Gaining Access to the Radically Unfamiliar: Religion in Modern Times

Postcolonial critique instructed anthropologists to turn to history in order to integrate time into their discourse. Yet historiography, even when undertaken from a postcolonial, subaltern standpoint, has foundered precisely on the challenge of doing justice to religious subjectivity. How then is the non-religious scholar to gain access to religious phenomena? Phenomenological understandings of body, temporality and place provide an alternative account of what it means to come to understand something. Seen from this perspective, disciplines such as anthropology in fact rely radically on time, on the capacity of the scholar's body to slowly effect a new synthesis of body, place and people. In the expansion that takes place lies the potential to come to understand, without any necessary involvement of consent or belief, the continuum between religious and non-religious experience.