Back to the Future: A Response to Martin and Wiebe

Extract

LIKE MOST RELIGIOUS STUDIES graduate students of my generation, I was assigned Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures in my theories and methods course. As brilliant, eloquent, and constantly re-readable as the essays collected in this volume are, something about them troubled me even back in my grad school days, and I have since come to view this work as a signpost marking the point when religious studies—like many humanistic disciplines—took a wrong turn down into the postmodern rabbit hole of interminable Verstehen. Geertz combines his celebration of Gilbert Ryle's “thick description” as a process of endlessly uncovering semiotic turtles upon turtles (Geertz 1973: 29) with a clear disdain for “reductionistic” attempts to explain religion or other cultural forms. In the process, the grand explanatory ambitions of the early figures in our field are made to seem both culturally naïve and dangerously hegemonistic.

I recently re-read most of the early religious studies pioneers in a seminar I taught to my own graduate students, and was shocked anew by the pervasive triumphalist Protestantism and the condescending tone of their surveys of “primitive” customs—surveys typically conducted from the comfort of Oxbridge armchairs. With some historical distance, we might almost find this cultural parochialism amusing, were it not for the horrific consequences it entailed for those “savage” peoples. It is arguably this laudable awareness of the excesses of colonialism—economic, political, and intellectual—that has lent so much moral force to the reaction against old-fashioned comparative religion. Again, this may be generationally idiosyncratic, but I associate the final triumph of the interpretation-only school of humanistic inquiry in our field with the publication of Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Taylor 1998)—hailed by my colleagues at my first job in religious studies as representing the definitive state of the art—with its destabilization of analytic categories and pervading suspicion of explanatory frameworks.