I've been watching the Daily Show and thinking about Mumbai.

I do religious studies for a variety of reasons, mainly because it's interesting. But what it does is push out into other related fields, right now ethics and history. I've been reading and grappling with Foucault (Archaeology of Knowledge) and Braudel (On History) and wondering about structures and discourses and statements, and more than that, of possibilities. Braudel and Foucault both open up new ways of looking at possibilities, for academic studies and otherwise. Foucault (at least in Archaeology) wants to create a metadiscourse, a discourse about discourses. And when we look at discourses, when we analyze statements, we find out what's possible for us to think, what's possible for us to study. Foucault fights against structures (for reasons I have to go back and re-explore), but does it in such a way that he opens up new modes of analysis, new tools for use. But enough about Foucault; he's one of the seminal thinkers for a reason, and I'd need to do a deeper look at his nuances to feel more comfortable talking about him.

Braudel is interesting because of the ways in which he is a structural thinker, but not in the traditional sense of the term. He's not bound by structures, but instead is invested in methods and undercurrents, not slave to individual events but attempting to master them by putting them in a much larger stream. But more than that is his plea for the human sciences to begin listening to each other, contributing to the greater understanding of humanity/culture/civilization. I'm unclear on this first reading whether Braudel agrees with Levi-Strauss in saying that mythology is a type of longue duree, but I think it's certainly worth taking those tools outside of the human sciences and into the humanities.

The point of all of this (besides getting ruminations off of my mind) is to say that the situation in Mumbai needs to be addressed differently. There's a huge historical and theological component here that isn't being addressed; I know that kind of commentary tends to come after some more facts have come out, but in this case it's being overshadowed by this whole Pakistan situation. Historically, there's a whole lot going on here and we're getting a lot of rhetoric about American views on terrorism and very little about India. The long history of Islam and Hindu relations deserves closer examination. The problem is that our American discourse is conditioned by 9/11 and, in many cases, Islamophobia, and that does a disservice to the uniquely Indian elements of the Mumbai attacks. I read comments about how India may have gotten word about these attacks days beforehand and not done anything about it, and I wonder why that's particularly relevant in this case. What matters now is how we move forward; terrorism is a long-standing element of history, as is inter-religious or inter-national violence. How have those elements manifested themselves in different ways throughout history and how have we dealt with them? How have they changed now, and how should we think about those changes?

In some sense, this is a larger ethical question. I skim around on the internet, highbrow and lowbrow, and I keep on running across people who refuse to acknowledge the point of view of anything besides their own familiar context. Secular or religious, Euro-American or otherwise, I wonder whether there is an obligation, a duty to try to put oneself in the position of another. I'm fascinated by literary ethics, the work of Martha Nussbaum but even the ethical content inherent in Eco or the Sanskrit literary philosophers. We are permeable, and especially in traumatic or emotionally wrenching situations we have the opportunity to reflect and ruminate. Perhaps because we don't track personal change on the internet as easily as we do in real life, we don't get to see those changes very often, but there is a lot of obstinence and talking past one another.

I read an article recently that said that we've become a post-modern society, that the European schools of postmodern thought had the last laugh in the end because of the ways in which modern discourse analyzes events and news. We ask what identity means, what McCain's claims that we don't actually know "the real Obama" meant, we deconstruct and are willing to deal with subtler claims and how those claims are made. Yet as often as those are used as critical tools, they are very rarely used in a comprehensive mode of critical thought, one which is then applied back on oneself. This is one of the debates I have with myself: I don't do theology in the traditional sense, I may study it as a discourse or anthropologically or historically or one of any number of other ways, but not as a normative field. Yet in religious ethics and semiotics, I think there is a normative aspect (leaving aside the fact that I would claim that there is ethical content in any field of study or worldview) (and yes I am conflating ethics and normativity here for the moment). Is it the place of such fields of study to actually compel us to change on a personal level, not just on the level of discourse? Should we develop tools of analysis which we then apply to ourselves outside of our studies? I'm not so blase as to think that is possible.

This is the first post, the third time I've tried to start one of these blogs. I want this to continue because I think that discourse needs a partner, many partners, whether they agree or disagree. We'll see what develops, and I would like to look back on this in a few years and laugh at the development of this space, tentative early gropings at Foucault and Braudel and vague ruminations on ethics.