Monthly Archives: September 2014

On Sabbatical

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On Sabbatical

September is almost over, and while most faculty and students at UVM are completing their first month of new classes, I have not stepped foot into a classroom. This is a very strange occurrence for me. Since 2007 I have participated in the “back to school” ritual of planning course readings and assignments, organizing my office, meeting new students, and catching up with advisees. Instead, this semester began with me sitting with my laptop and a stack of books on my front porch, staring out at Mount Ellen and diving into my research and writing. It is wonderful to be able to devote myself entirely to brainstorming new projects, putting the finishing touches on articles (and books) in progress, and catching up with the literature in my scholarly fields.

In the coming months, I plan to keep our blog readers updated on what I am thinking, writing, and reading about during this sabbatical year. I will tell you about the projects I am working on, give brief reviews of books that I am reading that may be of interest to you, and offer a glimpse into how I work—for example, what tools do I use to locate and organize sources, or how do I make sure that I make progress towards my goals without the structure of classes and meetings to help organize my time.

I have ambitious goals for this sabbatical—these include writing grants, finishing chapters, revising articles, and conducting fieldwork. I am hopeful that I will be able to achieve most of them, but I am also willing to follow tangents and new directions that emerge out of my reading, writing, and conversations with others to see where they take me. Such is the nature of scholarly inquiry—to seek answers to questions that more often lead to new questions rather than definitive conclusions. I am grateful that the sabbatical provides me with the time to pursue some of these lines of investigation to see where they take me. I look forward to sharing this discovery with you.

An Ethnographer, A Medievalist, and a South Asianist: A Conversation

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Over the last sixty years, scholars of religion have variously described their work in terms of both field and discipline. Since the decline of the Eliadian/Structuralist paradigm in the 1980s and 1990s, scholars have been increasingly likely to describe what we do in terms of specific subfields shaped more broadly by disciplinary unity (though even as I say this, I can think of ways that even these subfields are both unified and pulled apart by “discipline” – this is the joy and frustration of Religious Studies!).  We are fortunate, though perhaps not unique to have in the UVM Religion department several different broad disciplinary orientations in play at the same time.  Our faculty do philosophical, ethnographic, historical and comparative work.  This summer our two historians, Anne Clark and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, scholars of Medieval Europe and Muslim South Asia respectively, each spent portions of their summers in specialized libraries doing research.  Since my research generally entails chatting up monks in Thailand and China, it wasn’t completely clear to me what that meant.  So I asked Anne and Ilyse some questions over email about what it was like to do their type of research.

 

What is an archive for you?

IMF: Great question. An archive to me is a collection—or series of collections—of rare material, which might be newspapers, photos or prints, maps, or books on a particular topic or from a particular area. But beyond a definition, to me, an archive immediately conjures a set of (obnoxiously lofty) sensations: the smell of old newspapers and manuscripts; the look of someone else’s handwriting; the feel of sometimes-crumbling, leather-bound volumes and whisper-thin onion paper; the sounds of dozens of other scholars scribbling notes in pencil, each uncovering something remarkable.

AC: In general I don’t think of myself as working in archives.  For medievalists, “archive” usually refers to collections of documents like wills, charters, deeds, commercial records, etc., and I don’t work on that kind of material.  I work with medieval manuscripts, which are books created before the invention of the printing press, so each book is a unique handmade artifact, distinct from every other book in the world. I think maybe it’s especially because I’m an American, living in a world where the built environment is perhaps 100 years old (my house is 118 years old and the Religion Department about the same) with few older artifacts as part of my daily life, that handling an 800-year old book is really a thrill.

What is the physical space where you were doing research? 

IMF: I was working in the British Library, and spent most days in the Asian and African Studies Reading Room, though sometimes needed to use the Rare Books Room.

AC: I worked in the Österreichische Nationalbibiothek (Austrian National Library), in Vienna, in its beautiful Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books. The manuscript reading room was originally the library of an Augustinian monastery, attached to one of the Hapsburg palaces. As with most medieval manuscript collections, there are levels are security to go through, designed to protect the manuscripts from damage or theft.

Could you be more expansive about the literal space? Light?  Dark?  Comfortable?  Crowded? 

IMF: The Reading Room had rows of workspaces—long tables with individual “desks” designated by a change in the wood grain, an individual lamp, a few outlets, a desk number, and a call button to get a librarian. The room was cold, and while the light was decent for reading, I wouldn’t call it bright—rare materials like cold and dark. (After all, the books’ comfort far outweighs the researchers’.)

AC: Except for very hard wooden chairs (!), all the other appointments were quite good: wi-fi access; electric outlets at every desk (don’t forget to bring your electric current converter), good lighting through huge windows as well as individual desk lamps. There were rules that I inadvertently broke, like not realizing I had been assigned a particular desk, but since the reading room was not filled to capacity, no one scolded me or told me to move.

What is the process of doing research? How do you start the day?

IMF: I’m an early bird by nature, so my day usually looked like: retyping handwritten notes from the day before in the cafe while I waited for the BL to open, then immediately getting to work in a reading room!

AC: Because my time in Vienna was limited, I arrived at the library when it opened, picked up the manuscript and got set up in the reading room.  I stayed pretty much glued to my chair, poring over the one manuscript I was researching.  I had on my computer a scan of a similar manuscript, and my main work was a careful comparison of the two, and making detailed notes about the differences between them.

How do you get books  – are you getting books?

IMF: The British Library has a system for requesting materials. Basically, I would search the catalogs, request an item (books, manuscripts, and collections of tracts or newspapers, usually), and specify when I’d like it to be delivered. But I arrived in London with a list of 10 must-have works, ranging from a tract published in 1813 in an Indian newspaper to a Persian manuscript to a set of prints related to the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion.

AC: I had written to the staff at the library in advance, so the manuscript, sometimes called the Lilienfeld Prayerbook, was waiting for me as soon as I checked in.  This is important to do, because not all materials are always available.  For example, I had also wanted to look at a related manuscript in Munich, the so-called Prayerbook of St. Hildegard, in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Bavarian State Library), but when I had written ahead to inquire about access, I was told that it was not generally shown to scholars because of the availability of a photographic facsimile. This points to the dual role of the rare book library: to both protect and make available their resources.  The library took the big step of allowing the manuscript to be photographed and published to make it widely accessible.  Yet, for me to engage on a major analysis of the manuscript without seeing it “in the flesh” (and remember, the book itself is flesh, animal skin prepared into parchment), made me worried that I would miss something that couldn’t easily be seen in the photographs, and also makes me feel slightly tentative in writing about it.  And, truth be told, I wanted that flesh to flesh experience.

Is this a political process? Does it help to chat with the librarians?  To bribe them? 

IMF: This isn’t political at the BL, and bribing wasn’t necessary. Though, to be fair, befriending the librarians did help: I could bolt to lunch and not forfeit my seat even when the room was at capacity (and decorum would dictate getting up meant giving up), and occasionally it meant I could bend the 3 day rule ever so slightly (and I do mean slight: a few hours!).

AC:  Tom, maybe your experience in South Asia is showing here!  No bribes were needed in Vienna, although I was required to purchase a library membership (ten euros for one year).  And the staff was uniformly helpful, and fully comfortable with speaking to me in English so that I didn’t have to embarrass myself with pathetic attempts at German or sign language.

What are the materials you examine each day?

IMF: For the most part, on this trip, I was working with India Office Records, so my materials ranged from published, widely-circulated books to handwritten (Indic and Islamicate) language manuscripts and registers.

AC: My whole time was focused on one manuscript that I had researched in advance.  It is a twelfth-century illustrated prayerbook, primarily in Latin with Middle High German additions. This is part of my larger project about how the juxtaposition of texts and pictures in medieval prayerbooks may have been used by their owners to stimulate emotional experience in their devotional practices.

What are the constraints of the location?

IMF: In the reading rooms, one cannot have food or water, for obvious reasons. This broke my 4 cups of coffee a day habit, quickly! One also cannot remove materials from the room, but also only (for the most part) had access to each item for 3 days. So, I guess, days were long and caffeine-free.

AC: In addition to no food or drink, the library also prohibits use of pens, and monitors strolled by occasionally to ensure that the manuscripts were being carefully used.  We aren’t required to wear gloves, but there it is important to touch the books only minimally—just enough to set them up on the foam cushions provided and to gently turn the pages.

Do you enter the library/archive space knowing what you are going to read each day?

IMF: Sometimes! I tried to plan out what materials would arrive, and when. Days I needed to work exclusively with a Persian manuscript, for example, I planned for. Days that found me receiving a few ordered items—especially things I’d found via footnotes and in-text references—were a bit more surprising.

AC: I had a very focused plan to get through as much of that one manuscript as possible, but as with all manuscripts, you never know what you will find.  There’s always the moment of first opening, the excitement and slight fear that I may not even be able to read the handwriting, or that it will be damaged, or that there will be unexpected marginalia, etc.  So first I just look it over–the covers, the first and last pages, etc.  And I had particular themes and subject pages that I prioritized.  Also, because this was an illustrated prayer book, and my work investigates the relationship between text and image, I spent a fair amount of time looking closely at the pictures, and taking notes about them.

Sometimes when I interview someone, I have these moments where they say something I am not expecting, but it is exactly what I was hoping they would say (the reverse is also happens). In those moments, I can sometimes feel my heart racing with the excitement of the unexpected but sought for.  If you have found something you don’t expect, do you know immediately?

IMF: Yes and no! On the one hand, I had the sense that what I was looking at was really important or special, maybe even a true gem of a source. On the other, sometimes I’d look at a piece of writing and know it was important to my research, that it would become something I’d use and return to, but wouldn’t quite be sure how it fit into my overall project just yet.

AC: Sometimes I am so busy copying as much as I can, that the impact of it doesn’t always hit me at first.  Then it’s not till I’ve had time to do a more careful translation that I’ll discern the significance of even just a single word, or more likely, a pattern of words or phrases scattered throughout the whole work.

Field Notes

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via: https://www.princeton.edu/ ~ferguson/h-ra-th.html

As I was tracking down sources for a manuscript in progress which examines scholarly productions of Muslim identities, law, and subjecthood in light of the 1857 Rebellion, I came across a series of seven op-eds in the London-based newspaper, The Times. These op-eds were written in December 1857 and early January 1858, and took on the issue of rebellion, religion, and education; specifically, they each called for the establishment of a publicly- and Crown-supported Oriental Institute, which would educate any and all British subject headed to India in the fields of Indian languages, religions, and histories. The public nature of the debate sheds light, I think, on issues of how common the ideas portrayed were; that this conversation is given space in a daily newspaper represents its intelligibility to its audience, and in turn, the ideas presented about religion, language, and empire might be read as commonplace.

These op-eds were not haphazard commentary, but rather a conversation about British India, language, and religion between heavyweights. Five of the letters were penned under the pseudonyms “Philindus” and “Indophilus” (both of which indicate a love of India). A fabulous archival day was spent realizing that “Philindus,” one of the pseudonyms, was F. Max Müller–the well-known scholar of religion and philologist. In these essays, he argued that, in the wake of the 1857 Rebellion, the teaching of Indian languages and religion was the foremost business of the Empire. In fact, he claimed that the rebellion might have never happened if agents of the Empire had been properly educated in the first place; he credited–or, perhaps, blamed–both a colossal lack of information about religious sensibilities and a lack of linguistic prowess for the rebellion. To illustrate, he wrote:

It was the ignorance of the language that prevented the officers of the East India Company from having any real intercourse with the natives, and taking any interest in their personal conversation. It was the ignorance of language which created a feeling of estrangement, mistrust, and contempt on both sides. (Philindus, “The Neglect of the Study of the Indian Languages Considered as a Cause of the Indian Rebellion,” Letter to Times, dated December 30, 1857)

The other pseudonym, “Indophilus,” belonged to Sir Charles Trevelyan, a British civil servant and administrator. Largely in response to “Philindus’s” original piece, he, too, argued that the appalling lack of British awareness led to distrust amongst “native” Indians, and specifically posited a seven-point plan to establish an Oriental Institute, a publicly- and Crown-supported college meant to educate civil and military service men, as well as clergy, doctors, and laypeople before they went to India.

Ultimately, Müller and Trevelyan disagreed on what ought to have been taught in the Institute they proposed: Müller insisted that Sanskrit would cover the majority of Indic vocabulary, but, additionally Arabic would be helpful to understand the Muslim minority; Trevelyan argued that modern, spoken dialects would be more pragmatic. Both agreed, however, that understanding language meant understanding religion, which in turn meant better management, more security, and a stronger British India. Their exchange was augmented subsequently by M. Monier-Williams and Syed Abdoollah, with both in support of an Oriental Institute. The former supported Müller’s Sanskrit-heavy curricula, and the latter took issue with the other authors’ suggestion that British professors would be ideal. Abdoollah suggested that proper native speakers–i.e., South Asians–be employed, and (in politic language) accused British professors of India and Indic languages of being far too distant to get the accents quite right.

The debate about how an institution of higher learning might be established–complete with rudimentary budget proposals and funding sources–is itself fascinating. But what’s most interesting to me in these essays is how “religion” was deployed. No two authors say quite the same thing, but overall, religion is: imbricated with language(s); required information for effective governance; not to be taken lightly; and, ultimately, to be at least partially blamed for the 1857 Rebellion, both in its immediate and latent causes. One of the events leading up to the Rebellion was the greasing of weapons with animal fat–an act offensive to both Hindus and Muslims. Müller concludes that had civil or military servicemen understood just how offensive this could be, the issue would have resolved itself before becoming one. He writes that Indian civil servants:

ought to know something of Mohamed, the Koran, and the spreading of Mohamedanism, something about the Vedas, about Manu, Buddha, and the Purǎnas before they undertake to act as governors and teachers of Hindus and Mussalmans. (Philindus, “On the Proper Mode of Teaching the Languages of India,” Letter to Times. Dated January 4, 1858. All spellings in original.)

Religion here serves as a primary identity marker, and a primary way by which “governors and teachers” might understand their subjects and pupils. Certainly this is a hallmark of both Orientalist and colonial depictions of religions and religious subjects and in some ways this is simply data that is similar to what scholars of South Asia, colonialisms, and religion have seen before.

However, what’s fascinating and worthy of note is where this information happened: this was a public conversation, written for an obviously literate and educated audience, but public nevertheless. It represents a discourse that linked religion, governance, and language publicly, as in not just for Ivory Tower dwellers, and not merely as a thought experiment. For public consumption, debate, and action. These essays, both individually and when taken together, are a call on Parliament (in some cases explicitly) as well as the general public to form an institution dedicated to teaching language, history, and religion in the service of the British Empire, and as a response to a rebellion. As I parse sources about religion, rebellion, foreign rule in India, and religious belonging, such a public conversation–by such important voices–helps me underscore and frame how widespread “Müllerian” ideas about language and religion may have been, and to what avail.

Street Sign. New Delhi, India.

Street Sign. New Delhi, India.

Given contemporary debates on the utility of humanities in the face of STEM’s rise, it’s easy to forget that religion–as a broad, complicated category as well as those traditions that might comprise it–has long shaped questions and decisions in policy and governance. The op-eds I found not only foreground the creation of an institution that has the sound of a modern land-grant university, but also the vitality and necessity of understanding religion to the British Empire in India.  We do not need to agree with Indophilus and Philindus in an instrumental use of religion in the governance of society (and certainly not colonized societies) to appreciate their concern for the importance of religion as a part of public debate and conversation.

Religion, public debate, famed scholars, Orientalism, and calls for new universities for the betterment of Empire and subjects alike. Just one great day in the archives.