Monday, 7 September 2015

Identity and the Politics of Scholarship in the Study of Religion,
ed. José Ignacio Cabezón & Sheila Greeve Davaney, Routledge, 2004, page 14

Following 'teaser' outlines of some of contributors' essays, Cabezón and Davaney ask:

If it is not one's identity that principally drives one's scholarly agenda, what does? It it is not one's identity that privileges one's scholarship, what does?

By way of starting an answer, Cabezón and Davaney offer that one of the contributors:

shows how the prevailing intellectual ethos of a given scholarly field in a particular historical period affects scholarship more than, say, the scholar's ethnic/religious identity.

Essentially, they say,

Identity is important here, but it is identity as a scholar in a field with particular trends, methods, scholarly criteria and term of assessment that is most influential.