Thursday, 10 September 2015

Identity and the Politics of Scholarship in the Study of Religion,
ed. José Ignacio Cabezón & Sheila Greeve Davaney, Routledge, 2004, page 19

Pursuing their line that in the area of religion, external - read: the religious - authorities cand will act to censure academic work, Davaney and Cabezó continue:

In cases where the scholar's relationship to the tradition is not one ofan insider, other strategies are often used by critics to delegitimise what are deemed problematic claims. Sometimes the recourse is to academic criteria - challenging the scholar's command of the languages or his or her access to the historical sources of a tradition. In other cases ... more exaggerated claims have been put forward.

Citing the Courtright controversy - over the republishing in India of a scholarly book about Hindism - they conclude:

While we rarely hear that American scholars cannot teach European history or Asian literature, when religion is the topic, identity - and often forms of identity imbued with a normative character by certain persons or groups - move to the fore of the discussion.

Just who are you to make those claims or disclosures anyway?