Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Malcolm's avatar

Hi Jacqueline:

Thanks for your remarks.

"Now I expect it's far less overt in Buddhist Studies and Religious Studies more generally."

It is pretty overt. For example, a well-known professor at an elite university recanted their personal involvement in Buddhadharma to secure a job.

Even well-meaning academics are forced into conducting their research through this fabrication of etic "methodology." I've read countless dissertations that spend 100+ pages describing their methodology, and others that never even address the source material they are writing about, spending their time going through reams of western academic writing before saying one signiricant thing.

At this point, sadly, Buddhology has become an entirely navel gazing enterprise where people spend all their time discussing what Schmithausen and Frauwellner said, etc.

My point is that we need to use emetics to eliminate this trend, and only comitted Buddhist practitioners can do this, and they cannot do it by caving to the dictates of modern historiography.

Modern historiography fails to take into consideration "difference" and "otherness," and subordinate other narratives through its own colonial power, concentrated as it is in western universities. This became more and more clear to me as I began to investigate indigenous writers who have face similar problems.

For example, my own teacher, Chogyal Namkhai Norbu tried to have his book "Light of Kailash" published by a serious western press. But the anonymous reviewers of his book, which is a landmark, dismisssed the book because it lacked a narrative consistent with prejudices of the modern Buddhist studies academy. They could not appreciate the novelty and brilliance of Norbu Rinpoche's research.

Expand full comment
Jacqueline Zawyrucha's avatar

I think a lot of the emphasis on the etic perspective in the social sciences comes from a misplaced desire to steal the hard sciences' kind of legitimacy. Too many academics willfully ignore the subjectivity inherent in studying our own species, like they have some twisted intellectual inferiority complex. I saw it a lot back in the late 2000s when my then husband was working through graduate school in sociology. There was this sort of cold civil war between those who wanted sociology to be a hard science and those who saw the value in learning how people actually experience the world rather than ignoring the humanity of themselves and those they study in favor of objectification.

Now I expect it's far less overt in Buddhist Studies and Religious Studies more generally. But it's hard not to see strong echoes of that conflict in what you wrote here. They're both based in this cultural delusion we have that an objective, preferably scientific perspective is necessarily better in all (or at least nearly all) circumstances. It just sounds here like the wrong side ultimately won that war. You and I even demonstrate some subtle shades of it in how we talk about these things. I refer to "social sciences" as opposed to "hard sciences"--clearly prejudicial language--while you conflate a generalized "academic perspective" with this preference for objectivity above all, justifiable as such a generalization is under the circumstances. It's gotten in so deep its a tough thought pattern to break even when one is aware of it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of science. I was a physics major myself, even. Its methods are immeasurably valuable when used appropriately. But this idea that we can accurately study ourselves and each other any more deeply than on a gross physical/material level with the same kind of objectivity is madness. It's the very same madness that birthed scientific racism, eugenics, etc. Even entirely on its own terms, completely ignoring the insights of Buddhism on "objectivity", it's just completely self-contradictory nonsense. It demeans science itself as little more than an aesthetic and reduces the social sciences to a method to pointlessly reify our own worst delusions about ourselves and each other, painting unquestioned assumptions with a patina of false objectivity. That's all it's ever done. All it ever *can* do.

Expand full comment

No posts