oranitkinkaner

I'll begin with a bit of a grumble: I didn't like Gill's "Territory". I found the style of writing to be less than clear, the arguments often inconclusive, and ultimately, that the article did not contain conclusions which greatly expanded my intellectual horizons (which is what I've come to expect from this class - rather high standards, I know!). As well, in reading all three articles, I became increasing frustrated by the seemingly circular and thus never-ending nature of scholarship, with its endless repetitions and rephrasals of both one's own and others' opinions. And so, in an effort preserve what little scholarly sanity I have left, rather than critique Gill's critique of Smith's critique, I'd like, in the next few paragraphs, to entertain some of my own thoughts which arose out of the articles.

In "Territory", Gill writes the following: "Terms that are used in conjunction with territory - such as perspective, worldview, insight, outlook, landscape - all privilege the visual sense" (Gill, "Territory", 310). In Gill's presentation of Smith's "juxtaposition" of map with territory, territory is utopian and somehow real, whereas map is merely representational and (yearningly) repetitive. If the privileging of the visual sense in Western concerns regarding territory can be applied to the map/territory dichotomy, then I would argue that territory is equivalent to 'body', whereas map is equivalent to 'sight' or 'vision'.

Gill writes that "sight is understood to be the objective sense: seeing is believing. The other senses are more personal and therefore, more subjective." (I realize that Gill's statement is likely a critique of this 'Western' belief, and that he himself does not necessarily privilege sight over the other senses.) In my mind, the subjectivity of sight, which contains the individual's effort to process - and therefore to somehow mentally conform - to 'reality', is an apt depiction of how 'map' seeks to conform to the reality of 'territory'. To extend the analogy further, then, that which is embodied and pre-visual - 'territory' - takes precedence, in reality, over that which is merely seen. In other words, if territory is that which is, and map is merely that which mimics the reality of territory, then embodied reality is both superior and anterior to visual reality. "Lived territory"(Gill, "Territory", 310) is thus significant in that it occupies both real and metaphorical space; lived territory is available for human encounter.

In these discourses on the study of religion, the distinction between insider and outsider, praxis and theory, and the sacred and the profane engages with this dichotomy of vision and body, map and territory. In placing ourselves inside or "outside the temple"(Gill, "Territory", 306), in studying religion through the avenues of the sacred or the profane, we envision ourselves as either 'insiders' or 'outsiders'; we thus create, through vision and sight, an embodied and placed difference. In other words, the insider/outsider dichotomy is reliant on a vision of embodied separateness.

Why do we, as scholars of religion, feel the need to map ourselves and place our intellectual encounters within one of these two categories? Gill suggests that "To take a stance, in this complex multi-cultural world, without recognizing its absurdity is either religious, narrow-minded, or naive. To refuse to take any stance at all is either to indulge infinite regress, a favourite of many postmodernists, or silence. The alternative, which is at least more interesting, is the perspective of play: seriously taking a stance while acknowledging its absurdity."(Gill, "No Place to Stand", 191).

Is that what we must do? Should we stake our claim in one territory, only to acknowledge the inherent absurdity of a singular stance? In my mind, this 'play', this making of qualified statement, is little better than silence. Rather than envisioning ourselves in one map-land, while constantly watching for intellectual encroachment on the borders and barbs lobbed from a neighbouring state, why not root ourselves, body and all, inside either the sacred or the profane? Why not say, "Yes, I am not a believer. But I am committed to fully encountering this faith to the best of my abilities"? This is a scary position; it might necessitate the renunciation of previous conceptions; it might change one's vision entirely. But at least we might venture beyond 'play'; at least we might go beyond what is merely seen to what is actually encountered and experienced.

Prior to reading Ebersole's article “The Function of Ritual Weeping Revisited: Affective Expression and Moral Discourse”, I would have been inclined to loosely divide the notion of weeping into the two aforementioned categories; if individual weeping was an upwelling of 'valid' emotion, be it rational or irrational, then public weeping would be less an expression of emotion than a physical manifestation of a culturally proscribed norm. The verbs in use would thus be most telling, and would carry within themselves judgment, privileging emotional expression over social demonstration.

Reading Ebersole's article, I was forced to reconsider my seemingly instinctual judgment of 'true' and 'false' tears. In his article, Ebersole warns us not to “assume that when a formal setting or social script requires a person to cry, the tears shed in such contexts are less than 'real' precisely because they are not a spontaneous emotional response” (Ebersole, 187). He believes that the role of the historian of religions is not to judge tears as fake or real, but to consider the tears as an affective display relating to gender, class, social hierarchy, politics, and morality.

Given Ebersole's insistence that the scholar of religion must be wary of creating dichotomies which carry inherent value-judgments (true vs. false tears, spontaneous vs. simulated expression, crocodile tears vs. “pure acts of moral retribution”[201]), I was somewhat uncomfortable with what I felt to be Eversole's depiction (and preferencing?) of 'moral' tears. In his critique of LaFleur's Japanese folktale analysis, Ebersole accuses LaFleur of an overly simplistic interpretation and a desire to universalize human nature by projecting culturally specific concepts onto other peoples in other places and periods. In response, Ebersole suggests that “the tears in the folktale proper mark or point to a serious violation of moral contract...the implication is that a moral human nature is not something that is given or inherent in any body; it is achieved by being enacted” (190-91). He goes on to conclude that “ritual weeping should be regarded as symbolic activity that marks out the existence or the breach of social and/or moral relationships between beings” (209).

Perhaps it is here where my discomfort lies, in Ebersole's potential equating of morality with social order. Is it impossible for ritual weeping to take place without attendant moral structure? One could argue that all social contracts and constructs are grounded in concern for virtue and right conduct, but what of a privatized, ritualized weeping which concerns the individual's relationship with the divine? What of William A. Christian Jr.'s “economy of sentiment” (“Provoked Religious Weeping in Early Modern Spain”, 34) designed to influence God? And what happens when weeping is a lie?

Examining the notion of religious weeping in the context of my own interests (motherhood and child murder in Judeo-Christian myths), I'd like to look at the character of Hagar in the biblical book of Genesis. In Genesis 21, Sarah, Abraham's wife, requests that Abraham send his bondswoman Hagar and her son Ishmael into the wilderness. Abandoned to their fate, Hagar places Ishmael in the shade of a shrub and sits down some distance away so as not to witness his death: “And she sat over against him, and lifted up her voice, and wept. And God heard the voice of the lad; and the angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven, and said to her, What ails thee Hagar? Fear not, for God has heard the voice of the lad where he is." (Genesis, 16-17)

If Hagar lifted her voice and wept, why did God respond to her son's seeming silence, rather than Hagar's audible weeping? Is the implication that suffering silence is somehow more affective than Hagar's ritual-weeping-as-appeal (Ebersole, 210)? After all, if the “Lord could hear hearts” (Christian, 43), is there any need for audible sorrow, other than to inform the public eye and inspire the public heart? Yet Hagar's weeping was seemingly neither for God's sake, nor for her son's comfort, who was too distant to hear her cries. Was Hagar's weeping for herself, then? Did it reinforce a lacking sorrow, and was hers the heart her tears needed to pierce?

As such, the mystical experience may very well exist, in its inception and its experienced nature, within the realm of the private. For the mystical experience to be discussed and labeled as such, however, there must be a certain force of inclusion that allows for the mystic to remain within the parameters of an otherness defined by normative society. Along the same lines as 'If a tree falls in the forest...', if a person has a mystical experience, does the mystical nature of that experience have to be verified by a given social structure in order for it to be considered truly valid?

In his article “Belief”, Lopez references de Certeau's idea of the “contractual nature of belief”(Lopez, 28). He described faith and the practices that arise from faith as “economies of exchange” between the believer and the believed. This phrase could also be used to depict the extent to which the mystic remains rooted within the public, rather than the private, spectrum. In speaking of his/her experience, the mystic extends an aspect of lived faith into the public realm. In apprehending, judging, and labeling the experience as 'mystical', the public structure allows for the experience to acquire validation and a greater rootedness within reality, despite its super-real nature. Thus, the external manifestation of the experience gives credence to its internal origins.

Reading over what I've written, I'm concerned that my own approach is somewhat reductive, in that it would encourage the scholar to study belief and experience merely from a sociological dimension. I'm not averse to admitting that I would find extremely difficult to analyze a given mystical experience from a phenomenological perspective. It's likely that I don't know enough about Husserl's 'epoche', as outlined by Stoller, to comprehend how one might, as an observer, “apprehend lived reality”(Stoller, 249). Is it true that to comprehend a mystical experience, I myself would undergo a personal transformation (See Stoller 250-51)? And to what extent would my own apprehension-transformation fit within the context of lived experience as encountered within the social realm? This line of thinking seems inclined towards a Russian doll-syndrome with no end in sight; inevitably, certain evaluative judgments would be made concerning the phenomena of my own experience, and so on and so forth. Whether or not the scholar of the mystical experience would be able to apprehend my own lived experience, it would nevertheless necessitate an examination of belief in contrast to the non-belief of the world at large. And so the cycle would begin again...

Ritual, as indicated by Sharf, is “devoid of new information”; if we are able to characterize ritual as not-new, then it must have originated at a specific point (or a specific span) in linear time. However, ritual is inherently “scripted and repetitive”; the aspect of timelessness and enduring, unchanging authority as visited upon the individual act invites us to regard ritual time as circular.

In order to address the way in which ritual informs the body, we must intertwine ideas 1. and 2. Sharf writes that “participation in a living tradition reaches beyond the vagaries of the intellect to one's somatic being; ritual habitation indelibly inscribes the self with a set of perceptual orientations, affective dispositions, and autonomic responses that are, in effect, precognitive.”(Sharf, 249) Ritual inscribes itself in the flesh over time; the elaborate bowing rituals in the five-times daily prayers of devout Muslims, for example, is learned through repetition, through small mistakes and muscular adjustments until an adequate degree of ritual 'perfection' is achieved. Once the ritual has been mastered, it becomes precognitive both for the individual practitioner and the religious institution as a whole. As Sharf has indicated, ritual invites the performer to repeatedly re-enter that time in early childhood in which s/he first learned to distinguish form from meaning and self from other.

In treating ritual as text, the scholar/observer is working within a linear framework. Asking the question 'what does it mean?' is a request to travel back in time to when the ritual in question was first developed. To seek out a priori significance in a ritual is to assume that while the meaning of the ritual may be encoded within the act, the act is merely an echo, in time, of what was once a singularly vital and necessary action. Conversely, the performative approach to ritual gives credence both to the inherent meaningfulness of the ritual act as an action out of time, and to the performer of the act as “an ultimate source of ritual authority”.(Sharf, 251) In terms of scholarship, this idea informs the following question: Does this treatment of ritual as a non-historical phenomenon (in both the literal and the evaluative sense) require that the ethnographer, in 'studying' a given ritual, inhabit a purely noumenal realm? Is that even possible, given that the scholar must work within both temporal and linguistic parameters?

To begin to approach the last issue, I'd like to briefly address the idea of extracting form from content in language. In biblical Hebrew, there is the idea that words do not merely describe things; rather, they are the things which they denote. In terms of the story of creation, it has been said that the world was created by means of language in the sense that the world was spoken into existence. Thus, when the Bible writes “...and God said...”, it does not mean divine instruction, but rather, that God spoke a word and that word condensed/concretized into the very object it denoted. As such, in Hebrew, the word for 'word' and the word for 'thing' is the same word – davar – because in essence, any thing is none other than the word itself. Obviously, this idea is somewhat obscure and does not pertain to all languages; nonetheless, it indicates that the idea that ritual as reduced to its discursive content is a reductionist approach denies the possible noumenal nature of language.

Masuzawa places Troeltsch within a historical-intellectual context: “...the majority of the comparative historians of religion had, like Troeltsch himself, not only a personal alliance with, or affirmation of, Christianity but, more important, a sentimental attachment to the seemingly charitable notion that all human beings without exception were endowed with some distinct and irreducible capability or sensibility specific to the Infinite, the Holy, the Absolute.”(313) Leaving aside Masuzawa's implication of religious bias in Troeltsch and his contemporaries, I'd like to consider the idea of the divine in the study of world religions.

Masuzawa's book is essentially a historical critique of scholarly notions of religion; it seems somewhat natural, then, that she does not seriously contemplate notions of divinity. Masuzawa quotes Troeltsch, in a passage that I realized was rather anomalous in the context of the book: “...the deepest core of the religious history of humanity reveals itself as an experience that cannot be further analyzed...Everywhere the basic reality of religion is the same: an underivable, purely positive, again and again experienced contact with the Deity.”(315) In Masuzawa's subsequent treatment of Troeltsch's quotation – the very one she chose to highlight – she makes not a single reference to his repeated invocation of a divine presence. Does Masuzawa's general omission of these issues somehow indicate that we need to abandon assumptions of the divine in order to properly study religion?

If scholars of world religions are forgoing assumptions of the divine, whether to remove perceived bias or merely to streamline scholarly considerations, then isn't the study of world religions simply a study of human phenomena? Once questions of divinity are removed from the study of religion, what is left except (at best) God in man's own image, and (at worst, perhaps) man, at the apex of all considerations, be they anthropological, philological, psychological, or philosophical? I'm not certain how to fully express myself on this issue. I'm not at all trying to suggest that a study of religion must come from a so-called 'insider's' perspective. Moreover, I don't truly believe that we can fault Masuzawa for not considering notions of divinity in her text in any seriousness – that kind of study was not at all what she intended to achieve. Yet, is Masuzawa correct in denigrating the state of the study of world religions in which we currently find ourselves, in which plurality dictates a kind of shared divinity, and, in turn, a shared (and hence necessary) morality?

In order to understand religion as a phenomenon unto itself, it seems we must discover how religious concepts differ and diverge from ordinary shared experiences. And, if we let questions of divinity either fall by the wayside or purposely ignore them, then aren't we refusing to touch upon the nature of religion itself? On the other hand, what if divinity is merely a concept best understood (or perhaps, only understood) in how humans relate to it? What if divinity is merely a projection of human desire? It seems as though Masuzawa's nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars would certainly, if inadvertently, support this view. In a footnote, Masuzawa quotes an “anonymous statement” issued in 1888 in the Universal Review: “...religions are no longer judged by their supposed accordance with the letter of the Bible, but by their ability to minister to the wants and fulfill the aspirations of men. The individual, what can it make of him? As it raises or debases, purifies or corrupts, fills with happiness or torments with fear, so is it judged to accord with the Divine will.”(316)

Van Voorst's initial nod to historical perspective seems at odds with the nature of his proceeding chapter. He regards scripture as a living, dynamic force which is molded through its encounters with religious adherents. By examining scripture as it is utilized within a given community, van Voorst seems to remove scriptural study from the context of historical linearity. While van Voorst recognizes that scriptures themselves, being canonical in nature, hearken back to a specific point in history, he highlights the “degree of closure” which causes a given canon to be fixed. His conception of canonical sealing as a historical event, in my mind, seems most accurately represented as a small dash or pinpoint on the endless time-chart of history.

Van Voorst's idea of studying scriptures as they are encountered within religious communities seems equally historically isolated; he writes that using the scriptures within ritual, venerating them during worship, and using the texts as a “court of final appeal in religious matters”(6) is the most valid way to encounter these scriptures both for adherents to the faith and for scholars of scriptural study. However, these engagements with scriptures “in the context of their actual usage” seem merely detached occurrences without historical unity, and, consequently, without the combined power to lend these events historically meaningful weight.

While Van Voorst's privileging of isolated faith-experiences creates a gap which is difficult to ignore, I readily admit that we have only been exposed to his first chapter, and that he must have had ample opportunity in which to address this lacuna. However, his perspective causes me to wonder how he would weave together isolated events of 'living' scripture into a coherent whole. For example, he writes: “In both its informative and its performative aspects, scripture is also used for transformation. This transformative power is a result of its sacredness and authority. Scriptures come from a sacred source and are themselves sacred. This sacred quality generally entails some power to make holy those who read or listen to them.”(10) In order to lend weight to the living, transformative potential of a given scripture, one might need to perform a historically comprehensive ethnographic study; it seems unlikely that a scholar such as van Voorst would find studies of this nature relevant.

The idea of the 'armchair theorist', at first glance, hardly seems applicable to van Voorst, as he insists on studying scripture within the living context of a religion. Still, I can't seem to get the image out of my head of van Voorst in a maroon velvet armchair being magically teleported from one site in Asia to another; he sits with a book of scripture in his lap, frequently consulting it while watching members of the community conduct scripture-based rituals; he strokes his chin, mutters “Hmmm...”, and then flies off to the next locale, where he repeats the same process indefinitely, never quite allowing things to coalesce. (This is, of course, fanciful, and not meant to disparage van Voorst!)

In contrast to van Voorst, both Masuzawa and Smith approach the study of religion from a highly historical perspective, making an effort to locate the ideas inherent to study of world religions within the context of (predominantly nineteenth-century) Western thought. In particular, Masuzawa's linear treatment of the legacy of comparative theology evokes a subtly layered acknowledgment of historical progression. In a footnote to her Introduction, Masuzawa writes: “It is often assumed...that it is only by relinquishing the traditional kind of sheer memory (active re-presencing of significant past moments) that a people enter the domain of history proper.”(4) In van Voorst's prioritizing of the dynamic encounter with performative scriptures, he appears to 're-presence' significant present moments, thereby not allowing his scriptural religions to enter said domain.