Scholars in the humanities and social sciences have understood theory in a variety of ways ... But my understanding of theory departs from all five types, since I reject a presupposition they all share, even the constructivists' theory building and the critical theorists' power analysis - that the theorist and the theorized are static. To highlight the shifting position of the theorist, while also acknowledging the movements and relations I found among transnational migrants in Miami, I endorse James Clifford's suggestion that we turn to the metaphor of travel. More precisely, I reimagine theories as itineraries...
Theories, in the first sense of the word, are travels. Just as theorists walk the library stacks, shift from an idea to idea at their desks, or leap from citation to citation in online card catalogs, theories move too. They are journeys propelled by concepts ad tropes that follow lines of argument and narration. But there is too much linear progression. In the imagining and writing - and even in the reader's tracing of the argument on the printed page - there is crisscrossing, stepping down, and circling back...
It is helpful to understand theories as sightings, I suggest, but only if we keep in mind three cautions. First, as when motorists glance in the rearview mirror, the theorist always has blind spots... A second caution is necessary as we talk about theory's positioned representations as sightings: visual metaphors, like all others, have limitations, and the term sightings as I use it refers to multisensorial, culturally mediated embodied encounters... Those representations also are situated, and this is the final caution I want to urge as I propose that we understand theoretical reflections as sightings.
The locative approach, which I advocate, begins with the assumption that all theorists are situated and all theorists emerge from within categorical schemes and social contexts. It only makes sense to talk about reality-for-us, and questions about what's real or true make sense only within a socially constructed cluster of categories and an always-contested set of criteria for assessment.
In this locative approach there are more or less acceptable interpretations of those narratives, artifacts, and practices, where acceptable here means internally coherent and contextually useful. And it means more: a persuasive interpretation is one that would be found plausible by any fair and self-conscious interpreter who engaged in the same sort of research practices - listening, observing, reading, and so on. That, of course, is impossible, so the notion of an acceptable interpretation is always contested and contestable and is always a matter of offering a plausible account within an accepted categorical scheme and within a particular professional setting, with its scholarly idiom and role-specific obligations...
So however self-evident this claim might seem to some readers, it needs to be reaffirmed, because the authorial voice of most academic studies of religion fails to make it clear: as theorists make sense of narratives, artifacts, and practices they are always situated.
In this chapter, I meet my role-specific obligation to reflect on the field's constitutive term by offering a definition of religion, a positioned sighting that highlights movement and relation... Religions are confluences of organic-cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing on human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries.
This definition, like most others, is hardly transparent. I doubt that, upon reading it, you thought to yourself: Well ,thanks for clearing that up. Offering a dense definition of this complex term doesn't end my professional obligations or settle the issue. There is much more to say, and I try to say it in these last three chapters. Attending to each word and phrase, here I explain my choice of tropes and lay out some of the theoretical commitments inscribed in this definition...
Theories, in the first sense of the word, are travels. Just as theorists walk the library stacks, shift from an idea to idea at their desks, or leap from citation to citation in online card catalogs, theories move too. They are journeys propelled by concepts ad tropes that follow lines of argument and narration. But there is too much linear progression. In the imagining and writing - and even in the reader's tracing of the argument on the printed page - there is crisscrossing, stepping down, and circling back...
It is helpful to understand theories as sightings, I suggest, but only if we keep in mind three cautions. First, as when motorists glance in the rearview mirror, the theorist always has blind spots... A second caution is necessary as we talk about theory's positioned representations as sightings: visual metaphors, like all others, have limitations, and the term sightings as I use it refers to multisensorial, culturally mediated embodied encounters... Those representations also are situated, and this is the final caution I want to urge as I propose that we understand theoretical reflections as sightings.
The locative approach, which I advocate, begins with the assumption that all theorists are situated and all theorists emerge from within categorical schemes and social contexts. It only makes sense to talk about reality-for-us, and questions about what's real or true make sense only within a socially constructed cluster of categories and an always-contested set of criteria for assessment.
In this locative approach there are more or less acceptable interpretations of those narratives, artifacts, and practices, where acceptable here means internally coherent and contextually useful. And it means more: a persuasive interpretation is one that would be found plausible by any fair and self-conscious interpreter who engaged in the same sort of research practices - listening, observing, reading, and so on. That, of course, is impossible, so the notion of an acceptable interpretation is always contested and contestable and is always a matter of offering a plausible account within an accepted categorical scheme and within a particular professional setting, with its scholarly idiom and role-specific obligations...
So however self-evident this claim might seem to some readers, it needs to be reaffirmed, because the authorial voice of most academic studies of religion fails to make it clear: as theorists make sense of narratives, artifacts, and practices they are always situated.
In this chapter, I meet my role-specific obligation to reflect on the field's constitutive term by offering a definition of religion, a positioned sighting that highlights movement and relation... Religions are confluences of organic-cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing on human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries.
This definition, like most others, is hardly transparent. I doubt that, upon reading it, you thought to yourself: Well ,thanks for clearing that up. Offering a dense definition of this complex term doesn't end my professional obligations or settle the issue. There is much more to say, and I try to say it in these last three chapters. Attending to each word and phrase, here I explain my choice of tropes and lay out some of the theoretical commitments inscribed in this definition...
... Crossing And Dwelling: A Theory Of Religion, Thomas A Tweed
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