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Institute of
International Education
809 United Nations Plaza
7th Floor
New York, NY 10017
USA
Tel: +1 (212) 984 5367
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On Comparing Religions and Cultures: An Experiment in Study Abroad |
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By Andrew Irvine
I.
Comparative Religion and Culture (CRC) is a study abroad venture of the Friends World Program at Long Island University. Friends World is an innovative four year, undergraduate, liberal arts degree-granting program that combines the more established area studies approach with issue-based investigation of global society, within a unifying experiential educational framework. It currently comprises academic centers in five countries (Costa Rica, Japan, China, India, and the USA) plus the multi-location CRC.
CRC has operated since 1997, involving close to 200 students to date, from a variety of backgrounds, academic interests and institutions, in a direct experiential approach to studying religion. Each year a cohort of up to 20 students travels together for the academic year, visiting at least three distinct cultural regions. They are accompanied by a faculty advisor who works closely with them throughout the year. However, local scholars and religious practitioners guide the learning in every country.
This commitment to local leadership, and responsiveness to regional and world affairs mean that CRC is, in a quite real way, an ongoing experiment in cross-cultural understanding.
There are plenty of difficulties in performing such an experiment, let alone performing it repeatedly! Financial and safety considerations, for instance, conspire to make itineraries vulnerable. Thus, past CRC groups have studied in sites diverse as Japan, Taiwan, China, India, Thailand, Israel, Turkey, Romania, Greece, and Italy. Yet, the transformative impact of the program in students’ experience, year after year, and the growing articulation of a distinctive pedagogical approach animating it, suggest that CRC may share similarities with what philosopher of science, Imre Lakatos, called a progressive (as distinct from a “degenerative”) research programme (Lakatos, 1978: 1-7).
To call the program a research venture is at least unusual, and possibly controversial. My aim in the next section is to outline the pedagogical approach of CRC as I have come to understand it in those terms.
II.
In general terms, CRC is an experiential investigation of issues in cross-cultural understanding, in which the students are directly engaged as at once researchers and subjects of the research. The lynchpin of this claim is understanding what it is that we compare when we undertake to compare religions and cultures.
The issue of comparison is a vexing one in religious studies and anthropology. Comparison seems to presuppose judgments about what is being compared, such as that they are comparable – in which case, on what basis, and by whose criteria? Such judgments necessarily beg virtually unanswerable questions of whether or not we judge rightly. (To put this in perspective, the leader of one the most painstaking and systematic attempts at comparing religious ideas to date, claims that at present world religions are “only barely comparable” [Neville 2004: 118]!)
CRC attempts to handle this vexation in at least two ways. The first is to look to the experiential roots of the vexation, to what we call “oh events.” An “oh event,” I gloss as a moment when one learns one has something to learn. For example, the gap between students’ preconceptions about Buddhism and the well-financed, globally active Buddhist organizations they visit in Taiwan makes for a striking “oh event”. Students on CRC write numerous, short response papers probing their particular “oh events,” along with focused ethnographic exercises and longer research papers exploring the people and places that provoked them in more depth. A specific “oh” may be one of calm insight or agitated frustration, but the general point of emphasizing oh events is to suggest that what we can compare – at least in an initial phase of the project of comparison – is our reactions to various “others.” In other words, our own thwarted habits and overturned expectations supply clues to understanding the reality of those we encounter on their own, possibly quite different, terms.
The self, of course, is hardly a fixed standard. Students themselves change in the very course of their experience, so oh events in and of themselves do not deliver the truth about others. However, in keeping track of their encounters and reactions (and no one else can do it better than they), students document an ongoing attempt truly to understand and communicate the distinctive experience of different religions and their devotees.
Students are supported in this work through a program-long theory and methods seminar which introduces them to key issues and approaches in the study of religion. In addition, local faculty evaluate certain assignments, meeting with each student to discuss his or her work, thus further enabling students to contrast their understanding with insider points of view.
The second way of handling the problem of comparison depends and builds upon the first. At the end of the CRC program, students write a long (5000 word) capstone essay. For this, each student is required to review her work in its entirety: this time, not simply as a document of her attempts to understand others, but as a document of the distinctive commitments that regularly inform how they make sense of others. In the essay itself, students revisit the crucial learning events, analyzing them for the pattern of critical habits and presuppositions they disclose, developing the importance of that pattern for understanding their theory of, their “way of understanding,” religious and cultural difference and, finally, speculating on practical applications of the lessons learned as they prepare to return home. Finally, students incorporate the essay with the preceding work into a comprehensive portfolio of learning.
CRC may legitimately be likened to Imre Lakatos' idea of a research programme. The direct experiential and critical reflexive approach just outlined necessitates that students learn not just preexisting information, or the rote application of philosophical and anthropological techniques. Rather, students make genuine discoveries through the course of their experience; they learn also to criticize the informal "methodological" commitments implicit in how their particular course of experience is structured by religious, cultural and other influences. That CRC is a progressive research programme is suggested by the repeated phenomenon of student discovery year after year, and by the growing articulation of the program's rationale (not least as set forth here).
III.
Every way of understanding throws some things into prominence and neglects others. As I have elaborated it, CRC, too, involves a way of understanding. Here I will discuss perhaps the most difficult limitation entailed by it.
As a traveling program, CRC tends to forestall a deeper kind of cultural embeddedness at which many other long term study abroad programs aim. This is symbolized especially by the limited amount of time CRC gives to language acquisition – usually no more than 20 hours in any given country. This is a genuine limitation on what and how students may come to understand, somewhat compensated for by the extensive use of locally based faculty.
At the same time, however, this limitation is a resource for us, in that students do not work through so-called culture shock into a new set of settled habits. Rather, they must continually wrestle with the fit or lack thereof between their expectations and those of the culture around them. This is the soil of experience from which informed comparison grows. They may not grasp this as it happens, but it is remarkable how many students, in looking back over their work, discover themselves to be formed by a religion and culture in ways they had barely suspected. This process of self-discovery is integral to the process of learning about others very different from the self. The result of comparative religious studies, then, is much more than an idiosyncratic list of similarities and differences, tacitly shaped by one’s own values; the ultimate effect may be a personally transformative understanding of one another.
IV.
As I have said, every way of understanding weighs some things as more important, and others as less. Whether one way or another could be considered true depends on a host of considerations. Surely, though, such a process can hardly begin unless we become aware of our insights and oversights, how they enable and restrict our way of experiencing the world, and yet, how through this we might begin to understand the ways of others.
To say it a little differently, CRC offers students knowledge and skills above all so that they may “enlarge [their] sense of how life can go” (Geertz, 1988: 139). Through this enrichment of the imagination, students should not only become more able to move with understanding among the inhabitants of other religions, other cultures, but should become freer, too, in how they inhabit the conventions and assumptions of their own. Such freedom is one of the perennial aims of education. It is also an urgent need in a rapidly globalizing world.
Working on the CRC program has taught me a tremendous amount about how students learn about religion and cultures, and what the value of that learning may be. In this brief essay I have shared certain core lessons from my experience that, I believe, are worthy of wider attention in their own right, and that also may be transferable to other programs in ways that enhance the experience of education, both at home and abroad.
References
Clifford Geertz (1998). Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Imre Lakatos (1978). The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. Philosophical Papers, volume 1. Ed. John Worrall and Gregory Currie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Robert Cummings Neville (2004). “Toward a Theology of World Religions: The Existential Threats.” The Stranger’s Religion: Fascination and Fear, 113-130. Ed. Anna Lännström. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.
Andrew Irvine is Assistant Professor of Comparative Religion and Director of Senior Studies at the Friends World Program, Long Island University.
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