Messing Around with Introductory Religion Courses in Canada (original) (raw)
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ABSTRACT Defining religion as a negotiation about “what it means to be a human in a human place,” David Chidester invites scholars of religious studies to critically examine and name what it is that we are actually teaching, writing about, and researching. Certainly, many in our field have called for the elimination of “religion” as an academic term for a number of legitimate reasons. Yet our field continues to grow and thrive as an intriguing, if befuddling, discipline. Comparative studies of religion have an abhorrent legacy – a field mobilized systemically as an efficient agent of empire. Also because even the most well-meaning among us too often mangle, distort, and misapprehend much of what we encounter, and attempt to interpret, explain, or worse, analogize. Nevertheless, I follow Chidester’s lead and argue for strategic retention of the term so as to reverse the flow of production, authentication, and circulation of what counts as knowledge about religion. Chidester identifies a historical phenomenon – what he calls a triple mediation, whereby colonial agents absorbed, extracted and documented their perceptions of Indigenous cultural practices and then transferred that knowledge to the centers of empire, thus enabling our intellectual predecessors - “experts” of language, myth, and religion, to extrapolate cultural particularities for consumption and bureaucratic control of colonized peoples. This extraction has continued uninterrupted. Today, the pipeline flowing directly to imperial spaces (like universities), mainly requires quotation in order to function, albeit in circular fashion that feeds back on itself. The spaces embody the stains of the imperial agenda, as is the case in nation-state sponsored public institutions and private-endowment funded private universities. Indeed, this circularity has had a dominating effect. Indigenous theorists quoting imperial theorists, however, is the opening for an important strategic move: it is destabilizing and suggests alternative ways of both generating knowledge and establishing what is to be considered knowledge. Paying attention to the triple mediation, we may not only recover but also reclaim what has been erased by the flow from periphery to center. Doing so allows us to “combine critical reflection on our past…with creative possibilities for working through enduring categories in the study of religion to produce new knowledge.” This paper offers analysis of the film Qallunaat! Why White People Are Funny, to demonstrate the effectiveness of this subversive and invariably intriguing counter-production of knowledge. Key Words: Indigenous, Mediation, Religion, Difference