Author Archives: Richard H. Roberts

Does ‘spiritual activism’ render spirituality ‘critical’?

09 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ Comments Off on Does ‘spiritual activism’ render spirituality ‘critical’?

Tags

, , ,

I have known but a few figures who have enjoyed something of a prophetic status, and one of them is Alastair McIntosh, the free-lance Quaker activist, writer, broadcaster, poet, part-time academic – and all-round provocateur.  I first met Alastair when I was involved in the organisation of the Conference Nature Religion Today that took place way back in 1996 at Charlotte Mason College in Ambleside in the English Lake District. This unknown to us bearded figure arrived and began to deliver a formal academic paper on the environmental aspects of the controversial removal of Mount Roineabhal and the Harris ‘Super-quarry’ Inquiry, at which he had managed to persuade a Native Canadian chief and a prominent professor from the Free Church College in Edinburgh take part in a superbly well-publicised appearance.

Suddenly, some quarter of an hour into his slides the speaker put aside his text, slung a plaid over his shoulder and began to declaim with full bardic intensity his epic poem ‘The Gal-Gael Peoples of Scotland’. This had grown out of his involvement with the M77 road protest movement and had been ‘(w)ritten at the request of and dedicated to Tawny, Colin and Gehan Macleod and other powerful gentle warriors at the Pollok Free State M77 Motorway Protest in Glasgow, whose endeavours for renewal are both ecological and cultural’.

The impact upon those present, an unusual mixture of academic participants and representatives of the diverse wider Pagan community (some being both) was remarkable; I recall one participant rushing out of the lecture theatre tearing at his shirt apparently with the intention of re-connecting sky-clad with Nature. The elevated bardic style (think Dylan Thomas ‘hwyl’ – but as if charged up on whisky and magic mushrooms) is not for everyday use, but on this occasion it worked. I began more fully to understand the geopoetic intensity that lies behind that part of contemporary Scottish nationalism simmering on the rim of Caledonia amongst the dispossessed and damaged post-working class of Glasgow, just prior to the re-establishment in 1997 of the Scottish Parliament laid to one side in 1707 with the Union of the Parliaments. Since then the Scottish National Party has of course advanced in a remarkable way both in Edinburgh and most recently in Westminster.

Alastair and I found we had much in common as regards our experience of and resistance to the managerialisation and commodification of British universities. As Teaching Director of the Centre for Human Ecology then based in the University of Edinburgh, McIntosh’s teaching methods were considered controversial by authority, but in reality the introduction of a deep ecological perspectives and techniques into activism was turning out to be a highly effective critical response to the demands of agro-business and the animal research that formed and remains such a significant factor in university funding. There was sharp controversy in the press that reached the pages of the journal New Scientist and resulted in the eventual exit of the CHE from the University. McIntosh chronicled this conflict and his engagement in land reform and the Isle of Eigg buyout in his book Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power. Now, nearly twenty years later, McIntosh and his collaborator, the Leeds-based fellow activist Matt Carmichael, have published a how-to-do book, Spiritual Activism: Leadership as Service (Green Books), which also seeks to assert the intellectual validity of the integration of consciousness-altering techniques drawn from a wide range of sources into socio-political engagement.

Spiritual Activism is an intriguing and challenging book for a reader like me who has seen some of McIntosh’s work at first hand, but who regards himself as bound by limiting protocols as to the legitimacy of moving from an etic to emic posture. Thus what lies behind this lively and eclectic book is not simply the creative tension between participation and observation that underlies much research in ‘Religious Studies’, but the ingestion and integration of techniques and insights that have proven their utility in the field of protest – and not just been rehearsed vicariously in the classroom.  In short, this book is ‘critical’ in that its basic drive, its inner hermeneutical principle, is to make as many connections as possible between activism on the part of ‘one who acts to bring change in our relationships are structured, that is change in community, often taking one to a point of discomfort’ (p. 12), and the techniques that enable access to what McIntosh and Carmichael call the ‘inner aspect of reality’ (p. 30).

The problem for those working in British higher education (both sides of the border) is that what industry, commerce and the ever-proliferating apparatus of regulation imposed on body, mind and the social order are deemed to require is a human product manifesting informed passivity: the student outcome needs to know enough to conform in an intelligent way – or the chances are that s/he will over the cliff like Thelma and Louise. In Spiritual Activism the authors take a big risk and stick up two fingers at this now ‘normalised’ understanding of the education process.

Chapters consider the nature of activism, spirituality and its justification, the role of ‘higher consciousness’, the ‘structure of the psyche’, ‘movements and their movers’, ‘cults and charisma’, nonviolence and ‘the Powers that Be’, the psychodynamics of campaigning, discernment and, in conclusion, a chapter entitled ‘Into the Deeper Magic’. Each chapter concludes with a brief case study of a remarkable activist figure. Taken altogether this is a highly ambitious and heady mix. The exposition of Quaker and Jesuit protocols for deciding upon courses of action in chapter nine, ‘Tools for Discernment’ is particularly illuminating.  The book cover is graced with an exceptionally beautiful image of the Yggdrasil by Vic Brown of the GalGael Trust, in which the world tree is envisioned as the meeting point of all the themes in Spiritual Activism.

In a higher education world in which it were still possible to engage in experimentation (as was the case in the CHE), I would consider the possibility of using this book as an undergraduate resource. It would allow students to enter a zone into which spiritual texts and techniques are shifted from distant times and places and relocated in the controverted fabric of life today. It would also serve as a provocation as regards such questions as to how might the vision all hold together, are sources used responsibly and, if not then why not,  and so on. The reader is confronted by many connections made that are essayed in the interests of a higher purpose and transcend established conventions. The weaving together of many insights drawn from a wide array of sources with a qualified recognition of the proprieties imposed by either academia (get it straight or else!) or outright popularisation (give the reader an easy thrill!) put McIntosh and Carmichael’s book into an uneasy in-between category.

A hostile critic could well argue that this text confirms the predilections of the renowned intellectuals and activists (including Sir Jonathan Porritt, Starhawk, Dr Mary Midgley, the Revd Kathy Galloway, Dr Bashir Maan, Bruce Kent of CND, Professor David W. Orr of Oberlin College and the Australian deep ecologist John Seed) whose compliments and names are on the dustcover and in the opening unnumbered pages of ‘Praise for Spiritual Activism’. Alternatively, there may well be an equally negative stony silence on the part of some readers in the tunnels and caves of academe from which much of this material has been mined.

As a challenged reader I would venture the following positive evaluation. Whilst the authors are negative towards ‘postmodernism’, in reality Spiritual Activism is an exercise in what I would call critical constructive postmodernism. This is because whilst there is the surface level of collage that draws in full upon the capacity of information technology and the world-wide web to access the cultural artefacts of world history, the text is informed by a relentless emancipatory impulse to discern coherence in a world of commodified fragmentation – and to challenge it. In struggling with McIntosh and Carmichael to find these connections, rather than against them in denouncing possible transgressions, the reader is invited to join in the emancipatory task. The authors conclude with these words of encouragement:

Walk on, dear friends, stand in your love and power, go out and bless and be blessed. This is, indeed, a terrible time to be advocating ‘spiritual’ activism. That’s why the time is right (p. 198).

Spiritual Activism: Leadership as Service is consistently ‘critical’ as regards an unjust global and local status quo and it is consistently informed by emancipatory principles, but its tone and contents may well repel those who find the ‘discomfort’ of this kind of enhanced and grounded activism – well – just too plain uncomfortable.

On ‘Innovation’: Professor Helga Nowotny’s Recent Gifford Lecture

01 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ Comments Off on On ‘Innovation’: Professor Helga Nowotny’s Recent Gifford Lecture

Tags

, , ,

For participants in the Critical Religion network, Professor Helga Nowotny’s recent Gifford lecture, ‘Beyond Innovation. Temporalities. Re-use. Emergence’, delivered in the Edinburgh Business School on the 13th May this year is not without interest. The Gifford Lectures, were established by Adam Lord Gifford (1820–1887), a senator of the College of Justice in Scotland. The purpose of Lord Gifford’s bequest to the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews and Aberdeen was to sponsor lectures to “promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term—in other words, the knowledge of God”. Since 1888 a remarkable and diverse range of contributors have maintained the enduring prestige of the Gifford Lectures. The summary notice circulated in advance of Professor Nowotny’s lecture stated that:

The quest for innovation has become ubiquitous. It is high on the political agenda and raises hopes where few alternatives are in sight. It continues to be equated with the dynamics of wealth and even job creation and is hailed as solution to the major challenges facing our societies. Yet, as Schumpeter observed more than one hundred years ago, innovation is not only disruptive, but can also be destructive.

A distinguished Austrian-born social historian of science, Professor Emerita Helga Nowotny of the ETH in Zurich set herself the task of exposing some of the paradoxical difficulties that attend the tensions between the rhetorical representation and the realities of ‘innovation’. Drawing in passing upon Marx and Weber as architects of ideas of modernity, Nowotny then settled as intimated upon a third figure, the Austrian economic thinker and historian of economic analysis J. A Schumpeter, and his conception of innovation as ‘creative destruction’. Innovation is not just technological but social, so that, for example, the quest for the quantum computer when successful will have a heavy impact upon the temporalities by which we live. We have to find a balance and trade-off between explanation and exploitation, whilst also being conscious that the reification of ‘innovation’ in an entrepreneurial culture (in particular that of the United States) can be misleading.

n reality, much so-called innovation is in fact ‘recombination’, and Nowotny illustrated this by reference to the ‘shock of the old’ in the juxtapositional work of the artist David Jablonski. In pointing out how mixed the outcomes of prediction can be, she also related her qualifications of the concept of ‘innovation’ to John Maynard Keynes’ optimistic vision in his Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930), in which “I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of … traditional virtue – that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable”. Technological unemployment might, Keynes foresaw, free humankind for a higher form of existence for which we had to prepare, but present day workplace realities are very different. In short, the most brilliant minds can get things badly wrong, and the gist of Nowotny’s message was that what may save us then we come to the fork in the road ahead of humankind is the capacity to resist binary division and develop informed both/and responses to global crises rendered deceptively manageable because of the inherent unpredictability of innovation. Innovation leads to paradoxical consequences: the ‘natural’ in a post-human world is extremely complex and fraught with problematic real world juxtapositions highlighted by, for example, the contrast between the rapid take-up of cellphones in India as compared with slow increase in levels of basic sanitation.

‘Theology’ in however a vestigial form was very difficult, indeed scarcely possible to detect in Professor Nowotny’s lecture which could not be was not readily assimilated under the rubric laid down by Lord Gifford. Of course such resistance is not without precedent, given that the eminent Swiss-German theologian Karl Barth made it an essential part of his life’s work to deny the possibility of ‘natural theology’, albeit from a very different standpoint. What was, however, very much in evidence was Professor Nowotny’s defence of a distinctive kind of truth-seeking. She argued for the necessity of fundamental research freed from the immediate and all-encompassing diktats of what we in the United Kingdom are required to register in the metrics of socio-economic ‘impact’. Above all, for this listener, Professor Nowotny’s Gifford Lecture was a plea for a renewed sense of global responsibility informed by the full panoply of the ‘human sciences’.

Whilst there was to be a discussion the following day facilitated by the former Episcopalian Bishop of Edinburgh, Bryan Smith, it was disappointing that no questions were posed following the lecture by any of the many theologians currently active in Edinburgh. For this listener, Professor Nowotny’s critical account of the concept of ‘innovation’ was compelling. The risks raised by the unpredictability and unintended consequences of innovation give rise to a conundrum. The character of innovation might suggest that education, and in particular higher education should serve to develop an informed and agile responsiveness to change. By contrast, the societal reality of totalising managerial modernity is manifested in the urge of governments to impose ever greater degrees of control over our lives, and to understand ‘Quality’ as ever more sophisticated protocols of conformity. If, however, innovation is unpredictable then how can we know what we are directed to do will be the right thing? The posing of this question provoked a ripple of recognition in the audience, but no adequate response from the admirable Professor Nowotny.

Performance, sound and hegemony in the Empty Centre

04 Monday Aug 2014

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ Comments Off on Performance, sound and hegemony in the Empty Centre

Tags

, , ,

In the course of some years of retreat and recovery, yoga and music have been the focal points of my life. Both of these spheres afford borderless challenges, and, moreover, in each the reification of theory and the absence of practice is arguably understood as a deficiency – or even a perversion of basic purpose.

Participation in a 200 hour yoga teacher training programme and consistent application in musical performance have influenced my understanding of both theory and fieldwork in the borderlands of theology and religious studies. This experience has also had implications for how I understand the much contested notion of ‘religious studies’. As a survivor of the original cohort to pass through Religious Studies at Lancaster University, I am not a neutral observer of the prolonged deconstruction of what was conceived as a liberal project in the humanities with benign societal implications.

Immersion as a practitioner and performer in a range of contrasting contexts in yoga and music has sharpened and made immediate many reflexive questions pertaining to cultural translation, embodiment, the psychosomatic impact of movement, posture and sound, and as to how control and hierarchy are reworked in a fraught modernity. The latter I characterise as ‘managerial modernity’, a globalised ‘normalisation’ that imposes heavy identity demands upon any individual tempted to deviate from mandatory submission as a commodified human resource. As the erosion of the separation of powers and the dissolution of residual public/private distinctions proceed, so full-spectrum surrender of the managed subject to the Performative Absolute becomes the price of organisational survival. In existential terms we encounter the empowered Empty Centre in the face of which agency is relinquished.

If for present purposes we leave westernised yoga to one side and focus upon the structure of hegemony and the regulation of charisma within the performance of the religious music of Western and Eastern traditions, it becomes apparent that within each practice locale imposed resolutions of complex tensions take place. Traditions, lineages and sound generation are confronted by the demands, however well or inadequately expressed, placed upon the lives and identities of both performers and audiences (and congregations) as they are all impacted by the social construction of managerial modernity.

At the outset of my immersion in the life-worlds of a Royal School of Church Music (RSCM) elite choir, an audition chamber choir, a church choir in an ancient Scottish burgh church, and a group that specialises in Russian Orthodox a cappella performance these all appeared to be havens of traditionalism in which atomised and often marginalised, but musically competent individuals seek solace.

However, it became apparent that these marginal life-worlds may seethe with unexpressed tensions as ‘reconciliation’ is sought in the altered state of consciousness induced by the performance of highly regulated sacred sound. This, however, takes place in concert with the conscious repression of ‘truth’. There is, in effect, an inversion of the restorative logic of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in which truth-seeking precedes any resolution. The search for solace apart from, and on the basis of the repression of the recognition of trauma creates acute difficulties. Such self-alienated practice can be the elaborate pursuit of forms of ‘false consciousness’.

As a performer with some leadership responsibility, my puzzlement was intensified by an ever more psychologically burdensome awareness of the tensions between the unexpressed and unacknowledged, but real needs of those seeking refuge and solace – and the ritualised deferrals of performance. Each visit to, as it were, the musical Pool of Siloam plunged the sick soul in the water from which it later re-emerged temporarily cleansed, but seemingly unhealed, not least by reason of a systemic refusal to recognise the presence and consequences of trauma in the first place.

How, then, might some kind of bridge be built between the psycho-spiritual stimulus and frustrations of choral sacred solace and the matrix of theology and religious studies in which the present writer had spent a career? As an adjunct to the study of music theory and composition I began to explore recent musicology. At this juncture a set of affinities began to emerge between the theoretical arguments and resources exploited in the contested multi-disciplinary fields of religious studies and theology, and those drawn upon in recent debates on ‘historic performance’ and ‘authenticity’ in the contemporary performance of religious music in settings remote from their original contexts. Evident in each context is an acute need to provide viable hermeneutical resolutions of the relevant historical and semantic hiatus.

Rather like the formidable ‘early’ Karl Barth who wrestled with the gulf between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries in the Prefaces to his successive editions of the Römerbriefe (1919-1922), leading musicologists and performers like John Butt and John Eliot Gardner strive with the interpretation and performance of the early modern cantatas and the Passions of J. S. Bach in modernity. A notable commonality between these fields rests in a mutual dependence upon debates in modern/postmodern theory.

My recent participant observational fieldwork thus presents me with the following challenge: is T.W. Adorno’s depiction of the performance of music with sacral pretensions in late modernity as aestheticized alienation all too true – or might there be other viable ways of construing this activity? Might it be possible to regain authenticity in the face of the insatiable global demand for expressive release and consolation, be this in religious and spiritual practices or musical performance grounded in cognitively dissonant traditions?

Is the slide into the problematic solace of ‘false reconciliation’ (falsche Versöhnung) ineluctable, or could human needs for healing and transformation be more fully met in musical performance and sacred sound? The task thus presented is to explore ways in which this complex situation might be decoded so that performers and audiences alike could perform more fully in truth and authenticity. As regards ‘critical religion’, is such committed inquiry legitimate or should it be regarded as a naïve sui generis betrayal of the analytical reduction of the pseudo-category of ‘religion’ to its real status as a residual socio-political pathology?

Cyborgs or Goddesses? Donna Haraway, Human Resources Management and the coming of the Performative Absolute

14 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ Comments Off on Cyborgs or Goddesses? Donna Haraway, Human Resources Management and the coming of the Performative Absolute

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

For a life-long, dedicated – indeed passionate – academic, a decision to draw back from writing and reflection for a year, and to step into the sphere of singing, music-making and shamanic practice is not taken lightly.

Such a decision can be precipitated by life-changing grief. Given societal changes in identity and expectations with regards both sexuality and gender, it is unusual, almost freakish, to remain with a single partner for decades. Thus to be in grieving and recovery at the end of a long conjugal trajectory gives rise to a compound sense of isolation: there is sorrow, but the very experience may itself soon be regarded as the relic of an unlamented past.

I well recall a sad discussion with a class of undergraduates in which they expressed their view that it was highly improbable that they would ever experience a long-term partnership of the kind likely to sustain a children and a family. As Anthony Giddens has pointed out, in late modernity the multiple burdens placed upon dyadic relationships are intense and frequently unsustainable over long periods as demands change over time.

Given this challenging scenario how might we adjust to such dramatic inter-generational changes in socio-cultural expectation when, as yet, our biological determinants and cognitive limitations have not been fully overcome? Of course all categorisation in terms of binaries could be regarded as nostalgia for archaic, masculinist socially-constructed dichotomies but this is worth probing further.

It is now twenty years since the publication of Donna Haraway’s prescient, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ and this is an anniversary worth revisiting (Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York; Routledge, 1991, pp.149-181).

Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments…: first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

Re-examined in the retrospect of two decades, Donna Haraway’s declaration of intention deserves modified reiteration: ‘We (I include men) are no longer goddesses or gods; but we are not yet cyborgs’. Haraway was of course (amongst many other things) responding negatively to the emergence of the chthonic Goddess-centred feminism associated with such figures as the late and unforgettable Monika Sjöö who (with Barbara Mor) produced The Great Cosmic Mother: rediscovering the religion of the Earth that appeared in 1987 (New York: Harper and Row), and her viewpoint is essentially optimistic.

Haraway appeared to argue that the dissolution of categories and an unrestrained melding with technology and embracing of cyborg empowerment affords the best future for consciousness emancipated from the limitations of both biological determination and social construction. There are a number of responses to this cyborg feminist utopianism that could be examined. For example, one could argue against such optimism on the basis of the seemingly ineradicable and ongoing primordial significance for some of life-events like pregnancy, birth, inter-human fellowship, and death. This is to my mind a realisation that comes to most people  as theory breaks down in the face of experience.

There is, however, a darker threat to Haraway’s cyborg utopianism, and this is represented by the imposition of a growing fusion of ever more sophisticated information technology with social construction driven by the tentacular strategic empowerment of human resources managerialism (HRM), and controlled though the assumption (in the basis of the elimination of trust as an obstructive residuum) of the imposition of total transparency.

This form of strategic empowerment is creating a kind of technological neo-sovietic regime in settings like that of the United Kingdom where the separation of powers has been significantly weakened. Indeed, one of the many reasons why the present writer is a Scottish nationalist is because in the absence of the tensions between Parliaments in Edinburgh and London there would be little left to obstruct the relentless drive towards the centralisation of totalising, ostensibly rational power in the United Kingdom.

Leaving to one side the larger scheme addressed by Haraway, let us for a moment look at the context of any human attachment that exceeds strict utility in a performance culture confronted by dramatic economic crisis and decline. In this setting all attachments and life transitions are a potential liability. In a culture consistently controlled by HRM every life encounter of social atom (i.e. you or me) is with a potential collaborator – a competitor – or an enemy.

Each such encounter is dialectical: the other is a latency composed of both collaborator and competitor/enemy, and all that can therefore take place is a temporary alliance of intention and objectives: this is antagonistic cooperation. In consequence, the embodied human attributes shared by both parties to the encounter have to be subordinated to utility.

For the cognitive elite cadres to which most academics aspire, mutual recognition is first essayed through a mutual sensing and then a sharing of common theoretical postulates; once contact is established, projects can then be co-organised, books edited and written, and new courses promoted.

Personal relationships and even physical affinities may complement this temporary constellation (even a dedicated Kopfarbeiter might on rare occasions resile from meeting performance targets and relapse wearily into copulation or cognate somatic practices) – but the day will surely come sooner rather than later when such bonds must be broken.

The break can be positive when the cognitive elite worker senses that a theory or project has had its time and decides to move on; such separations may, however, be traumatic for others; but the agent who aspires to world class status cannot afford to be sentimental and has to move out into the pond again to look for new partner prospects.

Less positively, the break sometimes comes about when interdisciplinary team members are instructed by an unquestionable authority to cease collaboration, because, for instance, a growing affinity expressed in a nascent cross-unit teaching programme might run counter to strategic organisational objectives such as maximisation of student fee income in one sector as opposed to another.

Strangely, the break can frequently be attended by a brutal ritualisation of separation, for given the growth of somatic and affective bonds, reasons have to be found and blame ascribed. This can be seriously unpleasant and it is of course a complete reversal of ritualisation and ritual undertaken so as (pace Victor and Edith Turner) to promote communio.

This contemporary situation in the HRM-ruled life-world of cognitive elites is paradoxically not wholly dissimilar to the position of slaves in pre-Civil War North America who could not marry not least because such bonds might impede their subhuman status and value to slave owners as a fungible commodity.

Of course, for a cognitive elite the achievement and successful management of the limited but functional conscious awareness of personal commodity status required by HRM is the basis upon which depends maximisation in good times – and bare survival in bad times.

What might be the wider implications of comprehensive adjustment to the post-human condition and reconciling ourselves to becoming the mere conscious substrate, the informed passive receptivity that seeks to acquire and manifest the skill and knowledge bundles that are surrendered to HRM?

One implication is as regards intellectual property: the systemic virtualisation of teaching and learning, and the resource capture by those controlling higher education outlets of the ideas of academic staff through (e.g.) the forfeiture of intellectual ownership and copyright that enhances commodification and impedes mobility because the staff member’s thoughts have in effect been expropriated, and s/he will have lost much of their cultural capital. They will thus enjoy a degraded commodity status: the Kopfarbeiter is not so much slave as serf, tied to the organisation as a dispensable resource.

A question also arises that pertains to teaching and learning: once a cognitive elite has adapted and conformed to the construction, the systematic production of social identities through methods derived from HRM, then what becomes of their relationship with the learners with whom they may still have a residual relationship?

A dilemma emerges here: should a teacher either equip a student with the capacity for informed passivity and the surrender of attributes required by HRM and thus ensure their survival as commodities in the labour market, or perhaps fatefully disempower a student in the labour market by modelling and anticipating critical reflexivity of the kind that risks both teacher and learner becoming unemployable?

In my field research I have often encountered practices that challenge the prescriptions of contemporary consensus reality inasmuch as somatic and psychic risk are of integral importance. Thus, for example, whilst many may have fire-walked, in my experience it nonetheless requires a certain level of inner preparation and confidence before stepping out on to the crunching bed of glowing charcoal. Indeed for some of those broken by their past, such activities set in a ritualised context are genuinely liminal and facilitate the kind of death/birth transitions that bring about human maturation. Teaching and learning may not involve a literal walking on coals but there should be risk and excitement.

In my judgement the systematic ‘professionalisation’ of teaching and learning along lines dictated by managerialism proscribes that dimension of risk and well-managed ordeal essential to the emergence of embodied, responsible, empathic human beings, as opposed to post-human simulacra.

Through self-displacement into the performance of music, both instrumental and song, I find myself in a life-world in which the distinctions between ‘the learning experience’ and actual competence are starkly exposed.  This is a cosmos of activity, theory, meanings and activities informed by discipline, ordeal and risk, in which deception is usually futile – and genuine attainment requires much hard work.

It is all very well for Haraway to decry universals, but my point is that seen in Durkheimian terms HRM imposes a ‘Performative Absolute’ and an integrative universal (see my forthcoming paper, ‘Contemplation and the “Performative Absolute”: submission and identity in managerial modernity’ in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion). The Performative Absolute is, however, a dieu cache, the very essence of which is the self-concealment of its totalising power.

In the final analysis the question is this: is our world now so crisis-fraught and complex on all levels that any deviations from centrally-directed ‘best practice’ orchestrated by HRM are inevitable as the price of survival. This then confronts us with the adoption of the ‘Scandinavian’ benign social universal: whatever is not compulsory should be prohibited in the interests of the general social good.

Does technological utopianism, the conquest of the tyrannies of a biological and social construction, stand up as a means of emancipation, or, given the multiple global crises that reflect in ecological and human unsustainability, should we not revisit the kind of territory opened up by Sjöö, Mor and others and look to the recapture of embodied responses to the new totalitarianism that afflicts us?

Ritual as paradigm – and the making of life

13 Tuesday Sep 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ Comments Off on Ritual as paradigm – and the making of life

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

In his recent blog posting Tim Fitzgerald has offered some highly informed and trenchant observations on my attempt to urge caution upon those who might be perceived by a wider public as engaged in the deconstruction of the term ‘religion’ in ways that verge upon the wholesale destruction of entire dimensions of human experience. I am absorbing and digesting Tim’s comments.

In this posting I would, however, like to focus upon ‘ritual’ as a concept that has recently re-emerged as a key topos in many contexts, one notable example of which is the massive German 9.2m Euro ‘Ritual Dynamics’ project at the University of Heidelberg. I wish to focus upon this concept because I experience an affinity between the highly ambitious claims made for ‘ritual’ by the influential anthropologist Roy Rappaport in his ground-breaking book Ritual, Religion and the Making of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, 1989) and my own experience in the course of a decade of intense fieldwork.

My conscious journey into transformational ritual began in 1999 at a ‘Council of All Beings’ led the rain-forest activist John Seed in the north of Scotland. This consisted in a ritualised three day process involving exceptionally deep, indeed primordial regression that then culminated in the first explicit ‘open-ended’ ritual I had ever taken part in. By ‘open ended’ I mean the enactment of the classic ritual structure of preparation, departure to the limen, return and re-aggregation in which the outcome was not predetermined in the same way that the many Eucharists and Lord’s Suppers I have attended as a Christian are focused upon and structured around the symbolic re-enactment of the sacrifice of Christ with a view to the successful programming of the believer.

In the course of the Council of All Beings event I underwent acute disintegration – and then freaked out. In more formal terms I would regard this in Roy Rappaport’s language as an ‘operational’ abreactive rebirth experience that in cognitive terms was experienced and articulated as confrontation by and surrender to the Divine Feminine manifested as Gaia.

The upshot of this experience was the disturbing discovery that I had undergone an inner reversal, a kind of field switch, as though the polarity of my entire being and its energy flows had been reversed. For many years I had climbed the slippery pole of academia as dialectical Barthian theologian holding together by sheer energy and workaholic intensity contradictory tensions between the theological traditions and the versions of modernity I had learned and then taught. I lived in an ocean filled with books, cruising through the world of learning like a wandering basking shark that consumed almost everything of any interest it encountered, both the books – and sometimes people as well. However, I was also, like Calvin – and Carl Gustav Jung’s father – a repressed and driven Freudian, with a hungry and aggressive ego beating down and subordinating libido, and sublimating Eros into the super-ego of what Karl Barth helpfully, if fatefully, calls ‘God the Commander’ (Church Dogmatics, III/4).

With a Protestant identity shattered there was much to learn about ‘getting a life’; this involved growing and expanding the part that had undergone an energy inversion – all the rest has had to be melted down piece by piece through regression and surrender. As reported in a first posting on the Critical Religion web-site, I set out to do this through participant fieldwork in (e.g.) psycho-drama, Celtic spirituality, death-awareness training, trans-organisational shamanism, (neo-)shamanism, fire-walking, dry and wet rebirthing, the initiation practices of the men’s movement, Neo-Tantra, and so on. All such practices present challenges if observation is, as it were, for real and not intellectualised voyeurism – or an entomology directed at human insects. I am fully aware that this does not fit into the strict separation of the emic and etic.

After leaving an archaic role like that of Professor of Divinity at Scotland’s ‘first university’ and taking up a ‘modern’ chair in Religious Studies at Lancaster, I ceased teaching theology completely and developed the research base for a large book on Religion and Social Theory, the material of which I taught at Lancaster, and then recently here in Stirling. A complex conundrum then gradually emerged, part of which became the question I set myself to address at the recent BASR meeting in Durham. As reported in a posting following the BSA Sociology of Religion Group conference in Birmingham at Easter this year, it was apparent that whilst advocates of secularisation and globalisation theory had been engaged in a struggle for subdisciplinary hegemony in the study of religion, it would appear that the proponents of secularisation theory and its variants had won hands down, and the traditionalised life of the sub-discipline had been restored to its normality.

Given this broad context there is a pragmatic question as to how, and to what extent a concept of ritual might be used as an integrative paradigm, a middle rank theory capable of providing a framework for the comprehensive decipherment of the resurgent and highly complex contemporary religio-spiritual field to which Tim Fitzgerald rightly draws attention. This organisation and classification would it seems to me be possible on the basis of developing and then applying the model of ritual that evolves from Arnold Van Gennep through the work of Victor and Edith Turner, and the performance theorist Richard Schechner in, for example, his remarkable essay, ‘The Future of Ritual’ (1993). The basic pattern of preparation, departure, touching the limen, return and re-aggregation can serve as a template in relation to which a myriad processes ranging from small-scale spiritual workshop bricolage to global events such as the ever more elaborate quasi-rituals that attend the openings of the modern Olympic Games or the regular Parliament of the World Religions might be categorised.

There is beyond this pragmatic perspective a far more difficult theoretical question, and this concerns the reception of the claims of a renewed ritual paradigm advanced in magisterial terms by Rappaport in Ritual, Religion and the Making of Humanity. This is a text that divides opinion between definite enthusiasts and those who regard it as an obscure, even obscurantist book. Why should there be this difficulty?

Rappaport’s work is in my view grounded in a hermeneutical circle created on the basis of affinities between the role of relatively unambiguous ritual processes studied in, for example, such classics as his ground-breaking study of the Tsembaga Maring people in Papua New Guinea, Pigs for the Ancestors (1968/1984), and then theorised in the later Ecology, Meaning and Religion (1979), and the essentially modern and self-consciously grand theory of his posthumous masterpiece to which a global readership ought to relate. My contention is that the latter connection fails: most people in modernity have little or no conscious experience analogous to the primordial rituals of initiation, exchange, adaptation and transformation that form one pole within the ellipse underpinning Rappaport’s hermeneutic.

The terminal problem that has confronted me when attempting to write the kind of book I conceived in the outline of Religion and Social Theory: A Critical Introduction is this: on what assumptions or transcendental basis ought such a work be constructed?  Should an attempt to map the recomposition of the religio-spiritual field between the putative universality of globalisation processes and the infinite variety of the anthropology specific locales and of the body and consciousness assume the marginality of residual ‘religion’, or inspired by Rappaport, be worked out on the basis that ‘ritual is the basic social act’? But would the latter strategy be possible in the actual absence of the experience of the constitutive power of such ritual on the part of the vast majority of a projected readership? How could such a textbook be regarded as more than a dialectical fantasy informed by the tormented experiential trajectory of one individual?

Unwilling, indeed incapable of expending energy on what would be futile efforts to convince those without the first hand experience of the ritual process that there was plausibility informing Rappaport’s complex theoretical contentions, I now take my leave. For the moment the conundrum defeats me, and so I withdraw from the field until such time as a viable solution occurs to me.

I believe that there is a parallel between the phenomena which departments of Religious Studies purport to study and explain and the theories used in such explanation, and a parallel relationship between music and musicology. I now take my own hint – and leave to work at the music in the hope that the theory will eventually interpret that which has given me renewed life on the margins of a societal reality now in bondage to the market, subjected to omniscient surveillance, and dedicated to the manufacture of humankind in an inflated higher education industry.

 

Is there anything good to be said for ‘Religion’?

11 Thursday Aug 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ Comments Off on Is there anything good to be said for ‘Religion’?

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

As readers of the Critical Religion blog may be aware, my trenchant colleague Tim Fitzgerald has once more launched a missile against the category of ‘religion’ in his recent posting (30 May 2011) as the word reappeared in what he regards as the wholly illusory notion of ‘the global resurgence of religion’ advanced by Scott M. Thomas in his book, The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations: The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century (NY & Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2005).

Tim Fitzgerald has written a series of major books in which he has with unsparing consistency sought to deconstruct the ‘religion and secular politics binary’. Fitzgerald’s, The Ideology of Religious Studies (OUP 2000), his magisterial historical study Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A critical history of religion and related categories (OUP 2007) and the forthcoming Religion and Politics in International Relations: The Modern Myth all bear rich witness to this ongoing preoccupation. In the opening pages of Civility and Barbarity Fitzgerald expatiates at length upon the awesome potency of Arturo di Modica’s bovine masterpiece, the Bull of Wall Street, the very embodiment of the power of capitalism. In a paean of admiration reminiscent of Marx’s hymnic response to the capacity of capitalist (and bourgeois) modernity to melt all that is solid, Fitzgerald writes:

For this Leviathan is no sacred cow dwelling in the pastures of agricultural hierarchies. Looked at from the back view,  you can see he has bronze balls the size of mystic gongs, and you wouldn’t want to be tossed, mauled or trampled in this arena.  The Beast of Capital can normally be placated through the performance of the appropriate ritual proprieties, but he will fork you on his horns if you waver in your faith (p. x)

Indeed, this reader envisages Fitzgerald as a slaughterman repeatedly striving to confront the bull, avoid its horns, plant his bolt gun on the brow of the beast, pull the trigger and fell it for good.

There are, however, problems associated with this kind of approach to ‘critical religion’ and the oppositional reification, even fetishisation of the mythopoeic and alienative capacity of capitalism.  These problems do not, for me, stem from any inadequacies in Fitzgerald’s erudite analysis, that is once a reader has accepted all the basic postulates of his standpoint. As it happens, although I share with my colleague a belief in the validity and importance of aspects of Marx’s mythologised account of capitalism as ‘the jealous god’ as it is expounded in the posthumously published Grundrisse and elsewhere in the Marxian oeuvre, I do not agree with other aspects of his analysis and the lines of argument associated with, for example, leading contributors to the journal Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, notably the prolific writer Russell McCutcheon.

I believe that the difficulty resides in a confusion between ‘religion’ understood as a ‘category’ on the one hand and the study of the religion as a ‘field’. In principle, I remain critically loyal to the updating and renewal of the approach to the study of religion pioneered by my own esteemed first teacher, the late Ninian Smart, who had a free hand at Lancaster to develop as an interdisciplinary cluster of insights within an area of human experience and concern. This was an approach inspired by such figures as Edmund Husserl, Gerhardus Van Der Leeuw and Mircea Eliade, which was shared and then developed by, for example, Edward Conze, Michael Pye, and now Gavin Flood of Oxford. Within what the French sociologist of religion, Danièle Hervieu-Leger, has called ‘le champ religieux’, there is space for many interdisciplinary coalitions to emerge that may then harness the appropriate theories and methods with which to access and represent  the multifarious contexts in which the phenomena of human needs for community, transition and transformation occur.

Given Fitzgerald’s ongoing critique and deconstruction of categories what are we to do – and to think – if we find ourselves compelled to engage in ritual or other spiritual practices? This is, of course, on the assumption that such an aspirant practitioner might detect some vestige of human benefit in what we are not allowed to call in the most general terms in Anglo-American and European societies ‘religion’. In the interests of purging and purification where may those who like the customers exploited in Carrette and King’s ‘spiritual marketplace’ and the victims exploited in Heelas and Woodhead’s ‘spiritual revolution’ now turn?

The situation as it emerges in Fitzgerald’s critique may well remind us of that described in the early writings of Friedrich Engels, who observed that the weavers of Wuppertal ‘who do not fall prey to mysticism are ruined by drunkenness’ and presented the memorable image of the blacksmith, ‘on his right side the Bible, on his left ‑ very often at any rate ‑ a bottle of Schnapps’ captivated by the revivalist preacher Pastor Jürgens who entrances the congregation so that ‘first the young girls weep, then the old women join in with a heart‑rending soprano and the cacophony is completed  by the wailing of the enfeebled drunken pietists’.

In short, we are right back with ‘religion’ as the opiate that numbs the pain of existence and deludes the mind with structures of false consciousness and ideology.

Whilst the category of ‘religion’ may indeed be construed as a merely modern category conjoined with emergent liberalism that may then be inappropriately projected onto societies and cultures of  a perpetually estranged ‘other’, we should not fall victim once more to the contemporary analogue of the fallacies of a displaced version of the German Ideology, through which we dismiss the state and liberalism as simply the illusory and oppressive constructs of the dominant class, and seek their destruction in the secular eschatological hope of some kind of benevolent political Aufhebung.

As scholars in the field of religious studies (and I do not exclude from this the critically reflexive study of the discourses of traditions under the rubric of ‘theology’) we need both to interrogate and to investigate with empathic understanding that dimension of human life that originates in prehistoric antiquity, informs the lives of countless millions of human beings, and now manifests itself in an array of displaced and surrogate forms in the contemporary world. The world is in desperate crisis and in equally urgent need of beneficent shared symbolic universals. Religious and spiritual practices can serve as a benign source of such universals along with an array of other sources energised by what I refer to as the shamano-ritual complex.

Ironically enough, the quest for the extirpation of the category of ‘religion’ through its analytical deconstruction runs the acute risk of going way beyond critique into unmitigated destruction. Such an academic mission can further the current tendency to close down the Humanities in British higher education. The deconstruction of a category is therefore in imminent danger of becoming the destruction of a field. Such an attitude brings comfort to those in higher education deploying the techniques of human resources management who can now simply step back and watch scholars declare themselves devoid of viable categories and thus render their quiet elimination all the easier.

This situation enables the real enemies of what the Scottish historian George Elder Davie has called the ‘democratic intellect’ characteristic of the Scottish university tradition to conquer by default. The foes of an informed democracy will scarcely have to lift a finger if scholars in Religious Studies (and the Humanities at large) declare themselves and their colleagues to be relying upon nothing but figments of the class interest of the Western bourgeois imagination and the interstitial traces of a vanquished primitivism.

The events of the past week in England show that fundamental issues pertaining to the legitimation of government, social justice, and societal stability need to be addressed, or the anomie now evident in riots on the streets may engulf us all. In my view, scholars in Religious Studies should not simply remain the reluctant but paid tools of an industrialised system of defective socialisation that initiates students into informed passivity, but the source of a truly critical discourse that broadens the imagination and enhances personal agency.

Patriarchy, Patrimonialism – and Paradigm Change

08 Sunday May 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

Following some years in so-called early-retirement it was with much interest that I nervously ventured out once again to a mainstream academic conference: that of the Sociology of Religion Research Group of the British Sociological Association held at Easter in the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham. This BSA Group used to be a familiar stamping ground for me, and so I wondered how the sub-discipline would have fared since my last attendance five years before. Of course I also wanted to catch up with where things were now at, given not only the disputed increased salience and ambiguities of the religious factor in the world system, but also, not least, to observe what impact the substantial and unprecedented investment made through the Religion and Society Research Programme supported by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) with its £18 million budget might have made.

It has been apparent for at least the past fifteen years that what one might call the traditional sociology of religion exemplified most notably in a series of textbooks and monographs built around an array of recurrent basic concepts has faced a crisis. Of the latter thought patterns, the long drawn-out careers of the theory of secularisation and debates on the meaning of the term ‘religion’ are the most prominent. The slow but inevitable dying away of the pre-modern residua of religion in the inhospitable normality of rational scientific modernity charted in the theory of secularisation might remind readers with a poetic cast of mind of Matthew Arnold’s famous lines:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Those who have long memories may also recall the postmodern theologian Don Cupitt’s melancholic, grainy image in the Sea of Faith television series when he followed in the footsteps of Jesus and David Friedrich Strauss, and, somewhat lugubriously, announced his nocturnal presence in the Garden of Gethsemane. What this (post-) theologian also acknowledged in the poet was the threat of the unknown, a continuing presence of the irrational,

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Anyone involved in the study of religion, be they theologian, poet, critical scholar in the humanities, or indeed social scientist might well recognise that the retreating tide, with its ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ can now be seen as more like the retreat of the sea to the horizon that precedes the onset of a tsunami that carries much before it.

In face of this ‘resurgence of religion’ in the course of the last decade of the twentieth century Roland Robertson and Peter Beyer advanced the theory of globalisation and the ‘glocal’ matrix as the key components of a new ‘paradigm’ with which to challenge the persisting but apparently faltering theory of secularisation. The latter was regarded by them as incapable of explaining the increased salience of the religious factor and the apparent reflexivity of religious collectivities as they responded to global pressures. In his famous, controversial and influential work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1961), Thomas S. Kuhn argued that ‘normal’ science did not proceed thorough a smooth accumulation of objective evidence but could be subject to a crisis created by anomalies that would eventually bring about the collapse of a comprehensive theory and its displacement by a new ‘paradigm’. Was the same true of the theory of secularisation, and could globalisation theory effect such a displacement?

In my judgement there are problems associated with Robertson and Beyer’s advocacy of globalisation theory in that the ‘middle axioms’ that might make sense of the intermediate connections between the level of ‘grand theory’ (and theories do not come much grander than that of globalisation) and the contingent specificity of any given locale are not that obvious. Thus Beyer made use of the concept of ‘communication’ central to Niklaas Luhmann’s systems theory, and defines ‘religion’ in terms of it being communication, rather in the way that the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher made the feeling of ‘absolute dependence’ the category out of which to construct an entire experiential and theological architectonic. In short, however, Robertson and Beyer are in my judgement correct in attributing determinative significance to globalisation, but how this might be worked through in a satisfactory way is less than obvious.

The conference at Birmingham had a packed schedule and there was a rich diversity of short papers on a wide range of topics. There were three plenary and clearly definitional sessions respectively addressed by equally distinguished speakers. The first was the Scot, Professor Steven Bruce, the second the English (and European) sociologist Professor Grace Davie, and third the British/Australian Professor Bryan Turner. The question of national identity has itself become more salient as the nations of the United Kingdom move in the direction of individual self-determination, and the three speakers refracted this dimension and their awareness of their own individual social backgrounds in a number of ways.

Professor Bruce is a combative figure who throughout his career has trenchantly defended the secularisation tradition established by his mentor the late Bryan Wilson of the University of Oxford. At the BSA Conference Bruce once more re-asserted his position as a consistent scientific positivist, and pointedly excluded as basically irrelevant ‘normative theory’, ‘zeitgeist metaphors’, any extraneous ‘agenda-setting theory’ and feminist sociological insights, as opposed to the correct path of ‘sociological explanation’ to be applied to the study of religion. Professor Davie is a skilled practitioner of via media, and rather than confront Bruce she presented a positive (as opposed to a positivist) report as she highlighted the values of diversity in topics, theory and method apparent in the present-day sociology of religion in Britain. This emollient approach was indeed advisable as aspirant researchers availed themselves of the beneficence of the AHRC, a largesse that may well be unrepeatable; consequently we should think carefully before we bite the hand that feeds us. As a sociologist of renown, Professor Turner has had exceptionally wide international experience and he focused upon the topic of charisma, because unlike the positivist empiricist Bruce and the positively eclectic Davie, Turner would appear to have an enduring – even a personal – relationship with the core subject matter of religion, which on this occasion he identified with ‘charisma’. All three contributions were in their various ways controversial, but in the discussions that followed the interchanges were muted. Why, might one ask was this the case? How might we understand this relatively subdued atmosphere?

In the peace-promoting surroundings of Woodbrooke there was a strong sense that the sub-discipline of the sociological study of religion has reinforced its boundaries as a quasi-autonomous niche culture within the wider sociological field. Despite this, there are considerable questions that remained for the most part submerged. For example, whilst the ‘spiritual revolution’ was frequently mentioned but dismissed on the basis that the active spiritual subjects in Heelas and Woodhead’s Kendal Project only represented a tiny minority (according to Professor Bruce this was only 0.8% of the population), the tacit assumption that quantity should be equated with societal significance was never questioned. Such an assumption would make the terrorist an irrelevance. Globalisation and the global/local (‘glocal’) problematic was completely marginal. International political and cultural violence intensified by religious zealotry was likewise at the periphery of conference concerns whereas this is a matter of global importance. Clearly something was taking place that prevented anything really interesting from happening.

In conclusion, I invite you to imagine that we are beside a waterhole in the savannah amongst lions – and other animals standing at a respectful distance. The sombre tone of Sir David Attenborough’s voice can be heard as he comments quietly on the ethology of the animals we observe. A great grizzled lion who has banished many a rival continues to ensure the survival of his genes (and memes) by the elimination or cowing into silence of all opposition. The patriarch’s message is this: lions do not cultivate or eat vegetables; they do not eat fruit; they do not manufacture food; they hunt animals and eat meat alone: the true lion is a carnivore. A noble lioness, the matriarch that has born many cubs lies sunning herself at the other side of the waterhole. She knows that once roused the female is deadlier than the male, and so she keeps her counsel and lets her cubs down to the water’s edge to drink. All the other lions, young and old, know that the waterhole will soon dry up and so they likewise keep their growls to themselves. Another venerable master lion on the periphery stalks slowly forward and ventures to observe that lions should eat authentic wild meat and not factory-farmed animals. He then quietly walks off and away back to own far distant waterhole. The patriarch and the matriarch are meanwhile content. In ethological and social-psychological terms we can see that the patriarch and matriarch enjoy ‘sphere dominance’. Wisely, however, they know that they do not enjoy or aspire to ‘full spectrum dominance’, as this rightly belongs to a higher species that only very occasionally visits the oasis. Yet the future of the waterhole – and of the lions – depends upon the ideas and the behaviour of the higher species who understand the ecology that comprises both. The lions are meanwhile content to sun themselves until the hunt for the next meal. When, where, and in what form a Kuhnian ‘crisis’ might come that re-imagines some of the critical issues the BSA conference seemed unable to address is unclear, though simply continuing to lie in the sunshine and drink at the waterhole filled by AHRC largesse is not a long-term option.

On Theory and Practice in Religious Studies

14 Monday Mar 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ Comments Off on On Theory and Practice in Religious Studies

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

This is the first time I have ever ‘blogged’. In fact the latter word was so new to my PC that I had to add it to the dictionary in the software. In the course of the past two decade I have, however, both made field notes and kept a personal journal as I moved between two very different academic contexts and I draw upon these resources in the following observations.

As Professor of Divinity in Scotland’s most ancient university with its longstanding traditions of scholarly activity and golf (a searching pastime and form of outdoor freemasonry), I was participant observer in what was until fairly recently an exclusively male lineage saturated with explicit patriarchy. I then moved from a university that is about to celebrate the six hundredth anniversary of its foundation in 1411-12 to a Chair in Religious Studies at my alma mater, a wet and windswept concrete and brick sixties campus university in the northwest of England, a locale that in part inspired Malcolm Bradbury’s notorious novel, The History Man. It has to be said that the extraordinarily different genii loci of both contexts were very much alive, although the now omnipresent dead hand of bureaucratising British managerialism is successfully killing off and marginalising nearly all individuality as diamonds are relentlessly transmuted into glass.

When I survey a lifetime and a career spent shifting back and forth between ‘Religious Studies’ and ‘Theology’, I find much of the ideological polarisation erected between these ways of doing things less than helpful. This is above all the case in an era of ever-growing and multi-dimensional global crisis in which the identity-intensifying phenomena traditionally represented by the problematic Western category of ‘religion’ play an important, yet extremely ambiguous role.

Whilst I had the privilege of swinging between these seemingly antithetical academic contexts, for me the pendulum came to rest in a decade of subsistence on the periphery of academia as I explored the interface between burgeoning psychotherapies ranging from the banal repetitiveness of Rogerian counselling to the sudden and unexpected transpersonal insights of psychodrama – and the marketplace of once alternative (but now increasingly main-line) spiritualities. This borderland runs through contexts that extend from (e.g.) the milieu of casual power-clothing in organisational shamanism and transformational rituals in top-flight schools of management and leadership studies courses to primal screaming, firewalking, rebirthing, and running sky- and ash-clad over the sand dunes at initiatory men’s gatherings. Experienced in this way no-one could accuse Religious Studies of being boring.

At the same time as going on this journey I began, as Elizabeth Kübler-Ross puts it in her landmark book, On Death and Dying, the process of ‘learning from the dying’ through a series of workshops led by an Irish seabhéan Phyllida Anam-Aire (‘soul-mother’) who had trained with Kübler-Ross herself. This fieldwork confronted me with dimensions of human pain precipitated for the most part by childhood sexual abuse and rape of participants in relation to which it seemed to me well nigh impossible to maintain the epoche, the bracketing out of the researcher’s subjectivity. My entire self-understanding was called into question and my personal and intellectual identity had to expand and own realities largely new to me, that is if I were to be both true to myself and to the manifest needs of others.

As it happens, what began as participant observation turned out to be an essential preparation for supporting, caring for, nursing and the eventual ‘home death’ of Audrey, my wife and life-partner for over forty years. The decade of my immersion was for my wife a time of acute illness and then terminal cancer and this distressing reality caused me draw upon what I was learning in fieldwork. Here one re-learned that bodies are indeed all too real and intrinsic, and that they should not be regarded as merely empty signifiers upon which to project metaphors and meaning. Bodies are, of course, both; as touch replaces words body speaks silently in love to body in mutual surrender before the final relinquishment of the physical relationship in decathexis.

Much of the fieldwork I engaged in demanded degrees of confidentiality that has made publication extremely problematic. Nonetheless, any idea that I might, along with the radical secularisers within Religious Studies and the sociology of religion, regard what I experienced and then deployed as the trivial spiritual residue of a fading human pathology is both implausible and unacceptable.

The problem remains: how can one responsibly represent human experience as this is characterised by ritualisation and altered states of consciousness and as they manifest themselves today in late modernity through complex processes of differentiation, migration and surrogacy within a theoretical framework that needs to extend from the level of globalisation down through human communities to the individual, afflicted human body? How can we clarify this matrix in order, as I would hope, not merely to explain and facilitate comprehension, but also to make intelligently accessible ways of doing things that are as ancient and, I believe, as important to humankind as the making of music?