Thinking of religion as relationships between heaven and earth with the specific shapes that relationships take in particular times and places - the history of love in a certain part of the world at a certain time, or the nature of parenting, for example - frees us from any notion of religious practices as either good or bad. Religions are as ambiguous and ambivalent as the bonds that constitute them, and their effects cannot be generally anticipated but known in practice and experience. One challenge of writing about religion is to figure out how to include figures of special power as agents in history and actors of consequence in historical persons' lives and experiences...
My emphasis on religion as relationship does not preclude attention to the realities of power, the complexities of society, or the impress of history (nor is it meant to mask the intricacies of the relationships of a researcher in religion and the people he or she studies). "Relationship" is a friendly word, but this is not how I use it throughout this book, not am I focused on relationships as intimate realities apart from the arrangements of the social world in which they exist...
Once religion is understood as a web not of meanings but of relationships between heaven and earth, then scholars of religion take their places as participants in these networks too, together with the saints and in the company of practitioners. We get caught up in these bonds, whether we want to or not. Scholars of religion become preoccupied with themselves as interpreters of meanings, and so they forget that we do our work of interpretation with the network of relationship between heaven and earth, in the company of those among whom we have gone to study, in the field or in the archives. Again this is not innocent and I accord no special heuristic power to the notion of research as "relationship." To be in relationship with someone, as we all know, is not necessarily to understand him or her; but the relationship which arises always on a particular social field and is invariably inflected by needs, desires, and feelings, conscious and not, that draw on both parties' histories and experiences, becomes the context for understanding. Scholars get implicated in the socially structured struggles among people on earth into which the saints are drawn too; we are asked to take sides at the intersection of heaven and earth and within sight of the saints...
Of all aspects of religion, the one that has been clearly most out of place in the modernizing world - the one that has proven least tolerable to modern societies - has been the radical presence of the gods to practitioners. The modern world has assiduously and systematically disciplined the senses not to experience sacred presence; the imaginations of moderns are trained toward sacred absence. So while it is true that religious faith has not gone away, sacred presences have acquired an unsavory and disreputable aura, and this clings to practices and practitioners of presence alike... The tense dynamics of this encounter of modern life with inherited religious idioms of presence is one of the major topics of the book.
I am also concerned throughout with developing social psychological and social historical frames for examining presence: how can historians and scholars of culture talk about the realness of presence within particular social worlds at particular times but always within the limits of our modern disciplines? And how does serious engagement with the cultural realities of presence allow us to push against the limits of modern scholarship in religion? My hope is that by asking critical, analytical questions about presence (which, I have to admit, religious practitioners usually do not like to hear) I can contribute to grinding a shaper critical lens on the constraints and disavowals of modern scholarly methods in the study of religion (which, I have to recognize, modern scholars may not like).
My emphasis on religion as relationship does not preclude attention to the realities of power, the complexities of society, or the impress of history (nor is it meant to mask the intricacies of the relationships of a researcher in religion and the people he or she studies). "Relationship" is a friendly word, but this is not how I use it throughout this book, not am I focused on relationships as intimate realities apart from the arrangements of the social world in which they exist...
Once religion is understood as a web not of meanings but of relationships between heaven and earth, then scholars of religion take their places as participants in these networks too, together with the saints and in the company of practitioners. We get caught up in these bonds, whether we want to or not. Scholars of religion become preoccupied with themselves as interpreters of meanings, and so they forget that we do our work of interpretation with the network of relationship between heaven and earth, in the company of those among whom we have gone to study, in the field or in the archives. Again this is not innocent and I accord no special heuristic power to the notion of research as "relationship." To be in relationship with someone, as we all know, is not necessarily to understand him or her; but the relationship which arises always on a particular social field and is invariably inflected by needs, desires, and feelings, conscious and not, that draw on both parties' histories and experiences, becomes the context for understanding. Scholars get implicated in the socially structured struggles among people on earth into which the saints are drawn too; we are asked to take sides at the intersection of heaven and earth and within sight of the saints...
Of all aspects of religion, the one that has been clearly most out of place in the modernizing world - the one that has proven least tolerable to modern societies - has been the radical presence of the gods to practitioners. The modern world has assiduously and systematically disciplined the senses not to experience sacred presence; the imaginations of moderns are trained toward sacred absence. So while it is true that religious faith has not gone away, sacred presences have acquired an unsavory and disreputable aura, and this clings to practices and practitioners of presence alike... The tense dynamics of this encounter of modern life with inherited religious idioms of presence is one of the major topics of the book.
I am also concerned throughout with developing social psychological and social historical frames for examining presence: how can historians and scholars of culture talk about the realness of presence within particular social worlds at particular times but always within the limits of our modern disciplines? And how does serious engagement with the cultural realities of presence allow us to push against the limits of modern scholarship in religion? My hope is that by asking critical, analytical questions about presence (which, I have to admit, religious practitioners usually do not like to hear) I can contribute to grinding a shaper critical lens on the constraints and disavowals of modern scholarly methods in the study of religion (which, I have to recognize, modern scholars may not like).
... Between Heaven And Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make And The Scholars Who Study Them, Robert A. Orsi
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