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January 01, 1970
January 01, 1970
My questions, as a scholar at a publicly-funded university, are methodological rather than ethical. So I ask a version of MacIntyres’ question (what ethics? Whose ethics?) precisely in order to set ethics aside in favor of teaching theoretical and methodological competencies in the study of religion. I taught ethics at several two-year colleges for quite some time. In some circles (typically the professions as various as nursing to sports training) “ethics” is about adhering to governmental or guild based policies on scope of practice. In other circles, ethics is the (typically analytic) domain of moral theory or the domain of (typically continental) critical political inquiry and so, as I prepare to teach a fall course on “Asian religions,” of which Muslim-identifying communities figure largely ( a well as comprise the overwhelming majority of the over-generalization “Islam”) I am organizing the course design on the following:
Challenging representations of so-called “Asian religions” (if not “Asians” more generally) in three approaches to constructing/representing religion in print and visual media: (1) world religions (where “–ism” terms group objects of study and the underlying premise is “the sacred” that supposedly unifies all things religious), (2) pluralism (often framed as “tolerance for diversity”), and (3) personal spirituality. All three depend upon orientalist constructions/representations of religious others (in the Edward Said sense) and are refuted/challenged by critical social scientific approaches to the study of religion.
Learners in my course aren’t worrying about solidarity so much as learning to use academic tools to substantively criticize both folk and academic constructions that produce the over generalization problem that you have identified.
Thanks for your comments, Nathan. Methodological questions are certainly at the core of efforts avoid over-generalization. I do wonder, though, how learners in your class attend to the profoundly ethical implications of Said’s emphasis on the way that power functions in the construction/representation of religious others. Ethical questions, it seems to me, relate to having students consider who we are studying, why we are studying them, and what we intend to do with this knowledge. These are the kinds of questions to which Said was so dedicated, no?