ROAD MAP

Key Terms:
• Colonialism
• A practice of domination in which a nation state exercises control over
“others”, such as a dependent country, territory or people.
• Distinct from imperialism in the sense that colonialism seeks to take up
residence in the spaces that have been imperialized.
• European colonialism of the early modern and modern periods has been so
rapid, extensive and intensive that the study of its impact on the world has
become a preoccupation in numerous humanistic fields.
• An entire field of scholarship, Post-Colonial Studies, has developed to
scrutinize and theorize its implications.
Key Terms
• Agency
• Choice, the ability to act with intention.
• Causal force, the ability to “make history.”
• Structure
• Those presences—material or mental—that may constrain a subject’s range of
agency.
• How much “agency” do colonial subject (and, indeed, the “agents of
colonization” themselves) exercise within the structures of colonialism?
• Asad: You may be able to ad lib lines in the play, but who has written the
plot?
• Wenger: Can colonized peoples turn the structures to their favor?
• King: Richard G. Fox and the Sikh Appropriation of “Orientalism”
Why Start With Multiple Weeks on
Categories and Colonialism?
Pros:
• This is the conversation that has brought the field on religious studies into
its most profoundly self-conscious engagement with the category of religion.
• We cannot begin any study of “religion” without a consideration of the
rhetorical and institutional forces that have created that category.
• To decenter the discipline is to, hopefully, open up new vistas of exploration
for a group of budding scholars.
• It would be ethically unacceptable to me to launch into the a conversation
about religious without first discussing the legacies of colonialism and
subjugation that the academic discussion of religion has so often carried.
Why Start With Multiple Weeks on
Colonialism and Post-colonialism?
Cons:

If we start with the critique, and thus decenter the conversation, do we

ever get a sense of what is being critiqued and why it is so entrenched
in the first place?

Do we fail to see the historical developments that derive from these

theories?
Why Start With Multiple Weeks on
Colonialism and Post-colonialism?

To disabuse you of the notion that the academy’s hands are clean in its
“scientific” approach to religious studies.

To remind us that the way we talk about these things matters.

How do we handle all of the reading?
• 1. Sacrifice everything else on the altar of your Theories and Methods
reading.
• 2. Give up.
• 3. Make a good faith effort to engage these texts, recognizing that you
are benefitting from the process as well as the product.
Why Do We Have to Read So Much?
• The exercise of cognitive muscles.
• To hear an argument developed from beginning to end.
• To watch a scholar at work.
• To avoid univocality.

• You must read strategically…this course is not designed to ruin your

health, your happiness or otherwise derail your life.
Why do we have to write so little?
• The ability to distill is a useful intellectual skill.

• Precisely to remind you that you are not meant to master every nook
and cranny of every chapter, but to read for essential arguments.

• Housekeeping on the Writing:

• 10 minute grace period
• 24 hour grace period (prearranged)
• Missed section (prearranged paper)
We will do our best to make this
meaningful…
• Durkheim: Religion is a reflection of societal needs.
• Geertz: Religion is a set of symbolic systems that are not just
reflective of society but also shape society…thus we need to
understand the content of religious traditions.
• Assad: To even talk about “religion” is to invoke a historically
constructed category that is driven by society’s power dynamics. If,
like Geertz, you allow any portion of that category to exist prior to, or
above, the social relations, you dangerously blind yourself to the
power dynamics at play.
• What do we study when we say we study “religion”: contents
(symbolic meaning) or categories (instruments of power).
What is the difference between a theory and a
method?
• Method: A way of collecting and presenting data
• Theory: The analytical frame you bring to the data

• Marxist theory
• Historical methodology
• Butlerian theory
• Ethnographic methodology
Theories and Methods
• Sociologists
• The empirical development of theories about the origin, developing, and organization
functioning of human society; the identification of fundamental laws by which societies evolve
and function.
• Theory: Secularization thesis; rational choice theory, the idea that humans make rational
decisions on the basis of costs and benefits.
• Anthropologists
• The description and analysis of live human subjects through first-hand observation and
interaction. Feminist theory presupposes that there is a essential interior identity that desires
autonomy and freedom from oppressive gendered structures and that meaningful human agency
• Historians
• The recovery of material evidence to piece together sequences of causes and effects, to explain
change over time. (Masuzawa and Wenger)
• Theory: Historcism; Durkheimian Sociology
• Theologians
• Systematic thinking about the data of human encounters with the ultimate: not describing the
encounter, not explaining the encounter, but using the encounter as the data for reasoning about
the ultimate and its attendant demands for human thought and behavior.
 The Feedback Loop of the Theories and Methods
• The Literary Turn

• Is rhetoric simply an effort to represent an objective reality that it differs

from?
• Or is rhetoric a constituent element of reality?
• Said’s Orientalism: Pure construct or actual place?
Tomoko Masuzawa
• “I acknowledge the legitimacy of these concerns, though not of a
blanket dismissal of the rhetorical analytical strategy itself….it is
doubtful that there should be definitive answers that would satisfy all
readers once and for all.”

• So she read a lot of stuff and thought carefully about it.

• The problem of paraphrase.

Tomoko Masuzawa
• The Problem She Sets Up:
• The academy has created a field called World Religions.
• It acts as if the decisions about what those are and what gets included
in a book or on a syllabus are self-evident.
• It acts as if it has separated itself from the Christian and even the
European triumphalism with which discussions of global cultures began.
• But if we do a careful genealogy of the field, we see that the category of
“world religions” is historically constructed rather than objectively self-
evident and that the Christian/European assumptions that drove that
historical construction still linger in our discourse in ways that
perpetuate bias (e.g., in discussions of Islam.)
The Building of an Argument
• Start with the result: The early 20th Century field of World Religions
• Go back to a reasonable start to the story (later 1700s).
• Emphasize the Christian assumptions that were present at the start.
• Begin tracing the historical evolutions
• The popularity of comparative theology
• Christianity is uniquely universal: “World Religion”…singular
• 1880s: World Religions
• Buddhism
• Problem of Islam
• Linguistic Science: Innate characteristics of certain groups: broad, creative and expansive or narrow, rigid and
bound. (Agglutination v. Inflection)
• How does Christianity retain its old status as uniquely universal in the face of Buddhism’s priority and
Christianity’s link to Semitic nations: the power of the Aryan pull.
• There is this thing called religion, and the good ones (the ones that look the most like Christianity) should bind
together to face off the common enemy of secularism
• Those who really seemed to be distancing themselves from European triumphalism (e.g., Max Mueller) were
not as influential as we have assumed them to be.
Conclusion
• We need to be aware that discourses that seem self-evident (e.g., the
rhetoric of World Religions) can be freighted with unseen historical
baggage which shaped the real world as we encounter it.
Lucia Hulsether and the CSWR

• Civil academic discourse as academic counterrevolution.

• The scholar and the riddle of intentionality.