Let's talk about #SECSOR: Five Thoughts

I attended the Southeastern Commission for the Study of Religion (SECSOR, #SECSOR, #SECSOR2015) Regional Meeting this past weekend in Nashville, TN.  It was great to catch up with colleagues and hear what they were working on, present a paper that I’d been putting together in bits and pieces over the past year of exams and prospectus, receive some helpful feedback and points of clarification, and drink beers in a Martin Luther-themed brewery (hello Black Abbey Brewery).  Rather than summarize the papers I heard or describe the beverages and food I consumed, I thought it would be good to list a few conversations that will stick with me as I continue to work on developing my teaching and research, so here are five thoughts that arose from conversations and papers:

 1)      The scholar and how “she” works.

• After my panel, my wife remarked that she noticed a colleague and I both consistently referred to a hypothetical scholar with third person feminine pronouns (she, her).  There are issues here where grammar intersects with feminist philosophy and a general wariness regarding the ways that language reinforces universalizing particular understandings of the world (if scholars are consistently referred to as “he”, “him”, etc. then we may come to think of this as a purely male role (same goes for many other titles and terms)).  Some issues that we raised in this post-panel discussion were summarized by another colleague who said “using ‘she’ and ‘her’ isn’t solving the problem, just shifting the emphasis.”  On the one hand, if I must use a singular pronoun, I tend to err on “her” side of the argument, but on the other, if gendered essentialism is the problem then I’m not really helping…this act can therefore be seen as a self-aggrandizing gesture that says “look how open-minded I am” while continuing to reinforce an either/or gender binary and an essentialist view of social roles.  We didn’t solve the problem (I still think using “his or her” is cumbersome...) in this discussion, but it is certainly, in my humblest of opinions, worth reflecting on.

2)      Economics and Religion, Materiality and Spirituality

• Another paper by a colleague examined zakat in early Islam as delineating moral boundaries by prescribing specific modes of being for both the tax payer and the alms receiver.  An attendant at the panel suggested that this focus on taxes reflects a broader emphasis on materiality and not spirituality and he wondered whether this pendulum would be swinging back the other way any time soon.  I suggested that the “either/or” might not be a good way to approach the “material/spiritual” divide and then I rambled for a minute…upon reflection, though, I think I was trying to emphasize the way that appeals to certain forms of authority (“religious”, “political”, “immaterial”) serve material interests.  In this way the two categories (or maybe discourses?) aren’t opposed but tend to work in concert in contests over various resources and group membership.

3)      Who are we giving voice to?  Should we be concerned?

• A third paper by an FSU colleague looked at Franklin Graham’s longstanding interactions with the Middle East in order to contextualize and examine remarks he made post-9/11 about Islam.  While I do think that these types of remarks and these types of social actors warrant analysis, the presider of this panel suggested that we consider who we are giving voice to in our work – certainly a move reminiscent of J.Z. Smith’s statement that the scholar’s choice of data must be examined.  Further, this follows Bruno Latour’s contention that social science should examine the processes by which objects become “matters of concern” rather than mere “matters of fact” (and, arguably, vice-versa as concern about these objects becomes naturalized or taken for granted.  In our field, then, we continue to give voice to some “religious” actors and, thereby, provide a growing body of knowledge about what constitutes our object of study, for better or for worse…certainly considering the effects of data selection is important but I tend to waffle on the ethical imperative of the scholar to evaluate her choice of data (there I go with the “her” again…

4)      What theories, methods, or schools of thought do we dismiss and are we rightfully doing so?

• Another paper by an FSU colleague…I guess I’m a company man, after all…examined what he considered to be the premature and problematic dismissal of phenomenological approaches to religion by certain scholars in the field.  While I don’t pretend to “speak phenomenology”, I do think that an orientation to the field grounded in the individual’s experience of the world can be helpful as, even in what are deemed “more theoretical” treatments of social groups, certain assumptions of how humans interact with the world are at play (Bourdieu/Durkheim and the idea that social groups reproduce existing structures seems to, at times, impose a motive on social actors, even if at the group level – the claim that actors wish to maintain or improve their material conditions…at the very least implies a relation to the world and an orientation to that relation and a goal…).  In addition to suggesting that there is something in phenomenology worth salvaging, this paper raised the issue, for me, of what approaches I am willing to dismiss or ignore (see: pragmatism, usually) and whether I have given them a fair shake (I *obviously* have, but, you know, the thought’s there).

5)      Taking the "objects of comparison" as data.

• In response to what may have been the most repetitive and hastily read papers (see: mine) a respondent suggested that it is, indeed, a good idea in comparative work to subject the objects of comparison to more sustained critique/examination.  In the field of comparative religious ethics, this shifts things a little bit – instead of comparing two visions of “the good life” in order to contrast differences, note similarities, and propose a way forward I find it more interesting to examine how different visions of “the good life” or “morality” reinforce particular modes of social arrangement and tend to universalize a particular mode of being – the idea that it is most ethical for a certain society to be “free”, for instance, tends to mask, mystify, or otherwise ignore the fact that not all actors in that society experience freedom to the same extent, if at all…so instead of examining what Islamic or Christian arguments about freedom reveal about the society or tradition, I’m more interested in what they assume or conceal - in a way, this is a very similar question that pops up when we ask what "connects" various "Islamic" or "Christian" or "spiritual" or "religious" ways of thinking, talking, and acting...

There were many other excellent papers and conversations over the course of the weekend, but these are five of the issues that stood out as I reflect on the weekend and how it impacts the ways that I continue researching, writing, and teaching.