Tags
categories, Critical Religion, Deborah Stockdale, intersectionality, Lenin, Northern Ireland, Paul Nurse, privilege, religion, revolution, science
In mid-December a friend and I took a brief trip to London. During various activities we took in two very different events at two museums. On 11.12.14 we went to the Annual Science Lecture at the Natural History Museum. This was delivered by Sir Paul Nurse and was entitled “Science as Revolution”. In the hour or so that he spoke, he outlined various scientific advances that revolutionised how we understand the world – the discovery of a heliocentric world, the theory of evolution, the application of atomic energy, and others. Following his lecture there was a 45 minute question and answer section in which topics ranged from science specific issues on GM crops (his current research) to the existence of alien life, to the frustrations of science education in the UK.
However throughout he repeatedly used a taxonomy that was frustrating, uncritical and increasingly asinine. This was in regards to his use of categories, as though science, religion, politics and economy were singular, definable entities that exist a priori. Furthermore, science was to be protected – indeed, in responding to one of the questions he all but argued that it should be protected and not questioned or critiqued – from the interferences of the others as they were unmoveable bulwarks to progress, scientific discovery and revolution.
Throughout his lecture (and answers) religion was only every described as “religion” and when pushed for details he focused on those groups whom the media would describe as “fundamentalists”. There was no awareness, it seemed, that some scientists could have an agenda – and not necessarily a benign one at that, or even that some scientists are not exclusively non-religious or atheist. Politics was limited to the personal agendas of politicians or the militarisation of weapons. Science was equally poorly nuanced but was, unsurprisingly, seen as the only way forward, the only means of progress and revolution.
Yet the entirety of the lecture proved otherwise, as the scientific revolutions he lauded were abstracted from their context and thus stripped of their revolutionary potentiality. Revolutions are a confluence of events, never a singular happening (see for example Lenin’s four conditions for revolution in his The State and Revolution, London: Penguin, 2009 edition). Within any revolution there are scientific, religious, cultural, political, economic upheavals and advances (consider, for example, the importance of the French Revolution on science through the work of Jean-Baptise Lamarck and Georges Cuvier). There was no acknowledgement of other factors as leading motivators and flash points spurring a revolution in the lecture by Nurse, indeed if one was unfamiliar with European history one could get the impression that revolution depended upon science for cause, means and outcome.
Categories are slippery, hard to define and impossible to separate out. This is for a simple reason – they do not exist because they exist, they are not tangible coherent entities as Nurse wanted to present. Rather they are constructs that we create and use for various purposes. Like all constructs they are contingent upon their creators not for definition, but for existence. With their creators they share the qualities of being multi-faceted, duplicitous, and interdependent.
The second event we undertook was an exhibition entitled Disobedient Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This was a visual display on how everyday objects have been used as objects of protest, civil disobedience and social change or revolution. There was quite a small array on display – most related to areas of extreme poverty or civil war. It was a fascinating exhibition (and one I highly recommend) and at times shocking. One particular object is being focused on here and this is the use of an art form known as arpilleras in Chile as a means for women to tell their own story. One caught my attention.
Deborah Stockdale, “Shannonwatch”
It was designed by Deborah Stockdale, an American textile artist living in Donegal in Ireland and was entitled “Shannonwatch”. It was accompanied by the following explanation:
“Donegal Ireland, 2011
The arpilleras made in Chile have inspired women around the world to use the technique to tell their own stories of survival and resistance. This recent arpilleras was made by an America textile artist living in Ireland. It depicts the activities of Shannonwatch, who are monitoring the use of Shannon Airport by the American military. The protestors wear white burkas in support of Afghani women caught up in the ‘War on Terror’. Deborah Stockdale”
Shannon Watch is a protest group, and their purpose is to stop or at least highlight the use of Shannon Airport by the US military (it is also worth noting that Shannon Airport – close to Limerick, is over 174 miles from Stockdale’s home in Donegal). However Stockdale has misused, in my opinion, their protest in her artwork. There is no record of any of the group having worn burqas of any colour or made any comment or protest about the oppression of women in Afghanistan. Their sole concern is the improper use of the airport by another military force. Therefore her artwork does not depict the actions of the protest group, instead she has hijacked them to make her own personal statement.
Shannon Watch are an important protest group and their cause a worthy one but they are not oppressed minorities – nor are they all, or even majority, women. Using this form of material and protest to highlight one’s own ideas demonstrates the solipsistic nature of categories. The protest at the airport is about the use of Irish airspace, not about the oppression of Afghani women. The presence of the burqa as the dominant image immediately brings it into the misinformed and heavily biased discussion of the burqa as a means of religious oppression of women (see, for example, here and here).
Furthermore, these forms of artwork are typically used by women in areas of oppression to express themselves when other means are not available to them. Stockdale can make no such claim, she is a citizen of one of the most powerful nations in the world today, she is able to make a living as an artist in the country she chooses to live in and her voice and ideas are heard in other countries. In other words, this relates to the question of ‘white privilege’ and indeed further feeds into that privilege because the voice of the dominant, normative, educated is being placed over the voices of those without said privilege. Stockdale is what Peggy McIntosh describes as “a participant, an unfairly advantaged person, in a damaged culture.” There are of course nuances needed within the ‘white privilege question’ as oppression is really more about intersectionality, as Gina Crosley-Corcoan notes. Often white privilege is gained, not through the colour of skin, but through education status, employment, economic stability, and familial circumstances. One form of oppression is no less important, or impacting, than the other
Choosing to have your work displayed alongside those who are oppressed and whose voice is not heard by the dominant, smothers or drowns what they are saying for the purposes of having someone else speak who already has a voice and a platform. These arpilleras, once a means for the subaltern to speak, have now become a means for them to be spoken over once again, and indeed to be spoken for. The subaltern has a voice, we need to stop speaking over them and instead listen.
Both Nurse and Stockdale have misused categories and have in different ways demonstrated the dominance of the religious – secular – political – Western categories still in existence and use. In so doing they have not only indicated how far we still have to travel but that oppression can still sink its teeth in when users refuse to acknowledge the slippery and solipsistic nature of these categories.
The Critical Religion Association 
Reblogged this on francisstewart.
Categories exist as a framework to enable discussion. A structure or starting point. We may all see differently but we agree to say your blue is my blue, my orange is your orange. Not that they are the same but we reach concensus to catagorise them so we have a starting point to share emotion, mood, beauty or description. Dishonesty is another matter and comes into the realms of morals.
Hello Val,
Thank you for taking the time to read and comment on my posting, I appreciate you taking the time to do so and look forward to a fruitful discussion. (Word of warning: I make no guarantees that my spelling has in any way improved in the intervening years!)
I would like to start by engaging with the notion that “categories exist”. This is a problematic statement as it implies that there is something tangible out there that exists because it exists (sui generis). That simply isn’t the case, categories exist because we create them, and as with anything we create they arrive with baggage. That is we create something for an agenda – implicit or explicit. They are not discrete things but are intertwined on multiple layers with many other categories. For example, to have a secular nation one must first have an understanding of what religion is, in order to construct that which one considers not to be religious (as the term secular is now popularly used). Therefore categories are not really categories other than in the binaries or discourses in which we wish to use them.
The second point I would like to respond to is that of enabling discussion. How often does that really happen when categories are utilised? Categories divide far more often than they unite, even for the purpose of discussion. Categories are created for the purpose of defining, and to define we require an ‘other’, that which our category sets us apart from. Typically we have seen this within the colonial settings and fall-out, but increasingly we are seeing it with the rise of the new athiests who seek to set secular (and therefore political power) as more rational, benign and, in a sense, benevolent. The collary to that being, of course, that religion is dangerous, irrational and violent and so must be either strictly controlled or removed completly from any form of power or public appearance.
The final point is that actually we do not agree, more often than not we assume that the person we are speaking to – or often about – agrees with our understanding of the world. How often do we actually check? How often do we pause and ask ourselves, how is my understanding of Judaism, Islam, Paganism, Punk Rock, or whatever different from theirs and in what ways I am allowing that to colour what I see and hear and how I speak to them? Think of the classrooms we both taught in, our syllabus that we had to work with – we were expected to teach Islam, Christianity, Judaism etc as entities and we had to find ways to nuance them to demonstrate that belief is a broad spectrum.
If that is what we are doing, how much of a starting point do we really have? The Charlie Hebdo massacure and the reactions to it are a really interesting point. We have become used to hearing that those types of attacks are carried out by fundamentalists or extremists – no news stations stops and explains what those terms are, just assumes we all have a shared agreed understand. For the most part we do not. My understanding of an extremist is coloured with having grown up in N Ireland during the troubles, another may have no such reference point to call upon, and so on. When these terms or categories are used they drown out alternative perspectives – in this instance, the influence of years of bombings and civillian deaths on radicalising those who carried out the horrific killings. There becomes little or no space for asking whether it is caused by religious interpretation or whether they are the actions of oppressed peoples.
This is what we do here at Stirling, and in other universities within the field of Critical Religion, we pull apart these type of categories and ask what they are obscuring in the halls of power, the rooms of education, the ways in which people understand and live out their everyday lives and whatever faith they hold or reject. We would argue that doing so enables a better dialogue and a stronger base for the beginnings of a conversation. Unfortunately those calls seldom are heeded and so we see the uses of categories again and again as the two examples are in the article – Nurse and Stockdale. You are entirely right and dishonesty is another matter altogether, but it is often linked with these questions of categories as people react to things in the way Stockdale has and do not see that they are being dishonest in what they are doing.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this further. If you want to read more on what we are trying to do, the front page (sorry Michael I don’t know how to link it) of this website lays it out very clearly. Thanks again Val, great to get to talk through these kinds of ideas with you once more.
One bid to counter the suffocation of so much life by catergorising religions is attempted here:
LET US DECLARE OUR COMMON HUMANITY
AND AGREE THAT
ALL GOOD FAITH AND RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS AND THEIR SCRIPTURES
ARE NURSERIES FOR REACHING TOWARDS
A MATURE UNIVERSAL FAITH .
THAT IS
A COMMON FAITH IN INCLUSIVE JUSTICE;
FOUND IN MAINTAINING
THE DELICATE CREATIVE TENSION BETWEEN
INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM, COMMUNAL RESPONSIBILITY,
AND PLANETARY TRUSTEESHIP
Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to my blog.
I would like to question you on what you mean by “good faith”, are you then saying that there exists such a thing as “bad faith” – what is that? Who decides what is good or bad? What criteria do they use? On what authority and with what agenda?
“Religious traditions and their scriptures are nurseries” – so what about those whose faith has no religious tradition (whatever that actually is), or scripture per se, those who consider in all seriousness punk rock, heavy metal, jedi as their genuine spiritual path in life – they have no space in your vision? No role to play? The purpose of a nursery is to grow something until it is strong enough to be planted or placed in a much harsher environment, are you therefore arguing that ‘religion’ is only for the very weak and immature and once you have grown past that need then you can be placed into the real world?
While these are laudable sentiments, perhaps, in your vision of a common faith you are not actually defining any of them – what is inclusive justice? How do we create something when we have vastly different histories and experiences of justice, never mind iterations of what the very term itself means.
Categories exist because we created them to serve a purpose, seeking to move beyond them requires a deep understanding of what they do, why and the implications and outcomes. Nice words do not that provide, otherwise the world would have had perfection since the era of the Romantics. Define what you mean, engage with its implications and corollaries and then, perhaps, we might have something to work on for the future.
In response to your comment:
There is no record of any of the group having worn burqas of any colour or made any comment or protest about the oppression of women in Afghanistan.’
I would respectfully point out that there is in a fact a video on the Shannonwatch website which shows women dressed in white burkas.
See the video ‘Women’s Peace Camp 6-7 March 2010’ http://www.shannonwatch.org/page/videos
I would also like to add that the reference to burqas and Afghanistan is not a contrived add-on, it is integral to the Shannon watch project. In Dec. 2014 it was reported in The Irish Times that ‘Secret US military flights that refuelled in Shannon during America’s “war on terror” were never checked at the airport, according to a former pilot who flew military personnel to Afghanistan… The Rendition Project, a database compiled by two UK-based academic researchers who tracked 200 aircraft linked to CIA missions and Reprieve, a human rights legal charity, have identified 11 planes landing at Irish airports between 2002 and 2004 which, based on evidence available to them, suggests that the aircraft were on their way to, or on their way back from, known renditions of detainees… A report released by Democrats on the US Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday revealed how detainees were tortured at these sites using techniques that were “brutal and far worse than the CIA represented” under the “renditions, detentions and interrogations” programme.’ http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/us-military-flights-not-checked-in-shannon-says-pilot-1.2035089
The link is there between Shannon Airport and Afghanistan; this link is reflected in Deborah Stockdale’s work.