Cross of a Different Kind Religious Studies Review

April 15, 2021

By Robert A. Segal

Suppose one wants to report the French Revolution. One way is to study the event ever more intensely, learning more and more than virtually this case itself. The other way is to report the revolution comparatively, by matching it up with other revolutions. The aim is to come across how the French Revolution is both like and unlike, say, the American or Russian Revolution. Comparativists tin can seek either the similarities or the differences. Those who seek the similarities do not deny the differences just oftentimes demote them to mere details. The claim is not that any two or iii revolutions—or religions—are the same simply that they are alike.  Likewise, those comparativists who seek the differences do not deny the similarities but but deem them secondary, usually on the grounds that they are vague and abstract.

The comparative method is an attempt not merely to identify similarities or differences but to account for them. Whether a comparativist emphasizes similarities or differences is frequently determined by the dwelling discipline of the scholar. Disciplines that fall within the humanities—literature and history above all—tend to seek the distinctiveness of each case considered. Disciplines within the social sciences—anthropology, folklore, psychology, economic science, and political science—tend to seek similarities. They seek generalizations, laws, or theories, much equally the natural sciences do. There are, of course, exceptions. For case, anthropologists often emphasize the distinctiveness of the culture in which they practice their fieldwork even as they seek generalizations.

The comparative method goes dorsum to aboriginal times. The most famous aboriginal comparativist was Herodotus, who used the method to bear witness not the similarities but the differences between Greeks and Persians and the superiority of Greeks. The method, which has been primal to the natural sciences since before Aristotle, reached its elevation in the social sciences in the 19th century with the anthropologists Eastward. B. Tylor and J. Chiliad. Frazer and the sociologists Baronial Comte and Herbert Spencer. All of them sought similarities, in the class of laws or generalizations about cultures and societies.

The criticisms of the comparative quest have been nigh the same from Herodotus to the present, just they have go ever more than severe with the development of would-be universal generalizations. A hundred years ago, the anthropologist Franz Boas maintained that the generalizations offered by social scientists were premature. But this objection only called for the accumulation of more data, not for the abandonment of generalizing.  The stronger critiques of Tylor, Frazer, Comte, Spencer, and their successors are that these comparativists make generalizations that (a) deny differences, (b) equate similarity with identity, (c) generalize besides broadly, (d) take cases out of context, and even (e) generalize at all. This last objection is found to a higher place all in postmodernism.

The four books under review accept varying stands on the comparative method. In what follows, I volition examine the views on comparison and the cogency of the arguments offered in each of 4 contempo books that address the comparative method from unlike disciplinary approaches: religious studies, political science, theology, and classics.

Apples and Oranges: Explorations In, On, and With Comparison. By Bruce Lincoln. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 335 pp. $35 paperback.

Scholars in the field of religious studies, which is Bruce Lincoln's subject area, vary on the propriety of comparativism. On the one mitt, some scholars argue for universal similarities. For example, Mircea Eliade maintains that all humans are religious and that religion serves to enable them to run across God, or the sacred, in the same way. On the other hand, specialists in detail religions are ofttimes like specialists in the French Revolution: they root their studied faith in its own locale and hesitate to engage in comparativism, even to detect differences.

Lincoln falls in the heart of these camps. He advocates, not opposes, comparisons, but just equally long as they are express. He limits his examples to only two cases: "The more examples compared, the more superficial and peremptory is the assay of each" (26). He advocates "weak," or limited, comparativism and opposes "strong," or universal, comparativism.

For case, he compares the Middle Persian myth theGreater Bundhisn withBeowulf—ii myths from divergent geographical locations and cultures. In theGreater Bundhisn, the Wise Lord Ohrmazd is pitted against the Evil Spirit Ahreman. Where Ohrmazd is omniscient and chivalrous, Ahreman is stupid and subversive. Ahreman is motivated by envy, a catholic trait in turn inherited by humans. InBeowulf, Grendel is like Ahreman. He is envious of Hrothgar, the analogue to Ohrmazd. The envy of both Grendel and Ahreman sets cosmic state of war in motion. But at that place are "significant differences" in the ii narratives: "Whereas Ahreman is a demon (and the archdemon at that), Grendel is a monster or, more precisely, the last, most degenerate descendant in the line of the about sinful human" (30). Where Ahreman'due south envy is confronting God and creation, Grendel's is confronting a mere male monarch, Hrothgar, and his magnificent hall. TheGreater Bundhisn has a dyadic construction and operates at the supernatural level,Beowulf has a triadic structure and ties the human to the divine through the monstrous. The differences outweigh the similarities in Lincoln's reading.

While this example or any of Lincoln'southward one-half dozen more are rich and detailed, they do not prove his argument for "weak" comparison. Comparativism can certainly be used to seek differences as well as similarities. But differences begin just where similarities cease. The two narratives in his example are different only when they are no longer similar. More than important, zilch makes the differences deeper than the similarities. Differences are deeper only to those who prefer them. Undeniably, similarities are too, but past nature they provide links amongst many cases that differences never can.

When Lincoln praises weak comparativism for tending to the "social, historical, and political contexts" (27) of religions, he takes for granted that strong comparativism does not practise the same. Just surely universalist Marxist explanations, which he himself favors, center on the social context. At the same time in that location is no reason that strong explanationsmust focus on the social context. Lincoln ignores universalist psychological theories of religion—notably, Freud'due south and Jung'southward—that root religion and myth in the mind and see the social context as the sphere where the heed interacts with others.

In social club to cover every bit many cases as possible, comparisons, weak no less than strong, must ignore differences—after having sought to convert them into similarities. Similarities are not thereby automatically superficial or differences inherently deep.

Means of Knowing: Competing Methodologies in Social and Political Research. By Jonathan West. Moses and Torbjørn L. Knutsen. London: Red World Press, 2019. 347 pp. $43 paperback.

Lincoln categorizes comparativists by the severity of the comparisons. Strong comparativism seeks universal similarities and downplay differences. Weak comparativism, which he favors, seek less than universal similarities and stress differences. InWays of Knowing Jonathan Moses and Torbjorn Knutsen, Norwegian political scientists, value similarities and differences every bit, only their arroyo is more philosophical. They dissimilarity the naturalist approach, which seeks similarities, to the constructivist i, which seeks differences. The naturalist view, which is commonplace in political science and goes back to Galileo and Kepler, is that at that place exists a "real globe" out there, independent of observers. Information technology consists of not just specific things, such as individual copse or persons, merely likewise patterns among them. The patterns establish regularities or laws. One tin generalize about what makes all trees trees.

At its most extreme, constructivism, which goes back to Immanuel Kant and gain to

Wilhelm Dilthey and Clifford Geertz, denies that a real world exists. More often, it grants the beingness of that world but denies that humans, shaped by the workings of either their heed or their culture, tin can uncrease themselves from the world. Humans notwithstanding see patterns, but those patterns, or laws, prevarication as much in them every bit in the world itself.

Where naturalists focus on the world that we all perceive and so focus on similarities, constructivists focus on the different worlds we perceive. Constructivists seek the "context" of beliefs and practices, and that context varies from culture to culture. As Moses and Knutsen write, constructivists "protestation the thesis of a fixed human nature. Instead, they argue that human beings are formed past their context; that they are shaped and coloured by geographical space, historical time, social circumstance and other contextual factors" (198). The focus is therefore on what makes each civilisation unique. Comparisons can still be fabricated, merely only to find differences.

The naturalist approach is equivalent to the scientific approach: "Naturalist social science builds on three wide joists—all of them hewn from the trunk of traditional natural science" (41). Observations, all the same the core of naturalism, are now recognized as "theory-laden," which does non, every bit in extreme constructivism, mean that there are no observations but simply that observations are inseparable from theories. Because the naturalist approach is identical with the scientific approach, the goal is to discover similarities, which is to say laws: "the ultimate purpose of scientific discipline is to uncover these regularities and to re-state them as (natural) laws" (41). Differences do not count. Improve: they should be turned into underlying similarities. The aim is to explicate religion per se. By no coincidence, one chapter in the section of the book on this approach is called "the comparative method"—the method here being equated with the search for sheer similarities.

Moses and Knutsen aspire to bridge the gap betwixt these approaches to social science, but they practice not evidence how the gap tin can be reduced. All they offering is open-mindedness. They assert that the approaches differ so much that they may run askew and therefore be compatible. But they fail to show how. An case would help.

Meaning and Method in Comparative Theology. By Catherine Cornille. Chichester, Westward Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2020. 214 pp. $44.99 paperback.

Catherine Cornille hails from the field of theology, which is usually distinguished from the field of religious studies by its focus on a unmarried organized religion. Cornille argues for comparativism in theology, and her goal in writing is to illuminate Christianity, rather than religion, writ big.

Cornille parallels comparative theology to the comparative study of religion, which goes back to Friedrich Max Mueller. Theology starts with 1 organized religion. Information technology may use broad, even universal categories, such equally puberty rites to understand the Jewish Bar Mitzvah, to use her own example. But the payoff is the illumination of one's own religion: "The ultimate goal of comparative theology thus involves comparison . . . for the purpose of enriching and enhancing the cocky-agreement of a particular religion" (ten). In other words, i should study Christianity or Buddhism comparatively in order to acquire more about it, not about religion. Here is where Cornille differs from Lincoln. For the latter, the comparative written report of faith can seek the differences between ane religion and some other, but the aim is nevertheless to understand at least two religions compared and not just ane religion. Cornille uses Buddhism and Hinduism to elucidate Christianity.

Cornille distinguishes betwixt 19th-century and 20th-century comparative theology: "Whereas nineteenth-century comparative theology grew out of religious apologetics and continued to showroom a strongly normative bent, the new comparative theology has been more indebted to the subject field of religious studies and area studies" (79). The deviation between present-day comparative theology and religious studies remains. Comparative theology uses comparison equally a means of deciphering one religion only. Withal, even Cornille concedes that the departure between present-day comparative theology and religious studies "is at times sparse, or not ever articulate-cut" (18).

Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparing in History, Religion and Anthropology. Edited by Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019. 463 pp. $250 hardback.

InRegimes of Comparatism, Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey East. R. Lloyd, all classicists, amass essays that expose the supposed biases in cases of comparing. The cases comprehend the globe, and the biases vary. To quote Lloyd, "Of class those who engaged in comparing did not always do so with the express purpose of claiming Western, or indeed specifically Christian, superiority, merely that was certainly ofttimes the covert calendar" (448). Sometimes the bias is that civilisation Ten got its beliefs or practices from civilization Y. Other times it is that what is compared in culture X is more sophisticated than what is compared in culture Y. Or cultures Ten and Y turn out to be more than alike than had been assumed.

However the aim in this book is non, usually, to reject comparisons. The contributors are not postmodernists, for whom comparison is inherently worthless. They seek, rather, to recognize the biases built into comparisons. Whether the biases can be overcome is the question. As Lloyd sums upward the essays, "What all of this amounts to is that while comparatism tin exist and often has been abused, if we practice it self-critically it can indeed be a liberation" (456). The aim is to improve, not to refuse, comparisons. The culling is to requite upwards analyzing anything cross-culturally.

Comparativism has always been idiosyncratic. What religions or behavior or customs have been compared reflects the outlook of the comparativist. To quote Renaud Gagné, "The more than i looks at whatever one 'comparative method', the more idiosyncratic—culturally and historically located—information technology appears" (2). Just the comparative method is not in fact almost what things go compared. Any two entities can be compared and in any number of ways. The point is that proper comparing yields generalizations, or laws, from which in turn differences tin can emerge. (For the archetype argument for generalizations in history and the social sciences, see Carl Hempel, "The Part of Full general Laws in History,"Periodical of Philosophy39 [1942], 35-48.)

Conclusion

All four of these books fence for the comparative method. The four disagree not on the propriety of comparison simply on the goal. Lincoln argues for comparativism as the best fashion to grasp the deeper differences beneath the similarities. Moses and Knutsen advocate equal attention to similarities (naturalism) and differences (constructivism); they aspire to harmonize these approaches. Cornille argues for comparison equally the best style to empathise the uniqueness of a single organized religion. Gagné, Goldhill, and Lloyd strive to detect the biases in comparisons and aim to brand comparisons fairer. All four books reject the postmodern aversion to comparison and contend that comparing is the key to illuminate faith.

Robert A. Segal is Sixth Century Chair in Religious Studies at the University of Aberdeen.

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Source: http://readingreligion.org/blog/recent-books-on-the-comparative-method-in-religious-studies/

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