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  • Contesting Secularism:Reflexive Methodology, Belief Studies, and Disciplined Knowledge
  • Susan J. Ritchie (bio)
Abstract

Reflexive methodologies are increasingly suggested as a means of correcting what is assumed to be a secular bias with the study of belief. Yet the academic study of belief, like secularism itself, originated with liberal Protestant presumptions that continue to inform even our methodologies. Academic considerations of belief truly open to a range of diverse traditions and opinions will require reflexivity of belief not with respect to individual scholars but as to disciplinary practice.

In just the past generation, the fields of folkloristics and religious studies have evidenced new concern for theorizing how the disciplines' own production of knowledge has contributed to distorted or reductive understandings, especially in relation to the study of belief and believers. And yet for all the activity, something of an impasse has been reached in regard to developing a methodology adequate to the call of these new, negative theologies for a belief studies that is not patronizing, pathologizing, romanticizing, reductionist, imperialist, Eurocentrist, Christian, non-Christian, or atheistic.

In religious studies, this concern about theoretical exhaustion has been most commonly expressed as frustration over the absence of a model of religion that neither makes religion the mere functionary of some other cultural process nor privileges religion as a sui generis, and thereby untheorized and ahistorical, category (Asad 1993; King 1999; Preus 1987). In folkloristics a similar dynamic is at work in the oft-stated desire for an ethnographic method that neither idealizes nor pathologizes folk belief or believers (Hufford 1995; Lawless 1993; Mullen 2000). It is not an accident that the most vigorous attempts to define a newly reflexive or reciprocal ethnography have come from those folklorists most directly engaged with belief studies; nor is it odd, given the discipline's historic interest in the marginal, that the arguments for such a method are usually based on concern over the "awful asymmetry that currently exists in our field" between investigators and informants (Hufford 1995:74). In both cases, the seemingly ever-deferred hope is for a redemptive methodology that would correct the worst abuses of the past and the present, but in such a way as to establish those abuses as transientand unnecessary to central and enduring disciplinary interests.

Scholars including David Hufford, Robert King, and Elaine Lawless have suggested a variety of accommodations to this situation, all of which employ a reflexive methodology with which to advocate a new sensitivity to the truth claims of religion and religious believers even as they argue for the importance of moving ahead with disciplinary enterprises.1 Yet these proposals have been inadequate to the problem, as their own authors often freely admit, or they have purchased temporary resolutions only, and this often only through an insistence on the provisional character of their own recommendations.

Through an exploration of some representational provisional methodologies, I argue that the difficulty that folklorists and scholars of religious studies have in developing a methodology adequate to the seemingly antagonistic truth claims of emic belief and etic scholarship, in fact, indicates not that such is a theoretical impossibility but, rather, that the problematic has been incorrectly and incompletely framed. Specifically, I take issue with how it is commonly supposed that the difficulty of finding a methodology adequate to the integrity of belief is somehow a result of what is referred to as the historically "secular" character of the academic project and the supposedly atheistic presumptions of its favored models. Properly understood, secularism indicates neither a force intrinsically hostile to religion nor a cultural space isolated in some inexplicable way from religious influence. Yet many models assume one or both of these things in order to explain the complexities involved in an academic discussion of belief as the result of antireligious bias, if not on the part of individual scholars, at least on the part of scholarly norms. The result has been to keep each field trapped within an exclusively negative hermeneutic.2

As I will demonstrate, what is commonly termed "secularization" (the blurring of the boundary between the sacred and the profane, as that which was sacred enters everyday life) might just as appropriately be referred to as "sacralization" (the...

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