What Bodies Know About Religion and the Study of It

Abstract

To advance the project of attending to the bodily dimensions of religious life, scholars must develop ways of acknowledging the role that their own bodily being plays in the study of religious life. One follows the other. Yet, the cast of debates over theory and method in the field hinders such developments. The tendency to think of religious studies as either scientific or interpretive—and the accompanying pressure to resolve the debate to one side or another—reinforces attachment to linguistic methods, models, and metaphors in defending one's position. Such attachment in turn discourages scholars from paying attention to their bodily engagement in the study of religion. This paper argues that scholars, by embracing a tension between “reason” and “experience” as generative of the field, can expand their range beyond text-dominant approaches. This paper demonstrates one direction for doing so, drawing on the case of modern dance to develop a scholarly approach that does justice to what bodies know about religion and the study of it.

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