Here is an essay i wrote about the status of religious studies and our understanding of religion in the West. In it I question the common assumptions we make about religion and what might constitute it if it was used as a universal category. It also deconstructs the seperation we make in the West between secular practices and religious practices through theroies of embodiment and performativity.
Narration about what’s-going-on constitute our orthodoxy. Debates about figures become our theological wars. The combatants no longer bear the arms of the offensive of defensive idea. They move forward camouflaged as facts, data, and events. They present themselves as messengers from a “reality”. Their uniform takes on the color of the economic and social ground they move into. When they advance, the terrain itself seems to advance. But in fact they fabricate the terrain, simulate it, use it as a mask, accredit themselves by it, and thus create the scene of their own law.
—Michel de Certeau, 1984 [1]
As scholars of the word or text we seem to suffer from a mild (or extreme) case of amnesia. That is, we often forget that the concepts we use to interpret ‘religion’ are defined by the very same terms we employed in the first place to describe its contours. This egregious circularity can be seen in the way that scholars have approached the phenomena we call ‘religion’ by juxtaposing it with the ‘secular’. It is through this dualism that a powerful discourse is constructed whereby secular scholars come to understand ‘religion’ as a meaningful text which, with the right hermeneutic devise, can be decoded and understood much like a language, unlike secularity which is lived. What this essay proposes to do is undermine the performative rituals and myths that structure the academic discourse of religious studies. Through critical reflection on performativity I will relativize and problematize the “textocentrism”[2] which acts as our conceptual imperialism. This essay will endeavor to challenge dualistic tendencies that seek to prioritize the “word” over the “act”, “the map” over “the story”[3] and “belief” over “practice” amongst other things. Opening up, re-negotiating and transgressing these boundaries, I will debate that an embodied meta-theoretical perspective that assumes the recurring contingency of theory is necessary to deconstruct the hegemonic logo-centrism that debilitates (and also authorizes) religious studies. In turn, this reflection on our own biases should re-orient scholars to see how the ‘other’ (‘religious people’) is not so ‘other’. Rather ‘otherness’ is a constructed category that reinforces an elitist ideology and makes asymmetrical distinctions between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ practices.
Since the inception of Religious Studies many different theories have competed for primacy; most of which rest on a rigid dichotomy of “self” and “other.”[4] This is not the problem per se, as all theories depend on a certain amount of exclusion and reification. However theories often become problematic when they (un)consciously mask their own histories, agendas and practices through constantly (re)appropriate the construction of knowledge to reassert their superiority over the “other”. The academic discourse of self-reflexivity is the newest and most audacious of these assertions. However there are also several other currents in contemporary thought that are shaking the ground beneath the sui generis ideology of self-reflexivity. A deeper look into Michel Foucault’s theory of self-regulation in modernity is a testament to this. Pierre Bourdue’s idea of habitus also further challenges the self as a passive observer of the “other”.[5] The underlying conceptual move that both these scholars make to avoid reformulating the “self”/”other” discourse is to embed their theories in the lived in, acted upon and experienced through, bodies of people.
Judith Butler also makes a similar move in her theory of performativity.[6] What Butler does that goes beyond conventional structuralist theories of human agency and social constitution is to firmly place human consciousness in an active physical body. That is not to say she is a materialist, but that by articulating the extremely complex relationship between the materiality of the body and the performativity of identity, she eschews an essentialist theory of phenomenology. It is in fact, as she asserts through the reiteration, recitation and ritualization of social norms the body takes on a fictional essence. It is from the constitution of this essence that meaning arises, not the other way around; much like Sartre’s existentialism claimed. But unlike Sartre, Butler doesn’t revert to the complete indeterminism of individualism. While acknowledging nuanced and often inconsistent performances as well as the historicity of the body and its discursive constitution, she claims that it is the action or performance that creates external meaning, for without it there would be no-thing or no exteriorization of phenomenological processes. If this is so then we might also extend her theory to our understanding of the construction of the “other” in the discourse of religious studies.
This is important. For what many theories in Religious studies do (in)advertently, is fundamentally deny some significant degree of human embodiment. Often this is not explicit but is only realized through the critical reflection of what LaMothe calls the ‘forces for forgetting’, that is the rationalization, inwardization and textualization of ‘religion’ in the Western Academy. [7] As LaMothe notes, “text-driven approaches foster ignorance of the dynamic on which the scholarly enterprise itself rests: namely, the fact that reading and writing themselves are disciplines that inform what a scholar can perceive, think, and understand.” Scholars have just recently started to uncover the genealogy of this particular bias, although it is still widely occluded in contemporary analysis. That is to say, there is still a firmly entrenched resistance towards accepting the non-textual aspects of ‘religion’ as an active and embodied part in the processes of ‘meaning making’ in Western philosophical ‘thinking’ in general. Even when it is dealt with, it is so under the assumption that it is subordinate, not instrumental to reason, the mind or consciousness. We might say that the body has become the ‘other’, to the mind which in turn has become a quintessential representation of the ‘hu-man’ and is that which is claimed to guide ‘his-story’. This androcentic analogy can also be seen in the modern study of religion vis-à-vis the text.[8] For example, those who don’t have a sacred text, linguistic base or scriptural centre in their religious community are often denigrated or even excluded from having what we might call ‘religion.’[9]
As a result of these trends, in Religious Studies departments ‘religion’ has come to be seen as “textocentric”. Not because it necessarily is, but because our categories, taxonomies and schemas predominantly exclude that which cannot be written down.[10] Even when anthropologists such as Geertz analyzes rituals, rites and ceremonial performances he treats them as if they were hypostasized texts just waiting to be decoded, interpreted and transcribed, and thus controlled and ordered. This imperialist impulse perpetually creates the ‘realities’ in which we metaphorically live and breathe, thereby becoming our performance. While the supposed actualities, extra-linguistic signifiers and phenomenological meanings that arise from being-in-the-world become “one voice among others breaching the discourse in which it constitutes a parenthesis and a deviation.”[11] ‘Experience’ or ‘belief’ what ever these terms means, are not a text. Although they can be textualized they always elude, in their ethereal presence, becoming a text, simply because no “matter how successful literary scholars might be in animating texts, in bringing them to life, textual(ist) interpretations remain inflections of experience, slightly to the side of immediacy.”[12] Experiential phenomena or as philosophers call it qualia, is direct, indeterminate and sensible. It is unrepresentable in discourse, yet it also helps form the bases upon which discourse can be realized, acted out and (re)inscribed on the social body.
In terms of universality, we might say that the particularity of spatio-temporal experience is ubiquitous not because it is omnipresent but because it is always socially, culturally and historically located and defined. Our bodies do not transcend their concomitant relationship to the discourses they constitute and are constituted by. The dialectic of internalization and externalization is one that affirms the mediating role of the body; which can be seen as our main source of knowledge, however constructed and tenuous that knowledge may be.[13] Disregarding the distinct part that the body plays in the self-referential nature of language is where postmodernists lack intellectual rigor. Derridean post-structuralism and Lacan’s psychoanalysis can be contested to a certain extend by Levinas’ theory of embodiment.[14] Anti-essentialism in a sense has led to a denial of the body because it is not seen to have a physical essence underneath the plethora of arbitrary signifiers which are constantly deferred. This is obviously true from the traditional ‘objectivist’ point of view, but is not so within a performative and constructivist paradigm that takes seriously the power of embodied rituals in shaping the “psychical or interior dimensions of subjectivity and the surface corporeal exposures of the subject to social inscription and training.”[15] Hence, complexity is not only found in the transformative nature of language but on the ‘surfaces’ of the body, which “twist, accommodate and delimit” the possibilities of discourse.
A multi-focal approach such as this attempts to collapses dualisms such as ‘subject’ and ‘object’ through the acknowledgement of intersubjectivity as a guiding principle of knowledge constitution, subjective relationality and objective contingency. Text becomes just one facet of a ‘religious’ tradition which is intertwined with a collage of embodied ways of “religioning” rather than believing[16] Through performative disciplines and discursive practices traditions reflect on and negotiate interpretive strategies to communicate, physically and psychically, shared objectives or implicitly consensual agreements. The ‘self’ thus becomes enmeshed with the ‘other’ because it is implicated in the teleological rituals that attempt to define it. In other words, within the discourse of ‘secularism’, ‘religion’ cannot be held in a dichotomous juxtaposition with it, as “ritual is now regarded as a type of routine behavior that symbolizes or expresses something and, as such, relates differentially to individual consciousness and social organization. That is to say, it is no longer a script for regulating practice but a type of practice.”[17] Appropriating Marcel Mauss’s conception of the body as conduit for subjectivity and meaningful social activity, Talal Asad argues, as does Catherine Bell, that ritualized practices are primarily embedded in peoples bodies and actions and that it is from these ‘realities’ and knowledges that rituals “maintain and qualify the complex micro-relations of power”.[18] The main point to emphasize here is that the discursive formations are experienced subjectively as objective; as we could well say about an academic study of ‘religion’ in the classroom.
This insight might help us re-conceptualize our relationship to, and understanding of, the ‘other’ in terms of the performative rituals of disinterestedness, detachment and passivity that we practice. If our activities are seen as a performance (much like the ritualization found in ‘religious traditions’) then it might make more transparent the role in which a community of academics plays in ineluctable ordering the haphazard phenomena we call ‘religion’ or even ‘reality’. Thus we might conclude that, “subjects and communities are created and sustained by the complex interplay of sameness and difference constitutive of repetition itself.”[19] Cabezon also uses this dialectic to argue that the underlying structures and patterns of identity construction and boundary maintenance articulated by scholars of religion are analogous to those of a ‘religious community’. How far this analogy goes is a moot point. Putting aside the most obvious differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ such as our sine qua non claim to self-reflexivity and academic rigor, we might ask: what are some of the similarities? However, this statement in itself cannot fully be grasped, since it would assume we can sit outside our particular locality. That is, the “textocentric” disciplinary ideologies of the university which we routinely perform and ritualize, and are thus constituted by. Considering it is this very analysis that is usually avoided at all costs and which gives us a feeling of certainty that ‘we’ are separate from ‘them’—it must be pursued—regardless of the power structures that incessantly try to valorize difference and discontinuity.
This perspective tries to avoid both holism and monism by situating and grounding the observer in cultural practices that he or she can never become totally aware of. As Resaldo claims, each “viewpoint is arguably incomplete—a mix of insight and blindness, reach and limitation, impartiality and bias—and taken together they achieve neither omnipotence nor a unified master narrative but complex understandings of ever-changing, multifaceted social realities.”[20] This embodied understanding of social reality de-naturalizes the dominant myths and rituals found in religious studies while deconstructing the ‘difference’ that ‘we’ use to define ourselves. Thus the differential power relations become visible, freeing scholars to reflect on their own work and practice. Accordingly the discipline of religious studies might be seen as akin to the performative story telling procedures found in other communities.[21] Furthermore, Eastern ‘religious’ gurus such as Nāgārjuna might be compared to Western ‘secular’ academics such as Wittgenstein.[22] Instead of saying, as Duessen did, that “all great religious teachers…are alike unconsciously followers of Kant.” We might rather say that Kant was an unconscious follower of all the great religious teachers. This should lead us to question, as Fitzgerald does, the “ritual and ideological functions of our own academic institutions and procedures in historical and sociological context.” For there “is a great deal of what we academics do that looks like formal ritual practice, though we feel induced to re-describe it in terms of rational instrumental action”. [23] This level of self-reflexivity is needed to dismantle the overarching textual assumptions about ‘religion’ and the neutrality of ‘secularism’ in the academy.
To conclude, the turn towards language as the primary location of real has been reworked in this essay. Although it still remains a large part of our onto-theological understanding of ‘religion’, I have debated that a more de-centralized and embodied approach to the phenomenological realities and ritual practices of ‘religious people’ is needed. The “textocentrism” of religious studies obscures aspects of lived experience by emphasizing disembodied belief and the textulization of ‘religion’. By seeing ‘religion’ as a dynamic manifestation of culture, it becomes located between the complex interplay of power which is both actively inscribed on the body and negotiated by self-reflexive people, and by the more symbolic systems of meaning (textual sources) which are fluid and appropriated according to the context. This breaks down and resists such comprehensive dichotomies as ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ knowledge, the physical experience of being embodied and a transcendental ontology, abstract theory and fictive stories. Performativity neither claims universality nor disconnected particularity; but that knowledge is not so much believed in per se, but enacted, ritualized and normalized through discursive and disciplinary practices that simultaneously restrict and sanction certain behavior and ways of knowing. Academic studies do not escape this analysis and are seen as commensurate with ‘religious’ understandings of the world. This is not a universalizing relativism by default, but a denial of the supremacy of either textual or practical understandings of ‘religion’. Seeking to bridge “segregated and differently valued knowledges, drawing together legitimated as well as subjugated modes of inquiry,” a theory of ‘religion’ embracing performativity and embodiment reorganizes the textual oligarchy scholars use to exclude non-discursive and emotive ways of knowing.[24]
Bibliography
Bell Catherine, ‘Performance’, Critical Terms for Religious Studies, (ed) Mark Taylor, Ch.11(Chicago and London: The University of London Press, 1998)
Bell Vikki, Feminist Imagination (London: Sage, 1999).
Berger Peter and Luckmann Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality (USA: Penguin, 1966).
Butler Judith, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, in Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury (eds) Writing the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (New York: Colombia University University Press, 1997).
Cabezon Jose, ‘The Discipline and its Other: The Dialectic of Alterity in the Study of Religion’, in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, March 2006, Vol. 74, No 1,
Conquergood Dwight, ‘Interventions and Radical Research’ in The Performance Studies Reader, edited by Henry Bial (New York: Routledge, 2004).
Csordas Thomas J., Body/Meaning/Healing (Boston: Polgrave Macmillian, 2002).
De Certeau Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, (California: University of California Press, 1988).
Fitzgerald Timothy, ‘Language Games and Rituals’ in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (Leiden: Brill, Vol.15, 2003).
Flood Gavin, Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion (London and New York: Cassel, 1999).
Hollywood Amy, ‘Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization’, in History of Religions (University of Chicago Press, Vol. 42, No. 2, 2002)..
LaMothe Kimerer L., ‘Why Dance? Towards a Theory of Religion as Practice and Performance’ in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (Leiden: Brill, Vol.17, 2005).
McCutcheon Russel, ‘The Perils of Having One’s Cake and Eating it too’ in Religious Studies Review, (Vol. 31, No 1 & 2, January & April 2005).
Plummer Ken, Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds (London and New York: Routledge, 1995)
Nye Malory, ‘Religion, Post-religionism, and Religioning: Religious Studies and Contemporary Debates’ in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (Leiden: Brill, Vol.12, 2000).
Resaldo Renato, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989)
Tuck Andrew, ‘The Philosophy of Scholarship’ in Comparative Philosophy and the Philosophy of Scholarship: Western Interpretations of Nāgārjuna (New York: Oxford Press, 1990).
[1] The Practice of Everyday Life, (California: University of California Press, 1988), pp.185-6.
[2] This methodology is predicated on the critique of cultural theory and textualization by Dwight Conquergood, ‘Interventions and Radical Research’ in The Performance Studies Reader, edited by Henry Bial (New York: Routledge, 2004).
[3] This dichotomy represents the two domains of knowledge that are produced within the academic discourse of religion. The “map” is abstract, objective and elite whereas “the story” is embodied, subjective and popular. See de Certeau, Ibid, p.129
[4] Jose Cabezon, ‘The Discipline and its Other: The Dialectic of Alterity in the Study of Religion’, in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, March 2006, Vol. 74, No 1, pp.21-28.
[5] Ibid., de Certeau, ‘Foucault and Bourdieu’, pp.45-60
[6] ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory ‘, pp401-17. In Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury (eds) Writing the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (New York: Colombia University University Press, 1997).
[7] Kimerer L. LaMothe, ‘Why Dance? Towards a Theory of Religion as Practice and Performance’ in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (Leiden: Brill, Vol.17, 2005), p.105
[8] Malory Nye, ‘Religion, Post-religionism, and Religioning: Religious Studies and Contemporary Debates’ in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (Leiden: Brill, Vol.12, 2000), pp.447-476
[9] See McCutcheon, ‘The Perils of Having One’s Cake and Eating it too’ in Religious Studies Review, Vol. 31, No 1 & 2, January & April 2005.
[10]Ibid., Conquergood, The Performance Studies Reader p.316
[11] Ibid., de Certeau, ‘Quotations of Voices’, pp.162.
[12] Thomas J. Csordas, Body/Meaning/Healing (Boston: Polgrave Macmillian, 2002), p.3
[13] Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (USA: Penguin, 1966), pp.51, 154
[14] Vikki Bell, Feminist Imagination (London: Sage, 1999), p.119-138
[15] Ibid., Bell, p.134. Also see Gavin Flood, Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion
[16] Ibid., To Nye Religioning is “not a thing, with an essence, to be defined and explained. Religioning is a form of practice, like other practices, that is done and performed by actors with their own agency…who have their own particular ways and experiences of making religiosities manifest.”, p.467.
[17] Amy Hollywood, ‘Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization’, in History of Religions (University of Chicago Press, Nov 2002) Vol. 42, No. 2, pp.110-111
[18] Ibid., 112
[19] Ibid., p. 115
[20] Renato Resaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), p.128
[21] See Ken Plummer where he claims that we are “constantly writing the story of the world around us” which “gets told and read in different ways in different contexts”, and that, the “genres and structures of story telling may also link to the generic social processes and structures at work in social life.” In this case we might say that the discourse of ‘religion’ maintains “dominant orders” within the academy. This helps us to see that the “power to tell a story, or indeed to not tell a story, under conditions of one’s own choosing, is part of a political process.” In Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp.20, 24, 25.
[22] Andrew Tuck, ‘The Philosophy of Scholarship’ in Comarative Philosophy and the Philosophy of Scholarship: Western Interpretations of Nāgārjuna (New York: Oxford Press, 1990), p.19-30
[23] Timothy Fitzgerald, ‘Language Games and Rituals’ in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (Leiden: Brill, Vol.15, 2003), pp.250-51
[24] Ibid., Conquergood, p.318
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