{"id":1237,"date":"2013-03-01T14:17:44","date_gmt":"2013-03-01T19:17:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/practicalmattersjournal.ecdsdev.org\/?p=1237"},"modified":"2015-10-13T13:03:31","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T17:03:31","slug":"response-to-orsi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/2013\/03\/01\/response-to-orsi\/","title":{"rendered":"Response to Orsi: \u201cDoing Religious Studies with Your Whole Body\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
Download PDF:\u00a0Gade, Response to Orsi<\/a><\/h5>\n
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* Editors’ Note: This essay is part of the Roundtable on Ethnography and Religion.<\/em><\/p>\n

Robert Orsi makes a suggestion for powerful intersubjective understanding of the religious lifeworlds that bind \u201cheaven and earth\u201d and we humans together: he proposes that graduate programs in religious studies \u201crequire for all their students a season of self-reflexive fieldwork among religious practitioners.\u201d We know that religious studies is more than a presentist study of social systems. I think this proposal is more rhetorical than programmatic, relating to concerns Orsi presents about engagement, writing, and the categories of the academic study of religion. I would like to take up each of these ideas in light of the idea of \u201cfieldwork in religious studies,\u201d its limits, and Orsi\u2019s essay. I agree with what he has to say.<\/p>\n

There is a brief point to make at the outset. Orsi appears to carry his position on fieldwork rather farther than does the standard \u201canthropological turn\u201d in religious studies (or the ongoing discovery of \u201creligion\u201d in anthropology). The excitement about ethnographic methods for religious studies built all through the 1990s, and now it is here to stay. This has certainly been the case in my own field, Islamic studies, and even in my own research in the nineties on Qur\u2019anic scripture and performance that theorized (others\u2019) \u201cexperience.\u201d1\u00a0For the study of Islam, and religion more generally, however, Orsi suggests much more than did Edward Said decades ago when he praised Clifford Geertz for pointing to the need to bring real people into the picture (a point that is still made in Islamic studies).2<\/p>\n

Orsi stops short of claiming, however, that fieldwork is good just for its own sake or for the scholar\u2019s sake. We agree: fieldwork in the academic study of religion should not be just for the end of complementing the \u201creligious experience\u201d of the investigator in some personally meaningful way. Although I have worked on emotion and affect since that first project on the recited Qur\u2019an, for example, the fieldnotes, the write-up, and the theory were not carried out in terms of sharing directly in informants\u2019 performative, educative, or sentimental experience. In fact, many of the important things fieldwork can do in religious studies relate to limits as much as to “wholeness” with respect to experience, expression, and understanding. I would now like to consider such limits, below, considering three key points in Orsi\u2019s essay.<\/p>\n

First, in the title, Orsi tells us that \u201cyour whole body\u201d should do the study of religion. Orsi writes with depth and great sensitivity on bodies and Roman Catholic piety, here and elsewhere; however, in this piece, we do not read a theory of embodiment exactly. Orsi maybe means instead an \u201cengagement,\u201d perhaps what he calls elsewhere a \u201cmoral conversation,\u201d which would break down complacency. It is often true that being face-to-face with actual people prompts attention and possibly irreducible \u201cwholeness.\u201d However, I am not so sure that it is always, or primarily, the experience of fieldwork that provides this in the academic study of religion\u2014or even that this is what it should be expected to provide. Fieldwork does not automatically, nor does it always, produce results of authenticity and engagement in religious studies, nor is it really safe to say that requiring students to do it would make our students any more authentic or engaged than they would otherwise tend to be.<\/p>\n

I was invited by the editors of\u00a0Practical Matters<\/em>\u00a0to use my own fieldwork as an example. I spent most of a year in Cambodia engaging the lifeworlds of survivors of the regime of Democratic Kampuchea (the \u201cPol Pot\u201d era), and also considering how religious revitalization overlapped with experiences of recovery. I edited a book of survivor accounts (The Cham Rebellion: Survivors\u2019 Stories from the Villages<\/em>\u00a0by Ysa Osman) and heard many more stories in the field from informants, friends, and a few called \u201cfamily.\u201d3\u00a0In work not directly related to documentation of the Muslim experience of what is called the \u201cCambodian genocide,\u201d it was still common, nevertheless, to be shown scarred landscapes and bodies, living and dead. In my fieldwork, this was often the painfully formal, awkwardly distanced introduction I was given to an important place or person. I came to understand that this was not necessarily a gesture of intimacy, but rather an appeal. I was challenged to write and theorize about these moments not primarily as an immediate felt response, but rather in terms of imaginaries of patronage and structures of development (the same framework into which I was also cast as an investigator).<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s only in America that we (Americans) can expect students to \u201cunderstand\u201d subjects through themselves\u2014and maybe, too, this is a positive exceptionalism for the field brought about by a North Americanist turn in religious studies theory overall in the past decade. Orsi\u2019s beautiful book,\u00a0Between Heaven and Earth<\/em>, blends reflections on fieldwork with personal experience.4\u00a0Family ties, like the ones about which Orsi writes that bind us in and to \u201cthe field,\u201d can make scholars more engaged and entwined, even if we ultimately \u201cwrite about\u201d something or someone else. But what matters in the end for the discipline is writing (including what goes without saying and what remains unsaid). In any case, it\u2019s safe to say that there are many kinds of fieldwork that, while \u201cself-reflexive\u201d (Orsi\u2019s term), do not promote much empathetic engagement in the course of writing in the way that I think Orsi imagines. Examples come to mind of fieldwork conducted according to many disciplines without working knowledge of a language spoken by subjects, including studies of Cambodia, some survey-based research, and empirical work on theories of mind.<\/p>\n

Second, Orsi writes that to encourage fieldwork is an \u201cexistential and ethical\u201d position, which relates to pedagogy and method in religious studies. There ought to be no limited, \u201cillusory wholeness,\u201d he writes, no smugness nor the \u201cshells\u201d of self-protective stances. He emphasizes \u201cthe engine of our theory paused.\u201d But, just like a whole-body problem above, I am not yet convinced that it is the religious experience of fieldwork that overcomes challenges of an overly thin description, or at least not as much as a radical empiricist of an American phenomenological tradition, like William James, could make us willing to believe. And, as Orsi\u2019s own work shows profoundly, sources of the self are hybrid and fragmentary and subject to the mechanisms of memory.<\/p>\n

Orsi argues that a related pause in research and writing happens automatically, in his account of the investigator who returns to his or her campus to reread accounts of suffering. The moments of interruption Orsi rehearses in his piece interrupt not really in the field but in our studies (so is it more fieldwork that our students or we would need at such a juncture?). I think what Orsi shows being \u201cpaused\u201d self-reflexively in the discipline of religious studies is not theory, but the hard work of writing. Like Jonathan Z. Smith, Orsi here challenges our limits of explanation in the academic study of religion.5\u00a0This is the \u201cpractice\u201d I read about in his piece, which, as he states, is one that ideally \u201cscholars of religion continue throughout the rest of their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Orsi suggests that a scholar\u2019s block is not always exceptional, not necessarily a limit case nor a case-sensitive exception. Coming naturally as a response, it also may be generalized, after the brilliant work of Daniel Gold, as a critical matter of writing on religion.6\u00a0This notion overlaps with classic problems of ethnographic writing, but expands them as well: for example, Gold describes a scholar\u2019s \u201cfascination\u201d with the religions of others, assimilated through his or her non-\u201creligious sensibility.\u201d Most important, Gold recognizes the \u201cambivalent feelings\u201d scholars may have when they \u201clike religion\u201d and also \u201cbelieve in science\u201d\u2014 feelings that \u201cdraw them to the stuff of religious life but keep them twice removed from it.\u201d7\u00a0In a \u201cself-reflexive\u201d moment that demands analysis, which is naturally impossible, more fieldwork and less theory could help\u2014 or maybe not. Times like these already lead naturally to take refuge in the documentary (I try to make films now); \u201ctranscription,\u201d according to Orsi; or in the all-too-fine details of \u201ctranslation.\u201d8\u00a0Gold identifies such a dilemma of writing as a fundamental problem of \u201caesthetics\u201d related to the categories used to analyze religion.<\/p>\n

Third, Orsi writes that he seeks \u201cwhat religion is,\u201d not what is bounded or merely in \u201ccontrol.\u201d This statement seems prompted not by essentialism, but rather by a \u201cfailure of empiricism,\u201d as he writes: for one thing, our data are now just too big. If the \u201cfield\u201d includes cosmological and internal space, the lifeworlds we study truly are unruly. However, should it follow that theory is an obstacle to explanation or understanding, especially if our ideas are what directed us into \u201cthe field\u201d to start? Even fifty years ago, Clifford Geertz recognized moral and existential overload like this (\u201ccomplexity\u201d) as his new anthropology of religion challenged \u201cinterpretation\u201d and \u201ccommitment,\u201d \u201cpresence\u201d and \u201cencounter\u201d to stretch to their very \u201climits\u201d in his famous essay.9\u00a0Nobody wants to ignore salient data, overlook significant details, or ever miss the point. Also, good theory should never prevent us from seeing anything relevant that is really there.<\/p>\n

Alongside \u201cpausing theory,\u201d then, an elegant paradox is not a surprise when Orsi states that the \u201ctheoretical languages\u201d of the human sciences and especially \u201ctheological terms\u201d need to be extended beyond present limits. This also presents a practical matter: an actual interruption so profound that it requires the recovery of \u201cterms that theologians themselves have either abandoned or suborned into doctrinal and philosophical squabbles.\u201d More fieldwork all by itself does not offer a very great solution here either\u2014but it points to good problems in the academic study of religion. For example, Orsi calls for an expansion of the \u201chuman side\u201d of religion to include unseen forces and futures, as well as the ethical connections that scholars share with our subjects.<\/p>\n

I support what Orsi has to say. In the fieldwork project I now have carried out over three years in Indonesia on religion and environmentalism, the problem is a simple one that all our bodies share\u2014the degradation of the earth which sustains all life itself. Religion and ecological challenge also present systems with more variables than academic theory is equipped to handle in religious studies, especially when real people and their lived ecosystems are present in analysis. This confrontation confuses self-reflexivity, as it is a full-scale collision with ethnographic \u201ccomplexity,\u201d as Geertz first meant the term in \u201cReligion as a Cultural System.\u201d<\/p>\n

So far, many of the religious environmental activists in my research field (in this case, Muslim Indonesia), as in the United States and elsewhere, take upon themselves a task of perception: they ask how to get others to be present, embodied, and engaged enough to really care about ecological crisis. At first it seems like a straightforward academic assignment comes out of this: to analyze messages contextually (do people want to change attitudes? light bulbs? rethink legal norms? transform political economy?) However, as I come home to view and review preaching out of the religious imagination, the norms and aesthetics of seen and unseen worlds shift into new zones of existential immediacy and mathematical difficulty. For example, micro- and macro-cosmic ecological futures, the scientific and divine consequences of present action, are described in my materials in terms of esoteric ideas. Even theories of apocalypticism are inadequate to explain how real people confront the end of this world and the unknown state of a world to come in intellectual, affective, and embodied modes. Writing up field materials poses a theoretical and ethical conundrum, for whose solution no scale or dimension, human or non-human, can be ruled out, not by anyone\u2019s account, and for everyone\u2019s sake. And added to that, we are all living it, too, in real times.<\/p>\n

\u201cReligion,\u201d for the sake of an analysis at this point, is not a\u00a0sui generis<\/em>\u00a0category, but it is, nevertheless, one that compels deep analysis, empirically and \u201cessentially,\u201d in the spirit of Orsi\u2019s appeal. In these data, \u201creligion\u201d is the stuff through which people understand and address the idea and reality of the ultimate transformation of human and non-human worlds, as well as their responsibility and struggle in the face of perceived crisis. In the case of Muslim religious responses to environmental change, Islam is a resource to which humans turn to approach environmental well-being, and warn of catastrophe, while simultaneously it promises tools to apprehend cosmological and ethical complexity itself. What makes writing on this naturally impossible, then, are not the fuzzy sets beyond (or \u201cbetween\u201d) \u201csacred and profane,\u201d or the standard variations on themes of knowledges, local and global, but also a time-driven lack of determinism that should now leave us shaken and unsettled. In this field, to which our \u201cwhole bodies\u201d as well as the biosphere are subject, we must now be present, take pause, and move beyond limitations to share work.<\/p>\n

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Notes<\/h4>\n
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  1. Anna M. Gade,Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion and the Recited Qur\u2019an in Indonesia<\/em>\u00a0(Honolulu: University of Hawai\u2019i Press, 2004) and The Quran: An Introduction (Oxford, U.K.: Oneworld Publications, 2010).<\/li>\n
  2. Edward Said,Orientalism<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 326.<\/li>\n
  3. Ysa Osman,The Cham Rebellion: Survivors\u2019 Stories from the Villages<\/em>, ed. Anna M. Gade (Phnom Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia, 2006).<\/li>\n
  4. Robert Orsi,Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).<\/li>\n
  5. See essays in Jonathan Z. Smith,Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown<\/em>\u00a0(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).<\/li>\n
  6. Daniel Gold,Aesthetics and Analysis in Writing on Religion: Modern Fascinations<\/em>\u00a0(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 5.<\/li>\n
  7. Ibid., 5.<\/li>\n
  8. http:\/\/vimeo.com\/hijau<\/li>\n
  9. Clifford Geertz, \u201cReligion as a Cultural System.\u201d InThe Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Basic Books, 1973), 87-125.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Download PDF:\u00a0Gade, Response to Orsi * Editors’ Note: This essay is part of the Roundtable on Ethnography and Religion. Robert Orsi makes a suggestion for powerful intersubjective understanding of the religious lifeworlds that bind \u201cheaven and earth\u201d and we humans<\/p>\n

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