Religious Studies and the Goal of Interdisciplinarity

Brent Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429671128
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Education

This book offers a survey of the development of interdisciplinarity in religious studies within academia and offers ways for it to continue to progress in contemporary universities. It examines the use of the term 'interdisciplinary' in the context of the academic study of religion and how it shapes the way scholarly work in this field has developed.

The text uses two main elements to discuss religious studies as a field. Firstly, it looks at the history of the development of religious studies in academia, as seen through an interdisciplinary critique of the university as an epistemological project. It then uses the same interdisciplinary critique to develop a foundation for a 21st-century hermeneutic, one which uses the classical concepts reprised by that interdisciplinary critique and retools the field for the 21st century.

Setting out both the objects of religious studies as a subject and the techniques used to employ the study of those objects, this book offers an invaluable perspective on the progress of the field. It will, therefore, be of great use to scholars of research methods within religious studies.

1
Locating the academic study of religion

An interdisciplinary critique of the epistemological development of the university

In 2010 I made the professional move from the sanctuary to the classroom. Graduate school prepared me both for a 27-year stint as a parish minister and also a current appointment onto the faculty of Grand Valley State University (GVSU), a 25,000-student public university in Michigan. GVSU was in the final stages of creating a religious studies major and minor.

The program would be housed in the Liberal Studies Department of the university’s Brooks College of Interdisciplinary Studies, where it still resides. That is significant relative to academic identity. The academic study of religion was being conceived not as part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, housing the Philosophy Department and all of the social sciences. It was installed in interdisciplinarity and has become an integral part of a department whose purpose involves advocating for and fulfilling the university’s mission in liberal education. Location shapes purpose both institutionally and professionally.

In my first year I was privy to deliberations on the creation of this new program as in Faculty Senate meetings questions arose from various academic departments concerning the place in a public university for the study of religion. The epistemological privileging consistent with the historical development of the university location was on full display, and appropriately so. If a new academic major and minor was proposed it should be evaluated by the epistemological criterion represented in the location and as a means to fulfill the location’s purpose. The questions could be categorized by issues reflecting more the culture’s understanding of the concept of “religion,” such as “church and state,” and/or the distinction between theological study and religious practice, and theological study and religious studies: “Whose religion are we going to be teaching?” “Are we going to be interfaith?” “How can a public university teach religion?” Others, though, could be categorized by the discipline and specialty of the inquiring scholar with university structures: “Can/must I be a believer/atheist to teach religion?” “Are you going to teach world religions, employing a Rabbi to teach Judaism, a Muslim teaching Islam, etc.?” “How can a university that takes scientific method seriously, teach about faiths?” and of course, “What kinds of jobs will they be prepared for?” This category of question seemed more localized and curious to a newcomer. Even after establishing the program in 2012 and hiring faculty in the field of religious studies, questions continue to this day from faculty surprised to discover our university has a religious studies major and minor, and students who don’t know the difference between it and theology.

This simply mimics the way our culture considers religion as involving faith, belief, and largely, the assumptions about what to look for when studying faiths other than Christian. And it adds a crucial something more: how being inside the university’s structures of organizing compounds that complexity. But realizing the inescapable complexities involved when anyone studies the “religious inside” of another is part of the historical construction of the religious studies scholar’s self-consciousness: “Thus, broadly speaking, information about religions may be transmitted through four channels: (1) insider-to-insider, (2) insider-to-outsider, (3) outsider-to-outsider, and (4) outsider-to-insider.”¹ To those, one could add other domains that aren’t as distinct, are more overlapping and fluid than four, like teaching week-days in the university’s Biology Department and on Sundays the Adam and Eve story in a Protestant Christian Sunday school. Regardless of the academic level, every class of mine must begin with a two-week introduction of the academic study of religion, its distinctions from theology, philosophy, and the social sciences, and how it is a different way to learn about this human activity than how it would be learned in a church, temple, or masjid. Because of multiple complexities, the concept of insider/outsider, and the prospect that some domains referred to by them are fluid and overlapping, is part of the student’s orientation to the field. To be a self-conscious scholar involves among other things a knowledge of the history of a location and the language common to that location. And to be self-conscious in religious studies is to pursue that study as a dialogic endeavor involving one’s positionality engaging others’ positionalities.

This echoes my training in the early 1980s. One of my most exciting graduate experiences was a class on Darwin and evolution that mixed students from the divinity school, zoology, biology, history, and social sciences. The central challenge I thought was developing a common “class language” out of various academic locations; or, as was practiced, to ask a question and check responses from multiple academic locations. It embodied David Tracy’s insight regarding communication, location, and hermeneutics: “Anyone who uses a language bears the preunderstandings, partly conscious, more often preconscious, of the traditions of that language.”²

Over 37 years and a change of professional locations, I understand Tracy’s comment more deeply. Creating a common language might suggest that differences weren’t somehow real, although it would propose what science might call an objective referent and suggest an object of study. And addressing a single question from multiple perspectives is indicative of performing multidisciplinarity, “an approach that juxtaposes disciplines… foster[ing] wider knowledge, information, and methods… [whereas the] integration of disciplines [is] the ‘litmus test’ of interdisicplinarity.”³ A multidisciplinary approach was what we had the first day in that Darwin class and that seemed to fragment knowledge into isolated towers. Tracy’s observation now points me instead towards a different style of producing knowledge called interdisciplinarity.

If we are pursuing an understanding of what religious studies involves when it is performing interdisciplinarity, then first we need to describe what interdisciplinarity is and isn’t. Secondly, we need to enumerate the foundational characteristics of interdisciplinarity as they pertain to religious studies and perform the central, foundational characteristic, the construction of

a “parallax view” of intellectual history, whereby the normal account by which disciplines develop and give rise to interdisciplinary inquiry is taken to be only part of the whole story. There is at least one other side, which reflects a different sense of how things came to be as they are and how they might turn out to be in the future… [a kind of] counterfactual history.⁴

After establishing foundational characterisics we need to add secondary ones that form a cluster to distinguish an interdisciplinary style of performing methodology from others. And finally, we need to place the academic study of religion inside the domain of the university location as interdisciplinarity conceives of it and religious studies performs within it. This last aim will be begun in this chapter and continued throughout the rest of the book.

What does being “interdisciplinary” mean?

Interdisciplinarity is not a particular method of conducting study, not a methodology but a way to perform a given methodology. If methodologies – like comparison, explanation, description, and hermeneutics, commonly used in religious studies – were genres of music, interdisciplinarity would be a style within a genre. Mozart and Bach embody different styles within the genre of classical music, as do the Beatles and Santana in rock ‘n roll, and Getz and Holiday in blues. As a performing style interdisciplinarity integrates disciplinary yields, and using intellectual rigor, pushes beyond the rigidity disciplines incline towards, to create a new space within which to generate knowledge.

Like the concept of “religion,” interdisciplinarity is more amenable to a cluster description than a single definition. The Association for Interdisciplinary Studies – the professional organization for interdisciplinary practitioners – identifies interdisciplinarity as integrating “the insights of knowledge domains to produce a more comprehensive understanding of complex problems, issues, or questions [drawn from] real world applications.”⁵ Key to its style of methodological performance is an integrating trajectory aimed at understanding a first-order experience outside of the university. Self-conscious of three locations and the positionality created in each, the interdisciplinary scholar takes concepts formed in the university location into a positionality, brings that to a location outside the university to engage the activity forming phenomena in that context, and then back into the university for transforming that encounter into knowledge. Intrinsic to knowledge created through interdisciplinarity is a critique of all locations involved.

Scholars like Joe Moran⁶ and Julie Thompson Klein⁷ chronicle the dynamic relationship between the emergence of interdisciplinarity and its university location where scholarship begins. Today it critiques the historical/cultural development of the university’s epistemological structure of separate disciplines. Producing knowledge through the techniques of its performance style it generates a liminal region where new knowledge can be generated, by “establishing a kind of undisciplined space in the interstices between disciplines, or even attempting to transcend disciplinary boundaries altogether.”⁸ Thus, interdisciplinarity counters the modern university form of gathering knowledge into disciplinary “silos” scientifically organized and governed, though by using disciplinary yields in a different way and not by rejecting them. This in turn impacts how knowledge is gathered, especially in terms of the specialization disciplinary knowledge favors, and the reductionism that specialization can lean into and towards. Interdisciplinarity employs a comprehensive critique of location to spawn new knowledge production.

The university is a location of language and thinking accumulated over centuries and shaped by various cultures into a project involving why people question what they do in the way in which they do, as well as where, when, and how they question. Therefore, interdisciplinarity represents epistemology as dialogic. History involves chronicling how time and place influence how something has come to be what it is considered to be. It locates. Thus, a foundational characteristic of interdisciplinarity is that it is a dialogic endeavor on the history of knowledge formation in the university location. In this sense, this chapter offers a view of how the study of religion emerged in the Western university. Obviously, it will be a condensed narrative told from a point of view, and offered by an individual who is, for better and worse, constructing this narrative in a way that involves a personal history interfacing with this culture at this time. Because of its unique embodiment of insider/outsider issues in the location of the university, religious studies performed as an interdisciplinary endeavor necessarily involves characteristics of an autoethnographic performance. “Autoethnography is a method of culling the researcher’s own experiences in order to theorize larger phenomena”⁹ by using the scholar’s “personal experiences as primary data”¹⁰ instead of disregarding it, and thus self-consciously using the field to construct the nature of the distance between scholarly study and practitioner activity.

The academic study of religion arose and developed within the intellectual forces of the university, as well as the lines of inquiry and allegiances to certain discourses and ways of organizing knowledge that are characteristic of it, at certain times and in certain places. How is it that the epistemological project that is the modern university developed in such a way that the study of religion within its walls is conducted and understood now in the way that it is?

The development of the university as an epistemological project: a creation narrative

To practice interdisciplinarity, the religious studies scholar needs to account for location personally and professionally, and basic to professional identity is location in the university as an epistemological project. It is the purpose of the university to produce knowledge, and to fulfill its aim functions to gather, organize, and disseminate what it produces. “Disciplinary development was meant to occur within the overall framework of the university as a community of essentially like-minded scholars: indeed, the term ‘university’ derives from the Latin, universitas, meaning ‘universal’ or ‘whole.’”¹¹ Symbolic of its knowledge-gathering function are the scholar’s study and the disciplinary department’s hallwa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: location, positionality, and the interdisciplinary religious studies scholar
• 1 Locating the academic study of religion: an interdisciplinary critique of the epistemological development of the university
• 2 Something other than an “and” or an “is”: the overlapping domain of the sacred-profane
• 3 Sighting the sacred unseen: a camouflaged order appears
• 4 Hierophany as an interdisciplinary concept
• 5 A summary and summons
• Bibliography
• Index