David Buckley’s recent post in Notes from the field raises a crucial methodological question. On what basis is comparative work to be done if the methods of comparison developed by the culture of reference (the analyst’s culture) are seen to be so deeply embedded in the ethos—that is, in many cases, a worldview with a clearly identifiable history of religion and secularization—of the culture of reference that these “methods of comparison” obviously fall under the umbrella of what is to be analyzed from the start, and hence to be differentiated from or likened to some other culture or cultures? If my perspective on what rational comparison amounts to cannot be shared by those in the situations I am comparing, then what does it mean to compare anything in such a context, since the “frame” I construct for the comparison could itself always already be just “my” frame, and hence something that would in turn require a larger “frame” (but whence would it come?) to be properly understood?
In the social sciences, this sort of issue has mostly been treated under the heading of relativism. As I have described it elsewhere, “our ability to be comfortable with relativism oddly depends on, or slides inexorably toward, a thin but broad universalism. But this universalism, this sense that through a less judgmental and more dispassionate gaze one has grasped the most truly general characteristics of human being, human civilization, even ‘human rights,’ as the Abbé Sieyès and others obviously thought they had [. . .] can be explained away [. . .] as a fiction embedded in certain kind of Judeo-Christian culture, that is, the kind that believes in the secularizing narrative that entails a latitudinarian tolerance based on individual rights rather than communal duties, on a putatively dispassionate separation of private and public beliefs,” and so forth. In the humanities, the dilemma of the “frame” or structure that always somehow needs a larger one that it can never do more then gesture to “off the stage,” so to speak, was captured for many by Jacques Derrida’s very influential essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences,” which he delivered as a lecture at The Johns Hopkins University in 1966, and which was basically an account of the failure of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s attempt at a universal method. (Niklas Luhmann refined the argument under the heading of “systems theory,” and I think mathematics discovered the problem rather early in the twentieth century.) The problem David Buckley is confronting, along with the skeptical gazes of those he interviews, is thus in many ways a problem that defines so much humanist reflection on method after 1945.
And yet, the fact that the problem is real—and I believe it is—should not be allowed to reduce intellectual work to an unending reiteration of the problem, as happened to “deconstruction” in the literary fields, or to the unending performance of the contradiction into which mise-en-abîme the Frankfurt School fell. It does seem to me, moreover, that the question of “religion” in a “post-secular” age raises this issue in a most intense way, since for modernity the most common way to deal with the comparison of religious systems is by methodologically stepping back (whatever one’s own beliefs may be) into a space that, in many cases, is hard to distinguish from the secular reason that dominates the Western academy (as Dipesh Chakrabarty has quite elegantly noted). In this sense, I think Buckley’s instincts are correct: to pursue the comparison on the widest possible historical grounds, though (I would add) with as much awareness of the “frame” dilemma I outlined above as possible. To do less would be to stop thinking altogether. But to ignore the dilemma would reduce thinking to the imposition of Procrustean beds, and we have enough of those already.
I think the only way out of this is to acknowledge that language refers—that primary experience, shaped by past experience and education, is different from talking-about/reflecting on experience.
We can then set about being clear about both parts of experience and their relationship.
I agree that the problem as described is a genuine dilemma. Just a few years ago, the history of religions department at my alma mater came in for scorn when one of its staff used Freudian mythology to interpret Hindu mythology. Hindu scholars objected vehemently that the result was serious distortion.
So should the American scholar who offered the Western interpretation have submitted the work first to scholars of the Hindu tradition? Maybe, but is not every interpretation of whatever stripe liable to critique? Isn’t that what scholarship is all about?
At the same time, I have been mystified at the degree to which current literary and art critiques seem to be absent of any shared standards. Art critics get published no matter what they write about. If a work of literature is half decent, it is open to endless interpretations, so long as they do not make a pretense of ranking the work. But I expect criticism to be more than just creative writing.
Mark C. Taylor identifies the problem of standards for cross-cultural investigations of religious behavior with a comparison of Eliade and Ricoeur. For Ricoeur, “different religions are not, as Eliade insists, sui generis but are actually effects of supposedly more basic social, economic, political, and psychological processes [. . .] they must be understood by reducing them to something other than themselves.” Taylor’s answer is the book the quote is taken from, After God. It is just one of many addressing the issue. Again, isn’t that what scholarship is all about?
Interesting piece, Vince. It seems to me that you are right, above all, to point out that this problem has been with Western thought for a long time now, and that no satisfactory solution to it has yet been found. To speak of “comparative” and “relative” is to speak in the terms of this (our own) culture, and, as Derrida and others showed long ago, there can be no ground for speaking of the relativity of all cultural values or of all cultures, which would just be another, ‘weak’ version of L-S’s universalism. Religious Studies (along with plenty of other disciplines) has been wrestling with the resultant methodological dilemma, as you well know, without a great deal of success thus far in avoiding the reduction of religion “to something other than itself.”