The Implied Spider

“Attention to cultural specificity is part of the Hippocratic oath of historians of religion, including mythologists” (43)

Wendy Doniger’s The Implied Spider walks a precarious tightrope between two very different types of comparative work, akin to using two very different telescopes.  The first, which I believe can be useful, compares two myths from different cultures and points out areas of similarity and difference, and asks the question ‘why did this culture explain this experience this way, and not like this other culture”.  It is like pointing your telescope at two nearby planets, and comparing the similarities and difference between their craters or rings to better understand craters and rings in general.  The other, much more problematic approach that occasionally rears its head is to use one culture’s myth to infer a more complete meaning on another culture’s.  It’s like looking at a thousand yellow dots in the Hubble Deep Field, and then assuming they are all the same.  Universality is a dangerous assumption and can lead a scholar to manufacture ideas about a text and the people who wrote it.

The idea of a universal human experience that binds people together across cultures is enticing, but it is important to limit a text within its contexts.  Doniger states that a “text’s embeddedness in its culture makes it extend beyond its “author”...their authors may not be anonymous, but they are collective.  And that collectivity extends beyond the bounds of culture to other cultures that may share many of the same plots and agendas, despite their different historical experiences” (45).  A text is a product of the period and culture in which the author was writing, for the author’s views are shaped by his lived experiences.   For example, it is important to understand the politics and religious conflict occurring in North Africa and Rome at the turn of the 5^th century to understand Augustine.   To say that this authorial collectivity extends beyond the time and place of a texts creation, however, is true but problematic.  A text does reach across cultural lines by interacting with the reader, who puts her own experiences and knowledge of history into her understanding of the text.  This can change the meaning of a text in fundamental ways, demonstrated clearly in Bohannan’s anecdote on how the Africans she studied believed Hamlet to be a villain and Claudius a hero.  It is faulty, however, to assume that the African prospective on Hamlet sheds light on Shakespeare’s intentions.  

Doniger’s assumption on the universality of human experience, the strands of the web, can lead to the reader’s context influencing the original context of the text.  An example of this is the authors reading of the story of Tamar and Judah and Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well.  Both stories involve the ‘bed trick’, where a wife masquerades as someone else so as to trick her disinterested husband into bed.  The problem for biblical commentators is that the story of Tamar and Judah is woefully lacking in the psychology of how Tamar felt about the whole situation.  Shakespeare’s play, however, is clearer on why Helena decided to trick Bertram.  Doniger argues that “we can answer some of our own questions about the Bible by reading Shakespeare, we can imagine what a woman in Tamar’s situation might have felt, and imagine a woman’s voice in the bible asking that, and being suppressed” (40).  She then goes on to ask the question that should have been asked by anyone reading her comparison of the two works, “Would the author of the story of Tamar have felt like Shakespeare about such things as sexual rejection?...How do we know our questions are not projections?” (40)  She answers that we of course cannot know what is in the mind of the author, but that by projecting texts with similar themes of human experience, one can create a situation where the texts communicate in ‘textual intercourse’, and draws a line between “Shakespeare’s head and the Bible” (40).  It is acceptable to have Shakespeare affect your reading of the Bible, but to use his plays to fill in the emotional gaps of the Tamar story as a form of commentary on the original meaning or intent of the author is assuming that there is a universal experience.  That Helena in 16^th century England would have the same motives as Tamar in biblical times.  This is simply not falsifiable, we have no means of knowing what Tamar thought and it is especially problematic to justify these assumptions by showing similar themes in a text written in a dramatically different time and place.  This is the danger of cross-cultural comparison of myths, and demonstrates the problems that can occur when a comparatist succumbs to his artist half and substitutes imagination for empiricism.

For the past few years, I’ve been researching Muslim communities in France.  As I looked this topic it became increasingly evident that most scholars in this field found that ‘Muslim’+’France’=Headscarf Debate.  Doing a quick subject search on the University of Toronto library website for ‘France Muslim’ brings up the following books in the top 10:

-“Muslim women on the move : Moroccan women and French women of Moroccan origin speak out”

-“Why the French don't like headscarves : Islam, the state, and public space “

-“North African women in France : gender, culture, and identity “

-“Breaking the silence : French women's voices from the ghetto”

-“Muslim girls and the other France : race, identity politics, & social exclusion”

 

There are also two other books on women written in French.  The predominance of women’s issues in the study of French Muslims in particular, and Muslims in general is striking, and brought to my attention two things I hadn’t considered before.  First, I know next to nothing about women’s studies and second, that women’s studies offers important insight into what was a male dominated field but does so with some risk.

 

It seems almost misogynistic to say that I haven’t been well versed in women’s or gender studies.   The subject was skipped entirely in my “studying religion” survey course and in the history department’s required methodology course.  I was warned by my peers not to take courses in the women’s studies department since they were hostile classes for a man to be in (a similar experience was shared by Andrew in class).  Finally, in fourth year, gender studies played a part in a ‘Contemporary Issues in Islam’ course, and in my medieval history seminar.  The first course was useful, but the second seemed to be under the belief that women’s studies was devoted entirely to dowries and widows.  Our last class showed that this experience was not atypical, and that many of us went through four years in the humanities without learning about the study of half the human race.  I do side with those in class that believed that a Woman’s Studies department simply compartmentalizes the discipline and allows for professors in history or religion to simply pass over its impact.  It may be a necessary risk, however, since as a previously marginalized field the study of women and gender may need time to foster and grow without outside interference.   I do think that a disservice is being done by not allowing undergrads in the ‘traditional’ fields such as history and philosophy the chance to learn about this important subject. 

 

“The task of including all expressions of religiosity in the purview of the history of religions, of course, is not easy.  The extent to which it has failed to do so has been made embarrassingly clear by women’s studies” (Kinsley, 3).  Kinsley succeeds in demonstrating just how embarrassingly clear women’s studies has shown the deficiencies of the history of religions to be.  For years, the fact that men and women experience religion differently, that the sources we read largely come from men, and that religious materials are gendered had been ignored. Women’s studies has done an untold amount of good, but it is not without problems, and these problems arise far too often in the study of Muslim women.  

Kinsley states that, “categorizing males as oppressors and women as victims can also lead to objectifying women as a category and blinding the historian of religions to women’s own voices, keeping him or her from hearing women as subjects” (Kinsley, 12).  This is no truer than with the issue of the hijab.  Of the many books on the headscarf, most look at it objectively and with an understanding of both sides of the debate.  The odd example, however, asserts that the hijab is a misogynistic symbol forced upon Muslim women, and that any woman that says otherwise is doing so simply out of fear.  This simply does not account for the many women who decide in their 20s to start wearing the hijab for pious reasons, or the professional women who protested against the headscarf ban in Turkey.  These authors see Muslim women as a holistic entity that has lagged behind the ‘Western’ feminist movements and who is everywhere oppressed.   This generalization validates Scott’s criticism that women’s studies can take away from the experience of the individual and that the only experience which matters is that of middle class white women (Clarke 227). This has dire political ramifications.  The headscarf debate in France has long been fueled by the belief that the hijab is a symbol of oppression, and it is a certitude that the fair and balanced studies on the hijab did not lead to this conclusion.  The eventual ban of the headscarf in schools may have prevented many girls from having the hijab forced upon them by their parents, but it also prevented others who chose to do it out of religious conviction.   Seeing the world as split between oppressor and oppressed seems to be largely a result of women’s studies roots in political feminism, but it is unfair to women everything to generalize based on the Western experience.

The Sex/Gender debate

This was another debate that I found interesting in class, and I’ll quickly close with some remarks on it.  Boyarin tells us of two different interpretations of the Genesis chapters 1 and 2.  Philo of Alexandria wrote that the man and woman created in chapter one was actually an androgynous, spiritual being and that man was only given sex in the second chapter.  The Rabbinic interpretation is that the being created in God’s image was hermaphroditic, containing both sexes.  I will have to agree with the Talmud on this, and say that “two sexes exist from the beginning”  (Boyarin 129).  Sex is biological, and I do not believe that it is produced by culture.  Various cultures have engendered various sexes, but male, female and hermaphrodite exist sui generis. We may choose to culturally accept only male and female, but in so doing we are just forcing a gender description onto the third category by making hermaphrodites conform to something more ‘acceptable’.  It is still a sex category.

Questions of Authorship and Text: Finally tying in some sociological theory

“what is the past but a once material substance, now silenced, extant only as a sign and as a sign drawing to itself chains of conflicting interpretations that hover over its absent present and compete for possession of the relics, seeking to inscribe traces of significance upon the bodies of the dead” (Spiegel, quoted on 162)

My  background in history did very little to shape my opinion of texts since most of my professors were very much in line with the critics of “theoretically inclined historians” described by Clarke (161).  Fortunately, the University of Waterloo was a haven for Sociologists of Religion, and they above anything else shaped how I see the world.  While reading Clarkes synopsis of the various theoretical approaches to reading texts, I thought of how these theories fit with the problems of authorship and context and realized that I have been heavily influenced by the works of Peter Berger.  So bear with me while I describe Berger’s theory on the sociology of knowledge, and how I believe it ties in with this week’s topic. 

Berger argues that society is a ‘dialectic phenomenon’ that is a “human product, and nothing but a human product, that yet continuously acts back upon its producer” (Berger, “The Sacred Canopy”, pg 3) We unconsciously create society, and we are largely a product of the society that we make.  This dialectic occurs in three steps;  externalization, objectification, and internalization.  ‘Externalization’ concerns the continuous physical and mental creations of humans (books, law etc), ‘objectification’ is the process in which these ‘things’ gain a reality of their own that is separate from their creator, and ‘internalization’ is the “reappropriation by men of this same reality, transforming it once again from structures of the objective world into structures of the subjective consciousness” (Berger, 4).  We continuously make society, society becomes its own reality sui generis, and society imposes back on us.  It takes Berger two books to figure out the nuances of his theory, so this hardly gives it justice, but it applies itself well to how we should read texts from the past.

The various authors citied by Clarke are concerned with studying the various stages in the creation of a ‘text’.  Historians have attempted to explain ‘texts’ by their original meaning and authorship (externalization), as standalone objects (objectification), or by what they convey upon the reader (internalization).  The implications of Berger’s theory are that the original intentions of an author are meaningless.  Once something is written down, any claim of ownership by the author is lost, as his words are now independent objects.  Looking at the objective ‘text’ is also problematic, since at that point you’ve already internalized it and given it a subjective meaning.  At the point of ‘internalization’, we are grappling with our own interpretations and how others have interpreted it, and this I believe is where a ‘text’ gets its meaning.  Throughout history, words have been taken out of their original contexts and intended meaning and appropriated to become something completely different.  We must study ‘texts’ by how they are used and understood by others, since the original meaning has long since been lost because of the socialization of knowledge.

Since I subscribe to Berger’s theory and believe that it has relevance not just to sociology but to the study of history, it is easy to see why I had an affinity with the theories of Barthes and Foucault that were presented in this week’s readings.  Barthes criticizes literary critics who obsess with authorship, original meaning and the objectivity of ‘texts’.   He focuses on the “collaboration” between the reader and the text, and how the reader inevitably becomes the author (133).  The reader may claim to know the original meaning of a text by knowing the authors intentions or the context in which the text was written, but this is problematic.  Even in this case, the reader would have his/her own opinion of the author that would affect intentionality, and the choice of which “context” the book was written will affect its meaning.  The reader brings his/her own knowledge and interpretation to a text when it is internalized, and in so doing affects its meaning.   Foucault questioned the idea of authorship, and specifically the zeal in which many scholars sought to identify the original author in order to give a work ‘authority’.  I agree that this is a largely fruitless endeavour and that the important questions to ask are, “What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how does it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects?  Who can assume these various subject-functions?”  (134).  These questions assist us in finding the meanings within a text, meanings that are far distant from there now ‘silenced’ past.