Social Inclusion and the Ethics of Citation: Introduction

In the heady days of Enlightenment certitude, the ideal of critical objectivity was regularly asserted over against the supposedly uncritical habits of thinking that were bequeathed from the past. "Reason" needed to prevail over tradition. This binary contrast is no longer tenable, even among trenchant defenders of modernity; any effort to recover Enlightenment values now requires complex defenses of public reasoning. In the influential account of discourse ethics advanced by Jürgen Habermas, for example, scholarly arguments might be viewed through the lens of an ideal speech situation in which rigorous and inclusive debate is informed by comprehensive scrutiny of available evidence.¹ The ideal speech situation is a norm, rather than a reality, because numerous inequalities of power and resources inevitably influence scholarly proceedings. What aims to be an ideal speech situation often turns out to be, on closer inspection, yet one more example of systematically distorted communication.²

In the wake of a pandemic that has starkly revealed the inequalities of the world, the implications for biblical scholarship are clear: minoritized voices need to be amplified, and more "partial" scholarly traditions built from below. New traditions of citation will need to be invented.³ But, as minoritized scholars build their own traditions of interpretation, they may be rightly skeptical about the possibilities for cosmopolitan exchange.⁴ In this respect, their practice might reflect a more "communitarian" version of scholarly ethics, rather than a liberal one.⁵ In any event, in thinking through the implications of inequality for the business of biblical scholarship, a forum on the ethics of citation is timely.

The main purpose of this forum is not so much to dispute the need for scholarly norms and rigor as, more specifically, to discuss the ways in which the ethics of citation may illuminate debates about social inclusion. It is often held, for example, that a good scholarly argument is "comprehensive"—covering not just the evidence relevant to a research question but also the best scholarly accounts to date. In the pages of JBL, an article can be selective in its methodology, but it is valued more highly if it can engage judiciously not just with the scholarly works published in English but also in other commonly recognized research languages, especially German, French, Dutch, and Spanish. The ideal of comprehensiveness entails such a broad set of linguistic competencies in ancient and modern languages that one might wonder why an article in biblical studies is normally authored by an individual. An international team of authors (as is common in the natural sciences) would be more likely to gain the ideal coverage of the literature.⁶ Indeed, the professional ideal of the scholarly individual is itself problematic, even when individuals are scrupulous in awarding honor to predecessors in their own research tradition and strategically citing the younger scholars, or new perspectives, they wish to promote.⁷

It is no accident that English, German, French, Spanish, and Dutch are also the foremost languages associated with the history of Christian colonialism, so a question of epistemic injustice could be raised even against an article that is rich with European languages and research traditions. Many anticolonial treatises have been composed in all these languages, of course, but it is also the case that the historic circulation of academic resources, including institutional networks, have been mediated by precisely these European languages. For researchers who come from non-European cultures, being asked to engage comprehensively with international scholarship might well provoke some suspicion of unexamined ideology—revealed not just in the requirement to learn a third or fourth language in order to engage with a vast number of detailed publications in the dominant research traditions, but also in the assumed level of resourcing and institutional support that is necessary in order to make such publications accessible to researchers. Local cultures and needs in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific are likely to generate research questions that grow from their own contexts, rather than from the centuries-old citational practices that inform European scholarship.⁸

The exclusion of certain groups of people from the business of biblical scholarship can...