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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Making Strong Points10/20/2006 18:13:28There has been some discussion in my classes among us first-quarter graduate students about the style of scholarship. Reading Durkheim and Weber and the like, and blown away by the force of the points they make and their rhapsodic certainty, we have started to wonder what has happened to scholarship since. It was they, after all, who defined the field indelably. Mainly the blame falls on the incessant considerations of subjectivity, relativity, and other "postmodern" things. Like "race-gender-class" sensitivity. Because scholars have to be so over-careful, and so self-conscious as to be utterly narrow, it is impossible to say anything significant, like it once was. I find I have virtually no sympathy for this argument. First of all, the advances made in "postmodern" critique (though its name is unfortunate) are profoundly at home in religious studies, which since Frazer and Muller has been utterly muddled in difficulties of self and other. Jonathan Z. Smith, himself a seminal and forceful figure, puts it this way in the first paragraph of Imagining Religion: Religion is solely the creation of the scholar's study. It is created for the scholar's analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy. For this reason, the student of religion, and most particularly the historian of religion, must be relentlessly self-conscious. Indeed, this self-consciousness constitutes his primary expertise, his foremost subject of study. Note that he means "religion" as opposed to the practice and experience of religious things. I would also want to make another point: scholarship today isn't so bad in the forceful points department. Particularly in new areas of study, lots of people are making intrepid explorations and stating them intrepidly. I'm sure when they are followed by others, the things they said so boldly will be roundly criticized. But sometimes it is the subtle point that we need most of all, the article flourished with footnotes and self-corrections and self-awareness. Once the bold points have been made, these littler ones are what we need to stand on when we make our claims in the classroom, when we try to present something as Fact, so far as we know it. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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