Transitions in culture and religion II: body, agency and “telling our stories”

In this the second of our Transitions editorials, we explore some thoughts around narrating and (not) disciplining the knowledges that emerges from our stories. Writing is a revolutionary act, for the activity of telling, and retelling a story is a revolutionary and liberatory endeavour (Kandasamy 2014, Wynter 2003). Telling of one’s own lived experience, especially for communities that have been deliberately silenced historically, is a way in which to unsettle and disrupt the fundamental arrangements of knowledge (Foucault 2001). In this issue of Culture and Religion, we centre five pieces of scholarship that methodologically focus on the telling of ‘their’ own stories. In three of these articles, these stories are told through a meditation on the body, in terms of the othering of certain bodies, or particularly in how the body can be materially experienced whilst also being disembodied by external discourses.

Making these articles the focus of our second issue as editors is done in a deliberate fashion as we continue our attempts to dismantle the ways in which stories are told within the academy. We are intent on creating a space in which such stories can be told differently and more organically. Sometimes, these are stories that will not critically conform to ‘Western’ epistemic hegemony. In Babitha Justin and Meenakshi MS’s The Last Woman Oracles, for example, the authors provide ethnographic reflections that almost enter a mystical space as they find themselves in the sanctum sanctorum of the goddess Sri Kurumba Bhaghavathi. ‘At that moment our faith was slippery’ (Justin and Ms 2023:4). In this article, the authors describe the compulsion they feel to write down the unwritten lived experiences, struggles, emotions and ‘unperformed celebrations’ (ibid.) of the women oracles. In Toyin Samuel Ajose’s Me I go no Suffer, we encounter lived experience through music. Such music, we are told, is the worldview of the Yoruba Pentecostals, and all the dimensions of their worship is thereby musically expressed. We are then encouraged to consider the soundspace, or soundspaces as an epistemic site. In this instance, it is impossible to understand the theology of the Yoruba Pentecostals without considering the intrinsic rationality of the music. In both the articles discussed above, we have scholars who invite us to spaces that resist the centring of the western academic rationale. Rather, there is deliberate engagement with the local and the indigenous through ritual, music and embodied performance.

In other articles in this volume, writing allows for a witness of resistance, a challenge to othering, such as Ipsita Chatterjee’s striking piece The Muslim: Islamophobia as disembodiment. Chatterjee notes that ‘disembodiment is annihilation before corporeal death ensues, the Muslim does not get to construct her being, mark her corporeal and intellectual existence’ (Chatterjee 2022: 5). In drawing our attention to the ways in which the Muslim is multiply disembodied, Chatterjee challenges this process, as well as performs a powerful resistance to it. Joanna Krotofil’s Skirting heaven, Skirting hell combines in some sense both of these approaches by centring the knowledge within women’s lived experience, particularly in terms of rejecting and thereby reinterpreting legal categorisations. Krotofil’s discussion of how Catholic women negotiate abortion restrictions in Poland also highlights how these women recognise maternal knowledges as being superior to knowledge that stems from the medical, legal and religious. The knowledge of and within the lived experience of the body supersedes that of officialdom, and arguably, therefore, also the fundamentals of legitimate knowledge. Amilcar Barreto and Omar Sindi’s From Nearly White to Brown also tells us how lived experience and the assertion of identity causes a disruption to elite discourses that attempt to ‘tame’ Muslim Americans into easy categories. Barreto and Sindi discuss, through key case studies, how attempts by political elites to ‘whiten’ Muslim Americans were ‘resoundingly rejected’, because of an a resistance to differentiation. The bodies themselves resist categorisation. The lived experience provides the rationality of the narrative.

The lived experience

For over five decades the famous 1971 conversation between Nicky Giovanni and James Baldwin has captured the imaginations of successive generations of black thinkers, artists, historians, feminists, critical theorists, writers and activists. In the interview, broadcast on the WNET television series Soul, the then-28-year-old poet Nikki Giovanni’s conversation with the famous author James Baldwin, then 47, discussed gender, masculinity, racism and the responsibility to teach, and finally the role of the writer. This conversation culminates in the discussion about the ways that lived experiences connect people, insofar as:

You read something or you hear something, and you realise that your suffering does not isolate you; your suffering is your bridge. Many people have suffered before you, many people are suffering around you and always will, and all you can do is bring, hopefully, a little light into that suffering. Enough light so that the person who is suffering can begin to comprehend his and begin to live with it and begin to change it, change the situation.

And in the closing part of this now-famous conversation Giovanni and Baldwin highlight the ways that writing and teaching emerges as revolutionary acts, and it is here that their conversation connects with a longer tradition about the importance of making space for ‘telling our stories’.

Telling these stories is a way in which to continue the work towards epistemic justice. This is because the centring of the lived experience affirms the living knowledge traditions of the deliberately silenced as having an authoritative voice when it comes to identifying ‘what counts as a problem, what constitutes the problem and what are the means of redress’ (Shilliam 2013).

Sylvia Wynter often argued that we must remember that the method and methodology of creating categories of knowledge is a form of discipline, and that the exercise of discipline was what Empire was all about (Wynter 2003). Due to this, many scholars argue that we need to be mindful of the fact that knowledge production itself is a kind of accumulation and space of exclusivity. Knowledge production is less a creative endeavour and more a process of accumulation and imperial extension disguised as ‘knowledge for knowledge’s sake’ (Bhambra, Shilliam, and Orrells 2014). So, scholars like Robbie Shilliam argue for knowledge cultivation so that we ‘till, to turn matter around and fold back on itself so as to encourage growth’ (Shilliam 2013). Therefore, the telling of stories, we argue, is part of this tilling of matter.

Telling our own stories can be seen as a religious practice, as a feminist and decolonial move such as was evident in the work of Ivonne Gebara, Katie Cannon, Delores Williams, as well as Rigoberta Menchu. For example, Gebara, in her Longing for Running Water, demonstrates how incorporating women’s experiences into the disciplining regimes of liberation theology deepened our understanding of the relationship between poverty, land and religion. Gebara even details the fact that her own dislocation from lived experiences, from the pain, anguish and triumphs of life, made her a poor theologian. Mario Aguilar, reflecting on how to build a shared praxis of humanity, agrees, noting that experience is also encounter and therefore it is knowledge (Aguilar 2021). It is out of this transnational effort to cultivate knowledge through tiling a matter that we as editors of Culture and Religion wish to provide a space for scholars to tell their own stories. We hope to make this possible through assuming a posture against extractive scholarship, and by privileging of decolonial ways of narrating stories of self and of one’s community, while resisting the inherent impulse to too easily categorise, classify and ultimately discipline such knowledges, or lived and embodied experiences.

Contra categorisation

A certain kind of power has long structured how we ‘know’ the world. In the history of culture and religion, ethnology and anthropology has had a long and contested history of curating and narrating the culture and lived experiences of indigenous peoples. The critique of anthropology and its complicity with curating non-western, minority and indigenous cultures, or religious experiences is no longer new, and the field has enjoyed a sustained and wide-ranging set of critiques from authors working across various disciplinary approaches such as Talal Asad, Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Keri Day, Kerry Brown Douglas, Mario Aguilar, Srila Roy, Rosalba Icaza Garza and Naeem Inayatullah.

We see this most rigorously challenged in the work of scholars like Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012), Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2014), and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017), and countless others who point out the coloniality of knowledge production and categorisation, and the unbroken, though underacknowledged, resistance of indigenous communities to such epistemic violence. Ethnology and anthropology also play significant parts in the problematic relationship between religion and culture, particularly in how the former is often subsumed to the latter. Such categorisation has often limited our political imaginations (Kamal Pasha 2017), and refused the ability of religious thought, for example, as an epistemic site for the critique of modernity (Kamal Pasha 2017; Gani and Marshall 2022). The previous editor of this journal, Malory Nye, often thought about this relationship and noted that religion and culture are not easily distinguished, but we must find them in each other (Nye 2019). Therefore, one cannot dismiss religion to being subsumed by culture, but attempt to find both within each other. We see these discussions elaborated in different ways in the work of those like Trin Min-Ha (Women, Native, Other, 2009) or Chandra Mohanty (Under Western Eyes, 1984), and Dheepa Sundaram’s recent work on digital Hinduism. Each of these offers insights in the new ways that the intersections between race, body and culture are being imagined and critiqued, and the implications of the religious (variously defined) in these critiques. These are the conversations and the stories that we hope to host in Culture and Religion.

Since its inception Culture and Religion has sought to address some of these concerns, and as such its Aims and Scope has stated that:

Culture and Religion is an interdisciplinary journal seeking an engagement between scholars working across a range of disciplinary fields, including anthropology, cultural studies, critical theory and gender studies, and postcolonial studies. Lying at the interface between the study of religion and other academic studies of culture, Culture and Religion is a forum for exploring the perspectives of both anthropology and cultural studies. In particular, the journal will consider why cultural studies have hitherto neglected the significance of religious manifestations in cross-cultural perspectives, and define ways in which the discipline of religious studies needs to engage with other areas of contemporary critical, cultural, and anthropological theory.

The principal aim of Culture and Religion is to promote critical investigation into all aspects of the study of religion and culture, particularly from scholars with an innovative and multidisciplinary focus.

While we wish to honour this legacy of critical scholarship in the field of culture and religion, we are aware of the seeming neutrality and situatedness of the journal historically. While it has consistently and consciously made space for critique against normative approaches to cultural studies and particularly at ‘interface between the study of religion and other academic studies of culture’, it often did little to disrupt its position and modality of knowledge production within the academy. As we prepare to revise the Aims and Scope, we wish to retain the rigorous academic engagement related to scholarship in Culture and Religion. However, we wish to also make space for a wider range of knowledges, and modalities of knowledge cultivation to increase the visibility and contributions of scholars, and religious and cultural communities to tell their own stories and embodied experiences.

This effort is not new, and as such we simply need to situate the journal firmly within broader postcolonial and decolonial debates about culture and religion. For some time already postcolonial scholars have sought to recover the narrative authority through telling the stories of everyday life, through theorising stories of everyday suffering and struggle as well as stories of flourishing, of love and imaginative fantasy and futures. Abu-Lughod, in her introduction to Remaking Women, calls us to always honour the historical context within which we theorise and think through everyday lived experiences, and she reminds us that ‘those thinking seriously about race and modernity have argued for a genealogy of modernity that takes slavery of colonialism as foundation’ (Abu-Lughod 1998, 7). She then goes on to demonstrate how different postcolonial scholars have sought to at once expose the persistence of a modernity that sets West against its imagined others, while also demonstrating how local stories and local needs can be told through a series of sites and resources such as speeches, sermons and television soap operas. For example, M Shawn Copeland, in ‘Body, representation and black religious discourse’, notes that ‘sermon can serve as one mediation … in its retrieval of a human person as a dynamic moral agent, rather than a passive consuming being’ before going on to conclude that ‘the black sermon can serve as an instrument of recovery and healing of distorted and wounded imagination’ (Copeland 2002, 198) and that the ‘the sermon achieves an aesthetic function only insofar as the preacher and the congregation participate in the retrieval of those meaning and values that affirms the body, sex, and sexuality as good and beautiful’ (Copeland 2002, 194).

In a different register, religion scholars have for a long time critiqued memoir as a genre that has historically been associated with colonialism and cultural modernity – because in its telling stories of encountering the other, it is a genre that often engaged in widespread erasure of indigenous people. Defined by Laura Marcus’ as ‘an anecdotal depiction of people and events’ in an effort to document a life in its totality, memoir has increasingly emerged as a anticolonial, and norm-critical writing (Englund 2022). One of the many dynamic contemporary examples is the work of Su‘ad Abdul Khabeer. In a six-part multimedia digital exhibition, titled Umi’s Archive https://umisarchive.com/ she explores the intersections of race, religion and gender as ‘an invitation to think about power’. In this exhibition/memoir she tells the story of her Umi (mother), a black Muslim women living in America between 1950 and 2017. The key questions explored by Abdul Khabeer is ‘Whose account of the past counts? Whose lives should be remembered’.

Similarly, in taking the journal forward we wish to raise similar questions about whose stories, lived and embodies experience count ask knowledge and legitimate archive, but we also wish to raise critical questions about modalities of narration. What counts as an archive? And how are these lived experiences and religious experiences narrated and by whom? What the contestations in the field of culture and religion have made clear is that there has been a growing urgency to make space for a broader set of lived religious and cultural experiences that emphasise a plurality of archives, of knowledge and, importantly, of encounter.

In Culture and Religion we hope to facilitate the making of space for a wider range of scholars to tell their own story by inviting global south scholars to tell their stories, sometimes in vernacular that does not uncritically conform to epistemic hegemony. We intend to facilitate space for narratives that oppose othering, and disrupt regimes of coloniality.

We are very pleased that the five articles in this issue address some of this ambition to explore critical debates about culture and religion from a wide range of lived experiences, and we invite you to engage with us through your submissions as we deepen our reflections and editorial practices related to narrating and (not) disciplining the knowledges that emerge from our/your stories.