Insider/Outsider Issues in the Study of Religions

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Insider/Outsider Issues in the Study of Religions

• Kim Knott
• University of Leeds
• March 2007

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Structure of lecture

• Socio-spatial issues, including inside/outside,
  container metaphor, location, standpoint
• Faith, theology and the emergence of religious
  studies as a scientific discipline
• Participant observation and the empirical study
  of religion a spectrum of standpoints
• Critical issues on insider/outsider dichotomy.

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Socio-spatial issues
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Spatial issues and embodiment

• The use of insider/outsider terminology in the
  study of religions implies a container concept
  for religion.
• Embodied philosophy of Lakoff and Johnson (1999)
  conceptions of containment and inside/outside,
  like other spatial concepts, are related to our
  embodiment (inside the mother inside (and
  outside) body, self, family, home, community).

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Spatial issues and religion

• What is the relationship between the language we
  use, how we conceptualise ourselves, our
  experience and the wider world, and our human
  embodiment, evolution and spatial location and
  relations?
• And how does this question and the issues it
  raises relate to the study of religion?
• How we conceptualise religion/s?
• Who studies them and how?

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Location and the study of religion

• These questions are all matters of location.
• Location involves the position of things, people,
  groups in relation to others.
• How do we position ourselves as scholars and
  students of religion in relation to the groups we
  study?
• We often use the word standpoint to refer to our
  scholarly position (which may also be informed by
  our political, religious, ethnic, gender, and
  personal views).

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Religions as containers

• Insider/outsider language implies that religions
  or religious groups as objects of study are
  containers.
• What sort of containers are they?
• What sort of boundaries do they have?
• Who is inside who outside and on what grounds?
• (Even if we theorise religions as flows, networks
  or commodities, we must remember that others may
  continue to refer to them as containers.)

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Faith, theology and the emergence of religious
studies as a scientific discipline
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Example Martin Stringer on religions as
containers (2002)

• In the introduction to Arweck and Stringer (eds),
  Theorizing Faith The Insider/Outsider Problem in
  the Study of Ritual, Stringer considers faith
  as a construct, a means of excluding those who
  are not deemed to be insiders, most
  specifically researchers whom the religious
  communities wish to keep out. (4)
• He compares the construction of faith to the
  construction of culture (with reference to
  Wagner, The Invention of Culture, 1981).

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Stringer continued

• Faith is that which those who are religious
  have, and which those who are not religious do
  not have and, what is more, the non-religious
  cannot understand what it is. Faith is that
  which we (the insiders) have and which you
  (the outsiders) do not have. (12)
• Creating culture is part of a discourse that is
  undertaken by dominant groups as part of their
  domination of the other. Faith, I would
  suggest, is almost the opposite. It is part of a
  discourse undertaken by the dominated, the
  threatened, in order to retain their distance,
  their identity and their distinctiveness. (14)

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Faith and theology, an emic perspective

• Since the time of Anselm, many theologians have
  seen the task of theology as faith seeking
  understanding, an emic, insider form of
  scholarly activity.
• Emic studying behaviour as from inside the
  system (Pike 1967 37) etic the
  observersattempt to take the descriptive
  information they have already gathered and to
  organize, systematize, compare in a word
  redescribe that information in terms of a
  system of their own making. (McCutcheon 1999 17)

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Impartiality and RS an etic perspective

• The post-European Enlightenment non-theological
  study of religions stressed impartiality,
  objectivity, neutrality.
• From that stance we saw the development of two
  broad approaches the science of religion, a
  reductionist, etic approach the phenomenology of
  religion, which some critics have seen as
  quasi-theological and emic.

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The scientific approach in RS

• The idea of a secularist scientific study of
  religions is predicated on the idea of science as
  an empirical approach which involves observation,
  description and analysis as if from outside the
  system, from a critically distant standpoint by a
  professional class of researchers/observers
  external to what they are researching/observing.

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The Insider/Outside Problem McCutcheons four
stances

• The autonomy of religious experience (notably
  phenomenology)
• Reductionism
• Neutrality and methodological agnosticism
• Reflexivity.
• R. T. McCutcheon (ed), The Insider/Outsider
  Problem in the Study of Religion A Reader, 1999,
  Cassell.

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Participant observation and the empirical study
of religion
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Participant observation and the empirical study
of religion a spectrum of standpoints

• In my article Insider/outsider perspectives in
  J. Hinnells (ed), The Routledge Companion to the
  Study of Religion (2005), I presented a spectrum
  of participant/observer standpoints adopting a
  model derived from the work of Junker and Gold
  (Gold 1958). I illustrated four points on the
  spectrum complete participant, complete
  observer, observer-as-participant and
  participant-as-observer.

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Insider/outsider perspectives and participant
observation in the study of religion (Knott 2005)

• OUTSIDER INSIDER
• Complete Observer-as- Participant- Complete
• observer participant as-observer participant
• llll

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Fatima Mernissi A complete but contentious
participant?

• OUTSIDER INSIDER
• Complete
• participant
• llll

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Festinger et alThe struggle to be the complete
observer

• OUTSIDER INSIDER
• Complete
• observer
• llll

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Eileen BarkerIn neutral The observer as
participant

• OUTSIDER INSIDER
• Observer-as-
• participant
• llll

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The participant as observer comes of age
Heilman, Pearson, Collins

• OUTSIDER INSIDER
• Participant-
• as-observer
• llll

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What does the spectrum show?

• The spectrum is useful for showing the
  differences between different participant/observer
  standpoints and for reflecting on
  insider/outsider issues
• But the examples used all show how fuzzy the
  boundaries are between the different positions.
• The separation between insider/outsider is
  constantly compromised and the boundary breached,
  particularly with the rise of critical challenges
  from academic feminism and postmodernism.

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Critical perspectives on the insider/outsider
dichotomy
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Critical issues on insider/outsider dichotomy 1

• Who decides on who and what is inside/outside a
  religion or religious group, and on the nature
  and porousness of the boundary?
• Who and what is inside/outside is a matter of
  perspective. Different people will have
  differing views. This gives us a sense of
  overlapping containers.
• Everyones standpoint is complex we are all
  simultaneously insiders and outsiders in
  different systems (on the basis of gender, race,
  ethnicity, religion, status, family etc).

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Critical issues on insider/outsider dichotomy 2

• All standpoints have their own associated
  interests, commitments, beliefs, values. There
  are no value free positions, no view from
  nowhere (see Hufford in McCutcheon).
• Both insiders and outsiders, believers and
  scholars are co-creators in narratives about
  religion they jointly manufacture religion
  (see Collins in Knott).
• Reflexivity (Hufford, Davies etc).

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Hufford on reflexivity

• Because the personal religious beliefs of
  scholars are diverse, scholars of religion must
  recognise that they have at least two sets of
  rules for discourse and problem solving rules
  manifested in their personal voices and their
  scholarly voices. (200)
• Skepticism as a secularist value in belief
  studies from suspended judgement to a
  commitment to the belief that certain kinds of
  traditional religious ideas are false. (303)
• A reflexive analysis enables us to distinguish
  among the beliefs of our informants, our
  scholarly knowledge, our personal beliefs and our
  occupational ideology. (306)
• From Hufford in McCutcheon, 1999.

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Concluding comment

• The insider/outsider dichotomy in the study of
  religions remains a good tool to think with. It
  helps us to understand more about the differing
  interests of those researching and those
  researched. However, it tends to produce
  religions as containers, something that believers
  and religious adherents also do as a result of
  the way they refer to themselves and those
  outside the group.