Limits, Genealogies, and Openings

Introductory Remarks on Engaging Religion

in Religion and Society
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Andreas Bandak Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen, Denmark bandak@hum.ku.dk

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Simon Stjernholm Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen, Denmark stjernholm@hum.ku.dk

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Abstract

This article, which introduces a special collection of articles, is intended to invite scholarly reflection on the study of religion in the present day. We believe that a meaningful conversation about what happens when we engage religion for scholarly purposes forces us to consider the ways in which the very category ‘religion’ shapes our research interests and scholarly communities. A focus on ‘engagements’ is furthermore useful as we seek an open conversation about what is lost and what can be found in the translations and transitions between analytical categories and empirical findings. We contend that much can be learned by exploring what, exactly, is engaging us—and how we engage—in the study of religion. It is therefore the aim of this article and those that follow to participate in joint interdisciplinary thinking about the means, ends, methods, and results of academic analyses that deal with religions and religiosity.

With this Symposium we invite scholarly reflection on the predicament of the study of religion in the contemporary period. Such an endeavor is obviously never going to be exhaustive. However, we believe that a productive conversation on what happens when we engage religion for scholarly purposes forces us to reflect on the ways the very category shapes our scholarly communities and research interests, and on how we are to fashion a targeted yet open conversation on what is lost and found in the transitions and translations between empirical findings and analytical categories. The emphasis on engagements and what is engaging about the study of religion deliberately helps us to focus on the diverse forms of commitments, interests, desires, and quests that spur us on in our explorations. It is our contention that we stand to learn a great deal from exploring what exactly is engaging us—and how we engage—in the study of religion. It is thus the aim of this introduction, as well as this collection, to show the importance of interdisciplinarity when thinking about the means, ends, methods, and results of academic analyses that in one way or another deal with religions and religiosity.

The conversation partners are here placed within the fields of sociology of religion, anthropology, history of religions, theology, and philosophy of religion, even though none of them are covered fully. The purchase of setting the conversation up across these fields is to push some general issues to the fore, while respecting the legacies of each. With this introduction we inquire into how analytical categories shape our empirical findings and our engagements with them but also how our empirical findings work back on our categories and destabilize them, allowing us to formulate new questions and seek new answers—taking our point of departure in studies of religion but not claiming our insights to be unique to them. As such, this conversation is bound to experiment and play with our categories while also pushing the perimeters of what is currently in fashion. The benefit of such a conversation is that diverse ways of engaging religion are invited to the table, but also that genuinely self-reflexive takes on what goes on in these various engagements with religion can help us to simultaneously ground our claims and raise the stakes.

Religion: Comparison and Beyond

We take our point of departure in the very word ‘religion’. Religion derives from Latin, or, as Jacques Derrida (2002: 66) writes in Acts of Religion, the question of religion relates to the question of Latin and its globalization: “Religion circulates in the world, one might say, like an English word [comme un mot anglais] that has been to Rome and taken a detour to the United States.” In this sense, the word ‘religion’ carries a particular history that necessitates some initial reflection. For Derrida, the word's legacy is bound to a form of imperialism that is found in both language and Christian culture. Tracing the Latin meaning, however, gives us some space to think and reflect further. A central source on the Latin etymology of religion is Émile Benveniste ([1969] 2016), who in his Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society traces the etymology of religio to two different origins or sources: one is traced to Cicero, which is relegere; the other to Christian thinkers such as Tertulian and Lactantius, which is religare. These two verbs, relegere and religare, have different roots and emphasize different meanings. The former refers to a going through or over again in thought, or to reading again. The latter, however, refers to a binding or bond—to the sense that something is tied back to or refers back to something as in an obligation (see also Serres 1995: 47; 2022). Both meanings entail the prefix ‘re-’, which underlines the aspect of repetition or of doing again (Bandak and Coleman 2019; see also Derrida 1998; Weber 2001). In either of these two etymological senses, it is not just a single act but a continuous one that is underlined. We think that the tension in the different meanings may be important to underscore, at least heuristically. In other words, rather than deciding on the correct etymological sense of religion, we can use the basic tension inherent in the very tracing as a reminder that what we designate as phenomena falling under the category may not be decided once and for all but may rather remain open to later reworkings, in the senses of both a retying and a rereading. Further to this, it can also be stressed that this ‘re-’ aspect can be read as an invitation or exhortation to scholars to continue searching, trying, playing, experimenting, and remaining curious rather than staying with fixed interpretations and academic dogmas (Bal 2009; Szakolczai 2023).

Similarly, as Derrida also points out, nothing is decided in itself by a focus on sources. Etymology may not hold the meaning of a word, or, as observed by Kirsten Hastrup (1995: 39), “the history of a particular word need not reflect the history of its meaning.” The word may remain the same, whereas what it refers to is shifting. Accordingly, “with the concept goes an evaluation that may shift at its own pace” (ibid.). So we can say that the meanings and practices of what pertains to ‘religion’ and to being ‘religious’ or falling under the domain of ‘religiosity’ are constantly evolving. On the other hand, without keen attention to the meanings and histories of the category of religion, we also limit the potential of current and future work for disentangling and decolonizing the very category and placing it under scrutiny. In other words, this text does not propose a set definition of religion. Instead, it lays out a reflective and reflexive exploration of how the category of religion is being produced anew in our current work, and how any future conversation on ‘religion’ accordingly is formatted, delimited, and defined at least in part by work in the present and not just that of the past. We will return to this point later when we discuss the question of genealogies of religion.

A conversation on how to engage religion needs to look back to the ways the category has been employed but also to how it is currently being put to use. Such a conversation on how to approach and deal with religion as an analytical category can be carried forward by thinking and comparing across different disciplinary traditions and geographical locales. One could say that the study of religion and religions from its inception has been tied to the notion and practice of comparison (see, e.g., Freiberger 2019; Lincoln 2018; Smith 1990; Stausberg 2011). While comparison is often a highly charged endeavor, we think that there is good reason for addressing this problem in light of engagements with religion. Comparison has indeed been used in order to assert the prominence of Christian or Western ways of being (cf. Asad 1993). Comparisons have frequently also been used as a broad and total way of construing difference and similarity. Such total comparisons are obviously inherently flawed or even impossible (see Candea 2018; van der Veer 2015). However, this challenge should not detract from the merits of more situated forms of comparison, which might have a high purchase as they teach us not of the universality of any single category but of the diverse engagements and social obligations found in any given community. Comparison, then, may not be a solution to a problem but rather an entry point to forge reflexivity of what it takes to analyze whatever we designate as ‘religion’ or ‘religious’ practice. Comparison, and even the very idea of comparativity, can hence be seen as part of a wider methodological awareness that we believe at this current point may find some openings for pursuing. This approach should also aid us in fostering a fertile conversation on how we engage religion as an analytical category and on the kinds of impact it has on our thinking, writing, and teaching. And, conversely, on how we are engaged by the kinds of material we are working with. At times it may even be wise to sidestep the work on the categories itself in order to come back to it, now informed by different vantage points. One way to do so, we propose, is to focus on the limits and perimeters that allow for articulation and conversation on religion.

Working with or toward the Limit

We will therefore now turn to the limits and delimitations put to use in academic work when carving out a space for engaging empirically and/or theoretically with religion. Let us open this part of the conversation with some reflections on the question of working with or toward limits. The limit could here variously be thought of as the bounds of our own thinking and theoretical grasp, or the bounds of what our material allows us to say. It could also refer to the limits of what is possible or permitted to think and articulate within a disciplinary tradition. Limits can hence be consciously chosen and embraced, even if just as a heuristic exercise (Candea 2007); however, limits may also be working less consciously on us. There are things we are highly interested in getting to know and, conversely, things we are uninterested in or even feel strongly about not engaging (Dilley 2007, 2010; Foucault 1990). As such, we may see how dominant interests or narratives assert some themes and issues as more pertinent than others, or in Edward Bruner's (1986: 143) formulation: “Narrative structures organize and give meaning to experience, but there are always feelings and lived experience not fully encompassed by the dominant story.”

One case in point could here be Susan Harding's (1991) famous depiction of engaging what she designates as a ‘repugnant other’. Harding started to do ethnographic work on Southern Baptists and the community around Jerry Falwell and was soon informed by colleagues that this topic was not of interest—indeed, she was actively discouraged from doing such a study (see also Harding 2000). To an American liberal sensibility, at least at that time, it seemed a dead end to focus one's scholarly energy on this manifestation of religion. Much has changed since then. Today, at least in terms of anthropological work on religious practice and thinking, there is no shortage but rather an abundance of novel engagements with Christianity (see, e.g., Engelke 2007, 2013; Meyer 2015; Robbins 2004, 2014). In terms of interest and popularity, it is fair to say that Christianity has come to prominence, and perhaps so to the detriment of studies of other religious configurations. However, other disciplinary conversations on religion and religiosity may accordingly also have their localized senses of who or what the repugnant others are or would be. In his article in this collection, “Analytic Categories and Claims of Special Knowledge,” David Robertson shows how this stance plays out with regard to groups taken in by conspiracy theories. Such groups are easily relegated to the slot of the repugnant other in much theorizing and historicizing. We need, though, to be wary of such a perspective, Robertson contends, as it inhibits us from seeing how worldviews are made and negotiated in the first place. A self-conscious and self-reflexive engagement with religion needs to take into account how the conversation on religion does not fence off but rather invites more people to take part. That said, any scholarly conversation will not move forward because the field is in total agreement. Rather, informed disagreement, argument, and competing positions are part of any field and are integral to the sharpening of perspectives. Such a conversation, marked by dissenting perspectives, needs to simultaneously be characterized by generosity and respect, something we believe this collection of articles can further stimulate.

These variations on the limit also point to the crucial role that conscious as well as semi- or unconscious delimitation of the scope of any given form of research necessarily entails (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Without establishing the perimeters of a conversation, the focus inevitably will tend to become blurred. We also admit to the importance of the practice of constructing something as a ‘problem’. What constitutes a problem for research is already inscribed in advance within scholarly communities, where notions of interest, relevance, salience, and pertinence all guide and support what is solicited for further exploration (Said 1978). In this sense, there is a tension or play between what we could describe as independent observation and schooled attention in any given field. Similarly, the very notion of clarity may frequently not be a luxury the scholar has in advance. Quite often, we work from lacunae in existing knowledge and hence from an acknowledgment of a certain lack in our understanding of a given problem. Entering this conversation entails an active role in finding one's feet and getting one's head around how one can speak to existing problems. This might sound somewhat easier than it is, as the conversation on religion may indeed be marked by a certain messiness (Orsi 2005) and may be expanding in many directions simultaneously. Clear problems inevitably tend to get blurred in the conversations we have if we are to gain new empirical and theoretical knowledge through our engagements with the phenomena and life-worlds we explore.

Precisely such an insight regarding work with or toward the limit is found in the seminal work of Michel de Certeau. Whereas many are familiar with de Certeau's (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, we here want to engage with his broader project of thinking with the categories set by various disciplines such as history, ethnology, and the study of religion (see also Napolitano and Pratten 2007). Rather than locating the study of a phenomenon in one field, de Certeau asks us to open it up to the different legacies and traces it affords. In “The Historiographical Operation” in The Writing of History, de Certeau (1988: 56–113) presents a frame where disciplines and disciplinary histories are made open to what could have been otherwise. To quote from this chapter: “History manifests a heterogeneity relative to the homogenous wholes established by each discipline” (ibid.: 81). While no discipline is an island in itself, there may be particular methodologies, aesthetics, and canonical works that are learned and socialized as part of a specific academic training and outlook. To some, a graphic model may be the most significant and aesthetically appealing way to capture what is significant in or about a given religious world (Warburg 2014). Similarly, religious studies with a sociological bent will often find not just models but statistical samples and charts convincing and persuasive, and perhaps even evidence of a scholar's merits. As Astrid Krabbe Trolle shows in her contribution to this collection, “Contextualizing the Religious Survey: Possibilities and Limitations,” the use of national surveys and the construction of large samples may obviously be contested and show the protean nature of numbers for statecraft (see also Foucault 2009; Hacking 1990). The correlations and larger patterns that numbers can reveal is nonetheless a significant entry into how the phenomenon of religion is constructed and measured. However, with a different disciplinary training such aesthetics may look different and acquire different salience. In ethnographically oriented works on religious worlds, for instance, the vignette or Geertzian thick description of a social situation may be seen as presenting what is at stake in the religious world, but may also bespeak the quality of the scholar's engagement with it. For historically oriented work, it may be the way that sources and archives have been sought out and deeper patterns and connections established. In these various engagements with the material at hand, we see how what is counted as evidence is also undergirded by a training that has been acquired, as well as how ideas about aesthetics are found not just in the religious worlds we explore, but also in the scholarly traditions we identify with (cf. Berliner and Sarró 2007; Engelke 2008; Keane 2008; Meyer 2008).

We therefore need to attend to the ways our empirical material resists and speaks back to the conceptual work done to it in various disciplinary framings. This is also the reason why de Certeau is preoccupied with the work done on the margins, where space can be made for what could be otherwise, and for the invention of new categories. In his conception, we stand to learn a great deal by moving from the key questions toward the margins of the existing conversation and hence the limits of our knowledge. While limits may indeed be constricting and limiting, they are not unilaterally so. We may conversely find a fascination with regard to the limit where transgression and vectors of expansion are central for moving beyond what it seems to demarcate. This is so, de Certeau argues, because the work on the margin invites us to think more clearly about what we bring with us and accordingly opens a space from which to think and work back on received wisdom. In the work on and with the margin, there exists a different space for reflection and possibilities to renew interests and rediscover curiosity in core issues in disciplinary trajectories and genealogies.

One example of work with the limits of religious studies is provided by the recent widening of the perimeters of the conversation to include humanism, secularity, and non-religion as avenues of research (Asad 2003; Cannell 2010; Engelke 2014; Furani 2012; Hirschkind 2011; Lee 2015; Scheer et al. 2019). Obviously, studying groups that do not self-identify as religious pushes the limits for what the proper object of study for studies of religion might be. However, by exploring not just the Christian and Protestant legacy of religious studies but also the inherently secularist and even atheist legacies in terms of methodology and epistemology, the scholarly field is pushed to work toward nuance both for the conversations that have taken place as well as for those we hope to open up. In this collection, Birgitte Schepelern Johansen's article, titled “Chasing the Secular: Methodological Reflections on How to Make the Secular Tangible,” is significant in this regard as Johansen insightfully treats her own trajectory moving from the sociology of religion into a more open terrain engaging with the problem of how the category of religion is taught and disseminated in education (cf. Johansen 2014). Johansen argues for a reflexive engagement with the purchase of our categories even when it may mean that what one is searching for takes one far away from one's starting point. Such a journey may lead one to feel marginal, but also to find and develop new conversation partners. We find parallel insights in the work of Jacques Derrida (1982), who similarly is preoccupied with such work in the ‘margins of philosophy’.

Another way to engage the role of limits in this discussion is found in the work of Matthew Engelke and Matt Tomlinson (2006) in which they address the ‘limits of meaning’. In their discussion, Tomlinson and Engelke argue that there are limits to any productive way of exploring religion by way of the category of meaning. In this sense we are pushed to engage more openly with the category of meaning promoted by Clifford Geertz (1973) in his interpretative theory of culture as well as religion. By extension, we are also productively taken to Talal Asad (1993) and his strong criticism of Geertz. Limits of meaning could invite us to think about the breakdown and failure of, for example, religious transmission, ritual, or sermonizing (Stjernholm 2019). Religious actors may be part of rituals or devotional contexts that may not play out as planned, or where failure and breakdowns seem to be the primary lessons. What happens when the ideals and exemplary models do not succeed (Bandak 2022)? Or when religious actors do not pay heed to their authorities (Lincoln 1994)? In other words, empirical challenges to a framework emphasizing meaning in any total sense are currently pushing the conversation to engage with figures that were less consciously marked before. An endeavor such as the one proposed by Engelke and Tomlinson could therefore be thought of as one way to engage with a classic discussion, but also to point it to different configurations and figures for thought. This may be so because developments take place in the empirical world, where religion has come to mean quite diverse things and is employed differently, but also because conceptualizations of religion work their way back into the empirical worlds we study. As Monique Scheer shows in her contribution, “Culture and Religion: Remarks on an Indeterminate Relationship,” both essentializing and hybridizing depictions and modes of using the concept of religion—and the framing of religious practices—abound in contemporary societies, and scholars engaging with religion do well to consider what can be achieved by these different rhetorical strategies aimed respectively toward different ends, rather than simply by default sympathizing with hybridizing perspectives and criticizing essentializing moves. Accordingly, the very notion of religion may be ‘on shifting grounds’ as Simon Coleman (2012) aptly has described anthropological engagements with Christianity, or that we may indeed, as Geertz (2005) coined it, understand this as a matter of ‘shifting aims, moving targets’ for the conversation on religion. Such attention to the shifts taking place both in scholarly engagements with the concept of religion and in practices observed in the empirical worlds produces an interesting field for present and future conversations. In order to take part in them, we need critically to consider the genealogies that undergird the way ‘religion’ is being put to use.

Delimiting Genealogies

As we stated earlier, genealogies provide a fruitful mode of thinking about what we bring to—and encounter in—our engagement with religion. Genealogical relations can be uncovered through painstaking historical work, but they can also exist unacknowledged or can be actively sought after. We all have our disciplinary genealogies and personal biographies that to some degree interact and shape the way we define, for example, our field of research, legitimate (and perhaps illegitimate) questions and approaches, critical outlooks, methods for analysis, and so on. Sometimes these are in harmony with each other, but equally they may clash. Early on in our training to become scholars we often work hard to toe the line that we have been instructed to follow, but at some point, as we gain more experience and confidence and claim a voice for ourselves, we may increasingly try to break with such disciplinary/disciplining patterns and approach or experiment with the limits, as outlined above. In this collection of articles, this personal engagement with inherited academic genealogies is discussed by Hillary Kaell in “Working in Between: Interdisciplinary and Multivalent Approaches to the Study of Religion,” and by Birgitte Schepelern Johansen, both of whom share their reflections on gradually coming to terms with, and pushing against, the limits in addition to the possibilities in the framework of posing questions, analyzing, and writing academically that they have learned to master.

The term ‘genealogies’ was famously made relevant for the study of religion in Genealogies of Religion by the anthropologist Talal Asad (1993), whose analytical influences came from, among others, Michel Foucault. One of Asad's main targets of critique, as mentioned above, was Clifford Geertz and the latter's focus on uncovering ‘meaning’ in religious cultures through interpretive work. A central point in Asad's argument is that “what appears to anthropologists today to be self-evident” about religion “is in fact a view that has a specific Christian history” (ibid.: 42). A universally meaningful abstract concept of religion, therefore, is not analytically defensible to Asad. Instead, the “possibility” and “authoritative status” of religious practices and utterances “are to be explained as products of historically distinctive disciplines and forces” (ibid.: 54). Asad's method, approach, and conclusions offered crucially important insights into the historical specificity of dominant theories of both ‘religion’ and ‘ritual’. His work has inspired many later projects seeking to understand different forms of religiosity and conceptual engagements with ‘religion’ across several academic disciplines.

As crucial as Asad's approach is, it is important not only to reiterate its main points, but also to keep developing its critical analytical impulses and thereby perhaps uncover new, supplementary, plural genealogies that can—and indeed do—inform today's research. It is no doubt important for those carrying out research on religiosity to be critically aware of the specific, Protestant Christian, imperialist genealogy of the term ‘religion’ and its analytical limitations. However, it can further be asked how and when this concept and the history of its use intersect with related genealogical links/nodes that influence researchers’ ways of asking questions and engaging with their material. The history of Protestant forms of Christianity's influence on dominant modern concepts of religion is crucial. But, we may ask, is it always the most central, the most important, and the most influential form for the specific scholarly projects we engage in? How, why, and to what effect does this particular genealogy intersect with other potentially significant genealogies that may influence academic engagement with religion?

Despite the analytical deconstruction of a universally meaningful category of religion by Asad and others, and the related discursive critique of the modern academic study of religion (see, e.g., Dubuisson 2003, 2019; Fitzgerald 2003; Masuzawa 2005; McCutcheon 1997, 2003), we can also note that theories of religion—efforts to explain and make sense of the generalized concept and its related practices—have not disappeared as a genre. Such theories continue to be produced within several scholarly disciplines, not least within cognitively oriented research (see Stausberg 2009). Evidently, the critique of universalistic theories and conceptualizations of religion has not dissuaded everyone from engaging with broadly conceived conceptual experimentation and construction. Yet it is unlikely that any one of these ambitious attempts will sweep the board and establish a new ‘truth regime’ regarding a final definition of religion, which would surely be unwelcome in light of our discussion above regarding the continuously evolving and varied nature of the phenomena we are talking about.

Some of the most interesting recent work on religiosity with broad comparative and interdisciplinary analytical ambitions refrains from defining ‘religion’ or even making much use of it. The work of Ann Taves (2009, 2012, 2016) is especially significant to consider in this regard. Taves has focused on the admittedly difficult topic of religious experience (Martin et al. 2012). Taves (2009) has proposed a ‘building-block approach’ for studying those spiritual paths we sometimes call religion ‘and other special things’. The category of ‘specialness’ is crucial here. Taves builds on Durkheim's definition of the sacred as ‘things set apart’ and surrounded by taboos but suggests the more neutral ‘special’ to avoid the Christian normative conceptual baggage that terms like ‘holy’ or ‘sacred’ carry, for example, in the work of Rudolph Otto and Mircea Eliade. Taves (2016) has also comparatively explored the social, historical, and cognitive processes through which ascriptions of specialness to people, words, and experiences can develop into established spiritual paths that attract significant numbers of followers. Moreover, Taves (2012: 82) suggests that “departments of religious studies might want to conceive of themselves as loci for studying special things,” and because scholars of religion do not “have a monopoly on special things,” such a focus “would provide a bridge to other disciplines.” However, if we start thinking of researchers who have traditionally defined themselves in relation to the term ‘religion’ as being asked to redefine their specialization as, for example, ‘sociology of specialness’, ‘history of specialness’, or ‘philosophy of specialness’, it is probably easy to think of colleagues who would be less than enthusiastic. Nevertheless, Taves's conceptual development, methodological suggestions, and comparative empirical studies have given a welcome push toward renewed engagements with questions regarding the fundamentals (or not) of what we are actually doing, how and why, as we study religions or religiosity. This may be understood as an attempt to escape overly narrow inherited categories and to expand what is in reach—empirically, methodologically, and theoretically—for an interdisciplinary study of religion.

Epistemological, Tactical, and Personal Genealogies

We would like to suggest that genealogies are concerned not only with uncovering the more or less hidden past, but also with being in the present and projecting ourselves and our work into the future. Genealogies can be traced backward, starting with what we have decided to push as our argument and perspective in a piece of writing and then showing—for example, through citations, as discussed in the piece by Hillary Kaell (this volume)—where these ideas come from, what is inherent in them, what roots and links to previous thoughts and analyses they are indebted to. Or we can establish genealogies forward, starting with some identified alleged intellectual seed that has grown and borne fruit in chronologically later works, finally culminating in the very analytical framework or theoretical perspective we claim as our own. It goes without saying that our representation of these genealogies, these webs of relationships between the development of ideas, are necessarily incomplete. They can produce a more or less useful map, but do not represent the complexity of academic work as actual lived practice. Our academic writings are not ‘total communicative acts’, that is, they cannot (and should not) communicate all the processes, steps, and reflections that occur prior to their completion. However, opening up the complexities and choices inherent in the establishment of academic work is an important site of reflection and maturation for individual scholars as well as the wider field of conversation they are writing themselves into (Bandak and Kuzmanovic 2014; Stjernholm 2020).

One can propose the existence of at least three types of genealogies in scholarly work, including analyses of religions and religiosity. They might tentatively be called the ‘epistemological’, the ‘tactical’, and the ‘personal’, and they can each be related to interrelated, yet distinct, sets of questions. The set of questions related to our epistemological genealogies are, for example: What do we know about my topic? How do we know it? How have we—and presumably others—come to know it? This has to do with our education: what we have been asked to read and have chosen to read in search of particular insights and broadened perspectives. The issue of academic disciplines is important for understanding how this plays a role in our work. We have been taught to think and act in certain ways rather than others when we act professionally as researchers. We might feel strongly about certain dos and don'ts that seem perfectly natural to us and our closest fellows, while to others they might seem strange or unnecessary.

The second set of questions, relevant for our tactical genealogies, include: What is beneficial for me to communicate to my readers (or listeners) that I know (of)? How can choices regarding citation, exclusion, and inclusion, as well as terminology, influence my chances of being read, listened to, hired, or promoted? Here, we consciously construct links and cleavages between the work we present to our readers and previously existing work. It is not surprising that we would like to be seen as belonging to one part of the current academic landscape and not another. Perhaps most obviously, we do not want to be seen as associated with or dependent on some part of the scholarly world that is deemed as outdated, mistaken, or unsympathetic. There are always tactical choices—with ‘tactical’ here relating to de Certeau's (1984) usage—that go into our construction and representation of intellectual links.

Finally, the questions related to our personal genealogies are slightly different, such as: How and why did I come to seek out this knowledge and material? How does this knowledge and empirical engagement make me feel? How does it change me as a person—and should it? Our personal history and idiosyncrasies always have some level of relevance for the professional choices we have made. This observation should not be taken to mean that there is a direct link between some private emotion, experience, or opinion and the methods and objects of study we pursue as researchers. Nor is an emphasis on our personal selves a call for all of us to always write explicitly self-reflexively. Instead, it is an acknowledgment of the fact that in our academic work we are never completely separated from ourselves as socially, culturally, and psychologically situated individuals, and these genealogical links to, for example, our family background, relationships, and medical history also have a degree of impact on how we behave and fashion ourselves as researchers.

It can be argued that we continuously construct, reflect, and act on the basis of these three types of genealogies, either overtly or tacitly. Most likely, we do not always do it consciously, and our entanglements in these levels or types of genealogies can change over time. An example of a self-reflexive and time-layered engagement with how one is situated in terms of academic discipline, availability, limits of empirical data, and personal relationships are the three introductions that open the third edition of Robert Orsi's (2010) well-known The Madonna of 110th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950. These are the original introduction (1985), the introduction to the second edition (2002), and the third introduction (2010). In each, Orsi takes successive steps away from, but simultaneously deeper into, the original book and the process shaping both its production and aftermath. To begin with, he finds the academic limits of his discipline, history, to be too narrow for the project as it is taking shape. Being trained as a historian, Orsi worries about not being historical enough as his material creeps out of the safe deposits of the past and closer to his own lifetime—out of the archives and into the social and personal narratives, homes, and relationships of the people he encounters. He is thus pushed out of his disciplinary comfort zone by the empirical material he engages with. Moreover, as anyone who has read Orsi's work knows, his personal history as an heir of Italian Catholic immigrants in New York City is ever-present in the way he writes about his interlocutors. His own family history is present in his choice of topic and his mode of relating to it and writing about it. This genealogical aspect is extended into the book's afterlife, as Orsi in the third introduction shares how he is approached in letters and in person at the annual festa in Italian Harlem by people who want to share their memories by adding their stories to the book's account. For Orsi, it is clearly important that those readers who are also participants in the activities he writes about can recognize their own experiences in his writing—including their experience of what Orsi calls ‘real presence’. Noting that these people refuse to be ‘purified’, in Bruno Latour's sense, Orsi concludes the third introduction by stating: “Scholars of religion must refuse to be purified too” (ibid.: xxv).

Now, we may agree or not with the specific conclusions and academic ideals that Orsi arrives at—and scholars have indeed been both inspired and appalled by his writings. The point we want to emphasize here is that Orsi, unusually explicitly, brings the types of genealogies that he is simultaneously affected by and engaged in to the reader's attention: the epistemological, the tactical, and the personal genealogies, including how his own thinking has changed over time. Orsi's (2010: xii) approach can be framed as a form of resistance toward the “colder wind” of “radically critical” theory within the study of religion with its postulate of absence. Orsi would certainly agree with Asad that the all-too-dominant influence of Protestant religious ideals on the modern concept of religion is highly problematic, not least since much of what he finds in his material is cast as outside ‘proper’ religion, even by the US Catholic clergy. Yet there is more going on in a case of academic scholarship on religiosity than the more or less active ghost of a Protestantism-inspired ‘moral narrative of modernity’ (Keane 2007).

Another example of the entanglement of different types of genealogies can be found in the study of early Islam, including the Qur'an. In his book The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad's Life and the Beginnings of Islam, Stephen Shoemaker (2012) approaches questions regarding the chronology of narratives of Muhammad's life and death, the nature and gradual development of Muhammad's religious movement, the history of the Qur'anic text, and early Islam's changing sacred geography. These are sensitive topics to some, from either a religious or a scholarly perspective (or conceivably both). As Shoemaker continues a line of investigation from Patricia Crone and Michael Cook (1977), he uses methods for reading, comparing, and criticizing religious texts, taken from the study of early Christianity, on the formative period of Islam. Such critical investigations into what Shoemaker calls “sacred history” that are commonplace in studies of Christianity have been less common when it comes to Islam. Shoemaker (2012: 269–270) writes:

Given the broad range of competing opinions that are welcomed within New Testament studies, some of which are highly speculative and fundamentally contrary to the received narratives of origins, the forceful resistance to such ideas by certain scholars of Islamic origins is not only surprising but somewhat disheartening. Nonetheless, in spite of its controversial status within Islamic studies, this so-called skeptical approach to the study of early Islam offers the most methodological continuity with the study of other religious traditions from late antiquity, and for this reason alone it should be more actively pursued.

Here, Shoemaker compares how specialists within the study of different religions approach their topic. The reasons for these differences relate to the different genealogies of each respective field of study—and, most likely, the epistemological, tactical, and personal genealogies of the scholars engaged in those fields. Moving between and across research fields/disciplines in this way can allow one to notice less acknowledged perspectives and dynamics. It may provide a vantage point from which to disclose and criticize the accepted status quo or established truths within a field of research. For Shoemaker, the complex content of the data containing narrations of early Islamic history, from both Muslim and non-Muslim sources, necessitates that researchers move beyond and increasingly question views that are often taken for granted, for example, the interpretation of Muhammad as above all a social reformer rather than, as Shoemaker argues, a leader of an imminently eschatological community—a prominent feature of the Qur'an that, he argues, has been unduly downplayed. In Shoemaker's reasoning, it is in part his different disciplinary background, and thus his being less attuned to the particular sensibilities of the tradition of scholarship on early Islam in the specialized field of Islamic studies, that allows him to engage with his empirical material from a different perspective.

The two examples discussed above are obviously very different. Yet taken together, they illustrate broader, complex genealogical relations into which we enter when we engage in research on religions or religiosity. These relations can be varied depending on the field we enter and where and when we do so. What are taken as established truths within one field can be highly contentious in another. We posit that we may learn quite a bit from moving across established conversations, not in order to abolish them but to inform, inspire, and renew them (cf. Tweed 2006). When we negotiate our own position within these epistemological, tactical, and personal genealogies, perhaps with or against the various limits that are imposed on us, we need to continuously re-engage, reread, and to some extent retie the knots that keep the many-headed beast of the study of religion together.

Engagements for the Future

The subtitle of Religion and Society is Advances in Research. Perhaps reflecting on the notion of ‘advances’ may be an apt way of concluding an introduction to a thematic section on engaging religion. Following the Cambridge dictionary, an advance usually refers to the forward movement of something, or an improvement or development in something. In our case, then, it must refer to the forward movement of research. Obviously, a dictionary does not give any advice on how to move forward. What we, however, think we can conclude is that an advance, understood as a moving forward in research, can best take place by tacking between theoretical awareness and empirical attentiveness. In this sense, we advocate for a double reflexivity, which will have us listen with both ears attuned toward the different ways we can forge connections between theory and concepts, on the one side, and our empirical subject matter, on the other. This endeavor we here designate as a matter of engagement, and for the study of religion more pointedly as a matter of engaging religion. While we may never arrive at a precise formulation of the terms of engagement, we argue that when we explore religion, a keen focus on the various involvements may help us out of and away from antagonistic and unequal forms of interaction. As such, we find that a focus on these various implications of engaging religion may add to recent metaphors of entanglements (Maxwell 2022) and articulations (Coleman 2022). To engage with religion, we posit, requires us to reflect on the terms of engagement and to think across disciplinary frames and assumptions. And perhaps it even asks us to reconsider the role of our academic discussions and how and when to engage a wider public (cf. Eriksen 2006).

We could also formulate this insight slightly differently: namely, that advancing may not be to the detriment of a keen familiarity with the basics. In such a formulation there may be no hard distinction between basic and advanced. To be advanced implies attention to detail and subject matter. Moving forward accordingly also takes place through looking back and through a refounding by drawing upon key insights in the study of religion. This is why we have proposed that we work self-reflexively with the question of genealogies in their epistemological, tactical, and personal dimensions. Going back in order to revisit and rework key problems enables us to focus sensitively and sensibly on that which merited key insights and debates before. However, such an attention to past engagements is frequently most fruitful when it enables us to connect to current problems and hence to formulate new avenues for research for the present and beyond. At the same time, we must not limit ourselves to referring to giants of the past, but need to be open toward—and perhaps actively seek out—younger and less established scholarly voices who can contribute to deepened perspectives and exploring empirical fields in crucial ways. These contributions may not necessarily come from the most well-known universities, or geographical locations, or from dominant ethnic, social, linguistic, or gender groups.

Again, we turn to de Certeau (1988: 102) and his text “The Historical Operation,” in which he muses on the ambivalence in the writing of history but also in the vagueness of our own conceptualizations:

Such is the ambivalence of historiography: it is the condition of a process and the denial of an absence; by turns it acts as the discourse of a law (historical saying opens a present to be made) and as an alibi, a realistic illusion (the realistic effect creates the fiction of another history). It oscillates between “producing history” and “telling stories,” but without being reducible to either one or the other. No doubt we can recognize the same splitting in another form which completes the simultaneously critical and constructive historical operation: writing follows a path between blasphemy and curiosity; between what it eliminates in establishing it as past, and what it organizes from the present; between the privation or dispossession that it postulates, and the social normativity that it imposes on the unknowing reader.

We take de Certeau to point us toward the different poles of scholarship, namely critical and constructive, respectively, or between blasphemy and curiosity. However, rather than an antinomy, we take his formulation to direct us to their mutual implication in historical work and also the work implied by engaging religion. Our engagements with religion need to tack between being critical and being constructive, and when these attitudes are in play they accordingly tack and vacillate between blasphemy and curiosity.

Emphasizing the ambivalence found in scholarly attitudes does not mean that our conclusions are similarly ambivalent. However, it requires us to reflect on the openness, vagueness, and aspects of uncertainty in our research. These dimensions of our work also challenge us to work toward better, clearer, and more concise ideas and conceptualizations, even if these are never going to be complete or exhaustive. Here we also point out that the role of reworking is one where the method is rarely one of application of knowledge we already seem to possess. Rather, by engaging religion we underscore the continuous role of invention and co-creation that our categories and analyses set in play. Both our received and actively sought-after genealogies—epistemological, tactical, and personal—open up speculation over the categories we have inherited as well as the ones we are attempting to let loose in the current conversation.

Whereas Hent de Vries's (2008) edited magnum opus Religion: Beyond a Concept thinks through the various positive and pessimistic readings of the future of religion, we find it safe to say that for the time being there is no way ‘beyond’ religion. However, the question of what religion might mean—how it is practiced and the scholarly implications it could have—is not and will by no means be settled. ‘Religion’ may indeed be a phenomenon with transient qualities. Yet the fact that it engages large parts of the world also allows for scholarly engagements where we seek to work out how best to sharpen and widen our conversations, both empirically and theoretically. Indeed, as argued in this Symposium, we find the current climate particularly fertile to think with each other cross- and interdisciplinarily on the work done by our respective conceptual categories in relation to our empirical subject matter, but also to attend to how the category is being lived and practiced around us. Engaging these different aspects of a conversation on religion would surely give us the means to rework, in the sense of both rereading and retying, what possible and potential purchase our different disciplinary trainings have, how to bring these together, and when to retain the salience of the distinct legacies these all hold.

Acknowledgments

This Symposium came out of a series of organized events arranged by the Cluster for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion at the University of Copenhagen. This research cluster has been chaired by the authors and by Birgitte Schepelern Johansen and Astrid Krabbe Trolle. We are grateful for the contributors and discussants to the workshops, which included participation by Jakob Egeris Thorsen, Karen Lauterbach, Heiko Henkel, Margit Warburg, Maya Mayblin, Monique Scheer, Peter Westergaard, Titus Hjelm, and David Robertson. A warm thanks to Hillary Kaell who entered the conversation later. We are also grateful that Simon Coleman wanted to serve as a discussant for one of these workshops and also welcomed the conversation into this volume of Religion and Society.

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Contributor Notes

ANDREAS BANDAK is Associate Professor and Head of Center for Comparative Culture Studies in the Department for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Bandak specializes in the themes of temporality and exemplarity and in anthropological studies of Eastern Christians. He is the author of Exemplary Life: Modelling Sainthood in Christian Syria (2022) and has edited numerous volumes, including Ethnographies of Waiting (2018), The Social Life of Prayer (2021), and Porous Becomings (forthcoming). He has conducted research in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, and is currently co-PI on a project entitled “The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Global Modernities,” funded by the Velux Foundation. E-mail: bandak@hum.ku.dk

SIMON STJERNHOLM is Associate Professor of the Study of Religion in the Department for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses mainly on contemporary Sufism, Muslim preaching, mediation, and the senses. Stjernholm has conducted research in England, Northern Cyprus, Sweden, and Denmark. He is co-editor of Muslim Preaching in the Middle East and Beyond (2020, with Elisabeth Özdalga) and has published articles in numerous journals. He is PI of the research project “Rearticulating Islam: A New Generation of Muslim Religious Leaders,” funded by the Velux Foundation, and co-coordinator of a Nordic network for the study of Muslim piety funded by NOS-HS. E-mail: stjernholm@hum.ku.dk

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Advances in Research

  • Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

  • Bal, Mieke. 2009. “Working with Concepts.” European Journal of English Studies 13 (1): 1323.

  • Bandak, Andreas. 2022. Exemplary Life: Modelling Sainthood in Christian Syria. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

  • Bandak, Andreas, and Simon Coleman. 2019. “Different Repetitions: Anthropological engagements with figures of return, recurrence and redundancy.” History and Anthropology 30 (2): 119132.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Bandak, Andreas, and Daniella Kuzmanovic. 2014. “Introduction: Analytical Displacement and the Project of the Humanities.” In Kuzmanovic and Bandak 2014, 124.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Benveniste, Émile. (1969) 2016. Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society. Trans. Elizabeth Palmer. Chicago: HAU Books.

  • Berliner, David, and Ramon Sarró. 2007. Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches. New York: Berghahn Books.

  • Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc J. D. Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  • Bruner, Edward M. 1986. “Ethnography as Narrative.” In The Anthropology of Experience, ed. Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner, 139156. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Candea, Matei. 2007. “Arbitrary Locations: In Defence of the Bounded Field-Site.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (1): 167184.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Candea, Matei. 2018. Comparison in Anthropology: The Impossible Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Cannell, Fenella. 2010. “The Anthropology of Secularism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 85100.

  • Coleman, Simon. 2012. “Anthropology on Shifting Grounds.” Ethnos 77 (4): 556563.

  • Coleman, Simon. 2022. Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Movement. New York: NYU Press.

  • Crone, Patricia, and Michael Cook. 1977. Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  • de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press.

  • Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  • Derrida, Jacques. 1998. “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” In Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, 178. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Derrida, Jacques. 2002. Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge.

  • de Vries, Hent, ed. 2008. Religion: Beyond a Concept. New York: Fordham University Press.

  • Dilley, Roy. 2007. “The Construction of Ethnographic Knowledge in a Colonial Context: The Case of Henri Gaden (1867–1939).” In Ways of Knowing: New Approaches in the Anthropology of Experience and Learning, ed. Mark Harris, 139157. New York: Berghahn Books.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Dilley, Roy. 2010. “Reflections on Knowledge Practices and the Problem of Ignorance.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16 (S1): S176S192.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Dubuisson, Daniel. 2003. The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology. Trans. William Sayers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Dubuisson, Daniel. 2019. The Invention of Religions. Trans. Martha Cunningham. Sheffield: Equinox.

  • Engelke, Matthew. 2007. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  • Engelke, Matthew. 2008. “The Objects of Evidence: Anthropological Approaches to the Production of Knowledge.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (S1): S1S21.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Engelke, Matthew. 2013. God's Agents: Biblical Publicity in Contemporary England. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  • Engelke, Matthew. 2014. “Christianity and the Anthropology of Secular Humanism.” Current Anthropology 55 (S10): S292S301.

  • Engelke, Matthew, and Matt Tomlinson, eds. 2006. The Limits of Meaning: Case Studies in the Anthropology of Christianity. New York: Berghahn Books.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2006. Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence. Oxford: Berg.

  • Fitzgerald, Timothy. 2003. The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality. Vol 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.

  • Foucault, Michel. 2009. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. Trans. Graham Burchell; ed. Michel Senellart, François Ewald, and Alessandro Fontana. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Freiberger, Oliver. 2019. Considering Comparison: A Method for Religious Studies. New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Furani, Khaled. 2012. Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

  • Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.

  • Geertz, Clifford. 2005. “Shifting Aims, Moving Targets: On the Anthropology of Religion.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11 (1): 115.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
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