Phenomenology has long been seen as the source of uncritical approaches to the study of religion. This is because among those earlier practitioners of what became known as phenomenology of religion, empathy and description were prioritized over critical and theoretical examination. The advent of “critical phenomenology” within philosophy opens up an opportunity to return to phenomenology with fresh eyes. The panelists gathered here offer different approaches to engaging critical phenomenology and building on its insights within the field of religion.
Critical Phenomenology opens up space for the return to experience in religious studies. It does so by taking seriously the historical, social, and political constraints that shape our world, without losing sight of the experiences of individual persons living under those constraints. Given the polarized discourse surrounding the role of experience in religious studies—especially in light of the turn to new materialism and affect studies and away from purely structural analyses—critical phenomenology offers us a valuable tool for navigating the theoretical challenges we face. I contend that one of the more controversial subjects in phenomenology (and religious studies), what is called the first-person perspective, remains a necessary tool to understand our own normative engagements with what we study. I critically engage with Saba Mahmood’s normative vision (or lack thereof) in the _Politics of Piety_ in order to demonstrate the ongoing importance of this account of the self.
This paper interprets the film _The Embrace of the Serpent_ (2015) through a critical phenomenological lens and claims that the film exemplifies how “unconscious” or “anaesthetic” experiences might be understood not as defective modalities of experience, but as central aspects of it. The paper uses Cressida Heyes’ (2020) notion of the “anaesthetic” as a useful concept to think through experiences that usually fall outside the scope of traditional phenomenological assumptions about subjectivity and agency. In this case, the “anaesthetic” will be used to reflect on the function of hallucinatory experiences for indigenous peoples in the Colombian Amazon, as represented in the film. In a broader sense, the paper aims to exemplify how recent scholarship in critical phenomenology might offer useful tools to the philosophy of religion and to religious studies in general, especially in relation to questions of agency, experience, perception, and temporality.
If "Critical Phenomenology" is to be taken seriously as a methodology within Religious Studies, it must contend with not only problematic caricatures of Critical Theory and Phenomenology, but also Phenomenology of Religion. This paper explores Philosophy of Religion’s problematic past and its association with either theological projects or grandiose and supposedly universal theories of "Religion." It reflects upon a recent methodological experiment conducted in collaboration with a sociologist to argue that there are _already_ philosophers of religion engaging in phenomenological work that is both thoroughly rooted in particularity and thoroughly compatible with empirical verification. Ultimately, it concludes that Critical Phenomenology of Religion serves to renew—rather than simply dismiss—the history of the discipline.
Does history structure meaningful personal experience? If so, how might scholars carefully study historical events that constitute meaningful human experiences across time and space? This paper thinks through the compatibility of phenomenological and dialectical approaches to the historical study of religion. I argue that a critical, phenomenological approach tempers the historians' natural attitude–a “change-over-time” approach to historical study–by providing a means for criticizing what historians take for granted in the constitution of meaningful experience. Though phenomenology of religion may be contemporarily unfashionable to some, Africana scholars of religion have retooled phenomenological approaches to the study of religion to elucidate both the essential historical conditions constituting Africana religious experience and how these historical factors bear on the personal manufacture of meaning for Africana subjects. I extend lines of thought initiated by Dianne Stewart & Tracey Hucks, Ezra Chitando, and Charles Long regarding the facility of phenomenology to the historical study of Africana religion.
| Noreen Khawaja | noreen.khawaja@yale.edu | View |