A Garland of Feminist Reflections: Forty Years of Religious Exploration

5. Methodology: Tool or Trap?

Methodology: T ool or Trap? Comments from a Feminist Perspective Questions as to how best to study religion and to understand religion have fascinated me from early in my studies of religion. In this chapter, I want to reflect on questions about how scholars construct, accept, and reject methodologies, more than to argue for or against any specific methodology. I agree with scholars of religion who take methodology very seriously. Whether one is deeply self-reflective about or largely unconscious of one’s methodological assumptions, those assumptions determine what data one sees and how one organizes those data. Methodologies should be tools that improve our studies of religion, but they often become traps that curtail our ability to take in previously unseen data or more deeply examine the assumptions underlying our methodologies. In this chapter, I will recount the development of feminist methodology in religious studies and resistance to that development as a case study about how scholars deal with new methodological developments. The point of this case study is not to argue for the superiority of feminist methods in religious studies over conventional methods, but to demonstrate how easily received methodologies become traps that silence critical thinking. Using that case study as example, at the end of this chapter, I will suggest other underlying methodological assumptions , akin to androcentric assumptions, that may well deeply affect scholars’ conclusions about religion. 94 chapter 5 Gross_Ch05 10/17/08 14:41 Page 94 gender studies in religion as case study: the personal narrative Like many in the study of religion, I was first drawn to this field as a quest for personal understanding of how life and the world work. That motive continues to fuel my study of religion. T oday, I am especially concerned with questions about the purpose of the study of religion in a religiously plural world.1 However, along the way, very early along the way, I was forced by circumstances to deal with another methodological issue which has taken up a great deal of thought and energy in my career. T wo facts puzzled and irritated me. Religions routinely said terrible things about women and discriminated severely against them, at least in the textual and public dimensions of religions almost always studied by scholars of religion in prefeminist days, but other than that, women and gender were largely ignored by scholars of religion. In addition, those who studied religion were almost universally men.2 These facts did not seem noteworthy to my male colleagues, and I suppose the fact that I am a woman is responsible for my being unable to ignore them as easily as they did. I would prefer to live in a world in which these facts were not so, because that would make feminist concerns unnecessary, but I do not live in such a world. That women usually raised the issue of the need to study women, and men often resisted that study and punished those who insisted on its importance, was my first introduction to an important conclusion I have reached about method in the study of religion. There is no neutral “no place” from which one can objectively study religion. In addition to the more abstract issues that usually dominate discussions of methodology in religious studies, I want to emphasize a dimension that is often overlooked. Personal histories and experiences have a role in determining what subject matter and methodologies are “chosen” by every scholar. We cannot stand outside time and space to choose, unaffected by our life circumstances, what subject matter and methodology we deign to take up. The fact that I would be forever excluded from the class of “men” in a world made up largely of men who were comfortable ignoring the real religious lives of women in their scholarship and not reflecting critically on the demeaning things said about women in the traditions they studied launched me professionally in a direction I would never have chosen had I not inherited these scholarly norms. Admitting and reflecting upon how our life situations affect scholarship does not mean, as someone wrote in an article attacking my work, that such reflection is license to randomly conclude whatever one wants Methodology: T ool or Trap? 95 Gross_Ch05 10/17/08 14:41 Page 95 to conclude.3 Scholarly standards of research and argumentation still hold; they simply are applied to a wider field of vision. It is not the...