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.