Between Concept and Experience : Transmitting
Knowledge in Religious Studies
The
religious anthropology of Mircea
Eliade was based, at its outset, on metaphysical hypotheses concerning
hierophanies; Rudolph Otto, for his part, cautioned his reader from the outset
of his classic book The Sacred, that the latter could not really be explained
– but only « awoken » in his reader. Contemporary
religoius anthropology has since then evacuated these basic hypotheses in an
attempt to conform with certain intellectual criteria as well as respond to its
detractors. However, teaching these concepts in university classes produces
some disturbing observations. Are students expected to intellectually work with
the idea of the sacred if they have never experienced it ? Do these
metaphysical hypotheses operate at some repressed level while teaching
them ? Reflection on these questions could lead, in the long term, to a
different approach not only in religious anthropology but in its teaching as
well.
Believing What We Know or Knowing What We Believe? Critique
of an Inoperant Distinction
The
concept of belief is often seen as a characteristic of religion, and this use
is rarely questioned. The current definitions generally oppose belief to knowledge
as a non rational certainty contrasted with a methodical use of rational doubt.
This article questions this distinction by showing that the two criteria
invoked to separate belief and knowledge, certainty and demonstration, are not
valid. The use of the concept of belief as it is applied to religion is
criticized. It appears, when examining some common types of opposition between
belief and knowledge, that this opposition implies a value laden judgement of
difference. If belief and knowledge can only be distinguished at the price of a
judgement inappropriate in research, it seems more appropriate to use a
different concept, like representation, which accounts for similar assertions
often rendered by the concept of belief, but without the epistemological flaws
of the former.
I will present an overview
of the belief-knowledge phenomenon based on my personal experience in Myanmar.
In South-East Asia, the Theravadan Budhists make a distinction between belief
and knowledge. In the Theravadan thinking, a natural system rules the universe,
where karma (volitional actions) determine the destiny of beings ; there
is no creator and therefore no creation. Consequently, the idea of God represents
a belief, whereas the teaching of the Budha represents facts about the
universe, i.e., a knowledge. The Abhidamma, « the high teaching of
the Pali canon », describes the smallest components of matter and
energy. Moreover, it explains the composition and functioning of a thought,
essential information to attain nibbana (nirvana). The Theravadan Budhists hold
these sacred texts to be as authoratative as modern science. In fact, they
surpass science with their comprehension of the spirit and thought. Since he is
the one who discovered these facts, the Budha is the greatest scientist in the
world.
Sects and Science Today. Towards a Typology of the
Relationship Between Science and Religion
The
scientific advances of the 19th and 20th centuries have created a veritable halo over science
and technology almost granting them a sacred status while placing many of the
stories of traditional religions in question. It is in this context that the
first religious « scientific » movements have appeared.
They’ve grown rapidly around a clientèle that disliked the
christian religions and yet were dismayed by the inability of modern science to
understand man as a whole and to explain suffering, death, life, etc. With the
New Age, these shortcomings of science have become insufferable for a large
segment of american and european youth. A number of
« scientific » movements either came into being, or
finally took off to become organizations on a world scale. Among these, two are
of particular interest: the Raëlian Movement and the Church of
Scientology. This paper briefly presents these two groups and then interprets
them using Roland Barthes’s theorizing of myth in order to better
understand how science and religion can interrelate to make meaning coherent. From
this analysis two concepts, of especial utility for other groups, are
elaborated – scientisation and religiofication – which take into consideration the time and
the motives that can characterize the different forms of mystification in the
spheres of religion and science.
Feminist
Witchcraft is a religion which is continually developing and changing through
the spiritual creativity of women.
All across North America women are getting together in groups to forge
new rituals, beliefs and practices which fit into their everyday lives as
women. My
paper explores the importance of speculative fiction and speculative
ritualizing in the construction of feminist Witchcraft identity. Speculative fiction (that is, fiction,
such as fantasy or utopia, which moves beyond strict realism), as a tool for
imaginative thinking, generates possible directions this creative spirituality
might take. As such I will look at speculative as a genre and a mindset and
make suggestions about why it is important to take speculation and imagination
seriously for understanding feminist Witchcraft as a movement.
Maffesoli :
Epistemology, Ontology and Postmodernism
We
live in a time of a great transformation. The contemporary West is witnessing
the collapse of the modern épistemè. This collapse is equivalent
to an end of ideas of transcendance and brings us back to a concrete immanence.
This kind of immanantisation of thought is a liberating fall insofar as the end
of the political project, at the heart of the thinking of modernity, gives way
to a re-enchantement of the world. Our postmodern moment is characterized above
all by a paradox : the end of the emancipatory promise of modernity is the
necessary condition for the liberation of the irrepressable vitality at the
root of living-together. In other words, a realization of our existential
concreteness – the real as it is instead of what is ought to be – gives rise to
this passionate community that modernity wished to escape. By not incorporating
analyses of a concrete day-to-day sociality, the humanities have a difficult
time dealing with the return of this passional community. It is this vision of
the contemporary West that I propose to question by focussing on the
ontological and epistemological presuppositions on which Maffesoli builds his
comprehensive sociology of the day-to-day.
No
research can exist without a stance. But what is a stance? I propose a
definition, relying on three conceptual tools, which correspond to the
different aspects of a stance : fondement (Jacques Pierre), transvaluation (James Jakób
Liska), and finally, effects of power (Michel Foucault). In the study of
religion, there exist two primary stances. One sees secular society as distinct
from religion. The other suggests secular society produces religious-like
behavior. Both are analyzed with the concepts developed in the first section.
The analysis shows that the expressions « religion » and
« secular society » stem from, are informed by, and
maintain these two stances. Epistemological problems and ethical issues raised
by these two stances are explored showing that, as long as secularism, the home
of science, defines other systems of belief as religion, it maintains its interpretive
hegemony.
scansion and measure
Despite
being insoluble, obsolete and devoid of any meaning by the way the sciences
have gradually unfolded its intelligibility, the question of origin remains
intact. Considered by mythology as the moment of the eruption of Being and the
wellspring for all identities, the origin guarantees all material standards and
social norms. Thus, the narrative account of its memory becomes the catalogue
of all these norms. Now, other discourses have supplanted the tale of the
origin in this role — especially science — and have gradually
deprived the question of origin of its theoretical relevance. However, the
substitution of the formal and abstract metrics of science to a standard born
out of the mythology transpires at the expense of what can be called the
« event » and its scansion of the origin. Religious language has,
therefore, as its prime function, the scansion of the event, which bears the
interrogation of origin – and its grounding of all possible measures
– rendering it irreducible to scientific language.
The Weight of Things. Tradition and Modernity in Trente Arpents of Ringuet
The
author analyse how the representation of the other in Ringuet’s Trente arpents involve a deconstruction of the
«clérico-nationaliste» ideology.