What do you think?
Rate this book
Method as Identity: Manufacturing Distance in the Academic Study of Religion
Method as Manufacturing Distance in the Academic Study of Religion emphasizes the inexorable influence that social identities exert in shaping methodological choices within the academic study of religion, as witnessed in sui generis appeals to particularity and reliance on (or rejection of) identity-based standpoints. Can data speak back, and if so, would scholars have ears to listen? With a refreshing hip hop sensibility, Miller and Driscoll argue that what cultural theorist Jean-François Bayart refers to as a “battle for identity” forces a necessary confrontation with the (impact of) social identities (and, their histories) haunting our fields of study. These complex categorical specters make it nearly impossible to untether the categories of identity that we come to study from the identity of categories shaping our methodological lenses. Treating method as an identity-revealing technique of distance-making between the “proper” scholar and the less-than-scholarly advocate for religion, Miller and Driscoll examine a variety of discursive milieus of vagueness (consider for instance “essentialism,” “origins,” “authenticity”) at work in the contemporary discussion of “critical” methods that lack the necessary specificity for doing the heavy-lifting of analytically handling the asymmetrical dimensions of power part and parcel to social identification. Through interdisciplinary discussions that draw on thinkers including Charles H Long, Bruce Lincoln, Russell T. McCutcheon, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, C. Wright Mills, Laurel C. Schneider, William D. Hart, Tomoko Masuzawa, Anthony B. Pinn, bell hooks, Roderick Ferguson, John L. Jackson, Jasbir Puar, and Jean-François Bayart, among others, Method as Identity intentionally blurs the lines classifying “proper” scholarly approach and proper “objects” of study. With an intentional effort to challenge the de facto disciplinary segregation marking the field and study of religion today, Method as Identity will be of interest to scholars involved in discussions about theory and method for the study of religion, and especially researchers working at the intersections of identity, difference, and classification—and the politics thereof.
264 pages, Hardcover
Published November 26, 2018
1 person is currently reading
9 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Read
January 10, 2023• the discursive brand of critical method is necessary for the study of religion, yet ill-equipped to handle the complexity of identity as it relies on (and structures) the category of experience—leaving (established) critical approaches hopelessly “white” in allowing no room for experience to augment the relative “color” (i.e., opera- tional acts of diverse identification) enacted in (this) critical approach.
• Can any observer truly remove themselves or their social identifications from either the methodology or motivation sparking critique? Isn’t “scientific” method just as subject to the instabilities and scrutiny of discursivity as the unscientific “method” that originally spurred critical interest in analysis?
• the not-so-disinterested interests3 of the analyst remain all but invisible in what has come to be called the critical method or approach espoused by Wiebe and championed as the “proper” approach to the academic study of religion by various voices in the field today, even while those interests exert influence in practice.
• We hoped to address and examine what we perceived as a not-so-tacit assumption in the study of religion that something called “method” is somehow, presumably by degree of observation, immune to critique of identity-interested particularity from assumed “objects of study.” We argue that what cultural theorist Jean- François Bayart refers to as a “battle for identity”5 forces a necessary confron- tation with the (impact of) social identities (and their histories) haunting our fields of study, that shape both the data of scholarship and the scholarship of data. These complex categorical specters make it nearly impossible to unte- ther the categories of identity that we come to study from the identification of categories shaping the theoretical and methodological assumptions concern- ing the properly “academic”6 in the study of religion today. ****THESIS
• If the object of our study (e.g., religion) is not immune from the social interests that create it (and its manifold definitions, uses, etc.), then neither, really, can a critical method provide prophylaxis against the impact of similar interests on our handling of that data.
• The abbreviated over-determinacy at work in academic shorthand(s) and catchphrases (e.g., “critical method and theory”) are rhetorical techniques that manufacture discursive milieus of (a kind of) unmoored and universalized vagueness that unduly smuggles in the categorical Others marking what it is not—unique, particular, specific, authentic, and so on. Such rhetorical devices curate environments of fabricated generalizability whereby sup- positions or implications of theories x and y, or methods y and x are dis- tant (enough) from the social identities (race, religions, etc.) making such discourse, in the first instance, possible.
• the work of classifying, in fact classifies and telegraphs more than the effects of mere approach (i.e., the how) to data (i.e., the what). For many in the “aca- demic” study of religion, an approach such as the phenomenological (by way of theology) is assumed to lack the necessary merit as a “scientific” category in its perceived inability to parse claims to identity under its confessional moniker, on one hand. On the other, an asymmetrical overreliance on the notion of “religion as a human science” continues among a second wave of scholars (paradoxically) persuaded by both postmodern thought and the mod- ern promise of pristine method. Such a posture takes the notion of identity’s instability seriously enough to see it organized by/at work in (the category of) religion (as identity) insomuch as the “operational acts of identification” endemic to the strategies (such as nostalgia, authenticity, etc.) enabling reli- gion, invariably signify on the human interests of identity. However, this crit- ical accounting is most often followed by an appeal to methodological rigor assumed to hold promise for identity-free “critical” claims or descriptions on/ about the data and techniques under analysis.
• The historical prevalence of “theory and method” as necessary for doing “proper” work in the academic study of religion tends to homogenize “all other” approaches as doing “religious” (read: identity-based) work. For these reasons, we suggest that there exists a deep disciplinary segregation that, despite approach, structures how discourse in the field is classified based on the what of the identity of the data (e.g., theologically assumed approaches of black religion, black theology, womanist theology, etc., vs. the academic study of religion—e.g., history of religions, social scientific approaches, etc.)
• the academic study of religion is marked by veritable moments of panic (over its credibility and identity) wherein concerns over method or theory arise as critical anxieties about the shape and direction of the field.
• in defense of selfhood,” could it be that scholars of religion are “trying to remain altogether private men?”
• In a variety of ways, we tend to treat method as an always-been category that has remained constant, when, much like concepts such as “religion” and “authority,” it is too, in the end, both manufactured product and effect.
• Method, as it so grossly did at the inception of the modern study of religion, undercuts its utility if unable to situate itself historically and internalize its historicity with respect to goals, limits, and motives. Such a failure or incapacitated method is not the result of the inability to do it properly, but rather, the consequence of our belief in the neutral (scientific) name we have assigned to the ideological circumstances whereby a European world became “modern” by the “anti-modern” it sought so obsessively to mark as its antithesis. the shape-shifty identity work we have come to call method is (and has always been) quite good at producing semblances of knowledge, but not so productive in turning the social theoretic mirror of analysis onto its own operative rationales and logics of practice.
• THE QUESTION: would a “critical” method have the capacity to account for standpoints that know very well of their instabilities, and would it have the dexterity or courage to account for its own experiential standpoint?
• Intro
• method as an identity-revealing technique of distance making. Such that method involves (and reveals) travel.
• METHOD DEF: DISTANCE MAKING
• such a methodologically induced posture of experiential abstinence works to conceal particular human interests impacting our analyses by manu- facturing “critical” distance through various theoretical and methodological techniques that seek to buffer the battle between academic duty and the encroaching demands of proximal subjective identity and experience-based interests.
• Considering that the framework of prehistory and history relies on texts and language, then scholars of religion are in a methodological sense, literally prevented from seeing “religious” capacity in those rendered as “empirical others.”
• BUT If the historian of religions studies the “foreign” religions, but there are no foreign religions, then what, exactly, was or is the rationale for the history of religions (as specialization) and the study of religion, generally?
• The (subject-obsessed) distance-making method of method is concretized in the nineteenth-century European stance on religion as euphemism for “civi- lization.” A process which, as briefly discussed above, heavily relied on the “empirical other” to study the thing they had already rendered absent in the “empirical other”—“religion.” *********
• The empirical other never gets to make use of the utility of claiming “religion” or of rejecting “religion.” By this estimation, the move to deconstruct categories is less historical outgrowth of the Enlightenment, and more an ongoing program of social distinction making authorized by some through claims to the Enlightenment. Lab rats cannot be scientists, too.
• In many ways, the history of religions has never actually been about seeing or identifying “religion” in the Other, but about not seeing religion in the Oth- ers as to preserve it for the European.
• Can any observer truly remove themselves or their social identifications from either the methodology or motivation sparking critique? Isn’t “scientific” method just as subject to the instabilities and scrutiny of discursivity as the unscientific “method” that originally spurred critical interest in analysis?
• the not-so-disinterested interests3 of the analyst remain all but invisible in what has come to be called the critical method or approach espoused by Wiebe and championed as the “proper” approach to the academic study of religion by various voices in the field today, even while those interests exert influence in practice.
• We hoped to address and examine what we perceived as a not-so-tacit assumption in the study of religion that something called “method” is somehow, presumably by degree of observation, immune to critique of identity-interested particularity from assumed “objects of study.” We argue that what cultural theorist Jean- François Bayart refers to as a “battle for identity”5 forces a necessary confron- tation with the (impact of) social identities (and their histories) haunting our fields of study, that shape both the data of scholarship and the scholarship of data. These complex categorical specters make it nearly impossible to unte- ther the categories of identity that we come to study from the identification of categories shaping the theoretical and methodological assumptions concern- ing the properly “academic”6 in the study of religion today. ****THESIS
• If the object of our study (e.g., religion) is not immune from the social interests that create it (and its manifold definitions, uses, etc.), then neither, really, can a critical method provide prophylaxis against the impact of similar interests on our handling of that data.
• The abbreviated over-determinacy at work in academic shorthand(s) and catchphrases (e.g., “critical method and theory”) are rhetorical techniques that manufacture discursive milieus of (a kind of) unmoored and universalized vagueness that unduly smuggles in the categorical Others marking what it is not—unique, particular, specific, authentic, and so on. Such rhetorical devices curate environments of fabricated generalizability whereby sup- positions or implications of theories x and y, or methods y and x are dis- tant (enough) from the social identities (race, religions, etc.) making such discourse, in the first instance, possible.
• the work of classifying, in fact classifies and telegraphs more than the effects of mere approach (i.e., the how) to data (i.e., the what). For many in the “aca- demic” study of religion, an approach such as the phenomenological (by way of theology) is assumed to lack the necessary merit as a “scientific” category in its perceived inability to parse claims to identity under its confessional moniker, on one hand. On the other, an asymmetrical overreliance on the notion of “religion as a human science” continues among a second wave of scholars (paradoxically) persuaded by both postmodern thought and the mod- ern promise of pristine method. Such a posture takes the notion of identity’s instability seriously enough to see it organized by/at work in (the category of) religion (as identity) insomuch as the “operational acts of identification” endemic to the strategies (such as nostalgia, authenticity, etc.) enabling reli- gion, invariably signify on the human interests of identity. However, this crit- ical accounting is most often followed by an appeal to methodological rigor assumed to hold promise for identity-free “critical” claims or descriptions on/ about the data and techniques under analysis.
• The historical prevalence of “theory and method” as necessary for doing “proper” work in the academic study of religion tends to homogenize “all other” approaches as doing “religious” (read: identity-based) work. For these reasons, we suggest that there exists a deep disciplinary segregation that, despite approach, structures how discourse in the field is classified based on the what of the identity of the data (e.g., theologically assumed approaches of black religion, black theology, womanist theology, etc., vs. the academic study of religion—e.g., history of religions, social scientific approaches, etc.)
• the academic study of religion is marked by veritable moments of panic (over its credibility and identity) wherein concerns over method or theory arise as critical anxieties about the shape and direction of the field.
• in defense of selfhood,” could it be that scholars of religion are “trying to remain altogether private men?”
• In a variety of ways, we tend to treat method as an always-been category that has remained constant, when, much like concepts such as “religion” and “authority,” it is too, in the end, both manufactured product and effect.
• Method, as it so grossly did at the inception of the modern study of religion, undercuts its utility if unable to situate itself historically and internalize its historicity with respect to goals, limits, and motives. Such a failure or incapacitated method is not the result of the inability to do it properly, but rather, the consequence of our belief in the neutral (scientific) name we have assigned to the ideological circumstances whereby a European world became “modern” by the “anti-modern” it sought so obsessively to mark as its antithesis. the shape-shifty identity work we have come to call method is (and has always been) quite good at producing semblances of knowledge, but not so productive in turning the social theoretic mirror of analysis onto its own operative rationales and logics of practice.
• THE QUESTION: would a “critical” method have the capacity to account for standpoints that know very well of their instabilities, and would it have the dexterity or courage to account for its own experiential standpoint?
• Intro
• method as an identity-revealing technique of distance making. Such that method involves (and reveals) travel.
• METHOD DEF: DISTANCE MAKING
• such a methodologically induced posture of experiential abstinence works to conceal particular human interests impacting our analyses by manu- facturing “critical” distance through various theoretical and methodological techniques that seek to buffer the battle between academic duty and the encroaching demands of proximal subjective identity and experience-based interests.
• Considering that the framework of prehistory and history relies on texts and language, then scholars of religion are in a methodological sense, literally prevented from seeing “religious” capacity in those rendered as “empirical others.”
• BUT If the historian of religions studies the “foreign” religions, but there are no foreign religions, then what, exactly, was or is the rationale for the history of religions (as specialization) and the study of religion, generally?
• The (subject-obsessed) distance-making method of method is concretized in the nineteenth-century European stance on religion as euphemism for “civi- lization.” A process which, as briefly discussed above, heavily relied on the “empirical other” to study the thing they had already rendered absent in the “empirical other”—“religion.” *********
• The empirical other never gets to make use of the utility of claiming “religion” or of rejecting “religion.” By this estimation, the move to deconstruct categories is less historical outgrowth of the Enlightenment, and more an ongoing program of social distinction making authorized by some through claims to the Enlightenment. Lab rats cannot be scientists, too.
• In many ways, the history of religions has never actually been about seeing or identifying “religion” in the Other, but about not seeing religion in the Oth- ers as to preserve it for the European.
March 13, 2021
If one commonly held belief undergirds the academic study of religion, it is the objective stance maintained between the critical scholar and their object of study, Driscoll and Miller maintain. They problematize said objectivity as not inhering in method and not only argue that method is “an identity-revealing technique of distance making” (P.1) but also that “the substance of religious studies is identity” (p.182). Their deconstructive work centers around identity – in this case white, male, western identity – as religious scholars’ blind spot, from which they perceive the categories of objective scholarship as opposed to subjective experience. Basically, they argue that the objectivity upon which the field claims to be based is but an illusion, a nostalgia for what never was and never can be.
Academic religious studies has historically defined itself as the study of the empirical other, as opposed to theology’s confessional approach. Therefore ““proper” method for the field is not politically disinterested, but it is the active distancing of “us” from “them” by any methodological means necessary.” (p.12). They expound upon in the category of black religion in chapter 4, the core of their argument. Blackness is a constructed category of the empirical other that creates a false binary of white vs black: normative vs foreign, objective method vs. subjective experience. It is a binary designed to continually preserve the object of religious studies as a distinct other for the white scholar, and becomes a black reclamation and a rejection of stereotyping. Reclamation becomes a diasporic tactic which “overemphasizes and overdetermines black identity, making [it] … seemingly homogenous and stable … and black religion becomes the conduit by which “home” or “homeland” is found again” (p.123).
Deconstructing academic religious studies and hence ridding it of the illusion of objectivity and scientificity, Miller and Driscoll now call for religious studies to focus on this “battle for identity” (p.12) by calling for the “embrace of self-consciousness as a method as paranoia, and paranoia as a method to ensure continual self-consciousness” (p.211/212), through a “constant “semiotics of suspicion” (p.215-216).
In recent decades, the empirical other has risen in her own right and challenged its academic, white othering. This is true of black religion, Islamic studies, so-called Orientalism, minority traditions and multiple others. This both complements Driscoll and Miller’s arguments and challenges its assumption that the field of religious studies has remained ambivalent concerning the empirical other to this day.
And yet, a further complication of the (artificial and yet very real) insider/outsider distinction is that the empirical other now speaks to white scholarship as an academic. The outsiders make it into the ‘privileged’ academic insider group because they have been schooled in the same methods and critiques, and hence they neither belong completely to their insider scrutinized group nor to white academia. Academia both empowers and estranges them; it forms their own – paranoid – identity. Here, Driscoll and Miller would contend, is academia’s most faithful priest: the experiencing, subjective, and paranoidly self-conscious critical scholar. “It was the making of something so essential and endemic as racial and gendered coding that cultivated and shaped their experience of transparency.” P.210
Academic religious studies has historically defined itself as the study of the empirical other, as opposed to theology’s confessional approach. Therefore ““proper” method for the field is not politically disinterested, but it is the active distancing of “us” from “them” by any methodological means necessary.” (p.12). They expound upon in the category of black religion in chapter 4, the core of their argument. Blackness is a constructed category of the empirical other that creates a false binary of white vs black: normative vs foreign, objective method vs. subjective experience. It is a binary designed to continually preserve the object of religious studies as a distinct other for the white scholar, and becomes a black reclamation and a rejection of stereotyping. Reclamation becomes a diasporic tactic which “overemphasizes and overdetermines black identity, making [it] … seemingly homogenous and stable … and black religion becomes the conduit by which “home” or “homeland” is found again” (p.123).
Deconstructing academic religious studies and hence ridding it of the illusion of objectivity and scientificity, Miller and Driscoll now call for religious studies to focus on this “battle for identity” (p.12) by calling for the “embrace of self-consciousness as a method as paranoia, and paranoia as a method to ensure continual self-consciousness” (p.211/212), through a “constant “semiotics of suspicion” (p.215-216).
In recent decades, the empirical other has risen in her own right and challenged its academic, white othering. This is true of black religion, Islamic studies, so-called Orientalism, minority traditions and multiple others. This both complements Driscoll and Miller’s arguments and challenges its assumption that the field of religious studies has remained ambivalent concerning the empirical other to this day.
And yet, a further complication of the (artificial and yet very real) insider/outsider distinction is that the empirical other now speaks to white scholarship as an academic. The outsiders make it into the ‘privileged’ academic insider group because they have been schooled in the same methods and critiques, and hence they neither belong completely to their insider scrutinized group nor to white academia. Academia both empowers and estranges them; it forms their own – paranoid – identity. Here, Driscoll and Miller would contend, is academia’s most faithful priest: the experiencing, subjective, and paranoidly self-conscious critical scholar. “It was the making of something so essential and endemic as racial and gendered coding that cultivated and shaped their experience of transparency.” P.210
Read
July 25, 2021It seems like a small-circle talk surrounding several organizations: International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR), AAR, and UChicago. The "Western" method crisis in 1958 Tokyo IAHR Congress is interesting and worth noting though.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews