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1purport to communicate the self-understandings of, the 22 My larger theoretical point, as will become apparent below, is that human beings do not usually engage in self-representation; instead, more than likely they are simply immersed in, and thereby performing, their complex sociosemantic worlds. Only as a result of the non-participant arriving on the scene, making novel claims and asking unanticipated questions, does the so-called authentic Other engage in acts of self-conscious self-representation. As many before me have argued, the creation of Self/Other is therefore a complexly intertwined process, but this fact does not necessarily mean that the two parties are involved in a collegial conversation.This content downloaded from 165.82.54.63 on Wed, 25 Oct 2017 12:44:56 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
2McCutcheon: On the Limits of the Humanistic Study of Religion 735 September 11 hijackers? Although his work indicates that these disclo- sures can be read as-regardless of how the hijackers themselves may have understood them or how their remaining allies might understand them- highly useful rhetorics that accomplished practical, emotive/sociopoliti- cal ends, I cannot imagine colleagues calling Lincoln's method "chilling" for the way it avoids ever addressing the need to obtain such Others' con- sent for his use of their texts.23 I find it equally difficult to imagine col- leagues criticizing a scholar such as, say, Mark Juergensmeyer (2001), who, despite working very hard to take seriously the self-reports of actors who engage in what he terms religious violence, ends his, Terror in the Mind of God, by concluding that violence "has much to do with" the nature of the religious imagination, which always has had a propen- sity to absolutize and to project images of cosmic war. It also has much to do with social tensions of this moment of history that cry out for absolute solutions, and the sense of political humiliation experienced by men who long to restore an integrity they perceive as lost in the wake of virtually global social and political conflicts. (242) Despite how enlightening these words may have been to many of his readers, it seems clear to me that the people studied by Juergensmeyer were not themselves talking about "the nature of the religious imagination," neither were they talking about cosmic war being merely an "image," and they certainly were not self-diagnosing their actions as attempts to com- pensate for feelings of humiliation. As with Lincoln, so too in the case of Juergensmeyer: these are both instances of higher order theorization that takes as its starting point-as its data, if you will-the disclosures and behaviors of a specific group of human subjects. However, our ability to do this sort of higher order theoretical work is threatened by Orsi's sense of morality, for the research subject's right to challenge what Orsi charac- terized as scholars' "assertions" means that we will have to entertain quite seriously that, in the case of those who engage in acts of religious violence (or what some of them might simply call righteous violence or divine retribution-and here you see the kernel of my point: classification matters!), they might report that they do it simply because this or that powerful, non-empirical being told them to. Period. Full stop. End of story. This is what it means to entertain allowing research subjects to rep- resent themselves in competition with scholarly representations. It means 23 Instead, some U.S. readers (such as Kurzon 2003) might have been angered by the fact that Lincoln found similarities in the rhetorical conventions used in speeches by Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush (e.g., Lincoln 2003: 19-32).This content downloaded from 165.82.54.63 on Wed, 25 Oct 2017 12:44:56 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
3736 Journal of the American Academy of Religion the end of the human sciences as we know them, for it implies using dif- ferent methods for different people, all depending on how closely they agree with-well, let us just be honest for a change-some posited "us." Although I admit that I fear belaboring the point (something I realize I have already done, but, given his own prominent position in our field [i.e., an award-winning author and former president of the AAR], I believe that his charge must be taken very seriously), it is worth consider- ing the issue from yet another angle. As my former colleague Kurtis Schaeffer, who himself studies the politics of medieval Tibetan Bud- dhism, phrased the issue to me one day last year, because the collection of behaviors we have come to know since the nineteenth century as "Tantrism" is widely known by scholars to be regarded by its practitio- ners as based on secret teachings, is someone such as Andre Padoux (1987a; 1987b) to be criticized for letting some indigenous cat out of the bag by writing not one but two encyclopedia articles on it? I have a feel- ing that those who adopt Orsi's position would likely not bat an eye when it came to assessing the legitimacy of scholarship on Tantra, for they likely do not feel bound to keep this particular secret (but why not?).24 And they probably would have no difficulty when, for instance, they read Jeffrey Kripal concluding, in the preface to the second edition of his book on Ramakrishna, that the vocal critics of his book's first edition are deeply conflicted, "whether they know it or not" (1998: xiii; my italics). 24 The question is, must "their" secret be "ours" as well? If so, what do we make of the tremendous body of scholarly, not to mention popular, literature (i.e., everything from self-help manuals to titillation) that today exists on this thing we all seem to know as Tantrism-Mircea Eliade's classic work Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (1990) alone has eighty-four index entries on the topic, one of which is a seventy-three-page chapter entitled "Yoga and Tantrism" which informs readers that "Tantric texts are often composed in an 'intentional language' (sandhd-bhasa), a secret, dark, ambiguous language ... [that] seeks to conceal the doctrine form the noninitiate" (249-250). That examples such as this, drawn from the works of some of the most influential scholars in our field, could be reproduced virtually without end should be obvious; examples pertaining to recent literature on Tantra alone are numerous, for we could cite Kripal's Kali's Child, in which it is argued that the text English readers know as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna is structured as it is "in order to conceal, however intentionally, a secret" (3), David White's examination of the "widely advertised secret practices prescribed and described in sacred and secular literature" in his Kiss of the Yogi (2003: 126), as well as Hugh Urban's recent contributions to Tantric studies (2001a; 2001b; 2003). Are these scholars also to be chided for failing to get the consent form signed before they spilled the beans? See Urban (2001a: 15-19) for a useful discussion of the ethics of research on Tantra: "Either ... we must leave these traditions alone ... or we must risk doing violence to ancient esoteric traditions to which we have no right" (19). Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, the solution Urban offers to what he describes as an insoluble is to study not the secrets themselves (i.e., content) but the strategies that create the phenomenon known as secrecy (i.e., form). With all this in mind, it is curious to ponder the implication Orsi's proposed methodological rule might have for how we view Eliade's entire corpus, given his oft-repeated attempt to disclose and then compare instances of the what he termed the concealed and camouflaged sacred.This content downloaded from 165.82.54.63 on Wed, 25 Oct 2017 12:44:56 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
4McCutcheon: On the Limits of the Humanistic Study of Religion 737 Used in this case, the normative epistemology-at least as a scholar such as Orsi might phrase it-that some would say is signaled by such "whether they know it or not" statements would, at least to some of our peers, more than likely be unproblematic, and thus hardly imperialist.25 Such a statement is likely unproblematic because it reflects a confidence, more than likely shared among many current members of the academy, that sexuality ought not to be considered to be a taboo, shameful, or embarrassing topic and, therefore, that it rightly ought to be but one more lens through which we, as scholars, are entitled to view the lives of other people-whether these other people like it or not.26 So, although such Others no doubt take their own self-understandings as seriously as might Orsi's hypothetical widower, the people who angrily contested Courtright's psychological reading of Shiva and Ganesha's relationship, those who contested Kripal's discussion of homoerotic themes in the life and writings of Ramakrishna, or those who stormed the library in India where Laine worked on the history of "Islamic India" are easily judged by us to have misread and misperformed their own traditions, leaving them wide open for experts to try to account for their puzzling distance from the so-called orthodoxy (as is done whenever we hear such categories as "Fundamentalism" and "political religion" being invoked in contempo- rary geopolitical analysis). Much like the flawed human beings in Isaac Asimov's first collection of short science fiction stories, I, Robot, all these people therefore need to be saved from themselves. For Asimov, robots were up to the challenge, and they set about systematically eliminating us; in the cases I am discussing here, it is the liberal humanist scholar who is prepared to make the tough calls and distinguish between the toothless pious and the radical fanatics, authorizing the former whereas paving the way toward dispensing with the latter by defining them out of "the faithful"-which is nothing other than excommunication by other means. It therefore appears to me that those who speak back indecently (i.e., those who are unwilling to put up with our presumed ability to speak and act as we wish) are no longer counted among the sincere and are there- fore fair game for theorization-and just what are the limits of decency, 25 Readers must be clear: I am not making this charge but trying to imagine how those scholars who wish to (re)authorize the participant would react to statements that presuppose the scholar's so- called privileged insight into other people's subconscious motives. 26 That is to say, some scholars likely see their role not simply to be that of using a category such as sexuality as a legitimate scholarly lens through which to study other people's worlds (i.e., it is part of a scholarly toolbox) but, also, to be that of persuading the so-called inhibited or repressed occupants of these very worlds that they are wrong in seeing it to be out of bounds. My suspicion is that our research subjects detect this distinction and are justifiably angered by those who adopt the latter position.This content downloaded from 165.82.54.63 on Wed, 25 Oct 2017 12:44:56 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
5738 Journal of the American Academy of Religion how are they judged, established, and authorized; these are the questions that ought to attract our attention as social theorists! My hunch, therefore, is that those who adopt Orsi's methodological rule would likely not cri- tique the above-mentioned colleagues for their strong advocacy of a brand of theory-based redescriptive scholarship that unapologetically deviates from a participant's own self-representations and self-interests-so long as these research subjects failed to play by our rules, for in such a case we already know that their self-representations are insincere, inauthentic, duplicitous, fanatical, militant, and maybe even criminal. To bring home my point, consider what a scholar in Orsi's tradition would make of the privilege that Orsi himself exercises when, in his latest book's opening pages, he has the following to say about his own colleagues: Whether contemporary Americans working to understand particular religious phenomena know it or not, they bring to their inquiries local histories. ... Built into the very tools of analysis are hidden normativi- ties, implicit distinctions between "good" and "bad" religions, and these need to be unpacked. (Orsi 2005: 6; my italics) Have his research subjects consented to this much-needed unpacking? If so, as a scholar of religion working in the United States-the research subjects about whom Orsi seems to be making the above claim-I admit that I do not recall signing the form (aside: exactly how does one seek the consent of national groupings we might study?). Or, instead, is this need based on Orsi's own intellectual and political interests, regardless of what his or her subjects think is in their own best interest? Like a house guest coming to stay for the weekend, do we, as scholars, unpack our subjects' baggage only with their consent, or, as seems to be the case here, is some baggage so obviously messy that, as good hosts, we have every right to tidy it up, whether invited or not? Come to think of it, because we are told in the above quotation that this baggage is hidden to the people about whom he writes (echoing that earlier "whether they know it or not" statement), it makes little sense even to think of asking them about it-much less seeking their permission to neaten it up-for, by defini- tion, they do not even know it is there, much less that it is not neatly ordered.27 If, as Orsi goes on to write, "religious practitioners usually do not like to hear" what he characterizes as his own "critical, analytic questions" 27 We see here some indication of why the use of Freudian theory by some of those scholars in question may have sparked such controversy, for it necessarily presupposes that the scholar's object of study is unknown to participants themselves. When this assumption can, and cannot, be invoked is the interesting question that requires attention (as already begun by Godlove).This content downloaded from 165.82.54.63 on Wed, 25 Oct 2017 12:44:56 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
6McCutcheon: On the Limits of the Humanistic Study of Religion 739
7(12), then given the moral requirement to seek subjects' consent, what
8warrant does he have for subjecting the material of their lives to what he
9acknowledges to be unwanted scrutiny? Moreover, what reason could he
10have to invoke the supreme privilege, as he does, of presuming that his
11research subjects have an active subconscious where the latent source of
12the issue lies, undetected by the very people whom he studies? How is this
13any less chilling than any other methodology that treats human disclosures
14as data in need of theorization?
15To see how all this plays out in his own scholarship, consider Orsi's
16latest book's last chapter, which critiques an Alabama journalist, Dennis
17Covington (1995), for silencing the people about whom he wrote a widely
18read book on snake-handling Pentecostal churches in the Appalachian
19region of the United States. In this chapter, Orsi describes Covington's
20explanation for why the people he met, who live in rural northeast
21Alabama's Sand Mountain region, take the last verses of the Gospel of
22Mark, concerning the various signs of a true believer, so seriously:
23[Covington] came to see snake handling as a way for poor, displaced
24people in a ravaged land to contend with and to surmount, at least once
25and a while, with the snakes in their hands, the violence and danger that
26bore down on them in their everyday lives. (Orsi 2005: 180)
27Then, a few pages later, relying on Covington's own ethnographic narrative
28as his own primary source, Orsi describes how one of the leaders of a local
29church who befriended Covington-a man named Punkin' Brownhimself
30sees it:
31Brown believed that it was God present before him that caused him to
32pick up snakes at meetings; he embodied, in other words, the enduring
33power of sacred presence in the modern world and in modern persons'
34imaginations and memories, from which presence is disallowed. (182)
35Indeed, there is considerable distance between the journalist's loosely
36Marxist explanation and Orsi's redescription of Covington's description
37of this one participant's reported self-understanding concerning a powerful
38being who controls the universe ensuring that the following words
39be written in the Gospel of Mark-and taken by followers with deadly
40seriousness:
41And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will
42cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents,
43and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will
44lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover. (Mark 16: 17-18)
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47740 Journal of the American Academy of Religion But are these two accounts in competition (i.e., what, exactly, is the prob- lem with the so-called insider/outsider problem)? If so, then there must exist some vantage point, some fulcrum, from which their differences can be assessed, a point from which one could work toward having Dennis Covington and Punkin' Brown arrive at a balanced understanding and thereby mutual respect. Like many an ethnographer before him, this is the assumption that Covington employs in first making contact with his research subjects (i.e., he engages in participant observation); he befriends his hosts and, eventually, handles snakes in a service and preaches a spontaneous sermon or two of his own. This strategy is of considerable utility to the journalist (providing him with the sort of access that made it possible to obtain his book's many engaging stories)-until, that is, its limit becomes painfully apparent to him-for, taking a little too seriously the impression of unity that was created by his participation in the group, Covington reports, toward the end of his book, how he blundered by making a series of impromptu, public statements during a worship ser- vice concerning his strong views on gender equality, statements that he no doubt took as inspired and self-evident but which, once spoken as part of his sermon, provided the occasion for the local male leadership to cast him out of the group-for they ceased their echoes of his preaching with shouts of "You're in the Word" and "Amen" and, instead, replaced them with cold silence. "You're out of the Word," Covington was finally told, just before Punkin' Brown took the microphone from him and preached an impassioned sermon of his own on the false doctrine of women having authority over men (Covington 1995: 226 ff.). As Covington records it, Punkin' Brown's sermon ended with the preacher catching his eye, saying: "It's a lie, Dennis.... There's no truth in it! It's a sin!" (235). As is all too evident from this brief episode, there is a tremendous price to be paid when we try to overcome the significant gaps and see the study of the Other as an opportunity for nurturing solidarity. When the gap is too great to overlook-and what constitutes "significant" and "too great," now that is the $64,000 question that social theorists need to study-then what do we do? Do we champion the right of participants to interpret and represent their own words and worlds, recognizing that our shared humanity requires us just to sit politely and-recalling that lesson our parents taught us so long ago-keep quiet? Being a scholar myself, I suspect that just listening respectfully is not actually an option. Instead, I bet that we all do precisely what Orsi does in the above quotation: we put our words into their mouths and, for whatever reason, fail to recognize the sound of our own voices. So let me repeat Orsi's report of Punkin' Brown's understanding of snake handling, and, this time, pay careful attention to the important shift signaled by the phrase, "in other words":This content downloaded from 165.82.54.63 on Wed, 25 Oct 2017 12:44:56 UTC
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49McCutcheon: On the Limits of the Humanistic Study of Religion 741
50Brown believed that it was God present before him that caused him to
51pick up snakes at meetings; he embodied, in other words, the enduring
52power of sacred presence in the modern world and in modern persons'
53imaginations and memories, from which presence is disallowed. (my
54italics)
55This is a fascinating rhetorical move, especially given the manner in which
56Covington, just earlier in Orsi's chapter, is criticized rather harshly for
57offering what Orsi describes as a "humiliating" representation of "Punkin'
58Brown"-a name that Orsi here places in quotation marks, presumably
59to distinguish Covington's mere representation from Punkin' Brown
60himself, thereby signaling to Orsi's reader the way the preacher was "constructed"
61and "rendered," as Orsi phrases it, into Covington's version of
62"Punkin' Brown" (2005: 182)-a stereotyped, exotic character that, as Orsi
63puts it, "makes the world safe again for Covington and his readers" (181).
64But paying a little more attention to Orsi's text demonstrates that he
65has made a classic error common to a number of liberal humanist scholars,
66what Wayne Proudfoot has famously called the confusion of descriptive
67reductionism, which scholars all agree must be avoided, with the
68explanatory reduction that inevitably characterizes every scholar's work
69(1985: 96 ff.), for immediately following his attempt to describe (i.e., to
70present) what a research subject might say about his own motives for
71handling snakes (i.e., he handles them because God told him to), Orsi
72signals a transition by means of "in other words" (i.e., to re-present) and
73then goes on to do just that: he offers words other than those the research
74subject might himself offer, all in the guise of describing things from the
75indigenous subject's point of view. Moreover, the other words Orsi offers
76are those of a Eliadean cross-cultural comparativist who understands
77local practices as a disguised instance of an otherwise uniform sacred
78presence, one that is manifested in the actions and artifacts of a diverse
79collection of others, whether or not these people themselves understand
80their behaviors to be but one relative node in a cross-cultural system of
81signification-at least I seriously doubt whether someone such as Punkin'
82Brown, what little I have read of the man, sees it this way. In fact, on
83hearing Orsi's thoughts on how both snake handler and the Hindu pilgrim
84at the shrine of the imprint of Krishna's foot "embodied ... the enduring
85power of sacred presence in the modern world," I can only imagine that
86Punkin' Brown would catch Orsi's eye and sternly reply: "It's a lie, Bob,
87There's no truth in it! It's a sin."
88For, at least according to my ears, snake handlers say something
89remarkably different from a scholarly observer such as Orsi. For instance,
90consider the following quotation, transcribed from an explanation offered by
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93742 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
94Jimmy Williams-the main informant in "They Shall Take Up Serpents,"
95a well-known 1973 documentary on snake handling in east Tennessee.
96Speaking directly to the camera, beside the bed of a man who was "serpent
97bit" at that evening's service, he says:
98The reason that we take these serpents up is the Bible recommends to do
99it and all the apostles did it-everyone that believes. Jesus said these
100signs shall follow them that believe. He said, "In my name shall they cast
101out devils, they shall speak with new tongues, they shall take up serpents,
102and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them. They shall lay
103hands on the sick and they shall recover." Now, we believe that this
104interpretation of the scripture is for them that believe. In other words,
105them that believe, they shall take up serpents.28
106What is his "indigenous theory," as Cabez6n might name it? The Bible
107says to do it, which means that Jesus said to do it. And all of the apostles
108did it. Therefore we do it. Simple as that.29
109At least as I see it, then, Orsi's "other words" concerning the enduring
110power of sacred presence are therefore just that, different words placed
111into a subject's mouth, as if they expressed sentiments lodged deep
112within a subject's subconscious and therefore known only to the careful
113(i.e., privileged) interpreter. To my way of thinking, they are Othering
114words, as is the case with all language and all representation-and this is
115the point that many in the liberal humanist tradition, in their efforts to
116speak on behalf of humanity an sich, utterly fail to comprehend!-and
117not an innocent paraphrase of a universal subject's own self-perceptions.
118Instead, like all acts of signification, Orsi's "other words" are a translation
119of one set of claims into a language that is itself no closer than any other
120to some presumably authentic source of the Nile. To put it simply, all
121"Punkin' Browns" ought to be written in quotation marks, not just
122Covington's but Orsi's and my own as well-for how could either mine
123or Orsi's representation be any closer to the authentic man, for both of
12428 The documentary "They Shall Take Up Serpents" was filmed in early 1973 in Newport,
125Tennessee. Anyone familiar with this film knows that, at its end, viewers are informed that Jimmy
126Williams died on 8 April 1973, while attending a service and ingesting strychnine. My thanks to
127Jennifer Goodman for transcribing this segment of the film.
12829 That the ethnographer who has obviously posed some such question to him as "Why do you
129handle snakes in your worship service?" is not seen in the film exemplifies the problems examined in
130this article. Students viewing the film will quite reasonably come away thinking that participants
131spontaneously and authentically engage in acts of self-representation; our task is therefore merely to
132listen carefully and faithfully record their words. However, taking into account the presence of the
133filmmakers/fieldworker (as a previous generation of anthropologists, e.g., James Clifford et al., told
134us so convincingly) makes it evident that the so-called participant is in fact a creation of the observer.
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137McCutcheon: On the Limits of the Humanistic Study of Religion 743
138our readings are based on Covington's text. Come to think of it, even
139Punkin' Brown's own sense(s) of himself deserve the same quotation
140marks-a point nicely made by Jorge Louis Borges in a little piece entitled
141"Borges and I" in which, alienated from his own persona as famous
142author, he remarks: "I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges can spin
143out his literature" (1999: 324).
144With this in mind, we can say that mistaking a representation for the
145real-and if Jean Baudrillard is to be trusted, then all we have are representations,
146each competing for the chance to stand in for a Real that
147never was present to begin with-was also a problem with Orsi's description
148of the "devout working class man who kneels to pray at his wife's
149grave, suddenly uncertain and afraid at the end of his own life of what lies
150ahead"? Like most readers, I too have experienced the deaths of loved
151ones, but how does one generalize from this to read this one man's mind?
152I suspect that there are any number of things going through this hypothetical
153widower's head, including the uncertainly and fear that Orsi qua
154privileged narrator somehow intuits, along with panic, desperation, loneliness,
155anger, even guilt-who knows what else. In fact, we may be in
156error in approaching our speculative thought experiment in the manner
157of Orsi, for I am not even sure that, at the moment he catches the
158scholar's attention-becomes an item of discourse-anything much is
159actually going through this man's head. Not that he's oblivious to his surroundings
160or "overcome by emotion," as we sometimes say, but that,
161much of the time, human beings are completely immersed in their social
162worlds in rather unreflective ways, with nothing in particular in their
163heads, as it were, with no stories to tell let alone criteria to use in distinguishing
164a generic happening from an occurrence (recalling the words
165attributed to Robert Frost that appear as this essay's epigraph). Case in
166point, I presume that, although many readers are by now wondering
167when I will signal that my essay is drawing to a close-which will be
168soon, but not quite yet-few are now contemplating the significance of,
169say, their use of English grammar to make the symbols that appear on
170this page into units of meaning-although, now that the non-participant
171to their so-called reading experience has made this apparent commonplace
172of their world curious to them, no doubt readers are mulling it over
173and could go on at some length about it. But scholars of signification will
174likely not measure the adequacy of their work in light of the participant's
175hindsight reflections on their reading experience (i.e., despite both being
176engaged in signification, at least to the scholar they are not necessarily
177working toward the same goal and are therefore not in competition with
178each other); instead, such scholars will set about describing and then analyzing
179a series of observable behaviors of which the participant may be
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182744 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
183completely unaware, seeing the participant's self-reflections on the process,
184if there are any, as but one more piece of data in need of analysis.
185What I have in mind here is precisely what the mid-twentiethcentury
186British novelist, Bryan Stanley Johnson, wrote about in his 1973
187memoir:
188Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random; it leaves myriads
189of ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a story from life only by
190strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories
191really is telling lies. (Johnson 1973: 14)
192If, as I am suggesting, readers are not necessarily spontaneously doing the
193choosing, highlighting, and ignoring that produces a narrative about the
194occurrence of their current subject position as "readers"-but, instead,
195are immersed in a series of happenings and thereby acting out a subjectivity
196not of their making-then scholarship is not a matter of an
197observer qua stenographer respectfully recording the widower's dictated
198reflections on his grief. Instead, it is more a matter of an observer, much
199like an ethnographic filmmaker, interrupting this man's world by posing
200unanticipated questions that prompt him to articulate something that
201was not necessarily in his head to begin with, prompting him to fabricate
202a story that, prior to being given its starting point-such as, "Why are
203you crying?"-was not a story at all, at least not to him. If this is the case,
204if the complexity of this thing we call reality is only experienceable (i.e.,
205as a series of occurrences rather than disjointed happenings) once a nonindigenous
206framework is brought to bear (i.e., made into an item of discourse),
207then Orsi's methodological rule, which on the surface appears to
208protect the meek, is nothing other than a cleverly disguised paternal
209strategy that enables scholars to portray themselves as being in solidarity
210with the Other while retaining the right not only to distinguish Others
211from other Others but also to inform both groups where their stories
212ought to start and end. For this methodological rule, like that of Cantwell
213Smith, is a triumphalistic move ensuring the scholar's absolute monopoly
214over the means of representation, for such scholars both speak and
215record their own other words, all the while attributing them to their
216research subjects. It is somewhat akin to the manner in which government
217officials sometimes leak information to the press then turn around
218and publicly quote the reported leak in support of the position they are
219advocating; it strategically exercises a passive aggressive form of authority
220in which the supposedly authentic human subjects-to borrow some of
221Orsi's own words-remain silent despite the humanist's claims of listening
222carefully and empathetically. Much as in his critique of my own work,
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225McCutcheon: On the Limits of the Humanistic Study of Religion 745
226apparently Orsi's "other words" require no rationale or defense, for, to
227paraphrase him once again, the liberal humanist, by virtue of his or her
228normative epistemology, theoretical acuity, and political knowingness,
229apparently has the authority and the right to be a ventriloquist, for he or
230she speaks for those others who do not have the good sense or ability to
231recognize their misplaced emphasis on difference and particularity.30
232But if, as Bryan Stanley Johnson claims, all representation is inevitably
233a form of falsification-regardless of who is doing the storytellingthen
234we, as scholars, should be a little more careful of the tales we choose
235to tell and in whose voice they are being told. Recognizing that much
236comes down to the act of choice31 prompts us to adopt a rather more
237humble scholarly approach than we often find in the work of liberal
238humanist mind readers in our field-for, despite the proclaimed empathy
239for their subjects of study, like everyone else they have no choice but
240to deploy concepts and interests alien to their object of study, it is just
241that they seem to assume that their language and their interests are coterminous
242with reality, allowing them unimpeded access to the grieving
243widower's heart.32 And it is just this self-serving assumption, obviously
244detected by those research subjects who fail to recognize themselves in
245the supposed mirror held up to them by liberal humanists, that likely
246angers some people so much; the limits of the liberal humanist bait and
247switch are more than apparent to them.
248So, to return to the many rhetorical questions posed earlier, I fear
249that I have gone on far too long with hints and, instead, owe readers a
250straightforward answer: so here it is. When it comes to the liberal
251humanists whom I have studied, they diligently work to sanction those
252Others either toward whom they already feel affinity or toward whom
253they feel very little estrangement-those Others whose differences from
254some posited "us" and our interests and norms can either be explained
255away or, because they strike us as utterly inconsequential, simply overlooked
256altogether. It is easy, of course, to tolerate those whom one feels to
25730 It is worth noting that, when responding orally to an earlier version of this essay, Jeppe Sinding
258Jensen thought the image of a cannibal more apt than a ventriloquist.
25931 Although his thoughts on religion being "solely the creation of the scholar's study" have
260certainly influenced my own work in profound ways, I now think that the far more important insight
261contained into the opening pages to J. Z. Smith's Imagining Religion appear a little lower on the page,
262concerning this topic of choice: "The student of religion must be able to articulate clearly why 'this'
263rather than 'that' was chosen as an exemplum. His primary skill is concentrated in this choice"
264(1982: 11).
26532 As noted in my brief reply to Orsi's review (2004), that a hypothetical grieving widower, among
266others, is used as a trope in an essay meant to score rhetorical points strikes me as begging a series of
267crucial questions concerning just what type of morality Orsi implies.
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270746 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
271be inconsequential. However, when the differences of historical existence
272cannot be ignored, when the estrangements are painfully apparent because
273they strike at what the classic Marxist might once have termed the Base,
274then we understand these other Others to have relinquished their right to
275be taken seriously as conversation partners, for they have committed the
276mortal sin of taking themselves as seriously as we take ourselves; in so
277doing, they call into question our self-declared right to set the parameters
278for what gets to count as "decency" and "civility."33 In response, we withhold
279the classifications "religion," "faithful," and "spiritual" and excommunicate
280them from the body of the faithful, giving these people new
281names, all depending on the degree to which some posited "us" feels
282estranged from, or threatened by, "them": they can be classified as mildly
283curious and tolerated as exotic specimens, understood as deviants and
284thereby diagnosed and deprogrammed, or portrayed as outrightly dangerous
285and attacked or jailed as enemies.34
286My suspicion, then, is that scholars in the liberal humanist tradition
287never have to think twice about whom to include in their list of the faithful,
288for they are already seated at their kitchen table, swapping stories,
289and enjoying their no doubt kind hospitality. Only those who are bold
290enough to involve themselves actively in contesting how the political
291world works need to be saved from themselves, for their all too apparent
292interests prevent us from ever being invited into their homes, prompting
293us to resolve our differences by defining these other Others out of the tradition
294of the faithful, by saying to them "You're not in the Word." Their
295subsequent protestations simply confirm the line we have drawn. As for
296those who pose no threat to our world, they are in no position to challenge
297our representations; we can therefore speak for them, answering
298"Amen" to our own other words, without ever fearing reprisals, for we
299resolve our little differences with them by simply forgetting them.
300In both cases, our attempt to resolve conflict and difference, to borrow
301a few words from Courtright, "is not without its price" (2001: 116).35
302In my estimation, the price we pay when we worry over how scholarship
303silences the indigenous voice, a concern that prompts us to try to mediate
304and resolve difference, amounts to (to paraphrase Lincoln's thirteenth
30533 See Colas (1997) for an excellent study on the politics of discourses on civility.
30634 Anyone watching the news these past few years knows that, despite the universalist rhetoric of
307the humanist position that undergirds the liberal democratic nation-state, the so-called humanity of
308anyone can easily be defined away, especially those whom we have come to know as "cult fanatics"
309and "political extremists," those who, despite holding the sort of "deep beliefs" that we are so often
310told we ought to respect and take seriously, happen to hold the wrong set of deep beliefs.
31135 Courtright is here talking about the resolution of the child/parent conflict as represented in the
312story of Ganesha.
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315McCutcheon: On the Limits of the Humanistic Study of Religion 747
316thesis [1996: 227]) forfeiting our role of being anything but dedicated
317disciples to one set of voices, no longer able to be scholars of how the disciplining
318process happens to take place. It is a forfeiture that comes with
319far too high a price: the demise of the very institutions in which we carry
320out our work. It is therefore rather ironic that fretting over erasing Others
321ends up in our own demise.