Methodology In the Study of Religion

The Debate between Wilhelm Schmidt and Raffaele Pettazzoni about Monotheism and the Supreme Being

In the West throughout centuries the discourse about religion was under the monopoly of the Church. According to the Bible, God sent direct testimony to the first man and, therefore belief in a single God, namely monotheism constituted the religion of the primordial men.  In the 18th century the Enlightenment philosophers who aimed to re-evaluate the validity of the traditional assumptions considered as invariable, submitted them to the rational criteria. They formulated religious questions and in this context the problem of monotheism in terms of philosophical speculation. Contrary to Hume and Rousseau who assumed that because of their low level of intellectual development first men could not be monotheist, Voltaire argued that at the beginning men believed in a single God. Basing their arguments on the principle that such as the natural process, the process of mental evolution also develops from simple to complex or to “perfect situation”, these philosophers pronounced a philosophical judgment. But as there was no agreement regarded the simple or perfect situation, controversies concerning the primordial religion persisted. In the second half of the 19th century, The Science of Religions gaining its autonomy from Philosophy and Theology emerged as an independent discipline. It is hard to say that The Science of Religions which, like other scientific disciplines tried to elaborate a specific methodology has even today managed to find its own definitive method. After being evaluated from theological and philosophical perspectives the question of monotheism was reconsidered in the context of religious studies and because of the lack of a common methodology led to different results. Wilhelm Schmidt, an ethnologist and at the same time a Catholic clergy and, the Italian historian of religions Raffaele Pettazzoni who complained the pressure of the Vatican assumed to deal with the issue of monotheism and High God scientifically. But even though both emphasized the historical approach, the fact that they get very different results raises some questions.  For the basic nature of the scientific approach is that everyone processing the same data with the same method will obtain the same results. Therefore, if there is a conflicting situation, it is originated from either the nature of the issue, or from the researcher himself, or from the method employed.
The purpose of this study is to shed a light on just the methodological problem in The Study of Religions in the context of Schmidt’s and Pettazzoni’s views concerning monotheism and the Supreme Being and the criticism they addressed to each other.  On the other hand, this essay will provide some important clues about the ideological struggle conducted in the West under the name of science and which has scarcely been voiced.

This book is published in the Palgrave Macmillan Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism series. June McDaniel argues in “Introduction: What Happened to Ecstasy? Mysticism, Ecstasy, and the Constructivist Loop” that the study of mysticism is unfashionable, and that she wishes “to bring [mysticism and ecstatic experiences] back into the study of religious consciousness, at least partly by documenting how much of the field opposes it” (p. 2). The denial and delegitimation of religious experience is core to the reformulation of religious studies as an explicitly secular, anti-religionist, academic discipline. This reader is aligned with this approach and firmly in the camp that opposes the inclusion of theology in the remit of religious studies, yet believes that the study of religious and spiritual experiences (whether termed mysticism, ecstasy, or “non-ordinary reality”) is both valuable and possible in a scientific, non-confessional way. The author’s examination of the subject begins by chronicling examples of religious experience in the World Religions (another unfashionable category), and then analysing the “pathologisation” of such experiences within academic discourse. There are scholars who champion such anomalous states; McDaniel draws on the work of Grace Jantzen, Amy Hollywood, and Jeffrey Kripal to uncover an ecstasy that is erotic, powerful, and ignored at peril.

Pilgrimage is a phenomenon found within a myriad religions and spiritual traditions that are otherwise entirely distinct, being separated by history, geography, theology, and praxis. Yet an unproblematic definition of pilgrimage is difficult to agree on, and the related phenomena of religious pilgrimage, sacred journeys, secular pilgrimage, spiritual tourism, and tourism all have important common elements (Olsen and Timothy 2006: 3).

Evaluation of Raffaele Pettazzoni, Angelo Brelich and Ugo Bianchi’s Views on Methodology in the Context of the Italian School of History of Religions

History of Religions which was elaborated at the end of the 19th century as a scientific discipline despite a long time has passed has not gained a methodology agreed on by every student. Therefore methodological discussions concerning this discipline go on. One must question the source of these methodological problems, why it wasn’t possible to find a common method and why there are differences as important as being opposite between various methodological approaches. The aim of this essay is to consider from a concrete example the methodological debate in the frame of the Italian School of History of Religions which succeeded in forming a tradition. The idea of this essay is that the main cause of the difference between various methodological orien-tations is due to the difference in paradigm between the students who elaborates and uses them.  One sees that this difference arises in great measure from the real/unreal criterion attributed by the researcher to the metaphysical dimension which forms the basic quality of religious phenom-ena. In other words the main source of the methodological discussions in the History of Reli-gions arises from the difference of the answers given to “what is the ontological value of reli-gion?” question. And these answers are related to whether the researcher belongs to the category of homo religious or to that of profane man.

The business of scholarly research in the Humanities (and arguably in all disciplines) is the creation of new information or the revelation of existing knowledge that has been neglected or obscured for whatever reason (Gulbrandsen and Aanstad 2015). This is an easy statement to make, but in practice is a difficult and protracted task that in the twenty-first century often involves painstaking sifting of primary evidence, textual and material, and the interrogation of existing research, so as to shift perspectives or find unexpected and unexamined areas for development, whilst seeking competitive funding and a place in the “knowledge economy” (Hazelkorn 2015). The academic study of religion, and particularly of topics like mysticism and religious experience, esoteric fraternities and contested scriptures, is often underrated in the assessment of impactful or significant Humanities research. Since 2001, Islamic Studies has been subjected to “securitization,” which has directed a majority of funding to projects focused on anti-Western millenarian thought, radicalization, and terrorism (Kurzman and Ernst 2012). A research climate focused on such issues is hardly one in which the study of Sufism, or Islam’s contribution to mystical religion, or Islamic esotericism is likely to flourish.

ISBN 0205797113. Students must possess the correct (tenth) edition of the textbook and are required to bring the book to class meetings. Acceptable formats: paperback; hardback; e-book using laptop/tablet only. (Students are not permitted to use a cell phone for the e-book.)

Em resposta a uma recensão por mim escrita acerca do texto “Obras Pioneiras da Cultura Portuguesa: Primeiro Tratado de Cabala – Tratado da Ciência Cabala ou Notícia da Arte Cabalística”, publicada no Vol. XXXI, n.º2 (2018) do Boletim do AUC, e exercendo o seu irredutível direito de resposta, Manuel Curado escreveu e publicou uma detalhada defesa e contra-argumentação a esta recensão no passado número desta mesma publicação. Como creio ser também o meu direito, em baixo abordarei os pontos de contestação que Curado apresenta na sua resposta, aos quais responderei de volta na medida em que creio ser justo. Nesta contrarresposta não irei abordar as várias avaliações de caráter que Curado tece a meu respeito, nem aquelas declarações que poderão ser interpretadas como condescendência, menosprezo, sarcasmo, apelo ao ridículo ou mera troça. Focarei exclusivamente os seus argumentos pela mesma ordem em que este os apresenta.

D. Francisco Manuel de Melo (aut.), Manuel Curado (coord.), José Eduardo Franco (dir.) & Carlos Fiolhais (dir.), Obras Pioneiras da Cultura Portuguesa: Primeiro Tratado de Cabala –Tratado da Ciência Cabala ou Notícia da Arte Cabalística, Lisboa: Círculo de Leitores 2018, 189p. ISBN: 978-972-42-5148-6.

Carole Cusack est professeure de sciences des religions à l’Université de Sydney, Australie. Elle est spécialiste des religions de l’Europe du Nord médiévale ainsi que du paganisme médiéval aussi bien que moderne. Elle s’intéresse en outre aux religions inventées, notamment le jediisme, religion construite à partir des films de science-fiction de George Lucas Star Wars. Elle est l’auteure notamment de Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction, and Faith, Farnham and Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2010 et l’éditrice de The Sacred in Fantastic Fandom : Essays on the Intersection of Religion and Pop Culture, Jefferson, NC, McFarland, 2019.

Indrek Peedu’s excellent edited volume was given to delegates at the European Association for the Study of Religion conference in Tartu in June 2019. The book is introduced by Peedu and has an afterword by the American scholar Gregory D. Alles.

As both disciplines focus on an (often difficult to define) topic (“religion/s”, “motherhood”) rather than a geographical area, a historical period, or the use of specific research designs and methods, the study of religion/s and motherhood studies share some epistemological and methodological issues. This presentation will underline the most important ones and see which new paths of research could emerge from the intersection of the study of religion/s with contemporary motherhood studies, a burgeoning field. This introduction first consists in an overview of the state of scholarship in both disciplines. As this review of literature will show, even if it has successfully integrated theoretical inputs of gender studies, our discipline has not yet taken the “mother turn”. Motherhood, as a normative institution, and patriarchal representations of mothers are classical topics of research, but mothering, as women’s experience, remains an understudied issue (often because of a lack of access to sources).

This is the first extensive scholarly study of drone metal music and its religious associations, drawing on five years of ethnographic participant observation from more than 300 performances and 74 interviews, plus surveys, analyses of sound recordings, artwork, and extensive online discourse about music.

Owen Coggins shows that while many drone metal listeners identify as non-religious, their ways of engaging with and talking about drone metal are richly informed by mysticism, ritual and religion. He explores why language relating to mysticism and spiritual experience is so prevalent in drone metal culture and in discussion of musical experiences and practices of the genre.

The author develops the work of Michel de Certeau to provide an empirically grounded theory of mysticism in popular culture. He argues that the marginality of the genre culture, together with the extremely abstract sound produces a focus on the listeners' engagement with sound, and that this in turn creates a space for the open-ended exploration of religiosity in extreme states of bodily consciousness.

Table of contents

List of figures
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Mysticism and metal music
2. To be experienced not understood: Empirical mysticisms in dub, trance and drone
3. Beyond heaviness: Listener experience in a translocal and marginal genre
4. Pilgrimages to elsewhere: Languages of ineffability, otherness, and ambiguity
5. Amplifier worship: Materiality and mysticism in heavy sound
6. Methods to cross the abyss: Ritual, violence and noise
7. Conclusion: Drone metal mysticism
References
Index