Here is an essay i wrote about spirit possession and some of the misunderstandings that have often surrounded its meaning and interpretation in the West.
Healing at its most human is not an escape into irreality and mystification, but an intensification of the encounter between suffering and hope at the moment in which it finds a voice, where the anguished clash bare life and raw existence emerges from muteness into articulation.
—Thomas Csordas, Body/Meaning/Healing
Human interaction with God is typically mediated through the Goddess. Experience, both physical and psychical allows the divine to manifest, play and consolidate her relationship with the immanent dimension of reality that humans inhabit. The focus of this essay is possession; but more specifically it is the individual and social roles that possession plays in healing. The methodology I will use to analyze the dynamics of possession is derived from a performative perspective, grounded in phenomenology. This approach accepts the ‘objectivity’ of religious experience within the context and accordingly builds on the perceived reality to elucidate the sociological facets of possession. First I will describe some broad details about how possession has been interpreted in the past. To conclude I will describe several cases of possession and how they might relate to healing. Possession is not seen as a “convenient epiphenomenon”[1] in this essay, but as a fully integrated and active part of the world, giving devotees the resources to maintain social and cosmic stability, while often mitigating the suffering implicated in human existence.
Individual’s acts can rarely be seen as isolated. Rather they are almost always a part of some greater collective action. Possession does not transcend this assumption. People who become possessed, whether by a pure and benevolent deity or a fierce and malicious ghost, do so, according to the communities understanding(s) of the cosmos. The cosmos is not separate and disconnected from people but is intimately woven into everyday life. Thus, knowledge can be seen to arise, not from abstract thought, but through daily practices, ritual participation and joint understanding(s) of what constitutes knowledge. This process is not frozen in time, but is rather fluid, constantly being (re)negotiated by people. Meanings are perpetually contested and challenged, as is the validity of possession.[2] In the Indian context some possessions are falsified while others are verified as authentic. That considered a majority of possessions are believed to be the real appearance of a spirit of some sort or the emanation of sacred power.[3] Very few question the existence of foreign unseen powers that act mysteriously in the world. If this is so then a Western interpretive strategy that does not take seriously the existence of these entities or forces will be insufficient.
As many studies of possession have shown the Western model of empirical analysis is too reductive to account for the actual lived experiences of people who have been possessed.[4] The search for a scientific cause ignores the perspective of the possessed and tends to classify such events as pathological. This contradicts the indigenous interpretations of possession. While early missionaries called the possessed “devil dancers” (as Christians automatically assumed that the ‘other’ was of Satan), anthropologists saw the possessed behavior as ‘irrational’ and ‘inexplicable’ in relation to Western standards of ‘rationality’ and religiosity.[5] At first sight, as you can imagine, the Western mind set to work, decoding, classifying and explaining the phenomena they encountered. But more often than not they tended to explain it away. Because of individualistic models that assume the private and personal nature of religion, they tendentiously psychologized possession as neurotic—as can famously be seen in the work of Freud.[6] To Freud spirits and demons were nothing more than primitive projections of emotion. As a result psychological methods always prove futile as they miss the bigger picture. That is, the networks of symbolism that possession relays to the wider community.
Sociological accounts have tried to explain what some of the social causes of possession are in terms of its patterned reflection of broader socio-economic inequalities in India.[7] Opler, Obeyesekere and Harper claim that there is a correlation between the hierarchy of the caste system and that of the cosmos. In other words the higher auspicious gods are connected to the Brahmans while the lower spirits, ghosts and demons prey on the poor and vulnerable, namely women. Women therefore are seen to be the most susceptible to the imposition of a negative spirits in Hindu society because they are disproportionately disadvantaged and downtrodden. Possession in this respect is viewed as a way of circumventing some of the power and attention allotted to men, by redirecting it to disempowered women—which is then used as a form of protest. Caroline and Filippo Osella also argue that possession is part of what Bourdieu called habitus, which symbolically and devotionally stratifies the high from the low castes.[8] Brahmans are austere, aloof, and controlled in their communion with God while the outcasts are ecstatic, flamboyant and overcome in worship. By reinforcing the spiritual power and transcendental prowess of the Brahmans, lower casts are portrayed as corporeal, animalistic and desire ridden. This discursive hierarchy is also said to correspond to the division between the sexes as well. While men are seen as more pure and resistant to spirit possession, women are depicted as highly vulnerable to pollution and hysteria.
I will not pursue this analysis as I think it makes far too many broad generalizations that, although they may reflect reality, are not so useful in understanding possession as performative and phenomenological. Performance does not just mean the Shakespearian type that can be found in the līlās, but also involves symbolic and embodied activities that repetitively communicate systems of meaning, as to create a comprehensive network of rituals, rites and practices that make social life coherent and tenable to a community. Bell argues that a theory of performativity encompasses “the production of ritualized agents, persons who have an instinctive knowledge of the schemes embedded in their bodies, in their understandings of reality, and in their understanding of how to act in ways that both maintain and qualify the complex microrelations of power.”[9] While a phenomenology that doesn’t have the essentialist underpinnings of Husserl’s transcendent paradigm, a more relational and culturally sensitive understanding of perception, would help propagate an understanding of human consciousness according to the context in which one exists and actively participates in.[10] Thus if possession is understood, not ‘objectively’ or exogenously but through both embodied and culturally mediated experiences, then dualities such as subject and object, religious and non-religious, mind and matter will be undermined. Instead of using dyads to talk about possession we might talk about it as intersubjective, trans-religious and as a culturally specific experience. A theory that leaves out emotion, perception, theatricality, imagination, and embodiment as well as the tacitly shared understandings of reality misses the collective and subjective significance of possession.
In this light possession can be seen as a form of communication. The way in which people react to cases of possession says more about the society than it does about the actual possession itself. In India it is for the most part normalized whereas in Western culture it has been thoroughly stigmatized and demonized. Maybe this has something to do with the ‘inexplicable’ nature of possession, which eludes scientific explanation and also expresses the unwillingness of scientists to accept that their knowledge is also limited and partial. The idea of personhood centering on the individual self in the ‘West’ presupposes that possession is psychological.[11] Whilst in Hinduism the concept of self is relational, referential and free-floating. This dynamism tolerates the fluidity and multi-dimensionality of the self, and juxtaposes it vis-à-vis the social self. The ‘other’ (the possessed) in Western society is denigrated, subjugated and ostracized, while their knowledge is excluded from participation. On the contrary possession in India is often seen to express a deep truth beyond social convention and religious dogma.
Thus we might see possession as a “creative response to otherness.” In other words, “It takes up the self-Other question but tosses it about, turns it around and transforms it.”[12] The opposite has taken place in Western civilization. Otherness has tended to been censured, expelled and tormented in the West; while if we take god to be a representation of ‘otherness’ than we can see that divinity has been severed and differentiated from humanity. As a result, saints such as Ramaprasad, Caitanya and Ramakrishna would most likely be ‘institutionalized’ in the West. To the contrary in India their seemingly erratic, mad and nonchalant attitude towards normative behavior has been sacralized and imbued with divinity. Their extremely expressive and emotive form of devotion and possession twists and reorganizes the Self-Other relationship, making it malleable.[13] By emulating the divine play (līlā) of the goddess, these saints become an embodied force of divinity in the world, disrupting the separation of ‘otherness’. Thus the goddess is seen as an “agent herself, rather than as simply a disembodied symbol or projection.”[14] Her madness becomes the devotee’s madness, and together they dance and sing, merrily flaunting convention. They are said to be intoxicated by her spirit and possessed by her power (sakti).[15] This cultural understanding of reality breaks down simplistic dichotomies that seek to explain the function and cause of possession.
As such, possession should always be seen as part of a broader context in which it plays a significant role. Performance theory gives us an insight into the theatrical side of possession without making presumptuous judgments about the entities that are possessing or the people who are possessed. It also argues that possession is not as spontaneous as it might first seem. Rather it is often ritualized over time and scripted out for local people to gather and partake in the divine. Unwanted possession (as opposed to organized or performative possession) may initially be seen as the random consequence of illness, deprivation or individual idiosyncrasies, but often becomes explained in religious terms and routinized over time. Thus, once uncontrolled, unpleasant, uninvited and chaotic fits of possession are gradually brought under the person’s guidance whereby they may become a medium who is able to willingly contact and communicate with the spirits.[16] In other words, “What first looked like illness, protest or oblique strategy turned out to be a potential for ecstatic religious experience that could be developed into divine possession.” [17] This often empowers women, liberating them from having to follow the prototypical path of marriage and may also put a positive spin on ‘mental illness’. Thus “possession is not seen as an “illness” which has to be cured, but rather that the appropriate preconditions have to be provided in order to make it a positive event.”[18]
Here I would like to elaborate on possession as a life affirming episode that, although can torment and horrify, tends to be normalized within Hindu society on a continuum that displays creative and holistic approaches to healing. In Murphy Halliburton’s work he came across a case of possession in India. Below he describes the way in which the healing process works of this particular individual:
Sasi is a 27-year-old Hindu man who is possessed and has been living at Beemapalli mosque with his mother for years after spending a good portion of his life trying other treatments. Eight and a half years before our interview, when his problem started, Sasi’s family went to see a mantrav¯adan, a specialist in magic, to counter the sorcery that they thought might have been the cause of his affliction. Sasi then spent a year seeking treatment from a private allopathic psychiatric hospital in Trivandrum and two years in the state allopathic psychiatric hospital in Trivandrum. For the last five years, he has been at Beemapalli mosque, and his mother says that it is only at Beemapalli that he gets relief. During a follow-up interview seven months after our original interview, Sasi’s mother told us that Sasi’s condition has been “up and down.” She said she believes one gets relief by going through ups and downs, and affirmed that she and her son “have complete faith in Beemapalli.”[19]
First we might observe that the relationship between Sasi and his affliction is only alleviated through his religious devotion. Possession is not seen as a psychopathology in the Hindu context but as a unique cultural experience. Because this hermeneutic strategy is used to interpret experience, possession is viewed as an acceptable part of life. The ‘treatment’ is characteristic of India and moves away from seeing possession as an ‘illness’ which needs to be ‘cured’ to that of a process of religious healing which is transformative, rather than transitive. As Schutz would argue the specific way that people attend to their experiences constitutes the meaning of those experiences.[20] This significantly alters the Western interpretation of sickness, which sees it as a reified abnormality that must be mechanically ‘fixed’.
If possession is seen as a dynamic mechanism of support and protest, as well as a mode of communication in which people express their anguish and existential anxieties to one another, then it can be seen as a healing process whereby people collectively act and creatively negotiate the countless difficulties encountered in life. The “ups and downs” of life are themselves a form of healing as the ‘ups’ cannot exist without the ‘downs’. The story of Sushila is a testament to this.[21] Sushila is a shaman who specializes in the bhopi ritual. She is a healer, doctor and exorcist all in one. Coming from the Rawat caste she is fairly poor and relies on part-time work as well as her husband’s inconsistent income. She described her possessed states as primarily a consequence of, and protest against, her husband’s violent and abusive behavior, resulting also from the social exclusion she experienced as an Islamic/untouchable women. But as her mediumship progressed and she started routinely visiting and worshiping at the local shrine Pīr Bābā it has become her vocation and subsequently has transformed her familial relationships as well as the whole family’s spirituality. Her husband has now stopped drinking and helps out with her therapeutic practice. This shows how possession can be used as an emancipatory narrative where healing is experienced by all those associated with it.
Mayaram Stanley also tells a similar story.[22] In popular religion in the Maharashtra region there are two main types of possession. One is by a ghost (bhūt bādha) and the other is by a deity (angāt yene). Although they may appear, to the outsider, to have many similarities (hence they are often confused) they are purported to be experientially quite different. When one is spontaneously possessed by a ghost they often turn to a healing center (which is located in a temple) and operated by doctor type person called a bābā or holy person. The possession is interpreted as an opportunity to experience the sacred and renounce the chaos of the defiled spirit. As one treated patient describes his experience of possession, “I don’t know how to say it. Then everything was wrong—not only with me but with my sister, and all the family was sick. It was all wrong. Now I am fine and my sister is happy and everything is all right.”[23] The process of sickness, is much like a secular establishment, however it is not imputed as mechanical and spiritually devoid. Rather it is laden with spiritual overtones of devotion which is offered to the bābā as an exchange for the healing. Patients put their faith in bābā and take darshan for years after the treatment. In contrast angāt yene is rapturous possession by a god or saint. These possessions are ritualized and performed with recitations, singing or prayers. The body must also be purified before the deity enters. Possession consists of a trance like state, dancing and heavy breathing. These actions are thought to result from the ‘play’ of the Goddess in their bodies and minds.[24] Both types of experience follow a cyclical pattern of restoring of order that was felt to be lost or intensified when possessed. Although the former is not interpreted as a religious experience originally, it frequently becomes continuous with the experience of healing that comes after possession. While the latter (uncontrollable and unexpected) probably arose out of the former, it was piecemeal and transformed through ritual into the former.
To conclude, we can say that the localized and indigenous ways in which people make sense of human existence is seen in Indian cases of possession. Just as Western models have tried to explain (away) the complex phenomena that people experience when possessed, Indian cosmology has used possession as a way of letting divinity express itself in the domestic world of human affairs. Possession incarnates the divine and lets humans interacts with it. Phenomenologically, possession is real because it is experienced as such by the person. To use Western scientific categories that explain possession as an epiphenomenon in the context of India is to impose foreign taxonomies on a different world view. By seeing possession as a collective event rather than a personal one we can see it as a public performance which communicates important values and ideas about the social and spiritual world to the community. These ideas include a conception of healing that is spiritual, transformative and organic rather than secular, disjunctive and mechanistic. Possession can be seen as a form of healing because even in negative cases, it usually leads to a more profound understanding of one’s religion and self. Possession touches the very depths of human emotion and consciousness and expresses the obscurity and ambiguity of human experience. To understand such ethereal experiences, scholars must be highly self-reflexive and critical of how their own perspective fashions the way in which the world is interpreted. They must also be conscious of their own limitations as situated observers. Empathy and openness will always lead to a more dynamic and multifaceted analysis of such complex phenomena.
Bibliography
Bruckner Heidrun, Latze Lothar and Malik Aditya, Flags of Flame: Studies in South Asian Folk Culture, (Eds) New Delhi: Ajay Kumar Jain Manhar Publishers, 1993.
Bouez Serge, Staying on the Goddess’s Eyelid: Devotion and the Reversal of Values in Hindu Bengal, in Hinduism Reconsidered (Eds) Gunther-Dietz Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke, Heidelberg: Manohar, 1997.
Csordas Thomas, Body/Meaning/Healing, Boston: Palgrave Macmillian, 2002, pp.58-87
Clause Peter J., ‘Spirit possession and spirit mediumship from the perspective of Tulu oral Traditions’ in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 3(1), 1979 pp.29-56.
Erndl Kathleen M., Victory to the Mother: The Hindu Goddess of Northwest India in Myth, Ritual, and Symbol, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Mayes Elizabeth, ‘The Fantasy of Internalization in the Theoretical Imaginary’ in Representations, No. 62 (Spring, 1998), pp. 100-110
Halliburton Murphy, ‘The Importance of a Pleasant Process of Treatment: Lessons in Healing from South India’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Vol.26, pp.161-286, 2003.
Hollywood Amy, ‘Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization’, in History of Religions, University of Chicago Press, Nov 2002, Vol. 42, No. 2.
Klass Morton, Mind over Mind: The Anthropology and Psychology of Spirit Possession
Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
Kehoe A.B. and Geletti D.H. ‘Women’s Preponderance in Possession Cults: The Calcium-deficiency Hypothesis Extended’, In American Anthropologist, 83, pp.549-61
Kinsley David, The Divine Player: A Study of Krisna Lila, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1979.
Lewis I. M. Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism, England: Penguin Books, 1971.
McDaniel June, Madness of the Saints: Ecstatic Religion in Bengal, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
McLean Melcom, Devoted to the Goddess: The Life and Work of Ramprasad (Ed) Wendy Doniger, Albany: State New York Press,1989.
Shail Mayaram, ‘Spirit Possession: Refraiming discourses of Self and Other, Possession In South Asia: Speech, Body and Territory (Eds) J. Assayag and G. Tarabout, Paris: Collection Purusartha, 1999.
Stanley John M., ‘Gods, Ghosts, and Possession’, in The Experience of Hinduism: Essays on Religion in Maharashtra (Eds) Elenor Zelliot and Maxine Berntsen. New York: State University of New York Press, 1988.
Schutz Alfred The Phenomenology of the Social World, Evanston: Northwestern University,1967.
[1] Kathleen M. Erndl, Victory to the Mother: The Hindu Goddess of Northwest India in Myth, Ritual, and Symbol (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p.105
[2] John M. Stanley, ‘Gods, Ghosts, and Possession’, in The Experience of Hinduism: Essays on Religion in Maharashtra (Eds) Elenor Zelliot and Maxine Berntsen (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 26-57
[3] Although this distinction is commonly made (i.e. sacred and profane, pure and impure, spiritual and physical, mind and body) it often obscures the complexity that exists in the interplay. A better way to imagine this relationship is by creating a third category which can be seen as a bridge between the two, this is the middle ground where they meet and are inextricably interconnected in the form of the Goddess. See Serge Bouez, Staying on the Goddess’s Eyelid: Devotion and the Reversal of Values in Hindu Bengal, in Hinduism Reconsidered (Eds) Gunther-Dietz Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke (Heidelberg: Manohar, 1997).
[4] Peter J. Clause, ‘Spirit possession and spirit mediumship from the perspective of Tulu oral Traditions’ in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 3(1), 1979 pp.29-56. For a more up to date critique see Morton Klass, Mind Over Mind: The Anthropology and Psychology of Spirit Possession
(Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
[5] Elizabeth Schoembucher, ‘Gods, Ghosts and Demons: Possession in South Asia’, Flags of Flame: Studies in South Asian Folk Culture, (Eds) Heidrun Bruckner, Lothar Latze and Aditya Malik (New Delhi: Ajay Kumar Jain Manhar Publishers, 1993), pp.241-262
[6] Elizabeth Mayes, ‘The Fantasy of Internalization in the Theoretical Imaginary’ in Representations, No. 62 (Spring, 1998), pp. 100-110
[7] Cited in I. M. Lewis Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism (England: Penguin Books, 1971), pp.84-85. Also see Kehoe A.B. and Geletti D.H. ‘Women’s Preponderance in Possession Cults: The Calcium-deficiency Hypothesis Extended’, In American Anthropologist, 83, pp.549-61
[8] In Possession In South Asia: Speech, Body and Territory (Eds) J. Assayag and G. Tarabout (Paris: Collection Purusartha, 1999), pp. 183-20.
[9] Cited in Amy Hollywood, ‘Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization’, in History of Religions (University of Chicago Press, Nov 2002) Vol. 42, No. 2, p.111
[10] Thomas Csordas, Body/Meaning/Healing (Boston: Palgrave Macmillian, 2002), pp.58-87
[11] Shail Mayaram, ‘Spirit Possession: Refraiming discourses of Self and Other, Possession In South Asia: Speech, Body and Territory (Eds) J. Assayag and G. Tarabout (Paris: Collection Purusartha, 1999), p.101
[12] Ibid., p.103
[13] See David Kinsley, The Divine Player: A Study of Krisna Lila (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1979). See also June McDaniel, Madness of the Saints: Ecstatic Religion in Bengal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
[14] Kathleen M. Erndl, Victory to the Mother, p.105
[15] Melcom McLean, Devoted to the Goddess: The Life and Work of Ramprasad (Ed) Wendy Doniger (Albany: State New York Press,1989), p.39
[16] Shail Mayaram, 1999, pp. 105-109
[17] Elizabeth Schoembucher, 1993, p.252
[18] Ibid., look at her notes on p.253
[19] Murphy Halliburton, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Vol.26, pp.161-286, 2003), p.179
[20] Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,1967), p. 63-63, 215
[21] Shail Mayaram, 1999, p.105-6
[22] John M. Stanley, 1988, pp. 26-57
[23] Ibid., p.56
[24] Idid., p.42
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Religion in a post-“textocentric” world
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
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
unexpected noise
First of all welcome to anyone who happens to read this blog.
It was created to talk about some of the intangible aspects of life which are not explicated in the incessant droning of mainstream discourse with its delimiting and normalizing thought pattens that force us into a quite, submissive and pathetic state of consciousness.
I don't mean to sound elitist in the slightest and would hope that this blog appeals to a broad audience. Having said that, it will more than likely appeal to those who are forward thinking post-enlightenment, post-colonial and post-secular thinkers. Yes so many posts, however i think they are necessary so we can move on to a truly expressive conversation that includes our most intimate and fragile dreams, hopes and fears as human beings.
I would like also to question the status of the human being in this blog. Not to devalue it but to re-conceptualize some of its contours and extend the category of human to include non-human beings. Yes this has been done before; many humans throughout history have also thought there was something highly suspicious about our self-appointed position in the cosmos. And in this day and age with the wealth of scientific information we have about our evolutionary heritage, we must concede that other beings are beings much like us, that feel pain and joy, not exactly like we do, but nevertheless do indeed feel. Our treatment of 'them' will be the ultimate arbitrator of our civilization and the ease with which slaughter them on a daily bases for our own satisfaction will be our pedagogic ethic that determines how we as humans interact with each other and our environment.
It was created to talk about some of the intangible aspects of life which are not explicated in the incessant droning of mainstream discourse with its delimiting and normalizing thought pattens that force us into a quite, submissive and pathetic state of consciousness.
I don't mean to sound elitist in the slightest and would hope that this blog appeals to a broad audience. Having said that, it will more than likely appeal to those who are forward thinking post-enlightenment, post-colonial and post-secular thinkers. Yes so many posts, however i think they are necessary so we can move on to a truly expressive conversation that includes our most intimate and fragile dreams, hopes and fears as human beings.
I would like also to question the status of the human being in this blog. Not to devalue it but to re-conceptualize some of its contours and extend the category of human to include non-human beings. Yes this has been done before; many humans throughout history have also thought there was something highly suspicious about our self-appointed position in the cosmos. And in this day and age with the wealth of scientific information we have about our evolutionary heritage, we must concede that other beings are beings much like us, that feel pain and joy, not exactly like we do, but nevertheless do indeed feel. Our treatment of 'them' will be the ultimate arbitrator of our civilization and the ease with which slaughter them on a daily bases for our own satisfaction will be our pedagogic ethic that determines how we as humans interact with each other and our environment.
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