The start of this lecture reminds me of Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk The Problem of a Single Story (2009). I use this video a lot with both my BA and MA students when discussion the current Fashion History canon and how to address is biases and absences.

Sense of self is shaped by family but also from affiliations that spread out from there, like your nationality, gender, class, race, and religion.

Great example of intersectionality

When George Eliot writes in Middlemarch that Rosamond “was almost losing the sense of her identity,” it’s because her sense of self has been shaken by the revelation that the man she thinks she loves is hopelessly devoted to somebody else. So identity here is utterly personal. The identities we often think of today, on the other hand, are shared, sometimes with millions or billions of others. So they’re social.

Fascinating to distinguish identity between the personal and the social. I suppose all my research so far has focused on social identity, that is, the identity shared by a particular community, be it ethnic or national. I don’t seem to engage with personal identities as much, but maybe I should as well…

creed, because religious identities so often connect us with some of the very oldest stories that we have. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about Histories as a series of stories rather than a linear, universal narrative of progress. Religion as stories, I like that.

Take Judaism, the oldest of our Abrahamic creeds. For thousands of years, everyday dietary and hygienic practices; rituals, public and private; and forms of dress have played a central role in distinguishing a Jewish community from its neighbors. The Jews of Alexandria in the first century BCE looked different from their neighbors because of their hair and their beards, the clothes they wore; because of the foods they ate, the way they prayed, the scriptures they held holy. But of the things that set them apart, which were matters of custom and which were matters of creed?

It reminds me of the concept of ethnicity, as defined by social anthropologist Fredik Barth who focuses on the ongoing negotiations of boundaries between communities. Behavioural interactions are responsible for highlighting differences between the groups, and by so doing form what he refers to as ‘boundaries.’ In this social process, cultural traits like language, tradition and religion act as markers, helping to identify the differences that will construct the boundaries. Barth stresses the fluid nature of the markers, which are influenced by external circumstances to the group. In this sense, ethnic identities are seen as dynamic, socially and subjective constructed. (1969, p.10)

Every religion has three dimensions: there’s what you do—call that practice. There’s who you do it with—call that community, or fellowship. And, yes, there’s a body of beliefs. The trouble is that we tend to emphasize the details of belief over the shared practices and the communities that buttress religious life. We all know the word “orthodoxy”: it comes from a Greek word that means correct belief. But there’s a less familiar word, “orthopraxy” which comes from another Greek word, πρᾶξις (praxis), which means action. So orthopraxy is a matter not of believing right but of acting right.

The concept of orthopraxy could be applied to the wearing of a Kirchenpelz by a Saxon community in Transylvania. It was worn by both men and women, but only to church or church-related occasions, including events held outside the physical space of worship. When wearing it, certain codes of behaviour, such as no smoking or drinking, had to be observed. Failing to observe them was punishable by penalties, and in extreme cases it could result in the dismissal of one’s standing in the group.

These abstract beliefs mean very little if you lack a direct relationship to traditions of practice, conventions of interpretation, and communities of worship.

The things we do together, in fellowship, are at the core of religious experience.

scriptural determinism. Often, we’re told that our religious beliefs repose in our sacred texts—so that to be a believer is to believe what’s in the scriptures.

Very interesting point.

Much of scripture is written in language like this that is poetical, metaphorical, or simply obscure. Much consists of narratives, some, like the parables told by Jesus, overtly fictional. Scripture, in short, requires interpretation.

Interpretation is key then and could be argued as the differentiating aspect of different religious who might follow the same scriptures. I suppose then, interpretation is also how we understand (or not) each other.

The condemnation of homosexuality, in other words, reflects the power of everyday traditions of sentiment: it helps interpret the text, it isn’t simply derived from it.

The priests and the scholars often want to insist that doctrine, which they are, after all, the masters of, drives practice. So it’s easy to ignore the reverse process, the way doctrine is often driven by practice —by forms of worship, familiar feelings, traditions of social regulation.

Scriptural passages can get new interpretations. And if they can’t adapt, they’re often abandoned.

This idea of continued (re-)interpretation as key to the survival of religion creates very tight links to the concept of tradition, which also relies active interpretation and change. ‘Tradition as a mode of action that re-presents the past. Tradition must be performed, and in its various performances, tradition refers to, re-collects, and re-articulates the past. This is not to say that tradition is the past but rather a recollection from the past, articulated by social agents and performed at some present moment.’ (Thompson in Blank & Howard, 2013: 154-155)

‘Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin dismiss the idea that tradition might refer to a core of culture traits inherited from the past and regard it solely as a symbolic construction—an interpretation of the past enacted in the present (Handler and Linnekin 1984, 273). The traditional is what people claim their traditions to be.’ (Oring in Blank & Howard, 2013: 29)

if scriptures were not subject to interpretation—and thus to re-interpretation—they wouldn’t continue to guide people over long centuries. When it comes to their survival, their openness is not a bug but a feature.

The movements have something else in common: though they venerate the old, they’re all new, being reactions to the modern world. The great paradox of fundamentalism is that it relies on precisely what it repudiates: interpretive latitude.

scriptural determinism of this kind, you’ll notice, is mobilized both by outsiders to indict Islam and by insiders to defend practices they favor.

Using the scriptures to support one’s argument (or position of privilege). I tell my students to support their arguments in essays with theories and other secondary sources. But they can use any source to support any argument, because it all depends on how they interpret the source. Interesting…

Scriptures survive, then, in part precisely because they aren’t just lists of beliefs or instructions on how to live. But even religious documents that are lists of beliefs and instructions require interpretation.

To have mastery of the scriptures is to know which passages to read into and which to read past.

Again, it connects with the concept of tradition. Perhaps religion as defined by Appiah is an example of tradition?

none of us creates the world we inhabit from scratch; none of us crafts our values and commitments save in dialogue, or debate, with the past. 

I think of a passage by Isabel Wilkerson: ‘We in the developed world are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside, but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even. Many people may rightly say, “I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked indigenous people, never owned slaves.” And, yes. Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.’ (2020)

Once you think of creedal identities in terms of mutable practices and communities rather than sets of immutable beliefs, religion becomes more verb than noun: the identity is revealed as an activity not a thing. And it’s the nature of activities to bring change.

That we do not merely follow traditions; we create them.

People think of them as kind of trapping us and fixing us, but actually we are always free to move in the light of our best understandings away from the features of our identities that are dangerous. And clearly that’s what needs to be done in the case of gender not just for religious traditions, but in all of our practices we’re still woefully far from having reached proper gender equality.

there’s always something there to work with. It’s never the case that the tradition rules out an interpretation that can move you in a new direction. 

we always have choices; that identities are not a fate and that we have to figure out what to do with them.

I’m a big believer in conversation across difference.

I have sometimes felt that the right thing to do was to get people to stop using the word ‘religion’ and to start focusing on the people that they’re interacting with and to not use the concept of religion to understand them.

So many people seemed annoyed or slightly angry during the Q&A. I didn’t find his talk offensive, in fact, I found it really insightful and compelling. Interesting how provocations that crash with our views and opinions tend to create a defensive response. Some of the lectures in this unit have also incited a defensive response from me and I’m sure my students get that too. This raises a couple of thoughts:

How can I respond to a student/colleague/relation that is defensive from a place of compassion and understanding?

How can I use my own defensiveness as an opportunity for self-awareness and how to move on from it to a place of open communication?

Bibliography

Barth, F. (ed.) (1969) Ethnic groups and boundaries: the social organization of culture difference. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

Oring, E. (2013) Thinking Through Tradition. In: Blank, T. & Howard, R. (eds.) Tradition in the Twenty-First Century: Locating the Role of the Past in the Present. Logan: Utah State University Press

Thompson, T. (2013) Trajectories of Tradition: Following Tradition into a New Epoch of Human Culture. In: Blank, T. & Howard, R. (eds.) Tradition in the Twenty-First Century: Locating the Role of the Past in the Present. Logan: Utah State University Press

Wilkerson, I. (2020) Caste: The Lies That Divide Us. London: Allen Lane.