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2: Healing Waters' Belief Practices
- Baylor University Press
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47µ 2 Healing Waters’ Belief-Practices A fter finding Healing Waters, I was eager to talk about it. One of the people I turned to was a University of North Carolina scholar who has studied African American sanctified spirituality.15 I thought he would be interested in finding a place new to him that he might explore as well. Three minutes into my description of the church he said, “You aren’t talking about Healing Waters, are you?” I was surprised to learn that, not only had he heard of it, but he had worked closely with Pastor Hanford on his major book, had known the Hanford family for years, and considered them close friends. He had Pastor Hanford speak in his classes and had taken students to her church many times. The point is, this is a church that has been the object of white, academic scrutiny before, and now I was adding my own account of their life together. The risk is, of course, that scholars’ descriptions, intentionally or not, can serve pernicious ends. What Edward Said said of the Middle East and Middle Eastern studies (called the Orient and Orientalism in British scholarly circles) describes the risk in white scholarship about African American people and communities: 48 Caring Cultures Knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world. . . . The Oriental is depicted as something one judges (as in a court of law), something one studies and depicts (as in a curriculum), something one disciplines (as in a school or prison), something one illustrates (as in a zoological manual). The point is that in each of these cases the Oriental is contained and represented by dominating frameworks. (Said, 1979, 40; summarizing the language of British statesmen Arthur James Balfour and Evelyn Baring Cromer; emphasis in original) In this depiction, “The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, ‘different’; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, ‘normal’” (Said, 1979, 40). Elsewhere, Said refers to Claude Levi-Strauss’ phrase that anthropology is the “handmaiden of colonialism.” One of the ways scholars have tried to mitigate the risk of making oppressogenic claims about other groups, particularly when there is a power differential between the investigator and the studied group in the investigator’s favor, has been to refuse to make objective and universally true claims and to recognize the limitations of their observations. I believe a way to begin to discuss Healing Waters is to recognize that it will inevitably be done from a particular perspective, that there is no value-neutral place to stand in approaching it. My vantage point will always be that of a white, Presbyterian, feminist woman. As such I will always have biases, blinders, and blunders in my interpretations. I share with all interpreters of other contexts doubts about how much “bracketing” of one’s own perspective is possible in order to “capture” accurately a modicum of truth about what we are describing. Some claim that not only is “bracketing” one’s own perspective impossible, it is undesirable, and that moral judgments about other contexts are appropriate (Prothero). They might say it is desirable, for example, for the feminist to “unbracket” her beliefs and to critique clearly what appear to her to be problematic sexist strains through a culture . Yet others describe a stance of “empathy” toward the group being studied, understanding empathy as “the painstaking attempt [3.91.19.28] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:28 GMT) Healing Waters’ Belief-Practices 49 to comprehend the experiences and passions of diverse others, eventuating in one’s own moral transformation” (Griffith, 2004, 18). Empathy suggests a modesty about the certainty of the investigator ’s own morality and truth claims. Such reserve gives room for the voices of the other context to speak on their own terms, and even to change the investigator’s own claims. Taking into account these various perspectives on bracketing and empathy, I will describe my approach as having three moments: a moment of “empathetic description,” when I attempt as well as I am able to get inside the belief-practice world of Healing Waters and to describe it on its own terms. The second is a moment of “appreciative interpretation” when I use my own language to describe the strength of a particular belief-practice. Finally I move to a “cautionary warning,” when I discuss a belief-practice’s susceptibility to corruption by sin, which I am defining as idolatry, a turn...