Reflections

“I am generally suspicious of how useful strict adherence to a single methodology can be, and these readings didn’t alleviate me of that.”   (Me, “What is methodology?”)

That first blog entry was pretty terrible.  I confused the meanings of methodology and discipline and really seemed to go out of my way to drop names in that first paragraph.  At least I took a firm stance against ‘bias’!  It seems that every week I would have trouble fitting our readings into my own interests, and more than once I would get hung up on trying to define exactly what we were studying (Emotion, Ritual, Religion...).  Reflecting on these subjects now with the hindsight of both class discussions and hours of complaining among friends, I have realized just how impactful these past few months have been.  For my own interests, I still believe that a “strict adherence to a single methodology” is useless, but only because I’ve seen the value that diverse authors and subjects like Scott and Gender and Hobsbawm and Tradition have to my studies.  Why limit yourself to a single tool?

After meeting my classmates for the first time, I had no idea how class discussion could work.  How exactly would students of philosophy, history, literature, politics and sociology possibly have meaningful discussion without talking over each others’ heads?  I feared the class would devolve into a battle of name dropping authorities that no one else had read, or of historical examples that no one else cared about.  I’m not sure if it was because of the people or the subject matter or both, but it worked.  Sure, I’d usually find myself on Wikipedia after class frantically looking up people that had been mentioned (I had no idea who Heidegger was), but I realize now that this is the beauty of our department.  I’ve learned more about more diverse subjects than in any single class I’ve taken, because of the wide range of interests in our class.  Not only that, but it really helped me see other perspectives that I would have never considered before.  Now I’m a pretty opinionated guy (I know, shocking!) but after every class I found whatever boneheaded idea I had come in with had been turned around completely by someone else’s impeccable logic. I’m less certain about the idea of any actual conclusions coming out of our discussions, individually or as a whole.  The only thing we found consensus on was on how inconclusive most of what we study truly is.  I don’t think conclusiveness should be the aim of this course though. It should aim at simply exposing students to new ideas. Most seminars end up being a room full of talking heads, but because of the diversity of Religious Studies this seminar actually had students teaching each other, which was certainly a nice surprise. 

I think a professor forced into teaching a class like this would have to choose between dividing the course into terms and subjects, or into disciplines.  For awhile, I thought that the latter would have been the better option.  The first week could be on ‘Anthropology’ and could look at authors like Turner and Geertz, the second week could be on ‘Sociology’ and look at Berger and Stark etc etc...  This would be a more instructive way of teaching the class, a way of introducing key figures and helping students figure out how to navigate their own fields. I think now that this would be a more effective way of teaching undergraduates, since it doesn’t play to the strengths of a diverse graduate program.  If our class had been structured like that, week one would be dominated by the anthropology students talking amongst themselves in a room full of bored literary-theorists, week two would be dominated by the sociologists and it goes on. The terms selected for this course better suited the diversity of the class.  Topics like tradition, myth and gender have an inter-disciplinary appeal, and discussions on the methods and problems associated with studying them could be taken up by students with a variety of interests.  Even when we had trouble fitting a specific topic into our own field (round peg in a square hole and the like), we could at least discuss why it didn’t fit.  Any lesson plan from method and theory must work in tandem with the diverse interests of the students, and the selection of topics with broad applications is the most suitable that I can think of.  Of course it wouldn’t hurt throwing politics a bone.

Tradition

“...Consider how, beginning on September 12, 2001, the pundits began working in earnest to distance so-called authentic Islam – the ‘enduring values’ found in the ‘heart of Islam’...that comprise timeless ‘principles’ communicated by means of an apparently thing we call ‘tradition’ – from those accused of carrying out the previous day’s attacks...”  (McCutcheon, Religion and the Domestication of Dissent, pg. 29)

This week’s readings reminded me of a phenomenon I’m looking at in my own research – The tendency for groups to define themselves against a sort of ‘golden age’ as a means to both promote their own ideas and differentiate themselves from others.   This is a similar affect to that which was described in the Thomas article.  When faced with an overwhelmingly dominant political force, like the pacific denizens coping with a colonizing force, groups will accentuate the traditions that are accentuated by, or differentiate themselves from the oppressors as a form of identity building (like in my last entry).  The traditions they fall back on fit Hobsbawm’s definition of an “invented tradition” , which is a “set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past” (Hobsbawm, 1).  I didn’t read ‘invented’ to imply a fabrication, but rather a more-or-less deliberate creation of a tradition based on the perceived past of the creator.  Contemporary religious groups, when faced with a challenger or oppressor, legitimize their traditions by creating a connection to a perfect past.

Above, McCutcheon discusses the developments in discourse on Islam after September 11^th.  Professors and ‘experts’ appeared on the 24-hour news stations espousing the tenants of a ‘true Islam’ that had been perverted by the extremists that were responsible for the attacks.  The Islam they described was a religion of peace and social justice, which in the beginning promoted pluralism, freedom and individualism.   This is what is in the Qu’ran, and this is what the original tradition was intended to be.   Only after the time of Muhammad (or the Rashidun, depending on who is speaking) did Islam become corrupted by the cultures it found itself in. This is Islam that has been pushed by the pundits is designed to be acceptable to a secular, multicultural audience.  This same sort of argument has been pushed by big name Islamic reformers such as Tariq Ramadan as a means of creating an Islam that ‘fits’ within Europe.  These reformers are creating their view of Islam by historicizing certain parts of the Qu’ran and promoting certain hadith over others.  In this way they adapt the past to fit their ideal tradition, but of course their opposition does the same thing.

Sayyid Qutb was an interesting man. Qutb, an Egyptian, was educated in Colorado, but became disgusted with the lack of morality and consumerism that plagued the West.   He was involved in Egyptian politics in the 1960s and was an active opponent of General Nasser, the socialist president largely supported by ‘Western’ nations.   Nasser, being the dictator sort, didn’t take kindly to opposition and had Qutb arrested and tortured.  It was in prison that he wrote his book Milestones, which would heavily influence both the philosophies of the Muslim Brotherhood and later Al-Qaeda.   In Milestones, Qutb looks back to the ‘golden age’ of Islam, which he believed was the time between Muhammad and the Abbasid Caliphate.  It was only after the fall of Baghdad that Islam lost its way through corrupt leaders, a process which had become increasingly worse since colonialization and the coming of ‘Western values’.  He did not historicize the Qur’an, but instead focused on the violent episodes as proof that conflict to protect the true Islam was justified.   In order to allow for the killing of corrupt Muslims, Qutb invoked the tradition of jahilliya or an ‘age of ignorance’.  The world before Muhammad was in a state of jahilliya, and Qutb argues that since the true Islam has been usurped by corrupt Muslims the contemporary world is as well.  The self-proclaimed Muslims are therefore not true followers, and are infidels.  This argument has more or less been adopted by most revivalist groups, and is a direct contrast to the Islam promoted by the reformers.

Islam is not a monolithic entity, and there is no ‘true’ version of it.  Different groups with different political aims will adopt certain aspects of the tradition as a means of promoting their cause.  To do this, they’ll read the Qu’ran is certain ways, use certain traditional commentaries or hadith, and invoke traditionally loaded terms like jahilliya.  All these groups do this to both justify their own ideas and to differentiate themselves from the other, especially when they feel like they are under attack.  Reformers believed that they were under attack from the misconceptions that arose from 9/11, and revivalists feel like Islam is under attack from a morally bankrupt ‘west’.  Their ‘invented traditions’ helped them argue against these attacks.

Emotion and New Religious Movements

Well this week was a bit of a challenge.  As promised, I had to ask myself repeatedly “Just how does this fit in with my research?”  since trying to incorporate the study of emotion into policy decisions and law would be like trying to drive a round peg through a square hole.  I did, however, see some connections between the study of emotion and the study of how fringe movements separate themselves from society, that I can now cling to.  I found myself especially interested in Corrigan’s description of the dichotomy between the universality of emotion and the societal framework in which it operates.   Anything that is universally recognizable but socially malleable is a very useful tool for groups wanting to distance themselves from normative society.   Emotion is a universal language, but it is a language so regulated that any deviation from the norm becomes suspect.  Searching the internet, it becomes evident quickly that fringe groups and new religious movements play off emotion as a means to distance both themselves and their members.

St. John’s Episcopal Church

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VukgewIuN8

(you will get the point after 20 seconds or so)

Snake Handlers in West Virginia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUdc5h10zTo&feature=related

 

I think whoever originally came up with all the WASP stereotypes must have visited St. John's Episcopal Church.  The service, to an outsider, is rather bland and robotic.  I’m sure many of the people in the video are emotional about their religion, but like many groups in North America and Europe regulate emotion to the private sphere.  The second video has, well, snakes and dancing and is the sort of display that the people at St. John’s would probably find rather disconcerting.  It wouldn’t just be the dancing about brandishing poisonous vipers that would disturb them, but the apparent bliss and emotion involved (many groups weep while holding the snake).  The communal emotion the snake handlers bring into their service, like most Pentecostals,  is a part of their theology, their ritual, and their identity.  Emotion is one way in which they differentiate themselves socially from ‘the norm’. The snake handlers just decided to up the ante a little on their Pentecostal cousins by adding arsenic.  A similar phenomenon could be seen in the article about ritual weeping in Kabbalah.  The mystics of Safed were differentiating themselves from the rabbinical norm through both their theology and their rituals, and weeping was a part of both.

Louis Theroux (honestly, if you ever have an hour to kill watch this entire documentary.  It’s great.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0R1BgZsYlI
(Watch from around 7:50 on)

A new religious movement (NRM) has to find ways to ‘break’ their recruits ‘fixed-faces’, and using ‘unconventional’ displays of emotion is  an effective means distance itself away from the dominate society in order to attract the disaffected.  The majority of new members in NRMs within North America/Europe are middle class, educated twenty somethings from protestant or catholic traditions, and groups tend to attract these young people by offering the opposite of the ‘mainstream’; an emotive, communal experience.  Taboo emotions are especially powerful, as the guru in the above video taps into with his anger mediation, or the Children of God (I think they are the Family now..its hard to keep track) tap into with their rather liberal take on love.  Distancing from the emotional norms has the same effect as dressing differently or shaving your heads (such as in the Hare Krishna), and is a powerful means of both incorporating people within a group and distancing them from others outside.  The anti-cult movement uses emotion as well.  It portrays NRM members as either fanatically emotional or robotically detached, both clear signs of ‘brainwashing’.  For example, in an episode of Southpark Stan’s anti-Mormon rant at the end of “all about Mormons” begins with “Why do you guys have to be so happy all the time?!”.  For the inverse, in the ‘Joy of Sect’ episode of the Simpsons the family gets involved with the ‘movementarians’ and become automatons only capable of praising their illustrious ‘Leader’.  Both excessive emotion and lack of emotion are seen as deviant in our relatively repressed mainstream culture.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/d6/5F23.jpg/200px-5F23.jpg

The writings above are simply me musing on what emotion could do.  Emotion is an interesting social tool, and in that way can be used to analyze how organizations construct themselves.   This week’s reading surprised me, since I wasn’t expecting the study of emotion to be so diverse.  I thought I was going to be reading a rehashing of our look at ritual studies last week, so it was a nice reading works on sophistic rhetoric and kabalahistic theology.  

Ritual

(Sorry for this being so late.  For some reason blogger wouldn't let me copy and paste from my parents windows 95)

Ritual, like religion, is one of those ‘things’ that is easy to recognize but difficult to define.  This was certainly obvious while reading the articles this week, with Bell and Grimes summarizing and bickering about how ritual should be studied and what its function was, and Mamoud discussing the blurring of lines between mundane and ritual action.  Do we look at the movements of the participants?  Do we focus on the performance? The emotions invoked? The intention?  What is the difference between ‘ritually’ playing a slit-gong and a Rush concert?  Lastly, what is the place of the observer? Are we just there to describe what we see, or are we searching to explain the ‘blindspots’ and ‘misrecognitions’ of the ritual performer? Can we do that?  Obviously, I have a lot of questions about the study of ritual, and since it really isn’t something that has come up reading policy and population data, it is not an area I’ve put a significant amount of thought into.  I’ll look at the issue of ‘ritual’ by looking at a few case studies, including something that happened to me recently, a ‘social drama’ from Turner’s Schism and Continuity and the story of Mona from the Mahmood article.

A few Saturdays ago, I attended the funeral of someone I knew at a local Anglican church.   Since this was the first such event I’ve experienced, I made sure to take the time to digest the pomp and ‘ritual’ that was going on around me.  In my pew, I (not religious) was bordered by my parents (semi-religious) cousin (too young to be religious) and grandfather (self-described fundamentalist). It was all the standard fair of speeches, hymns, scripture reading and a homily.  The service ended with the Eucharist.  The minister did the normal ritual actions, waving his arms about and saying his prayers, and then dedicated the Host/Wine not to Jesus, but to the deceased.  This shift in ritual intention caught me off guard, and really ticked off my grandfather.  When he took the Eucharist, he made up for the ministers lack of attention to tradition by audibly praying to Christ.  Since I’m not Christian or even baptized, I really had no intention of taking part in the ritual, but since I have a healthy fear of my grandfather’s wraith I went up and crossed my arms to receive a blessing.  My cousin went up, went through all the motions of ritual, got back and commented on how delicious the cracker was.  My parents, although both Christian, decided not to take part and stayed in the pew.

What would an ethnographer, sitting in the back row, have taken away from this spectacle?  Hopefully he/she had some background knowledge on Christian ritual, or else they would come away thinking this ‘deviant’ form of the Eucharist was correct.  Is it even right to regard the ministers shift of meaning as deviant, since all he intended was to make the ritual fit the situation he was in?  How would the ethnographer react to my cousin, who has certainly been socialized into Christianity, but doesn’t understand the significance of the ritual aside from it being a tasty treat.  Would my parents come off as atheistic for not participating? Would the ethnographer believe that I saw significance in what I was doing?    Again, I don’t have the answers.  I lean towards the idea that intent in ritual is what differentiates it from other activities, more so then its choreography or traditional value.  As the minister showed, tradition and meaning can be changed from situation to situation, and I don’t believe my cousin was taking part in a ‘ritual’ performance despite mimicking the motions since he did not understand what he was doing.

Turner first proposed the importance of “Social Drama” in the book Schism and Continuity in an African Society.  This ethnographical method, mentioned in all three articles, is based on the idea that people will use ritualized action in order to provide redress in times of conflict.  In the Ndembu society that Turner studied, there lived a fear sorcerer named Sandombu.  Sandombu was the village scapegoat, and many deaths were blamed on his foul magic and he is eventually run out of town (to about 500 feet away, where he makes his own town of misfits).  This seems like an unfortunate situation, but in Turner’s discussions with Sandombu it becomes obvious that he was a willingly participant in his victimization.  Since he was infertile, he had no means of creating a legacy for himself other than by becoming the headman of the village and in order to do that he had to be feared.  He purposely acted out taboo ritual behaviour (shouting curses, performing magical rites etc.) in order to build up this reputation.  Is village counter-part, Kasonda, also actively promoted Sandombu’s sorcery in the hopes that he would be driven out of the village.  After a death in the village, he actively sought out a diviner in order to incriminate Sandombu.  Both these men used the rituals and traditions that they were socialized into as a means of attaining power.  Both, in discussions with Turner, held reservations about the magic’s true effectiveness but both went through the motions in order to convince others of their legitimacy.  In this case, the actors involved had their own agency.  They had clear intentions with their use of ritual, but may not have actually believed in their traditional power.  Is agency required for ritual participants? Is belief in the tradition required?  Is ritual simply a means of communication or a way of sorting out a crisis?

Lasting, Mahmood tells us of the advice that an Islamic woman named Mona gave to another woman that was having difficulty in getting up for morning prayers.   Mona said that as long as this woman thought of God in her every day actions, and directed her energy and emotions towards him at all times, she would no longer find it difficult to wake up for morning prayer (831).  This story again points to intention as part of ritual.  Is the only difference between a mundane act and a ritualized one the intention of the participant?  In Mona’s life, is everything she does considered ritual?  I can assume there is no traditional basis for making daily chores a ritual act, but if she believes that all her actions are significant beyond their ‘mundane’ function than isn’t it something more?    

I apologize for this stream of consciousness, and I hope that it is not too disjointed in thought.  I left this week’s readings with many more questions concerning “what is ritual” then on the best way to study it.  These few stories that I immediately thought of while reading all regard the actor as a knowing participant within the activity and that it is the significance they attach to a task that is more important than any ‘tradition’.  The variety of ritual is astounding and its definition difficult to come by, at least for myself.