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.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
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.
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