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.