Friday, 11 September 2015

Identity and the Politics of Scholarship in the Study of Religion,
ed. José Ignacio Cabezón & Sheila Greeve Davaney, Routledge, 2004, page 20

Lest this appear to be a negative or partisan view of scholarship, Davaney and Cabezó assert that, in practice, everyone is human and has the same issues:

There are no detached observers, no utterly "clean slates." This means that scholars always bring their identities to the table and that such identities should in no way rule them out as scholars.

Pointing out that all the contributors to the book are in consensus, they make the statement that:

... if we all have identities ... no particular religious, racial, gender or other identity in and of itself shoud function as the trump card when evaluating the quality of scholarly work. Nor should any lack of particular identity rule out scholarly participation in a field of enquiry.

Perhaps what it boils down to is:

Here identity matters, but it is only one of the factors that must be taken into account.