Study Group "Emic and etic Perspektives on Religion and Politics" (until 2012)
We plan to read and discuss:
Clifford Geertz’s “Religion as a Cultural System” and Talal Asad’s “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz”. Please contact Michael Höckelmann about the texts and questions relating to the study group.
The disciplines that form part of the cluster of excellence ‘Religion and Politics in Modern and Pre-Modern Cultures’ take to some extent very different methodical paths in dealing with the tensions between the emic and etic perspectives. While some strive to reconstruct the meaning of texts and rituals in respect of their specific cultural environment, that is, by taking the emic perspectives of authors/performers and recipients/audience into account, others aim to explain these primarily within the bounds of external discourse. Both approaches have their raison d’être and have to be understood simply as ideal types, which are weighted differently, depending on the type and scope of source material, in practical research work.
By becoming aware of the two perspectives, one’s own historical, social, cultural and scientific preconditions and ‘the uniqueness’ of the object of research come into awareness and become transparent in a dialectic process. Therefore, the study group will expound the problems of the conflicting demands of hermeneutical and analytical approaches and, with regard to the study of pre-modern and non-European cultures, the applicability of etic categories such as normativity, staging, integrative procedures, violence and religion and politics. For dealing academically with modern, European cultures, too, it can be fruitful to take up questions as to the limits and overlappings of these terms.
The study group ‘Emic and Etic Perspectives on Religion and Politics’ aims to advance the exchange of those disciplines and sciences that promote the more emic perspective (e.g. the philologies, ethnology) with those that emphasise the etic perspective (e.g. the social sciences), and, in doing so, to fulfil the cluster’s cultural comparative claim. Universal terms and their applicability to ancient and non-European cultures (and, thus, also to modern, European cultures) will be questioned. Together, we intend to test and to apply the analytical tools that are adapted to specific cultural and linguistic conditions. The study group was not formed anew but emerged out of the study group “The Mixing of Religions – Religiously Multiple Identities”, from the activities of which it was able to gain important knowledge.
In summary, the study group aims to,
- methodically accentuate the discrimination of the emic and the etic perspective in the project work and to transfer this discrimination to other disciplines (e.g. pre-modern philologies) in order to reveal possible syntheses of the two perspectives.
- historically-comparatively clarify the linguistic-cultural contexts within which concepts such as religion, politics, culture, science etc. develop in the first place, and to clarify which strategies are chosen to deal with the religious and the political.
- practically organise a workshop with external researchers in which the diversity of the emic understanding of religion of different cultures and epochs is presented and systematically compared.