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Bush Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 92, No. 2 (April 2012), pp. 199-223 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/663718 . Accessed: 24/10/2012 02:31
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i. new materialism and the rhetoric of experience When a charismatic Christian has a religious experience in which she encounters Jesus as her husband-lover, much about this experience is public in nature.1 For example, her body is in a particular posture during the experience, and this posture is observable. Furthermore, if she should report the experience to anyone, her testimony, whether verbal or written, is a public matter. And even the concepts she brings with her into the experience, concepts like Jesus, God, love, and so on, are public in that they are shared and were acquired through social processes of language learning. But beyond all this, it seems that something about the experience is private in nature, undergone by her alone, removed from the public realm. Only she really knows what the event felt like. Only she knows whether she really had an experience or whether she is lying about what occurred. Some aspect of the experience transpires in the privacy of subjective consciousness, a seemingly invisible, inaccessible realm. This private dimension of religious and mystical experiences has long posed vexing methodological issues for scholars of religion. Nevertheless, until recently, most have taken it for granted that experiences are something that we can talk about and theorize. That assumption, however, is increasingly facing a challenge from a new and important approach to religious studies in which attention to discourse, social prac* I delivered an early version of this article at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, and Im grateful for the remarks of Robert Sharf and the respondent, Wayne Proudfoot, on that occasion. I also received helpful suggestions from Charles Matthewes, Josanda Jinnette, Michaelle Jinnette, Nancy Jinnette, two anonymous referees, and especially Jeffrey Stout. 1 Such experiences are recounted in R. Marie Grifth, Gods Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-4189/2012/9202-0002$10.00
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Ibid., 104.
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So in Buddhist Modernism, Sharf maintains a view much like my own, which strives to acknowledge both that experiences of some sort do occur and that they and their reports can have political implications, whereas in Experience, he makes suggestions that indicate that we must forego discussion of the experiences themselves and focus instead on discourse about experience. So I cannot condently assign to Sharf either the modest or ambitious interpretation. This is not cause for concern, however, because for my purposes, it is not important what Sharfs settled conviction is. Whatever Sharf thinks, his essay is an occasion to reect on the past and future of the study of experience and examine what possibilities exist and what pitfalls we should avoid. Sharf raises powerful concerns about whether and how language can refer to religious experiences, and we need to think through how best to respond to the issues he raises. The constructivist approach to religious experience has had much to say against the rhetoric of experience, but the constructivists have not themselves taken on the topic that Sharf brings to the forefront: how can language, which is essentially public, meaningfully refer to private psychological episodes. Whether or not Sharf endorses the ambitious thesis, there are at least moments in his text that exhibit strong tendencies toward it, and these tendencies are present among others who gravitate toward the new materialist perspective as well.26 My concern is to track carefully where these tendencies lead and, regardless of what Sharfs settled opinion is, to pose the question of whether the rest of us should adopt the modest interpretation or the ambitious one. This decision matters a great deal, especially since the ambitious interpretation is, if not enSharf, Experience, 107, 113. Sharf, Buddhist Modernism, 25960. 26 See, e.g., Russell T. McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 910; and Donald S. Lopez Jr., Belief, in Critical Terms for Religious Studies.
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R. Andrew Chesnut, too, places religious experience squarely at the center of his explanation of Pentecostal growth, this time in Brazil. Specically Chesnut sees experiences of faith healing as the principal explanatory factor, and he posits that the dialectic between povertyrelated illness and faith healing provides the key to understanding the appeal of Pentecostalism and much of Latin America.42 Were experience to drop out of the scholarly lexicon, the sorts of studies and explanations that Grifth, M guez, and Chesnut conduct would be impossible. To understand experientially rich religious communities like charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity, and indeed, any religious community in which people report occasional or ongoing awareness of some transcendent reality, requires a robust category of experience and a conceptual distinction between experiences and discourse about experiences. What needs to occur is a refashioning of the concept of
40 For a gender-based explanation of conversion to Pentecostalism, see Elizabeth E. Brusco, The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia, 1st ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). For the other types of explanation, see Andre Droogers, Paradoxical Views on a Paradoxical Religion: Models for the Explanation of Pentecostal Expansion in Brazil and Chile, in More than Opium: An Anthropological Approach to Latin American and Caribbean Pentecostal Praxis, ed. Barbara Boudewijnse, A. F. Droogers, and Frans Kamsteeg (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998), 134. 41 Daniel M guez, Spiritual Bonre in Argentina: Confronting Current Theories with an Ethnographic Account of Pentecostal Growth in a Buenos Aires Suburb (Amsterdam: CEDLA, 1998), 168. 42 R. Andrew Chesnut, Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 6.
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