Home and the Field

                The Coleman articles this week really resonated with me, despite the fact that I have safely decided on studying the ‘other’.  As I have mentioned before, the religion program at the University of Waterloo has a clear focus on both minority groups within North America and on New Religious Movements.   While learning about the Mormons, the Unification Church and the Raliens, it struck me that there are no clear ethnographic or anthropological studies of these groups.  Scholars would do the field work and write about their experiences, but their qualitative analysis had to be backed up by sociological, quantitative data.  Coleman’s thoughts on studying fundamentalist Protestants in his article “Abominations of Anthropology” helped explain to me why it is that these fringe movements are so difficult for ethnographers to study, and I even found connections with my own research on Islamic groups.

            It is amazing the sort of disdain you receive when you decide not to study either the completely alien or the very familiar.  Coleman’s article deals with the problems of a Western scholar doing field research with evangelical Christian communities.  These communities are too close to ‘home’ and because of this the scholar can come off as less than objective.  His subjects know what an anthropologist is and are able to use that knowledge to their advantage.  Also, frankly, in a modern secular society they should know better than to take the bible at its word and push their beliefs on others within the public sphere.  Any ethnographer studying these groups has to understand and be part of the practices of the congregation, as well as be an objective observer that distances himself from the group’s goal of witnessing to others.  Through the works of Gellner, Harding and Warner, Coleman clearly demonstrates the different options available to an ethnographer.  What struck me in particular, however, was the reason why these groups are so difficult to study.  They are seen as ‘unreasonable’ and repugnant because they differ from our ideal of what a true Western fairth should be.   Coleman mentions that Harding was chastised for her choice on studying Falwell, since he was an atypical Western religious figure.  We are raised into a society that is rife with Christianity, and even those of us who aren’t Christians have an idea of how Christians should act.  The groups that don’t fit this ideal are simply deviants.  They aren’t fit to study because they should ‘know better’ and act like proper Christians.

            I think the readings this week apply to more than just ethnographers studying Christian groups. Today, the distance between ‘home’ and ‘the field’ has completely collapsed.  Unlike the era of Malinowski, ethnographers now go into the field with extensive knowledge of their subjects.  They read books on their history, their practices, and their culture in order to situate their fieldwork into the grander narrative of the group.  An anthropologist who studies Islam has the entire field of the Anthropology of Islam at her disposal.  She goes into the field with preconceptions on how Islam ought to be.  She would find it impossible to study a group like Hamas or Hezbollah in isolation.  This is, I believe, why the literature on such groups is dominated by accounts on how they are deviant and wrong.  They are not proper Islam, they do not follow the ideals of an ‘Islam of Peace’.  Even if the ethnographer studies the group on its own merits, she will run into the same problems as studying Christian groups at home, since many of these groups are not the simple primitives that fieldworkers seek out.  Many of their members are educated, and many will know what an anthropologist is and challenge their relativist path to the truth.   I think that that in the last few decades the ‘field’ has shrunk dramatically, and that the ethnographer has very little hope to study anything outside the comfort of home.

            This lack of distance between subject and ethnographer damaged the latter’s claim to objectivity, and I think this is why so few qualitative, ethnographic works exist on fringe religious movements.  These groups occupy a grey area between ‘the field’ and ‘home’, and the only way of establishing a sense of authority is through the use of hard, quantitative facts.  It is in this way that the ethnographer does not come off as witnessing for these groups. 

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.

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.