What is Methodology?

I may as well start this entry by stating my own opinions on methodology before I delve into what this week’s authors have to say on the subject, and give fair warning that I have never taken a course on theory before. I think of a methodology as a matrix where a researcher can make sense of her findings. The methods used are as diverse as the number of authors writing, because everyone will use what best fits their own biases in order to best communicate their ideas. Authors will dabble in or modify a variety of methods of research in order to support their conclusions. I suppose this kind of thought process places me in the same sociologist matrix as Berger-Luckmann, and allows me to wholeheartedly agree with Huntington’s statement that “what we learn in our encounter with these texts is in every way a function of the tools we bring to our study” (Huntington, 9). While reading the articles this week, it seemed to me that both authors were critical of the use of a single, wholeheartedly endorsed methodology, and both were cognizant of the biases that inevitably come from the author and the tools he uses.

“It is necessary to dismantle the approved methodology and expose its presuppositions, rescue what is most valuable, and move on” (Huntington, 8)

Huntington’s article ‘Methodological Considerations’ focuses on the dominance of the philological and ‘proselytic’ methodologies in the field of Asian Studies. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, and both rest on the concepts of an ‘objectively present tradition’ and the ‘proper application of an approved methodology’ to understand it. Huntington argues that scholars of Asian Studies have been too insular in their pursuits, and have failed to notice the criticisms of objectification and method by authors like James, Nietzsche, Derrida and Foucault. While having done important work, the text-critical method neglects the meaning of the texts it translates. The text-critical scholar’s reliance on objectivity keeps him/her from realizing how their own biases affect their interpretation, since they are “not living in seventh-century India, nor do [they] share the presuppositions and prejudices of medieval Hindu society…thus [they] cannot expect on [their] own terms to engage in effortless conversation with the Madhyamika” (10). Huntington does not call for the complete rejection of the philological method, since “The problem is not whether to dispense with these valuable text-critical tools but how best to divest the philological methodology of its privileged claim to absolute hegemony in textual interpretation” (12). He also argues against interpretation being based completely in historical context, and that the philosophical views and spiritual life of both historic and present day Buddhists need necessarily be taken into account. Thus, an inter-disciplinary approach that calls into question “the presuppositions underlying any arbitrary separation of religious, philosophical, and sociological domains in the study of Buddhism” is necessary to gain a more complete picture of the Buddhist tradition (14)

“If readers leave this book simply condemning the past as peculiar, I shall have failed. But I shall have failed just as profoundly if readers draw direct answers to modern problems from the lives I chronicle” (Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 9)

Bynum is clear in the introduction of ‘Holy Feast and Holy Fast’ that one of the greatest challenges for any historian is to “[cross] the distance created by many centuries and by vastly different modern assumptions” (5). In our time-period where food is plentiful, it is difficult for us to understand the significance that eating and fasting would have had for the average medieval women. When a story surfaces that describes a fourteenth century nun who refuses to eat, is it appropriate to label her with modern terms like anorexic? Bynum describes her methodology as both functionalist and phenomenological, she explains the function of food in women’s piety and what this meant for the women themselves (6). To do this, she used the phenomenological tool of ‘bracketing’, cordoning off her own beliefs, and reading the medieval documents for what they had to say. This can be an exceptionally difficult thing to do, but your own biases and assumptions are important to realize whenever you are confronted with the strange and different.

“…historians have to learn from recourse to the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and art history” (Bynum, Fragments, 15)

Bynum wrote ‘In Praise of Fragments’ in a period of heated debate on how to best study history. The infusion of anthropological and quantitative methodologies into the discipline forced historians to question how far their studies should drift from the lives of great people and important events. It also brought into question our ability to determine historic causation while being hampered by our own modern-day prospective. In response to the debate, Bynum relates to the ideas of Lynn Hunt and finds that the ‘new cultural history’ is best seen as comic. The comic stance “is aware of contrivance, of risk. It always admits that we may be wrong…Its goal is the pluralistic, not the total. It embraces the partial as partial” (25). This is truly a brilliant way to state that no method can possibly give a complete picture of the past. Methodological debates, as well as inter-disciplinary research, are essential to the construction of good history, and the type of insularity that Huntington says plagued the Asian Studies discipline will only limit our complete understanding. Bynum’s critique of three historic authors further makes this point. She looks at the anthropological work on symbols conducted by Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, the sociological studies of Max Weber, and Leo Steinberg’s work in art history. She places each of these works against current works in gender studies and finds that “when even the small bit we are able to retrieve about medieval women’s experience is taken into account, each modern theorist appears less universal in conclusion and implication” (16). It is all part of the whole, and all very comic.

I am generally suspicious of how useful strict adherence to a single methodology can be, and these readings didn’t alleviate me of that. I found that both authors valued an inter-disciplinary approach in order to understand the past, and that the importance of method paled in comparison to the importance of putting aside one’s own bias. So the question I leave with is; are methodological debates useful? Or is proper scholarship more like that of Bynum’s, where she writes what she thinks and sees what matrix she fits in later? (Fragments, 22)