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~ Critical Approaches to the Study of Religion

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Tag Archives: Scotland

Religious education or indoctrination: an evening of lively discussion

24 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by Timothy Fitzgerald in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Critical Religion, religious education, religious observance, religious studies, schools, Scotland, University of Stirling

[Picking up on the debate at Stirling University on 23.10.14, the introductory blog to this topic by Alison Jasper and John I’Anson, the contribution by Sarah Clark, and the first comment piece by Russell Hunter, Tim Fitzgerald here offers our final piece on this specific event.  We hope you have found all of these contributions helpful in thinking about the wider debate on RE in schools, and not just in the Scottish context. – Michael Marten, Editor]

The organisers should be thanked and praised as far as the idea of the forum is concerned. Clearly it was a legitimate forum for local teachers, parents, theology professors and Liberal Christian ministers to express their feelings and ideas about the goods and the bads of RE in school. The forum rightly included a representative of secular humanism. The problem for me is that secular humanists talk the binary reverse of what the religionists talk, and thus challenge nothing, because the circularity of the discourse is maintained. This binary discourse centred around ‘religion’ and ‘non-religion’ ensures the circular rehashing of the same persistent, un-deconstructed discourse whose deadening ubiquity stops us all thinking new thoughts.

Our very own Sarah Clark had something powerful and original to say, but the chair and the other speakers failed to pick it up. Sarah referred to the ‘cognitive dissonance’ she experienced between teaching RE in school and studying critical religion at Stirling University. This led her to make a career change. This significant content seemed to be of no interest to the chairperson or to any of the other speakers, despite the lavish praise and the mutual love-in and prize-winning ceremony at the end.

True, I am more on the academic side of the topic of ‘religion’, but, as a result of the urging of others, I imagined that this might be a forum where I could learn something and perhaps also make some useful connections between what we do in critical religion at Stirling and ideas about how RE in schools might be rethought to give it critical relevance.  However I cannot in all honesty say that anything at all was advanced by this event – from my own perspective at least – and indeed it may have done some damage. I feel disappointed at the way this debate was staged and conducted.

Sarah received loud applause when she went to the podium to speak, yet none of the organisers or other speakers seemed alerted by this that a sizeable number of undergraduates, and several postgraduates and lecturers were present, or that we might have anything worthy to contribute. Two lecturers in particular – Alison Jasper and John I’Anson, have published interesting contributions to the topic of RE, but these do not seem to have been mentioned.

You cannot have everyone on a panel, and the organisers have the right to choose who they want to be there. Yet neither Alison nor John were acknowledged from the platform and nor were the rest of us from the Stirling religion subject area. The many religion students and lecturers in the audience seemed to be invisible and inaudible to those up on the platform and to those of the organisers who were sitting in the front row. I felt that I was intruding into someone else’s private assembly, and I began to wonder why my wife and I were there, and why I had urged my students and postgraduates to attend – some coming from as far away as St Andrews and Edinburgh.

Some people may now want to organise a counter-debate, preferable led by a combination of current RE teachers in schools and critical religion students at Stirling, especially those who, like Sarah, intend – or intended – to teach RE in school. Yes, we need all the constituencies to participate. It seems potentially more creative to try to bring the academic subject area and the school curriculum into some kind of direct, creative tension. After all, that is exactly what Sarah Clark was talking about: the dissonance between the two.

I believe and hope that what we do successfully in the religion subject area at Stirling is to deconstruct the empty and confused rhetoric around religion and secularity, and show how it serves wider power agendas that tend to remain half-hidden in the background.  But I recognise the need for caution. I suspect that many teachers and parents, whose legitimate concerns are with the actualities of the school curriculum, will be puzzled by how we proceed, and slow to recognise the relevance of deconstructing discourses on religion. It would be unhelpful if the ‘lively discussion’ split into a false assumed dichotomy of realists and idealists – the idealists being those supposedly privileged academics like myself who live and teach abstractions that have no bearing on the supposed realities, and the realists being the teachers who do the immensely difficult job working within the externally imposed realities of the curriculum.  This is, I believe, yet another of those either-or binaries that keep us stupefied and ensure that nothing new can be thought. I would not go cold into that forum. It needs to be prepared. A space could be made for what we do at Stirling, even if it is only trying to clear the conceptual rubble so evident that evening.

What is education and what is indoctrination? Reflections on the RE debate

18 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by R Hunter in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Critical Religion, religious education, religious observance, religious studies, schools, Scotland, University of Stirling

[Picking up on the debate at Stirling University on 23.10.14, the introductory blog to this topic by Alison Jasper and John I’Anson, and the contribution by Sarah Clark, Russell Hunter, a Masters student at Stirling University, here offers his thoughts on the debate.  There will be one more comment piece next week. – Michael Marten, Editor]

After discussing with Dr. Fitzgerald the terms and use of education/indoctrination programs, I was excited to attend this panel discussion. I listened intently to the four panelists and came away from each of their presentations wanting to hear a bold statement. Was the current system about education or was it about indoctrination? They tiptoed around this issue.

Professor James Conroy came the closest to addressing it, but what did he mean when he said, “You cannot educate if a culture is not willing to learn, and if indoctrination was the goal, it failed”? He further argued that “there is no link to theological questions” in the Scottish school curriculum. He used statistics from his survey findings to show that religious affiliations are decreasing among schoolchildren today, which is why there is no indoctrination. To conclude that indoctrination does not exist because religious affiliations among schoolchildren are decreasing is questionable. I would be interested to see the survey questions. The teachers surveyed may not have fully supported the presence of Religious Education (RE) in the school curriculum and were so politically correct in their delivery of it that their RE instruction had a counter-effect. Would that not amount to indoctrination?

Reverend Sally Foster-Fulton was passionate but failed to convince me of RE’s future role in Scottish schools or even clarify its future role. “Time for reflection” is a nice catch phrase that she coined. I take it to mean coalescing support for RE by drawing attention to the fact that all religions have the commonality of reflection. Be it prayer, meditation, or just quite time, time for reflection creates a common bond between each faith. She quoted the Scottish government’s policy on RE in the Scottish school curriculum. It would have been more powerful if she had clarified how schools interpret and apply this legislation and what role the church plays in all of this. That was the most confusing issue: what role does the church play? Is the government lobbying for time for reflection? If so, is that indoctrination?

Mr. Douglas McLellan of the Humanist Society of Scotland focused on the 1918 Educational Act and the Catholic schools. He was all about secular education and believed RE has no place in schools. Yet, when pushed, he said yes, we need to learn about religions and have discussions about them. He failed to lay out how this is to be accomplished. He railed against the denominational school system but not against the nondenominational system. From my perspective, his presentation was one-dimensional and unfair. If a parent wants to put a child into a denominational school because of religious beliefs, why should Mr. McLellan object? It is possible I am not sufficiently familiar with the Scottish system, but I must also ask why Mr. McLellan did not talk about the 1980 Educational Act or the 2011 guidelines on RE implementation in the school curriculum? Why was he not challenged on that issue?

Mrs. Sarah Clark spoke from personal experience. Her presentation was based on personal experiences working within the school system and critical religion at the University of Stirling. She provided a different perspective. She took an experiential approach to the subject and discussed values and beliefs that are transmitted through socialization. She talked about what she termed a “dissonance” or conflict in the way the school system addressed RE, brought about by the fact that teachers and the school system take a politically correct approach while students wanted openness. She claimed that religion is interwoven across all educational disciplines, a circumstance that schools must address. Her plan for how this could be done included classroom discussions on the impact of religion on the development of various disciplines. Her realist approach allowed her to offer a framework for the implementation of RE in the school curriculum. At least she had a plan. She was the only panelist who suggested a clear plan for implementing RE in the school curriculum.

I watched the faces and reactions of the panelists as each of them got up to speak. It was immediately obvious that the divide of opinions was wide. When Mr. McLellan was speaking, Reverend Foster-Fulton and Professor Conroy made comments to each other and mouthed words such as “not correct,” or something similar, or they shook their heads in disagreement. This behavior from someone who, just a few minutes earlier, had asked that we should all have a time for reflection seemed very disingenuous. The hard question for everyone on this panel and in the audience is the first question that should have been asked: what is the difference between education and indoctrination? If “education” as a mandated curriculum comes from a hierarchy of power, is that not a form of indoctrination? Is a secular mandate on RE in contention with itself? Or does that even matter to those who can only see from their own point of view? How ironic that the panel all agreed the exchange of ideas and customs, religions and values, is the only way to move forward and yet they were closed-minded during the debate.

Those who advocate inclusiveness don’t always show it. Surveys are only as good as the questions asked. Education and indoctrination are intertwined much as someone’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. When a secular government issues a curriculum mandate, is it not indoctrination? The panel discussion has made me aware of the complications and pitfalls of a discourse that is interwoven across various disciplines, as RE is.  More importantly it has made me question the words education and indoctrination. These words may be more alike than the panel is willing to concede.

Education or indoctrination: the future role of religion in Scotland’s schools – a student view

04 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by CRA Editor in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Critical Religion, religious education, religious observance, religious studies, schools, Scotland, University of Stirling

[Picking up on the debate at Stirling University on 23.10.14, and the introductory blog to this topic by Alison Jasper and John I’Anson, we’re delighted that Sarah Clark, who presented a student view at the debate, has kindly agreed to provide us with her contribution.  We will also be offering two comment pieces on the debate.  Comments are turned off on this posting, but we look forward to comments on the later postings. – Michael Marten, Editor]

I approach the question of Religion, Education and Indoctrination from the multi faceted perspective of someone who has encountered the process of religion and education from simultaneous and varying viewpoints: as a school student, as a university student, as a teacher (of sorts) and as a mother of two children currently attending a Scottish and supposedly non-denominational school.

I arrived at Stirling University in 2010 with a preconceived notion of religion and religious education that was based on my school experiences. I attended Scottish non-denominational schools throughout my education and while I do not recall encountering religion at primary school I can clearly remember it at secondary school, in particular I recall my first year, when I earned full marks for a class test on world religions. I was met at the gates the following day by a baying crowd of bullies shouting ‘Bible basher’ at me – because in the 1980s there was a common misconception that to study religion equated to ‘being’ religious. Thankfully, from a school perspective, this understanding has diminished. However, and many other students of Critical Religion may identify with this point, I do still meet peers and elders who on hearing I am studying ‘Religion’ at university say things like – ‘oh I didn’t know you were religious’ and ‘what religion are you?’.

I decided after the school incident it would be safer to avoid Religious Education altogether. What I hadn’t recognized at the time was how the school continued to provide me with a Religious Education of sorts. As per the government’s education directive and in recognition of Scotland’s Christian heritage, a particular set of norms values and beliefs were being transmitted to me in the classroom and through the schools social environment. As those of you studying Education will be aware, research has shown that through its socializing function, education inserts individuals into existing ways of doing and being. I don’t like the word indoctrinated or the term ‘hidden curriculum’ as to most of us it represents something pernicious, so I have used the word socialized here instead. However, my point is that I left school all packed up with a knowledge base built around existing ways of doing and being, a knowledge base carefully constructed by the Scottish Education system that had me believe my cultural practices (to which the word ‘Religion’ was never attached) were the status quo and that Religion was something that the others had, and that to know others is possible through knowing their Religion.

I do not suggest that this was the experience of everyone who came through the Scottish Education system but I do believe it was for the majority. How do I know this?   Firstly through the shared experiences I have had with fellow students who, on arriving at Stirling University had their carefully constructed knowledge base examined and unpacked by the department of Critical Religion. A valuable process is that it enables one to study ‘objectively’. Secondly, I know this due to the resistance I feel when attempting to share my new understandings with friends and family enquiring about my studies or passing comment about recent news events and foreign affairs.

I started my degree with the intention of becoming an RE teacher but this intention changed after my practice experience in schools. Having worked in various Government institutions (incl. social work, prison service, nursing), I was fully prepared for the disparity between the Governments directive about what will be done, the nice glossy brochure or user friendly website outlining how things will be done, and the harsh reality of what actually happens. What I was not prepared for was the cognitive dissonance I experienced when I realised how badly this disparity impacts on the subject of Religion.

The Scottish Government has issued two papers in relation to Religion in schools – one on provisions for religious observance, the other on religious education. In terms of religious observance the Directorate encourages schools to draw upon the rich resources of Scottish Christianity when planning and to recognise the students of other faiths or with no faith commitment. A challenge indeed. What my experience in my teaching placements and as a mother of two young children attending a Scottish non-denominational school shows is that a kind of P.C. approach is used that involves a complete avoidance of the word Religion, but that includes teaching and singing hymns at assembly (whilst switching the word God for joy).

Alongside but almost in opposition to this, the Directorate states that in relation to religion and class room learning, ‘through an understanding and appreciation of the world’s major religions and views, children and young people can develop responsible attitudes to other people which will assist in counteracting prejudice and intolerance’.

Between the two papers, what is essentially being said is this: ensure pupils are socialised within a Christian context (‘us’) and learn about other people through their religion (‘others’). Creating such a binary division is the backbone of ethnocentrism, in this instance parcelling up knowledge about ‘others’ under the category of Religion whilst reinforcing a ‘Christian identity’ that hasn’t been afforded the same categorisation? The very aims of the Directorate are being undermined by the incompatibility of what I consider to be a dishonest and out-dated approach. How can we acknowledge our Scottish Christian heritage without being honest about what it is we are practicing – religion – whilst categorising others and claiming to know them by applying the term to their practices? Rather than being an antidote to prejudice and racism this practice is adding fuel to the fire!

Thankfully, the glossy brochure, Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, (CfE) offers an opportunity to address this issue through its ‘curriculum areas‘. There are 8 curriculum areas including expressive arts, sciences, languages, one of which is religious and moral education. These are different from subject areas: they are broad umbrella terms, and are not structures for timetabling: the intention is that each curriculum area contributes to student development through its own disciplinary context and through connections with other areas of learning. There is a strong emphasis at Stirling University for student teachers to embrace this feature of the curriculum, to work with other subject areas and find the connections between disciplines, which is wonderful. The sad reality is that many students set sail from University ready for challenges and opportunities of interdisciplinary learning, only to be washed away and drowned in the sea of ‘do as your told’. The relentless drive for improved school performance, statistics and league tables, which, unfortunately is still measured by subject,-driven exam results, means that subject area still outranks curriculum area. So  what this translates to is shoe-horned and token-gesture interdisciplinary learning. And for Religious and Moral Education (RME), the shoe-horning focuses more on issues of sex, relationships, and citizenship than it does on issues of religion and faith.

So. Is there a future for Religion in Scottish non-denominational schools? Is it still relevant?

Yes. And Yes!

Recently the former First Minister of Scotland, Jack McConnell spoke at Stirling University reminding students of the importance of Arts and Humanities in what he described as an increasingly diverse and deeply complicated world. Speaking just prior to the vote on Scotland’s independence and as tensions were rising in Syria, he noted the importance of having people that can communicate in a global context and share events with others (English, languages and media), who can unravel our past (history), and shape our political future (politics). I was initially frustrated and disappointed that he had not acknowledged the importance of Religion, but then I reminded myself that the subject of Religion need not be separate. Religion is, at its nexus, an ideology, a belief system that is intertwined with and reverberates through literature, through history, through economics, social studies, politics, science and language.

The Bible, as just one example, has been a major influence on artistic themes, scientific inspiration, conflict, intertexuality, economics and political discourse throughout the last few centuries. A lack of knowledge and understanding about the text and its historical context can make teaching what on the surface might be considered an unrelated subject, far more difficult. How should schools successfully approach a subject that is so interwoven into everything we do?

What I suggest is, that to deal with a subject that is so interwoven into everything we do – we interweave the topic teachers! (I don’t mean physically sew them together of course!)

I envisage our specialist teachers working peripatetically from first to third year, moving around the school and integrating into other subject classrooms to help students identify, engage with and contextualise religion and faith issues as they encounter them. Explore the diversity and hybridity of Hinduism whilst engaging with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in English. Discuss what the Shinto tradition has to say about organ donation in Biology. Debate the international basketball association’s ban on religious attire at PE. Pupils will be allowed to focus on the subject more specifically in 4th year and even more critically in 5th and 6th year thereby safeguarding the subject qualification element and ensuring its future. But all pupils will be encouraged to engage with Critical Religion and critical thinking that takes them beyond their own belief system in all subject areas… bearing in mind that we first have to be honest about what our belief system is, instead of blurring the edges so as not to offend others.

I would encourage all RE teachers currently practicing in Scottish schools to take the amazing opportunity that the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence has presented us with before it passes us by: take advantage of the flexibility it allows, take ownership of the curriculum area and the subject of Religion in Scottish Schools and move it forward.

Is RE perhaps a terrorist activity?

25 Saturday Oct 2014

Posted by Bashir S. in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Critical Religion, religious education, religious observance, religious studies, schools, Scotland, University of Stirling

Thursday evening’s discussion at Stirling University ‘Education or Indoctrination:  The future role of religion in Scottish Schools,’ predictably fell, to these writers’ and minds, a little flat. But why?

Debates about RE in UK – and Scottish – schools are frequently characterised by ambivalence– in Scotland skirting around unacknowledged or unmentionable aspects of its social and economic history that come with sectarian and religious labels – and  sometimes what is reflected in them is further retrenchment rather than trenchant thinking. Arguably what emerged here were various familiar themes: the desire of hard-working committed RE teachers to encourage their students to engage with forms of wisdom (not limited to Christianity); the importance of developing  attitudes of respect and tolerance partly at least as a kind of defence against the dark arts of terrorism and fundamentalism; a lament for a lost form of theological and biblical literacy; the claim that  theological and biblical literacy enriches the appreciation of history and literature (a somewhat backhanded legitimation of RE as handmaiden to a range of more acceptable humanities?); a view that the only kind of knowledge relevant within Schools ought to be based on ‘secular’ reason and empirical science; and various attempts to define ‘religion’ as a concern with transcendence, as historical tradition as the commodification of  ‘otherness’.

In respect of this last point, the discussion was enlivened with an elegant critique of the ‘world religions’ paradigm that parcels up knowledge of ‘the other’ whilst schools continue to maintain a ‘hidden curriculum’ – actions and expectations developing a form of ‘our’ subjective, Christianised identity that acts ironically to reinforce a sense of the otherness of what we study ‘objectively’. Sarah Clark addressed the question of a possible future for the subject creatively and optimistically with suggestions for an interdisciplinarity that  would not be subordinated to the demands of a ‘policy assessment culture’ fostering rigid disciplinary boundaries. Based on her enthusiasm for the possibilities of the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (2010) she began to flesh this out in terms of an idea that refreshingly, wasn’t constrained by current orderings or assumptions – proposing a more nomadic and less territorialised approach.   However, thinking on this creative level is hard to sustain and gave way for the most part to a more diffuse discussion, for example in terms of parental rights – clearly an important issue, but one with  polarising  effects that closed down rather than opened up possibilities for the exchange of ideas about the future.

What then, by way of post script to this event, do we have to contribute to this discussion?  We have previously identified the Official Account of Religious Studies  (OARS, see I’Anson & Jasper, 2006) in British Schools and Universities as one that is built on a late modernist ethos of rationality, objectivity and neutrality reflecting a substantive ontology and a rhetorics (within RE and society more broadly) characterised  by openness to multiculturalism as a social good. It seemed to us that this OARS was very much in evidence in yesterday’s discussion. (By ‘substantive ontology’ we mean the kind of normative, western and masculinist discourse which is still widely believed to be neutral whereas it is arguably a highly privileged construction.) Scholars like Smart and the organisation of RE teachers with which he was closely involved in the 1970s (the SHAP working party) took advantage of a move observable at that time, away from older confessional or narrowly moral certainties that had characterised ‘Religious Instruction’ or ‘Scripture’ before the 1980s. The approach (at secondary and higher levels) they developed was in tune with this rhetorics and substantive approach. Yet what was key here, was that this dominant approach – still detectable today – remained, at the same time as it appeared rhetorically open to difference/s, intellectually aligned within the quite rigid categorisations of what we’ve referred to here as substantive ontologies – for example in relation to the familiar western notion of ‘beliefs’.

In the academy, things have changed. There has been movement – mediated through a diffusion of broadly post structuralist approaches – towards the recognition of much more relational ontologies (Irigaray, 2004; Wildman, 2010) and this has shifted understanding from a basis in essentialised towards contextualised knowledge. Yet as a number of the speakers noted in the course of yesterday’s discussion, at the same time schools, universities and educational research more generally has  been required increasingly to conform to  structures whereby education is seen as a means to achieve measurable economic or socio-economic benefits with students and stakeholders configured as customers. At the same time there has also been a clear cooling of popular enthusiasm for differences/multiculturalism that could be associated with pressures from economic migration and the fear of international terrorism (after 9/11) in a time of austerity (after 2008). (A recent document produced in England even suggested that teachers should be wary of  students who betray too great an interest in issues of cultural difference (Coppock, 2014).) In the light of these changes, it was entirely appropriate to be having yesterday’s discussion and to be pointing to the need for new creative ideas for the future although it was clear that the framing of the event largely assumed all participants would be more or less aligned with a certain common vocabulary and disappointingly, made little allowance for the kinds of ‘interruptions’ from different perspectives that might have opened the discussion up.

The contradictions between these forces – substantive and relational ontologies – has clearly now led to a crisis of plausibility in relation to the language of RE – a fundamental failure on the part of policy makers particularly but perhaps also on the part of academics to think through the implications of the newer relational ontologies as they have revolutionised thinking about identity and difference/s in relation to lived experience as this exceeds the limited categories and essentialised knowledges produced by the substantive ontologies of the past. And this, arguably, is to some extent exemplified in  the evident disconnections between RE at primary and secondary level and many forms of theology and critical religion at higher education levels.

We do need some new thinking – perhaps an AAR (Alternative Account of Religion?) – that proposes more robustly educational rather than ideological or neoliberal justifications for maintaining space for Religion in the curriculum – perhaps as a space for critical  attentiveness to genuine and challenging difference/s and a response to ‘learnification’ (Biesta, 2008). In other words, we need to acknowledge the ways in which engaging with cultural differences will inevitably lead to, and call forth, changes to our characteristic ways of carrying on.  This will interrupt the prevailing discourse that assumes we can encounter knowledge in general and knowledge of religion in particular in purely ‘neutral’ terms.

As we envision it, we could perhaps say that the implication for yesterday evening’s discussants (and listeners), is the need for all of us to acknowledge the imbrication of religion, cultural difference/s and education and to recognise that at present the current framing at policy level remains in/different; difference/s is/are continually resolved/translated into familiar polarities that are fundamentally impoverishing.  We argue that we need then to engage urgently with the question of what is educationally desirable – to broaden the understanding of socialisation and genuinely to consider the implications for present day cultural horizons.

Alison Jasper & John I’Anson

Jackie Kay’s encounter with double-consciousness and religion

30 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by fionadarroch2013 in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Christian, double consciousness, Glasgow, Jackie Kay, Nigeria, Scotland, Vijay Mishra, W. E. B. DuBois

Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh in the 1960s to a Nigerian father, and a white mother from the Highlands. She was adopted by a white couple who were active members of the Communist party. And she is a graduate of, and holds an honorary doctorate from, the University of Stirling. She is the author of novels such as The Trumpet (Picador: London, 1998) and collections of poetry such as The Adoption Papers (Bloodaxe Books: Northumberland, 1991). She has recently published her witty and heartfelt memoirs, Red Dust Road (Picador: London, 2001), about her upbringing and being reunited with her birth parents. The opening chapter is an amusing account of her first meeting with her birth father in a hotel room in Nigeria, which raises fascinating questions about ‘religion’, and identity:

And now we’re in the room. I’m about to have a conversation with my birth father for the first time.

Jonathan is moving about from foot to foot, shifting his weight from side to side, like a man who is about to say something life-changing. He begins: ‘Before we can proceed with this meeting, I would like to pray for you and to welcome you to Nigeria.’ I feel alarmed. Extreme religion scares the hell out of me. It seems to me like a kind of madness. But it is obvious to me that Jonathan won’t be able to talk at all if I try and skip the sermon, ‘OK, then,’ and he says, ‘Sit, please.’ And I sit.

He plucks the Bible from the plastic bag. Then he immediately starts whirling and twirling around the blue hotel room, dancing and clapping his hands above his head, then below his waist, pointing his face up at the ceiling and then down to the floor, singing, ‘O, God Almighty, O God Almighty, O God Almighty, we welcome Jackie Kay to Nigeria. Thank you…’ He does some fancy footwork. He’s incredibly speedy for a man of seventy-three. He’s whirling like a dervish.

I shift uneasily in my seat. Christ Almighty, my father is barking mad…

When I tell my mum about it on the phone, down an incredibly clear line from Abuja to Glasgow, how he doesn’t want to tell any of his children, and how I must remain a secret, how he feels I am his past sin, she says: ‘By God, did we rescue you!’ (Kay, 2010: 3-11).

As an academic in Scotland specialising in critical religion and culture, and in postcolonial literature, what do I do with this extract? As a teacher, and a researcher, here are some of the questions I would start with: How do we make sense of the concept of ‘religion’ that is portrayed? What does it tell us about national identity, about Scottish identity? What role does the humour play? How can this whole extract inform us to think creatively about writing about religion and postcolonial literature?

In many ways, the reader is presented with the meeting of European rational thought, and non-western modes of thought. The awkwardness of this incredibly personal moment makes us laugh. For Jackie Kay this is the meeting with the fabric of herself, her ancestry, and therefore a significant part of her identity, an identity that is also rooted in European and Scottish rational thought, an identity that rests on a safe distance maintained between religious and secular spaces. The imposition of this almost ecstatic religious display within the confines of a Hilton hotel room leaves Jackie Kay in a state of semi-consciousness: “I’ve zoned out now, drugged by his voice. I go in and out of consciousness like somebody who’s very ill. I can’t see properly” (Kay, 2010: 6). Kay playfully suggests that she has succumbed to a religious trance and is loosing grip on her post-Enlightenment, rational, secular self. I am intrigued by the complexity and contradictions of this exchange; the banal yet often embedded notion of appropriate religious behaviour or the impact of colonial violence? Are we laughing because we can safely sit in our armchairs knowing that we are choosing not to believe, or that we at least know how to contain our religious self appropriately? Or what about what Kay sees, which is the crude imposition of Christianity on African culture leaving behind a ludicrous mimicry and madness. To classify Jonathan’s display as a colonial mimicry is to subjugate and ‘exoticise’ his voice again, but this time by the western (postcolonial) academic. Graham Huggan talks about the risk that the marketing of postcolonial literature takes by ‘replicating the exotic consumption of otherness’ (Huggan, 2001: 37). Is our laughter merely a crude consumption of this display of ‘otherness’?

Mary Keller states that if we, as western academics, continue to correlate the word ‘religion’ with the word ‘belief’, we continue to limit our understanding of “religiousness in the modern world”. She writes: “those whose religiousness is expressed in their work, in their wars… or in public displays have slid into the anachronistic space of backwardness. They are suspected of being mentally needy because they cannot contain their bubble of belief properly” (Keller, 2002: 7). Kay’s diagnosis that her father is indeed insane makes us laugh; it makes us laugh because we are uncomfortable with this inappropriate display of religiousness, and made reassuringly comfortable again with Kay’s playful diagnosis of her birth father being mentally needy, so we can section this display off into a safe category, mentally ill.

But there is a more personal story, with sadness and humour, which goes beyond academic categorisations and theories. Kay’s upbringing as a black child, with white parents, in a predominantly white suburb of Glasgow, gave her an identity of difference, of both wanting to belong and wanting to understand her difference more fully. She describes the moment she arrives in the Igbo village of her ancestors and father. She takes off her shoes and walks down the red dust road:

The earth is so copper warm and beautiful and the green of the elephant grasses so lushly green they make me want to weep. I feel such a strong sense of affinity with the colours and the landscape, a strong sense of recognition. There’s a feeling of liberation, and exhilaration, that at last, at last, at last I’m here. It feels a million miles from Glasgow, from my lovely Fintry Hills, but, surprisingly, it also feels like home (Kay, 2010: 213).

But then only hours later, her affinity with the land is shaken as the local villagers, look at her and gather around her saying “Oyibo”, meaning white person:

I spent some of my childhood wishing I was white like the other kids and feeling like I stuck out like a sore thumb; and now in Nigeria, I’m wishing I was black and feeling like I stick out like a sore thumb. It’s the first time in my life that I have properly understood what it means being mixed race (Kay, 2010: 216).

This neither-nor identity, or what W. E. B. DuBois called “double consciousness”, (DuBois, 1903/1994: 2) leaves Kay searching for her multiple homelands. She is one of many ‘hyphenated bodies’, to take Vijay Mishra’s term (Mishra, 1996), from diasporas across the world. In Kay’s case, this trauma is even more astute for it is the personal separation from her birth parents.

Jackie Kay’s memoir demonstrates and celebrates the complexity of Scottish identity and culture; a place that, especially now in the eve of the referendum on Independence, is even more aware of its borders, of its imaginary and real homelands scattered around the world, and its relationship with the imperial centre. Jackie Kay allows us to see that its beauty is in its fluid borders and global presence.

—-

Works cited:

  • W.E.B. DuBois The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover Publications, 1903/1994).
  • Graham Huggan The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, (London: Routledge, 2001).
  • Jackie Kay Red Dust Road (London: Picador, 2010).
  • Mary Keller The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power and Spirit Possession (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002).
  • Vijay Mishra “The diasporic imaginary: theorizing the Indian diaspora” in Textual Practice 10 (3) 1996: pp. 421 – 447.

Chauvinism and constructivism in contemporary Scotland

04 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by Michael Marten in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

categories, constructivism, Critical Religion, essentialism, independence, nationalism, Scotland, unionism

On 18. September 2014 a referendum will take place in Scotland that will decide whether or not Scotland should become independent of the rest of the United Kingdom: the referendum was a key manifesto pledge of the Scottish National Party that won the last elections in the devolved Scottish Parliament. The question – “Should Scotland be an independent country?” – will allow the vast majority of people resident in Scotland the opportunity to choose independence for Scotland, or reaffirm their commitment to the three centuries-old union.

The two opposing campaigns are already hard at work on the issue. The unionist movement consists of the three major UK parties: the ruling Westminster coalition Conservative (Tory) and Liberal Democrat parties, along with Labour (all are now essentially neoliberal parties, though it is worth noting many grassroots Labour activists – marginalised by the party hierarchy – are not). They are campaigning under the banner of Better Together, though divisions in the campaign are emerging as Labour activists in particular struggle with the Tories. The independence movement consists (unsurprisingly) of parties with their roots firmly in Scotland: the Scottish National Party, the Scottish Greens, and Scottish Socialist Party and others (along with numerous elements of civil society, the arts and more – broadly, though not exclusively, a movement that tends towards the left and centre-left). They are campaigning under the banner of Yes Scotland.

My own positionality on this issue is important before discussing further detail: I expect to vote ‘yes’ in 2014, though I would never identify myself as a Scottish nationalist, as will become clear. This is why I feel Eric Hobsbawm’s warning does not apply to me (that it is impossible to seriously study the history of nations and nationalism as a committed political nationalist because ‘Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.’(1)). What I want to do here is look briefly at the categories being discussed. My position in this debate has arisen in part from these reflections.

The unionist side are British nationalists. This is not how they tend to describe themselves, and those who do so can expect to be vilified (the novelist Alan Bissett describes this happening to him when he uses the term; see also Gerry Hassan‘s writing). Instead, the unionists expend much effort at deriding what they see as a narrow nationalism that the SNP (in particular) are supposed to represent. And yet, in arguing for a united country, the No campaign – whose website homepage has the heading ‘The patriotic all-party and non-party campaign for Scotland in the UK’ – espouses a very clear form of chauvinistic nationalism. The Better Together website’s About page explains that they think ‘Scotland is a better and stronger country as part of the United Kingdom… [retaining the existing devolved parliament but also keeping] the strength and security of the United Kingdom.’ This is a point reiterated in several ways on another page that supposedly argues ‘The +ve case‘, including embarrassing comments about the British armed forces being ‘the best in the world’. The case being made is largely an essentialist one about greater strength, unclearly defined, in a world that is a threat (indeed, internally they call their own campaigning strategy ‘Project Fear‘). There is little self-reflection here. For example, we might want to ask: wherein lies this ‘strength and security’? As Simon Gikandi (e.g. in Maps of Englishness) and many others have described over the years, English identity in the colonial era was created largely on the basis of empire and the domination of peripheral neighbours (Wales, Ireland, Scotland), indeed, the novelist James Kelman argues that ‘Britain is not a country, it is the name used by the ruling elite and its structures of authority to describe itself.’ The growth of empire and the growth of global British trade are intimately linked, and this has played a role in post-World War II British foreign policy too. Even with the independence of most of Britain’s colonial possessions overseas, military engagement since the war has often been at least in part about securing trading advantages for Britain. Apart from 1968, Britain has been engaged in military conflict somewhere in the world in every single year since World War II. Many of these conflicts have been of dubious legality (the 2003 invasion of Iraq is simply the latest in any such list), but in any case, given the evidence of abuse at the hands of the British from 1950s Kenya to 2000s Iraq, those on the receiving end have rarely felt warmly about British military adventurism, even when cloaked in a mantle of ‘liberation’ or ‘freedom’. Britain is also – against the consistently expressed will of the vast majority of Scots in whose territory they are based – one of a handful of states with nuclear weapons of mass destruction (making no obvious move towards disarmament as they are obliged to do, in fact, quite the reverse). There are increasing numbers of Scots who do not see in such indicators a ‘strength and security’ they want to be associated with.  And yet much of Better Together‘s rhetoric is about such forms of chauvinist nationalist identity.

In contrast, the Yes Scotland movement is light on identity issues, but strong on the opportunities for positive change that a ‘yes’ vote would bring. Whereas the Better Together campaign worries about the ‘threats’ that would face an independent Scotland, the Yes Scotland website (‘the campaign for an independent Scotland’) speaks of the opportunities that would arise, and does so in a positive way, as their Why vote Yes page argues: ‘This is an exciting and historic opportunity for our nation. We can choose a different and better path.’  Independence, they argue, is about ensuring that ‘decisions about Scotland’s future are taken by the people who care most about Scotland – that is by the people of Scotland. It is the people who live here who will do the best job of making our nation a fairer, greener and more successful place.’ Such an emphasis on opportunity, self-determination, fairness, environmentalism and success is not about essentialist interpretations of the past. There is no Braveheart here (such twee nonsense is left to the Tourist Board!): instead, there is a positive image of what Scotland could be in the context of self-determination. Yes Scotland is treading a fine line here: on the one hand, they want to extol the virtues of positive opportunity, whilst on the other, they seek to address some of the fears that the ‘no’ campaign is seeking to raise. The difficulty Yes Scotland have with this – and they have at times failed to recognise it – is that the ‘no’ campaign will mostly seem to ‘win’ such arguments, since they are demanding facts about the future, something that is patently impossible to provide (and Better Together know this). The alternative to the unrelenting negativity of the ‘no’ campaign cannot be unremitting optimism, however, since voters will simply regard that as naïvety. That is something that Yes Scotland have sought to avoid, with reassurances about Scotland ‘the day after’ the referendum. There is probably more they need to do in relation to thinking about the future, particularly in looking at other countries of similar size and context such as the Nordic countries (Lesley Riddoch’s Nordic Horizons does some of this; see also recent National Collective blog postings). The international context will, I think, become more important as time goes on, and offers Yes Scotland the possibility of meaningful insights into what an independent Scotland could be.

Why is all this important or of interest in the context of a project like the Critical Religion Association, which is seeking to understand categories of analysis?

It seems to me that the referendum debate offers us an insight into the interaction between categories which have a very definite end-point in the form of a referendum on 18. September 2014. Ostensibly, both the Better Together and the Yes Scotland campaigns are addressing the same issue, and yet the debate is happening in terms that mean they are effectively talking past one other:

  • The tendency for the British nationalists is to connect to a chauvinist nationalist identity that emphasises the place of Britain above all else. There is little recognition of what might need to change: no sense that British nationalism is a contaminated brand, or that the Scottish place in Britain is marginal, not only in relation to England, but especially in relation to the de facto city-state of London. The liberal use of the language of ‘patriotism’ and ‘pride’ and similar terms reflects an emphasis on identity based on a particular understanding of ‘tradition’ (or, as Scots might say, ‘it’s aye bin!’), rather than a future of potential and possibility. Of course, it is a truism to say that it is always harder to campaign positively for any kind of ‘no’, but whilst there is support from corporate sources for Better Together (some profoundly problematic), there simply does not appear to be a creative or inspiring hinterland underpinning the Better Together campaign, as Joyce McMillan recently noted. A negative referendum result would (in the short-term at least) almost certainly curtail any moves towards alternative possible futures for Scotland – the Westminster neo-liberal parties would see no incentive to give the devolved Scottish parliament additional powers, and the head of Better Together has made clear that is not how they see their role.
  • The Yes Scotland approach tends towards a constructivist perspective, one that argues for creating something by taking the steps that are necessary for that creation. What Yes Scotland and other independence campaigners want to do is ‘Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation’ (paraphrased by Alasdair Gray from Dennis Lee), or to refer to Hobsbawm again: ‘Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way round.’(2) Independence, in the eyes of Yes Scotland – and the various energetic and creative think-tanks and artistic movements that support independence (such as Bella Caledonia and National Collective, both, in different ways, models of creative civic engagement) – is not the end of a process, but the beginning of something new, something that allows for the creation of a state that will, ideally, be congruent with the developing national identity that Scots want to pursue, but cannot at the moment. The journalists Lesley Riddoch and Joyce McMillan have both argued in different ways that this idea of constructing a better society is what will motivate them to vote ‘yes’. In such a vision, voting for independence is not an end in and of itself, but a step on the way towards a society that more closely reflects what it is that Scots want. What the ‘yes’ supporters are aiming to excite is the imagination, in the belief that a community of people that can imagine a better future can also bring it about. This involves building on the past but not being held hostage to it, as Dominic Hinde puts it: ‘The historically rooted aspects of Scottish identity will not vanish, but they must be selectively built upon… Self determination for Scotland has the potential to be a Stunde Null, and that involves reimagining parts of the national consciousness which have no place in a modern society.’

Of course, there are chauvinists on the ‘yes’ side and constructivists on the ‘no’ side, but the overall tendencies are pretty clear. Perhaps it is the incongruence of categories of discussion here – chauvinistic essentialism vs. optimistic constructivism – that is one of the reasons why the debate itself has been characterised as negative.

Finally, in thinking about categories of analysis when considering responses to a question such as independence, we might be able to point to essentialism and constructivism as alternative approaches, but what this means for the vote itself next September is unclear: fear and chauvinism have often defeated creative and inspirational constructivist approaches – but there are also examples of the reverse happening, and I am hopeful a more positive approach will win out, and continue to work for such an outcome. Certainly, Yes Scotland’s case that the people of Scotland should decide Scotland’s future has an undeniable logic to it, and the fact that Scotland is even debating independence is met with bemusement by many outsiders. What is clear is that were it not for the common date of the referendum in 2014, many observers might struggle to realise that the two sides are even discussing the question of Scottish independence, so different are the categories with which they engage.

——

(1) Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. Programme, Myth, Reality, London, 1990, 1992: 12.
(2) ibid, 10.

What is a University for?

31 Monday Jan 2011

Posted by Andrew W. Hass in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

crisis, Critical Religion, education, higher education, humanities, liberal education, religion, religious studies, Scotland, theology, United Kingdom, university

The University is in a crisis. Even casual readers of the broadsheets know this. But the crisis is not what most people think, including those who run the University itself. The crisis is not that the University is underfunded, and therefore has to start cutting back on staff, programmes, and services. Nobody would deny the University is underfunded, and that the breadth and quality of education it once offered is now being seriously eroded. But funding is not where the real crisis lies. Cutbacks are just the symptom of a greater underlying problem. The real crisis is an identity crisis.

What, in this early millennium, and at this present stage of modernity, is the University for? What is its role in society? What is its fundamental raison d’être? We are being told one thing, and one thing only: it is to be an engine of the economy. It is to be, alongside several of other central engines, a crucial driver of economic activity. The government tells us this. The economists tell us this. Business tells us this. And now, increasingly, those who manage the universities – the Chancellors, the Vice-Chancellors, the Principals, the top administrators – tell us this. And thus, as part of the economic machine, the University must become more efficient, more corporate, and run on business models that have proven effectiveness towards economic growth.

This all may seem sensible enough, especially as the global economy becomes more homogenous, while still struggling to emerge from a recession that has made every institution (except banks) more fiscally aware, and more fiscally parsimonious. But the problem is that the University, as an institution, never began as an economic generator, run on the model of business. Nor have its main contributors, those who make the University what it is, the researchers and lecturers, ever seen themselves, except only very recently, and then not by choice but by coercion, as in the business of business. We did not undergo seven or more years of post-secondary education to become experts in fuelling the economy by providing qualified workers and immediately transferable research. Thus the crisis of identity. The University is being told it is one thing, but the very “cogs in the machine” do not, either by definition or by training, operate towards that end. They do not buy the metaphor of the machine or the engine itself. They do not buy the metaphor of buying. But they are now equally hard-pressed to tell us what they do accept.

The modern University has lost sight of its roots as liberal education. This is most salient in the area of the humanities: the University no longer has a sense of the “liberal arts”. Here, if we follow the theories of higher education that were forged during the 18th and 19th centuries in the West, “liberal” meant free from control of the State, from control of the Church, and from control of Business. This did not mean liberal arts subjects did not treat the domains of politics, religion and economics in their thinking. Far from it. But it did mean these domains did not set the agenda for research and teaching, did not dictate the curricula. Research was free to investigate all areas open-endedly, without vested interests, without being directed and governed by spread sheet logic and statistics. This was more than merely knowledge for knowledge sake; it was based on what it understood as the proper culturing, or cultivation, of humanity, and of the structures by which humanity should live. Research was free to probe, to question, to critique, to innovate the very paradigms under which we might find ourselves trying to live our lives, or better them. And these paradigms included those ruling within the domains of the State, the Church, and Business (which now too must be “capitalised”).

We now have a ruling global paradigm of liberal, free-market democracy – a politics so deeply entwined with an economic ideology (or a political ideology so deeply entwined with an economics) the two cannot be separated or distinguished – which, as a matter of course, is sold to us as truth. By imposing this paradigm upon the University, where now is the legitimate and legitimated voices who can, in the name of open-ended enquiry, ask the critical question: Is this the best paradigm available? Is this the only one we should be cultivating, and at all levels?

It might be. I can’t say I know the answer. But I do know the question needs to be asked, the matter debated, and no more than within the University itself. We need to address the fundamental issue of identity: what is the University now for? what is the University for now? And we need to debate this outside the context of a corporate understanding of balance sheets, of key performance indicators, and of government-led funding-driven research exercises. Must teaching and researching the disciplines of the arts and humanities necessarily lead towards some economic liquidity? Must careerism be the only motive for studying a subject like religion, or philosophy, or history, or literature? No one is debating these questions within the academy.

And the crisis is precisely that we cannot, under the present paradigm, find the space or the time to debate these questions. We are too busy administrating our way through the system, too busy conforming our research projects to maximise our minimal chances of being awarded external research funding from sources wholly wedded to the ruling paradigm, too busy writing departmental narratives that align ourselves to economic justification, too busy adjusting to managerial restructuring, too busy trying to attract “customers” through marketing schemes, too busy trying to achieve top-rate status as teachers and researchers who validate the ruling assumptions, too busy simply trying to survive what has become a profession with its own deep psychoses.

My own area, the study of religion (and theology), like so many of its cognate disciplines, will never be able to justify its existence on the grounds of economic contribution, careerist employability or spread sheet empiricism alone. Nor should it have to try. But it does, like others, have a tremendous amount to add to the debate about ruling paradigms. As we know, it had a monopoly on this subject – for better or for worse – for a good portion of the last millennium. And it should be given every chance to continue in that debate.

But the debate is not happening. Not in the halls of the government. Not in the aisles of the churches. Not in the boardrooms of the corporations. Not in the files of the so-called independent think-tanks. And not, worst of all, in the academic classrooms and research centres.

Perhaps blogs might be the only truly liberal sphere available these days.

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