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256 25 Powerful Words The Social-intellectual Location of the International Signifying Scriptures Project Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza The inauguration of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS), which has been initiated by Professor Wimbush, is a historic event that calls for celebration and critical reflection. This international institute is historic because it programmatically intends to study the signifying of scriptures by subaltern peoples rather than to focus on the biblical text and its ancient contexts. At the same time this event calls for critical reflection because the ISS intends to do so within the disciplinary parameters and interdisciplinary opportunities of the university. It will not come as a surprise that I engage in such a critical reflection on questions of method and institutional location from a critical feminist perspective,1 which is in tension with a phenomenology of religion approach.2 Theoretical Frameworks I began work on this panel’s topic, “Settings/Situations/Practices,” with a rather impressionistic inventory of the social locations and sites where “signifying scriptures ” takes place and then compared my own rather unscientific list of the phenomenon with the ethnographic inventory detailed in the prior project, African Americans and the Bible. This inventory, which was developed by student researchers in collaboration with sociologists and ethnographers for charting the sites of the study of and engagement with the Bible, has utilized four major heuristic categories for sorting its findings: institutions/organizations, socialization contexts, cultural contexts and expressions, and political/economic contexts.3 Such an inventory lacks, however, a critical edge insofar as it cannot tell us much about who is engaging the Bible in, for example, barbershops, universities, political movements, education of children, films, the White House, or nursing homes, and to what ends they are doing so. Are those who are engaging the Bible evangelical or Catholic wo/men,4 are they fundamentalist or liberal men, highly educated or illiterate people? Is the political rally where scripture is used or appealed to as an icon an antigay or a wo/men’s reproductive rights rally? Is scripture engaged by a community of feminist or fundamentalist theologians? It might have been unnecessary to spell out social location, subjects, goals, and function of scriptural interpretation in the preceding project, which focused on Powerful Words 257 one specific group of signifiers, African Americans, although it did not elaborate the perspective of African American women and womanist interpretation. To separate settings/situations and practices from the “practitioners” and agents of signifying as well as from psychosocial needs and consequences seems neither advisable nor possible in this present undertaking. Rather it is necessary to focus on the practices of inquiry into power relations, structural functions, and ideological goals for engaging the scriptures. Because the present Signifying Scriptures project does not presuppose a single, unified subject of signifying or claim to speak from a particular social location within a specific community of marginalized people, an ethics of interpretation5 (i.e., a second order critical reflection on the method and ethos of the envisioned ISS) is called for. This is especially necessary if one approaches the “phenomenon” of signifying scriptures with a critical feminist perspective, which insists that wo/men of all races, classes, colors, and religions must become visible and audible subjects of interpretation. Hence it is crucial to scrutinize the phenomenological method of the Signifying Scriptures project, which is taken over from the academic comparative religions or history of religions approach. First, Vincent Wimbush’s discussion paper for this conference seems to work with this phenomenological method, although he clearly states that he does not find this approach quite satisfactory: I threaded the question not through the dominant world religions and the investigative and rhetorical categories they provoke, but through some of the experiences of the historically and persistently subaltern, usually darker peoples of the world.6 Yet, in order to articulate such a subaltern interpretation, one must critically ask whether the phenomenological method is helpful or counterproductive to this intent. The phenomenological approach involves not only synchronic or crosscultural comparisons and the search for universal essences, patterns, or types,7 often called comparative religion, “but also historical study of religions with an emphasis on philology and text.”8 Because the envisioned ISS does not emphasize the historical study of scripture, it is part of the comparative religion direction, which looks for cross-cultural and cross-religious comparisons and describes as the center of such comparisons the phenomenon “of signifying sacred scriptures,” thereby understanding sacred scripture as an essence or type...

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