Tag Archives: music

Performance, sound and hegemony in the Empty Centre

04 Monday Aug 2014

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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?

Performing Gender and Sexuality in Early 20th Century India

25 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Contemporary understandings of Karnatic Music and Bharatnatyam (also known as Indian classical music and dance, respectively) as ‘religious’ arts that represent Hinduism and Indian culture originated within a very specific historical context: the Indian nationalist movement in the 1920s colonial city of Madras; Partha Chatterjee, discussing a similar movement in Bengal, describes this as ‘Classicization’ (Nation and Its Fragments, 1997, p73). The nationalist movement in Madras was a ‘culture-defining’ project in which music and dance were carefully re-constructed by pruning specific practices and traditions to represent the ‘pure’ inner sphere of spirituality that would displace the outer sphere of colonial politics. Such re-defining of performance arts mystified music and dance performances as ‘religious’ (read: Hindu) experiences and gendered the performances by defining femininity within the politics of nationalism. According to this emerging nationalistic patriarchy, whilst the outer/’material’ world belonged to men, the inner/’spiritual’ world ‘assigned’ to women had to be protected and nurtured. The nationalist politics created a new hyper-feminine middle-class woman defined by monogamous conjugal relationships as the Hindu way of life. This woman was defined by her sexual propriety who, through her spirituality, had to maintain the cohesion of family life whilst the man succumbed to the pressures of the material world.

Discourses on women’s sexual propriety as a pivotal point of re-defining performance arts specifically targeted communities traditionally performing music and dance, the devadāsis. Devadāsi (literally: ‘Servant of God’) referred to diverse categories of women (and occasionally men) who learned and performed dance and music within diverse settings such as temples or royal courts, festivals and private ceremonies for their patrons. They lived in a matrilineal set-up within a patriarchal society in which they had the right to education and property and enjoyed a high societal status as nityasumangali (eternally auspicious). However, in the early 20th century discourses on ‘purifying’ performance arts focused on two aspects of their tradition: a) they were not bound by monogamous conjugal arrangements; these courtesans went through dedication rituals after which they entered concubinage of the king or became mistresses of their patrons; b) traditionally they performed (among others) compositions that were erotic poems portraying explicit sexual acts (usually between the hero and heroine of the poem/story). A focus on the devadāsi community, which had a historically significant presence in South India, as a symbol of immorality emerged due to a set of historical developments beginning in the mid-19th century. As court patronages diminished devadāsis moved to Madras and set up salon performances for the newly urbanized audiences, both native and European. The mid-19th century saw transformations in colonial representations of devadāsis from performers of arts (from a tradition outside of monogamous conjugal relationships) to ‘prostitutes’ who could perform dance and music. This description, ‘prostitutes’, was affirmed by a series of Anglo-Indian laws passed during the late 19th century modeled after Britain’s Contagious Diseases Act that targeted ‘prostitutes’ catering to British soldiers, and brought devadāsis under the laws. Judicial definitions, coupled with the influence of the Purity Campaign in 1880s Britain, triggered a politics of morality that resulted in a ‘devadāsi-reform’ movement, which saw devadāsis as moral deviants from whom sacred music and dance had to be rescued.

The early 20th century focus on nationalism and Hinduism, in addition to transforming perceptions of devadāsis, resulted in the movement that defined female sexuality in the public sphere by drawing distinctions between the divine and the erotic. Thus, not only was the divine redefined to indicate a nostalgic pure religious and Hindu past, but the erotic was also redefined as sexual impropriety. Reformers petitioned the government to abolish the devadāsi tradition; the movement was spearheaded by Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy, who was born into a devadāsi family but rejected the tradition. Her movement received support from (among others) the theosophist Annie Besant and Gandhi, who argued that music and dance were sacred but had been despoiled by devadāsis who had to be rehabilitated to become respectable middle-class women bound and defined by their monogamous conjugal relationships. Despite opposition from the devadāsi community, the Devadāsi Abolition Act was passed in 1947. Devadāsis were thus banned from performing dance and music within a salon set-up.

Whilst the vacuum in the performance space left by devadāsis was being filled by middle-class Brahmin women encouraged by nationalists and organizations such as the Madras Music Academy, these spaces were also being deified. Specifically, Rukmini Devi Arundale, a prominent theosophist and protégé of Anne Besant, employed stagecraft that reified Bharatnatyam as ‘religious dance’ by conducting a series of performances where she incorporated chants of Sanskrit verses and displayed an icon of Natarāja, an incarnation of the god Shiva in his form as a cosmic dancer, thereby representing the cosmic connection between art and the divine. She introduced sets of compositions in her performances that extolled Natarāja. While the devadāsi repertoire was removed from temple settings, Arundale adopted temple settings to her performance stage through portable temple background sets, thereby deifying the performance space. In contemporary Bharatnatyam performances, the presence of Natarāja idols and temple-setting backgrounds are ubiquitous.


(In this video, The image in the background is of Shiva, of whom Natarāja is an incarnation. The song is about Natarāja.)

The history of Karnatic Music and Bharatnatyam posits a focus on (among other issues) questions of embodiment and the female body. That the female body is impure had been established in the case of devadāsis within the politics of nationalism: music and dance representing the divine, their ‘sacred’ (read: ‘Hindu’) past therefore had to remain ‘pure’. The dimension of embodiment of music and dance permitted by patriarchy represents a dichotomy between the soul and the body in which the soul is the pure inner sphere that connects the performer to the divine, whilst the body represents the material outer sphere that needs to be removed from the context. Women as custodians of this inner spiritual sphere were to learn and perform these arts, thus embodying them, but had to remove the erotic from their performances, which were seen as belonging to the sacred inner space. This solidified the understanding that ‘true religion’ was sacred and must be distinguished from the non-sacred.

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

14 Monday Nov 2011

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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

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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.

 

Musicology and philosophy, religion and political science – the issue of interdisciplinarity

15 Friday Jul 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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I have for some time been reflecting on why it is that so few ‘secular’ scholars engage meaningfully with ‘religion’, or to put it another way: why is it that so many of us as religion scholars depend upon and practice disciplinary heterogeneity, whereas many of the scholars we use do not appear to engage substantially with what we write.  My thinking on this has been further prompted by reading a blog entry by J.P.E. Harper-Scott, Senior Lecturer in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London.  He recently wrote about a conference he attended for musicologists and philosophers.  The frustration evident in his posting is clear: the musicologists at his conference engaged actively with a variety of philosophers, but from his perspective at least, few if any of the philosophers engaged seriously with musicologists that he regarded as central to his work.

He outlines his main point as follows:

The musicologists at the conference are interested in philosophy. They read major figures such as Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and so on, and they read the secondary literature too… at least enough to gain perspective on the principal debates… In the main, however, philosophers who are interested in music… do not read musicology. If they did, then their frequently catastrophic failures of definition and unwillingness to engage with – or even conceive of – political, economic, cultural, and historical context for the music, composers (where there are any), performers, listeners, and critics who jointly make up the world we call ‘music’ would show up to them as glaringly as an elementary error in a syllogism. The short form: there will never be meaningful exchange between philosophy and musicology while philosophers fail to read anything as obvious as the major writings of Richard Taruskin.

That I can do no more than acknowledge knowing Taruskin is a musicologist limits any further comment I might make on Harper-Scott’s argument about musicologists and philosophers.  However, as I asked in a comment on his blog, why is it that some disciplines seem to be more interdisciplinary than others?  After all, the experience he describes is far from unique.  I want to develop my relatively unformed comment a little in this blog posting.

Many of us working in the field of ‘religion’ depend upon a variety of other disciplines – such as political science, philosophy, history, linguistics, phenomenology and more – to help us understand the phenomena we are dealing with.  Consequently, numerous scholars who are not directly involved in ‘religion’ as a discipline inform the work that I (and many other colleagues) pursue.  For example, in a relatively short essay soon to appear in what promises to be a useful collection on Protestant Missions and Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (eds. Hilde Nielssen, Inger Marie Okkenhaug, Karina Hestad Skeie), I refer to the following scholars (in order of appearance): Gen Doy, Simon Gikandi, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Ann Laura Stoler, Benedict Anderson, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Edward Casey, Jeremy Black, Hélène Gill, Victor Turner, Homi Bhabha, Karina Hestad Skeie, Pierre Bourdieu, Christine Lindner, Andrew Ross, Susan Thorne, David Richards, Lester Irwin Vogel, Bill Marshall, Robert Young, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty.  This list reveals a fairly clear ideological bias, but it also suggests a wide range of disciplines that I draw on for my paper – and in this regard I see myself as a typical religion scholar: most of the interesting ‘religion’ work I read uses these scholars and many more.

However, few of the scholars I mentioned not explicitly working in the field of religion (such as Skeie, Lindner, Ross, Thorne, Vogel) appear to engage very much with religion scholars of any hue, even if we think of ‘religion’ in extremely broad terms.  Why is it that so few ‘secular’ scholars fail to engage meaningfully with ‘religion’?  For example, Said’s dismissal of missionaries in Orientalism has been commented on adversely by many – though that has not stopped scholars using his work creatively (one might think directly of work such as Richard King’s Orientalism and Religion: Post-colonial Theory, India and the Mystic East).

However we understand ‘religion’, whether as a category or as a field of study – and there are issues here that go to the core of what we think the discipline of ‘religion’ is about – Harper-Scott, in his response to my comment, identifies the problem in ontic/ontological terms.  I can see a validity to this understanding, though I would express it slightly differently and perhaps point to the idea of ‘professionalism’, as Said called it in his 1993 Reith Lectures (Representations of the Intellectual, New York: Vintage, 1994: 73-4; rather wonderfully, the BBC have made it possible to listen to his lectures online).

Said argues that amongst other things, professionalism induces specialisation.  One very clear way in which this manifests itself in the contemporary context is in governmental assessment exercises.  In the UK, for example, academics are required to write several pieces of work that can be entered into the RAE, or REF, or whatever the government’s lackeys of the day decide to call the arbitrary quantification of academic ‘output’ – even the word induces nausea – as if writing an article is being equated with factory production.  These ‘outputs’ are assessed by other academics in ‘the same field’, the idea being that political scientists are best placed to peer review and assess the work of other political scientists, religion scholars can best do the same for their colleagues, and so on.  Of course, there is an inherent logic here, but one of the problems with this approach is that it fosters increased specialisation, and in turn, Said argues, this leads to shutting out other disciplines; from the perspective of a literary scholar:

Specialization means losing sight of the raw effort of constructing either art or knowledge; as a result you cannot view knowledge and art as choices and decisions, commitments and alignments, but only in terms of impersonal theories or methodologies.  To be a specialist in literature too often means shutting out history or music, or politics. (p77)

The production of ‘impersonal theories or methodologies’ fits the stereotype of the academic in the wider public, but this is core of the problem.  What happens to the disciplines that have been shut out?  Simplistically put, they often tend to shut out other disciplines too, the consequence being atomisation – whilst this makes control by university administrators and management much easier, it tends to deaden wide-ranging intellectual and public engagement.  And it is precisely engagement – in the academy and the wider world – that Said argues for.  Not as a ‘professional’ he points out, but as an amateur, engaging in ‘an activity that is fueled by care and affection rather than by profit and selfish, narrow specialization'(p82); this sounds remarkably similar to Harper-Scott’s description of musicologists’ approach to philosophy.  Said is not suggesting that this is easy, far from it!  His Humanism and Democratic Criticism (esp. ch. 5) discusses further some of the immense difficulties involved (and he is not the only one to deal with these issues, as, for example, Pierre Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus demonstrates).

However, the obvious difficulties involved do not obviate the necessity of such engagement.  Of course, if it is impossible to see how one’s academic life might relate to the wider world, it will be difficult to see how it could relate to other academics, and how other academics could relate to it.  What connects the list of scholars noted above in relation to my essay is their general willingness to engage across and beyond the boundaries of ‘their’ discipline, whether this be politics, economics, or history etc., however hard it may be.  Indeed, it is probably appropriate to argue that some of the most stimulating scholars are those who explicitly engage with other disciplines and the wider world.  The apparent failure, often, to engage with religion is therefore all the more puzzling.

There is, of course, a difference in the way musicologists and religion scholars have dealt with some of the issues raised by postmodern thinkers: I think it is probably impossible for most musicologists to deny the existence of ‘music’ and the attendant emotional and physical engagement that the practice of music, however defined, can offer.  Engagement, as Said calls it, has multiple levels; with some scholars essentially denying the existence of religion as a phenomenon enabling emotional and psychological engagement and seeing it only as a category of study, it is perhaps understandable that scholars from other disciplines might see what we think of as important as actually being irrelevant.

I suspect this is perhaps part of the issue for many who see themselves outwith the discipline of religion: a lack of personal engagement with religion – however defined – means they regard themselves as ‘secular’ without ever really thinking about what that term means (in other words, they ‘don’t believe in god’ and therefore they must be ‘secular’).  In this kind of thinking, ‘secular’ is the mainstream and ‘religion’ is seen as an optional but largely irrelevant add-on.  From such a starting point there is no reason to think an understanding of religion might have a substantial bearing on political science, history, economics etc.  Perhaps this stems from a mistaken understanding that there is ‘a universal definition of religion’ that can be compartmentalised away, failing to recognise historical contingencies and discursive constructions arising from and impacting upon politics, history, economics and so on (as Talal Asad would perhaps argue).  That precise problematic is, of course, one of the key issues that the Critical Religion Research Group is seeking to address in its programmes, and my colleagues and I seek to explore different aspects of this in our various blog postings.  As the summer is upon us and we look back at nearly six months of postings on a variety of topics, it is to be hoped that a helpful contribution to the furtherance of interdisciplinarity and understanding of the place of ‘the study of religion’ has been made.

‘The study of religion’ (as it is often called) is ‘an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary mode of engagement: incorporating many disciplines, but also going beyond the limits of any one discipline’ (as we say here).  Reflecting on what it is we are thinking about when we think about ‘religion’ helps us cross disciplinary boundaries and engage with wider questions, and can, in fact, only happen by doing so.  Perhaps the philosophers at Harper-Scott’s conference left with a greater awareness of the importance of engaging with musicologists’ work; similarly we hope that ‘non-religion’ scholars will find what we do stimulates further engagement with some of the questions we are dealing with.  Conversing with other religion scholars is good – conversing with people from all kinds of disciplines and backgrounds is even better!

(I would like to gratefully acknowledge comments from Richard Roberts on an early draft of this posting, though he is not, of course, to blame for any inconsistencies etc. in my text.)