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!
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