a female mystic (Kempe? I can’t remember) that portrayed Christ as a woman, and talked about His/Her breast milk as symbolic of saving grace. In the text’s following two examples on pages 3 and 4, these two modes of imagery, food and lover seem interchangeable, or conflated. Bynum’s thesis is interesting, that food deprivation was not a flight from the body, but the realizing of the body as possible tool, to be changed, both in physical appearance, and needs-composition to reflect the faith, religious persuasion etc. The body provided choices, instead of restricted them.
I do find interesting her siding with phenomenology in her study of history, as the Religious studies departments around Canada grapple with the proper way to study Religion. Eliade is often discredited, his ‘bracketing of biases’ is sometimes thought to be impossible, and even inadvisable for scholars to do, for it is presumptuous to imagine that one can think outside of one’s own presuppositions, time, and environment. She also seems to cite Clifford Geertz, which is perhaps problematic in the sense that if religion is seen as a collection of symbol systems, one risks not looking at the things themselves, or the texts, but looking beyond these tangibles for “the truth”. Furthermore, any overarching idea that one would arrive at, would be based not so much on observation of what material you have available to you, but to a secondary theory, that of what those materials ‘mean’. You run the risk of sacrificing what the texts say, for what the texts mean.
Huntington: Methodological Considerations
Pg. 6: Is it just me, or is he hating on the proselytic model? He has a lot in common with book historians of English literature who try to make book history into science, to the extent where they claim that words are just “symbols on a page” and you can find out the meaning and significance of a text without any recourse to them at all. However, this text-critical model, both in English Lit, and religious studies if accused of as, Huntington says ‘of being too abstract, and sterile in its refusal to give attention to the problem of meaning’ (pg. 7).
The Gadamer quote on page 7 is great, it echoes what I mentioned earlier in regards to Bynum, that phenomenology does not take sufficient account of the activity of the interpreter. The interpreter changes the phenomenon studied, just as post-modern literary criticism holds that the reader changes the text and makes it their own (Wolfgang Iser might be an example of this). On this point he differs from the previous author by better pointing out the flaws of this “objectivism” bias in phenomenology. (7)
(Top of) Pg.8: Bynum and Huntington both don’t like the modernist idea of authorial intentionality. Huntington seems to be rejecting the phenomenological preoccupation with essences as being illusory. He does seem more in line with Roland Barthes, that the meaning of the text does not really exist independent of the reader.
Pg. 9: ‘What we learn in these texts is in every way a function of the tools we bring to our study’. In this phrase, he appears much more ‘officially’ a post-modern deconstructioist type theorizer, in comparison to Bynum’s half-postmodern, half new historicism method. Incidentally, Huntington’s methodology seems appropriate for studying things like Nagarjuna’s writing who was constantly breaking down the meaning of language and questioning duality.
Pg. 13: I’m not sure that I agree with the idea that the historicizing of an object of study necessarily implies that one suspends its truth claim nor that the acknowledgement of the Other as other means that one cannot access their truths. It seem one would have to acknowledge any historical subject as other simply because in doing so one acknowledges one’s own position and the distance of time.
At the end of pg. 14 he more explicitly states how important it is to carry with one during research, an acknowledgement of one’s own presuppositions, I think this is less emphasized in Bynum’s two articles.
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