Theorizing Scriptures: New Critical Orientations to a Cultural Phenomenon

27 Who Needs the Subaltern?

278 27 Who Needs the Subaltern? Ranu Samantrai To the ordinary man. To a common hero, an ubiquitous character, walking in countless thousands on the streets. In invoking here at the outset of my narratives the absent figure who provides both their beginning and their necessity, I inquire into the desire whose impossible object he represents. What are we asking this oracle whose voice is almost indistinguishable from the rumble of history to license us, to authorize us to say, when we dedicate to him the writing that we formerly offered in praise of the gods or the inspiring muses? —Michel de Certeau1 I read the call for an Institute for Signifying Scriptures primarily as a methodological statement, one that resonates well with my own research affiliations and inclinations. Vincent Wimbush proposes an approach to “scriptures” that shifts attention from the correct interpretation of canonical texts to the use of scriptural material in practice. Understood as phenomena, “scriptures” derives their meaning not from authorial intent but from their activation in everyday life in often unintended and surprising uses. Shifting from “what ‘scriptures’ mean” to “how ‘scriptures’ mean,” Wimbush also directs our attention to the range of scriptural materials evident in the meaning-making, or signifying, practices of ordinary people .2 Too often ignored or devalued in scriptural scholarship, vernacular and oral traditions that fall outside the major religions are particularly rich resources for the disenfranchised peoples who concern Wimbush. He suggests that here, outside the official interpretations of the dominant religions, we find a wealth of ways in which “scriptures” signify and are significant. In short, Wimbush proposes that we change both the objects and the methods of our analysis. But taken together, the two alterations necessitate a further rethinking: they call into question the role of the investigating agent and his or her relationship to the objects of analysis. Running throughout the proposal before us is the implication that our knowledge production has very real consequences, not least because our recognition contributes to the conditions of enfranchisement. Who Needs the Subaltern? 279 To become self-conscious about crafting or selecting the objects and methods of our analysis is to acknowledge responsibility for the consequences of our scholarly choices. It is to cease to believe ourselves to be innocent observers of objective phenomena and to begin to understand our implicatedness in the power-knowledge nexus. The model of scriptural study as canon interpretation valorizes interpreters (priests, intellectuals) as privileged readers whose authority resides in their position as gatekeepers and mediators. By contrast, the model of “scriptures” as social phenomenon positions interpreters, in Clifford Geertz’s famous formulation, as “straining to read over the shoulders of those to whom [the phenomena] properly belong.”3 I offer, then, a friendly amendment to the proposal before us. To grapple with all three elements in our methodological model—investigator, investigated, and tools of investigation—let us add a further set of issues to the categories already proffered for our consideration: the role of the scholar, and the relationship between the student and the studied.4 What does it mean to be responsible for our scholarly choices and self-conscious regarding our desires in that relationship? Although I am not a scholar of “scriptures,” from Wimbush’s proposal I derive a generally applicable method for the analysis of cultural practices including, but not limited to, scriptural practices. It is a model that resonates in my fields, postcolonial and cultural studies. I am, therefore, delighted to find an emphasis on everyday and lived engagements with received meanings that, in the process of incorporation, reshape those meanings in unpredictable and often subversive ways. Cultural studies especially takes as its methodological foundation that texts or discourses do not control their meanings. They come into being as they are received and practiced, in a complex dialectic of culture and consciousness, of being made and in turn remaking the world. It advocates a shift from text to reading , or more generally from production to consumption, and so from the elite who presume to make the world to the masses who put the made products they receive to unintended uses. That creative consumption in turn becomes a new production, setting in motion the generation, or signification, of new meanings. In postcolonial studies this gesture has taken the form of the turn to the subaltern, a term that signifies forms of agency that do not and perhaps cannot appear in either official or revisionist historical records. In both cultural and postcolonial studies...