TY - CHAP
T1 - Gaining access to the radically unfamiliar
T2 - World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (21st : 2015)
AU - Ram, Kalpana
N1 - Copyright the Author(s) 2017. Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - Postcolonial critique instructed anthropologists to turn to history in order to integrate time into their discourse. Yet historiography, even when undertaken from a postcolonial, subaltern standpoint, has foundered precisely on the challenge of doing justice to religious subjectivity. How then is the non-religious scholar to gain access to religious phenomena? Phenomenological understandings of body, temporality and place provide an alternative account of what it means to come to understand something. Seen from this perspective, disciplines such as anthropology in fact rely radically on time, on the capacity of the scholar's body to slowly effect a new synthesis of body, place and people. In the expansion that takes place lies the potential to come to understand, without any necessary involvement of consent or belief, the continuum between religious and non-religious experience.
AB - Postcolonial critique instructed anthropologists to turn to history in order to integrate time into their discourse. Yet historiography, even when undertaken from a postcolonial, subaltern standpoint, has foundered precisely on the challenge of doing justice to religious subjectivity. How then is the non-religious scholar to gain access to religious phenomena? Phenomenological understandings of body, temporality and place provide an alternative account of what it means to come to understand something. Seen from this perspective, disciplines such as anthropology in fact rely radically on time, on the capacity of the scholar's body to slowly effect a new synthesis of body, place and people. In the expansion that takes place lies the potential to come to understand, without any necessary involvement of consent or belief, the continuum between religious and non-religious experience.
KW - modernity
KW - historical time
KW - postcolonial and feminist critiques of modernity
KW - temporality of anthropological practice
KW - phenomenology
KW - bodily access to the unfamiliar
KW - spirit possession
KW - continuities of experience
KW - religious agency
U2 - 10.1515/9783110450934-011
DO - 10.1515/9783110450934-011
M3 - Chapter
SN - 9783110450927
T3 - Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten
SP - 191
EP - 210
BT - Dynamics of religion
A2 - Bochinger, Christoph
A2 - Rüpke, Jörg
PB - De Gruyter
CY - Berlin ; Boston
Y2 - 23 August 2015 through 29 August 2015
ER -