Video: Ethical Scholarship: Gender, Religion, and Difference

Full transcript:

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Ethical Scholarship. Gender, Religion, and Difference. August 30, 2023.

ANN BRAUDE: Good afternoon. Oh, yes, this definitely is on, and at quite a good level. My name is Anne Braude, I'm on the faculty here and director of the Women's Studies in Religion Program. And I'm really delighted to welcome you to Harvard Divinity School, and especially to our opening panel of the Women's Studies in Religion Program.

This program-- it's such a special moment to introduce new students to the new research associates. They arrived yesterday, so this is the first time that they are going to hear each other's speak, and that I will hear them speak about their projects. And you are here for the debut.

We would like to introduce the Women's Studies and Religion visiting research scholars to the new class because they're your class. There and this program is one of the things that connects the school to the really radical changes in our curriculum and our population that go back to the founding of this program in 1973, which was really inspired by student activism when women students came to HDS for the first time in significant numbers after having been admitted only in 1955.

And they noticed right away, gee, no women faculty, no women on the syllabi. What's going on here? So the idea was to start a program that would provide the resources to change that. And I think we're doing pretty well. You all have this piece of paper, which shows you the names of the people you're about to hear from and the projects that they're working on this year here at HDS.

If you turn this piece of paper over, you will see all of the scholars who have been in the Women's Studies in Religion Program since its inception in the 1970s. And you may see people here whose books you have read, who wrote those books in this program. And you see here people who studied with those people whose books you read, who wrote their books in this program.

And I am looking now out at people who are going to study with the people who are writing the books that you're going to assign to your students, and someday, join this what I think is really a proud legacy of Harvard Divinity School in placing women and religion and the Study of Gender centrally to what we do here and what we're committed to as an institution.

These scholars are here for one year that's why we're making sure you get a chance to hear from them now. They each will give a public lecture about their research during the year. And please watch for those announcements. We are all located across the street in the carriage house. We all have our offices there. It's kind of the edge of the campus, but do come see us and come find us.

Each scholar will be teaching a course closely related to her research topic. So that said, I'm going to let each of them very, very briefly introduce their topics. We're going to go in reverse, alphabetical order just to switch things up a little bit since we're all tired of being in alphabetical order.

And I'm going to start out with a question to each scholar, which I hope will give them a chance to let you know what their-- let them tell you what they're all about. So I'm, first, really happy to welcome Ashley Purpura, who comes to us from Purdue University, where she's on the faculty, and her project is entitled, Liberating Orthodoxy, Feminism, Faith, and Divine Otherness.

And we're so excited to have Ashley here. We've been looking for a scholar who would bring feminist theology into Eastern Orthodoxy for about 30 years. And we're thrilled to have Ashley here. It's really-- and I think your work really reminds us that feminist thought has gained little traction within Orthodox Christianity.

Because this tradition values it-- because of the feminist values of equality, freedom, autonomy, choice, self-advocacy, and reproductive justice that have been seen as being intended with deeply held spiritual values of ascetic obedience, humility, hierarchy, renunciation, martyrdom, and the sanctity of life in this tradition.

So how do you plan to overcome these apparent contradictions, and what can Orthodox Christianity add to discussions of feminist theology? Ashley.

ASHLEY PURPURA: Thank you, Anne, for these-- is it on? There we go.

ANN BRAUDE: Yeah. You might get a little closer.

ASHLEY PURPURA: Thank you for your questions. And I'll just note that yes, you have maybe been looking for this type of project for 30 years, and that's probably because Orthodox Christianity and scholarship in this area is about 30 years behind. So we're a few waves behind in terms of feminist engagement.

But I'll note that there has been engagement, even though in my proposal for this project and in some of my other work, I note the dearth of feminist scholarship in Orthodox Christianity, there have been women for decades writing. And they may not be considered "theologians," and there's all sorts of gatekeeping analysis that we could do to understand why that's the case, but then have been drawing on their tradition to find ways to push back against androcentric and exclusively patriarchal views about their faith, and to find a voice within it.

So I think the first way I'll tackle your question and keep in mind, I have five minutes, I'm timing myself to answer, and then I'm writing a 300 page book that'll do a better job. But there really is-- there needs to be some contextualization of these spiritual values that are so highly held within I say, Eastern, but Orthodox Christianity about asceticism kenosis or the self-emptying, self-sacrificial love, which are all wonderful things. But we know as scholars of gender and sexuality that they've been used against women, in particular, as ways to uphold patriarchal values and systems of oppression.

So how to undo that? One thing is to first acknowledge that they're not neutral. They're not universal, and they ignore the intersectionality that is present within Eastern Orthodox thought and the communities that draw on it.

The second thing I'll note is that it's really significant to look at the people that have already offered alternatives. So women within this tradition, so there's a whole history of communism and feminism that came out of that. There's Orthodox converts in America who brought with them, perhaps a more evangelical conservative kind of approach to sexuality and gender that converted into orthodoxy as a safe haven from things like women's ordination or feminism.

So there's all different kind of historical and sociological backgrounds to these issues. But women have, within orthodoxy from all those perspectives, have engaged their faith and have found other types of values. And so something that I draw on this project is looking at women writers who maybe have not been considered "theologians" but have been writing and asking for greater equality in their faith.

So there's a lot of English speakers in that category, and there's some French speakers, some Russian speakers, some Greeks that if you take my class, which I'll talk about tomorrow, we'll also be reading them.

I'll also note that really, it has to be-- and this is my approach for this topic, has to be constructive theological project. Theology has been written one way within this tradition that is very patriarchal, something that orthodoxy kind of boasts about. This is the faith of our fathers. OK, well, there are mothers there too. There are women there also. So it's a rewriting of the narrative.

And one way to do that is to look theologically is who do Orthodox claim God is, and how do they believe God is in relation to humanity. And then taking that as a starting point, something that I do in my work is look at-- OK, we see God as the embodiment and-- well, embodiment, but also the source of all power. So then how does that reconfigure our conception of power relationships between men and women, or any other marginalized group, or something like that?

And so we see this a different conception of power as ultimately self-giving as empowering the marginalized. There's all sorts of Christological kind of arguments, sub-arguments that I'll make about that. And bringing this differences of otherness into union, right. So we have the most powerful person emptying himself of his power to bring up the most fallen, the most lowly.

And so this is something other traditions liberation theology has been drawing on for decades. Orthodox are little slow to the game, but I think they have a lot to offer in this way. And so that's something to your second point, Ann, about what can orthodoxy bring to feminist theology beside sharing the own theological, our own theological emphasis on things like theosis, or Pascha, or the Resurrection as being kind of a point where we're going to defend life, women's lives, right, in the face of systems of oppression that would proclaim death or something like this, that there's different heritage there in a tradition.

And also just another way of saying you can rebuild from within a tradition that's been historically androcentric and patriarchal, and reclaim, have kind of a reclamation of resources and approaches and theological belief from within it on behalf of women.

ANN BRAUDE: Thank you so much Ashley.

[APPLAUSE]

 

Can I go out of order and go to Fareen? That's our reverse alphabetical order. Professor Fareen Parvez comes to us from the University of Massachusetts where she's an associate professor in the Sociology Department. And she is working this year on an ethnographic project entitled, "Women Trauma and the Islamic Sciences of Healing, a Case Study of Jinn Possession in Morocco."

FAREEN PARVEZ: Thank you. Is this on? can hear me? OK, great. Thank you, Anne, for the excellent questions that I referenced.

ANN BRAUDE: Oh, which I forgot to ask.

[LAUGHS]

FAREEN PARVEZ: Do you want to ask?

[LAUGHTER]

 

ANN BRAUDE: She knows what the question is. But let me share it with the--

[LAUGHTER]

 

Thank you so much. This is the question I posed to Fareen. You've had the unique opportunity to conduct in-depth interviews with working class women in Morocco who have experienced jinn possession and have sought healing within the Islamic tradition often for experiences of trauma related to love sex, marriage, and sexual assault. Why is this practice controversial in contemporary Islam? And what can students of trauma related to sexual violence learn from this Moroccan case study?

FAREEN PARVEZ: Great. Thank you. And thank you for the opportunity to introduce myself, and welcome to all of you. We're all newbies, I guess, to the institution. So we're in this together. So--

ANN BRAUDE: Are you hearing her?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

ANN BRAUDE: Yeah. Get it really close.

AUDIENCE: No over here.

FAREEN PARVEZ: Closer.

ANN BRAUDE: No over there, Yeah.

FAREEN PARVEZ: OK. Is that better?

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

FAREEN PARVEZ: Sure. So my research has been on jinn possession or spirit possession in Morocco, and it's a fairly prevalent social phenomenon. There's a long tradition in anthropology, less so in sociology, which is my home discipline of studying this topic in different parts of Africa. But there's not much work on the revival of what's called the "Islamic sciences of healing" or known as [NON-ENGLISH]. So it's a contribution in that respect.

So I was studying this field of religious healing, spending time with healers, and also with patients, mostly women, although men get possessed too. And I did have the opportunity to observe and interview a number of men. So the question of why is this practice of both possession and attempts at religious healing controversial is, it's an important one.

And it's controversial-- one, theologically, two, kind of within societies, and three, also at the level of the state. So theologically, the existence of jinns is not particularly controversial. It's established in the Quran, in the Holy Text. The controversy is whether or not jinns actually have agency, if they have an impact on people, whether they can actually touch you or possess you.

And I met many people, especially those with more educated backgrounds who don't believe that, who don't believe there's any religious basis for this. And then of course, there are the patients and healers who do believe it and who experience it. And this gets at the sociological issue in terms of there's a social hierarchy of what forms of healing are considered legitimate, and what forms of healing and types of practice are authentically Islamic. So it's a very dynamic debate.

The healing-- so-called "healing" field with the greatest legitimacy is still Western scientific medical care, but the field of Islamic healing is in the throes of trying to carve out a status of professional and religious legitimacy. And they tend to distinguish themselves from traditional healers whom they claim are superstitious, polytheistic, and essentially un-Islamic. And often it's traditional female healers who get denigrated in this very complex dynamic of defining boundaries around legitimate and illegitimate practice.

And then finally, at the level of politics, the Moroccan state finds this all very problematic and troubling, as anti-modern, unscientific. They also conflate possession and Islamic healing with fundamentalist political movements. So for example, two of the healers I observed had been in prison. They were under regular surveillance because they'd been accused by the State of anti-state organizing. So that's some background as to why this is actually a controversial phenomenon.

So what can students of trauma related to sexual violence learn from this Moroccan case study? And the connection to this question is that so many of the patients who I observed kind of incidentally mentioned experiences of sexual violence and gender-based violence.

This is a really important key question that I want to think through this year. So for now, I'll just say, I think women search for ways to express their pain, spiritual, emotional, physical, and find ways to explain, to cope with, to make sense of their suffering. And all of this has to happen within the confines of family structures, gender, and sexual norms, and gender relations.

And jinn possession in ruqyah, the Islamic healing is one avenue in setting where their suffering is taken seriously from what I observed in a way that's very different from the Western medical system, so the field of religious healing has a lot of problems, but there's a certain ethic of care in that relationship between the Islamic healer and the patient that is really critical, And it's also kind of powerful to be able to place agency onto the jinn, to the spirit, or to share agency with the jinn as you try to understand your own experiences in history.

And I'll just say that the challenge for me as a scholar is to not impose a Western secular scientific perspective on their situations. And instead, to be able to really accept and sit with the reality of possession, and to translate concepts like trauma across different worldviews because most of the people I met and interviewed don't necessarily make the connection between experiencing or witnessing gender-based violence and their possession. Whereas for me as the scholar, it seemed very, very clearly connected. So I think there's important methodological, epistemological questions in this project.

ANN BRAUDE: Thank you so much for these insights.

[APPLAUSE]

 

It's so thrilling to get to hear from these scholars after waiting for them to arrive for a year. We're going to turn next to Zahra Moballegh who comes to us from the-- she was trained and taught at the University of Tehran, and she has worked at research institutes in Women's Studies in Tehran.

Zahra, you have spent many years analyzing the stories of female characters in the Quran to discern how God's view of women and femininity is presented in the text. How does this approach allow new understandings of Quranic teachings about women's role in Islam?

And Zahra is coming to us a second time. She was here four years ago. And if you have time, I'd love to hear you reflect on how changes in Iran have changed your approach to this topic.

ZAHRA MOBALLEGH: Thank you. Thank you so much, Ann, for your interesting question. And thank you everyone for joining us today. As Professor Braude mentioned, it's over several years that I'm working on the stories of women in the Quran.

ANN BRAUDE: Can you hold the mic close?

ZAHRA MOBALLEGH: Yeah. OK, and so it has been a long project, and it has developed into something else from its beginning to what is now. The project initiated when I was writing the entry on women in the Quran for the Encyclopedia of Islam. And for writing that entry, I had to read the Quranic text, read the Bible, and I had to read the exegetical resources many times.

And through reading these resources, I could find or observe some features about women in the original resources that has remained absent from the modern representations of women in the Islamic tradition. So I decided to come back to those material and recover the ignored features of women in the Islamic resources.

And one part of this material were the narratives of women, especially in the Sacred Text. And also we can recover them in other materials, such as historical resources, lexicon in lexical books. Many resources can be read as the narratives of women, and I especially focused on the narratives of women in the Quran.

Simply in at first, it was a study, a narratological study about the role of women in the Quranic narratives. So at first, a friend and I simply tried to analyze the narrative Quranic fragments in which a woman has a role as a heroine or a secondary character. And we had prospectively in mind some common characteristics among the positive characters such as making dialogue with God, applying a kind of relational wisdom, being empathetic, and being faithful to God.

So we provided a long list of characteristics of women in the stories that are in sharp contrast to what is presented in the Islamic tradition as women's nature. But it didn't bring any surprise to us. The appealing discovery of the research appeared when we endeavored to reconstruct the plot, the atmosphere, and the point of view of the narrator in every single narrative.

After this try, after this endeavor, a narrator unfolded before our eyes who was making the story world through the act of narrating and by the aid of different narratological strategies. And in developing most of the stories, including a woman character, the Quranic narrator turned out to be in a revolutionary struggle against the patriarchal atmospheres.

And she was struggling against patriarchy that was-- and this struggle was running in a silent and hidden layer of the text. So it is not obvious. When we read the stories very simply, we can't see, we can discover this struggle. We should see the text and ask the text narratological questions from a narratological perspective, and then we can discover or recover this very deep struggle in a hidden layer of the text.

And beside all these narratological elements, we considered a repeated phenomenon in the narrating style of the Quranic stories. It was that the narrator repeatedly leaves some crucial parts of the plot of the stories silent or covers some important information in the warp and woof of the words.

There are so many other narratological elements when we analyze the narratives of women in the Quran, and all of these narratological elements which are related to the features of a Quranic narrator sparked the idea of developing a kind of narrative Islamic theology, and an ethical theory that is related to it.

So we tried to recover a divine narrator who is in the process of becoming what it is through the eternal act of telling the stories of the marginalized women. And she is also in interaction with its audiences by leaving many silent and implicit contents within its narratives.

So we believe that Quranic narratives have a great potential to open a new theological world in front of us. And if we try to watch the sacred texts through his narratives and considering the author of the text as a narrator instead of a commander, who is telling the stories of some human beings, especially the marginalized and hidden women, that may change our understanding of our images of the divine and the nature of the Sacred Text. And also that may change an understanding of the role of women in Islam and how Islam may represent women in a different way.

And all these changes in turn can lead to a paradigm shift in Muslims approaches to how and what an Islamic ethical and legal system should be. So I hope if we can develop a process theology, a new narrative theology that is inevitably a kind of a process theology, that theology may let emotions enter the realm of legislation in the Islamic tradition, and that would pave the way for making policies more local and more adaptable to the diversity of lives.

So as to your second question, that is what I could observe in Iran during the last movement, the last Iranian women movement just as an observer, not as someone who attended or participated in the movement. When I was watching what is happening not only in the social media, but in the streets of Iran, I could see a kind of universal human community that has or had been expanded throughout the history of humanity.

And I want to tell you that human community is not restricted to any region to any time. When you hear the slogans in the street in Iran, that slogans, they are very progressive. As someone who has written in this field, in the field of women's liberation in Iran, I didn't believe, I couldn't believe that women in Iran and men in Iran could have such progressive ideas about liberty, about freedom, about women's rights.

So it was really amazing how people could reach this understanding, this high level of understanding about freedom, about democracy, about human rights while we have a very-- we didn't have enough background in this field. So I think that all you are doing here, all we are doing here and in other places, in the Divinity School, and in philosophy schools, wherever we are doing something about humanity, these things are like a spiritual community.

And these efforts continue to live and grow within the processes of struggling for living by women and men around the world. And the achievements of your endeavors, your writings, your thoughts, the concepts that you create, the language that you use, you apply, the universal literature that is being created within our activities, all of these can be transmitted to the next generations. And it's like a process of reproduction.

So I want to tell you that your endeavors in WSRP, at HDS, all of these theoretical discussions and the practices of sisterhood, all are being spread into the minds of some people you have never met in person, but they remain alive and make changes in their real lives of women, men, and those who seek freedom around the world. So I want to appreciate all your efforts here and wherever you are doing something for human beings.

ANN BRAUDE: Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]

 

Next, it's a pleasure to welcome back to HDS Samira Mehta, who is a Professor of Jewish Studies and gender studies at the University of Colorado. I should mention that both Ashley Purpura and Samira Mehta once sat where you sit now as master's students here at HDS.

So Samira, you've been working for several years on your book, God Bless the Pill, one of the best book titles I've come across on the intertwining histories of religion and contraception in the United States. How did the Supreme Court's 2022 decision overturning Roe versus Wade affect your approach your approach to this topic, or did it?

SAMIRA MEHTA: Thank you. And that's a really important question. And thank you to all of you for being here. It's true. 21 years ago, I was sitting where you are sitting now, and it's really therefore, extra special to me to be back. So I think one of the things that I learned as I was training to be a historian is that one of the ways-- so one of the ways that historians insult each other is they accuse people's work of being presentist. And what that means is that you are reading your present moment into the past.

Now, I'm going to suggest that, in some ways, presentism is inevitable, right? The moment that we're in shapes the questions that we ask of the past. It shapes the perspective with which we look at the past. What you want to try to do is avoid having it too strongly shape the answers that you find in the past. But there's sort of this idea that historical work is descriptive work. It's describing something that happened. And then work like what Ashley or Zahra are describing is normative work, it's creating a potential future.

And that's not really true, right? The way that we think about history-- yes, you're describing something, but you're bringing your moral values to it. And that's something that I've been working on this project for not quite 10 years. But that's something that's become very clear to me in the past, I would say, two to three years.

I'm not sure if Dobbs changed things dramatically, but here are the three questions that because of the moment I'm writing this project, I find myself thinking about. The first is, what is religious freedom when it comes to reproductive rights? Now, part of the reason I think about religious freedom is that I've got a close friend who is a thought partner, who writes specifically on religious freedom in other contexts.

And one of the important things to note is that throughout history, whose freedom you're talking about changes. So we are in a moment where in for instance, the Hobby Lobby case, which was a Supreme Court case, that said Hobby Lobby, an organization, a privately held company owned by evangelicals, did not have to provide health insurance for the IUD because they believe that the IUD causes abortion. So the idea is that it's not actually a form of preventative birth control, but a form of abortion. It does not matter that the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology does not agree with this, right?

So if you look back into the past and to the era that I'm writing about, which is the sort of immediately post World War II era, people are making religious freedom arguments then as well. Religious freedom arguments are all over conversations about contraceptive access. But instead of thinking of the company or the health care provider as having religious freedom, they're thinking about the woman and her religious freedom.

So I write about this court case where the city of New York is debating whether they can have diaphragms in public hospitals. About 50% of the New York tax base is Catholic. The Catholic Church condemns contraception. Can you use Catholic tax dollars to put diaphragms in a pharmacy, in a public hospital, even though like you're going to pay for your diaphragm when you get it, right? So it's not state-funded.

And what you see are Protestant and Jewish clergy arguing, this is a religious freedom issue. Women who are dependent on the public hospitals, so lower income women, have every right to use contraception as their religion dictates. So I think about how is religious freedom as a concept used, whose religious freedom matters in contraceptive debates in different moments.

I also ask, how has contraception been framed in different moments in history? And if you look again at that post-war period, you see contraception being framed as a moral good. People are coming up with theologies, of responsible parenthood. And what they mean by that, it means something different in conservative Catholic contexts now. But in the middle of the 20th century, it means thinking about how many children you can have with reference to a number of other factors-- your economic health, your emotional capacity to care for children, what it means to be a good steward of the planet.

Now, all of these sound sort of good in the way that I describe them, but I also think about what's going on there. So what does it mean to be able to support your children in according to your economics? It turns out that the people who were developing this theology were, by and large, middle and upper middle class, white Protestant leaders.

So they're thinking about a fairly resource intensive way of raising children, and an increasingly resource intensive way in that moment because the percentage of the population that is going to college is skyrocketing.

And so that's not necessarily good or bad. They're talking about many things that many people want to be able to give their children, but they start pathologizing people who, for a variety of reasons, most of which are based in how race works in the United States are not necessarily structurally available, right. There's systemic racism that prevents everybody from being able to access what looks like "responsible parenthood," and then people get penalized when they can't do that.

The resource question, population control, this is-- right now, like, we're likely to think of it in terms of the climate crisis that's also a racially inflected conversation. Yes, they are saying to their upper middle class white congregations, you shouldn't have more than two or three kids. But the pictures that they're showing are of Africa, of Asia, places where they're kind of depicting huge numbers of kids and huge numbers of poverty. And they're not thinking about the implications of their resource intensive child-rearing or lifestyle on a global food economy, for instance. So it's not just celebrating these things.

And that leads to the third thing that I think about, which it turns out you would think a push to expand contraception would be feminist. No, not really. Nobody in the middle of the 20th century in these really public influential conversations. Plenty of women totally know what they're up to. Margaret Sanger, absolutely who is a leader in the birth control movement in the first half of the 20th century, absolutely is thinking about feminist implications.

But what they're thinking about is family stability. They are thinking about maternal health because a family in which it's sort of the first marriage, no one is being raised by a stepmother, they're thinking is a healthier family. They're thinking that if a couple can have basically a really healthy and robust sex life without straining the family by having too many kids, for what they can comfortably support, marriages will not fail. They're worried about a rising divorce rate, right?

So they're thinking about family stability. They're thinking about global resources. They're not calling the fact that if you had access to the birth control pill, you might go to law school. They're also thinking that the reason that women enter the workforce is because if you can't control the number of kids you have, you can't scale it to an income, right?

So I try to look at all of these things and take the past on its own terms, but then I do use it to fuel a feminist activist agenda in my own writing. So I collaborate with my colleague, who writes on religious freedom, and we write op-eds in response to Dobbs talking about the need to protect the individual religious freedom, pushing for that kind of earlier definition because we think that, that's something that the Supreme Court, whatever one might think of their sort of politics around women's bodies, otherwise, may be more receptive to.

With another colleague, who's a historian of Medicine, we write when the Dobbs' decision says, "abortion is not present in American history." We write back against it, pointing out that there are advertisements in 18th and 19th, early 19th century newspapers for abortifacients, right?

And so we can use that history to advocate for feminist principles in the current moment. At the same time, that, again, one can use one's contemporary position to inform the questions you ask, but not always the answers you find. That doesn't mean that you can't find ways to deploy those answers in your contemporary moment.

ANN BRAUDE: Thank you so much, Samira.

[APPLAUSE]

 

I'm very happy next to welcome Elena Herminia Guzman, who is an assistant professor of Women's Studies and African religions at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. Elena, your work uses a variety of media to explore the use of ritual in the search for identity in the African diaspora. You are a filmmaker, as well as an ethnographer. And I'm outing you as I know there are a lot of people interested in film here.

And you've had to pursue more kinds of training than many of your colleagues and master multiple modes of inquiry and expertise to combine these approaches. Why did you do this? It's a ton of work. And how does the use of film benefit your academic work, and how does your academic work benefit your work as a filmmaker?

ELENA HERMINIA GUZMAN: Thank you for those questions, Ann. And thank you all for being here. I often joke around with people that I have two full-time jobs as a filmmaker, and also as a Professor, which is probably three full-time jobs. So I have a lot of full-time jobs. But I guess to answer this question, I kind of have to go back a little bit to my original training, which is in anthropology, which I was first introduced to in undergraduate.

And the anthropology that I learned from the jump was Black, Latinx, Indigenous, it was activists, it was engaged. I went to Hunter College in New York City. And so it was very different experience. And then when I went to grad school, it was a very, very different experience. I learned that, that is not actually mainstream anthropology.

[LAUGHTER]

 

So from that moment, I ended up having a crisis a bit about anthropology. And it came in graduate school when I was taking a history of anthropology, theoretical course. And we were reading Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Malinowski. And for those of you who aren't familiar with that book, it is often thought to be the beginning of the understanding of ethnography as a field method within anthropology and the social sciences.

And so what I learned at that point was that anthropology was deeply a part of the colonial mission of-- like literal colonialism, not just like colonial and thought, but colonialism in describing people, other cultures, et cetera. I learned that in ethnography or the building of the methodology that they actually were drawing from objective scientific methods, where say, someone like-- someone who studies birds would go to the field. They would observe birds behavior, and then they would then report their findings in their work.

And so ethnography or what we call "field work" actually stems from this ideal that humans and cultures can be observed and understood in the same way that animals can. And so you can see how this is a very deeply troubling foundation. And so when I learned this, I thought if this is the foundation of anthropology and ethnography, how can I, as a person of color, as someone who is reading these texts that my ancestors are being called primitive, that my ancestors are being called savages, and our practices are being called savages, how can I legitimately say that I can practice this?

And it was a real crisis moment for me. I almost quit graduate school because of that. And so I was in this crisis moment, and I started to learn a little bit more about anthropologists who were doing other kinds of work and really digging into my foundations of what I thought anthropology was. And so I was learning about Zora Neale Hurston. I was learning about Pearl Primus, Kathryn Dunham, all of these people who had creative practices as a core part of their anthropological practices and as a way to understand their own customs and beliefs.

So not understanding as an anthropology in terms of the cultural other, but more so understanding what it is that fuels our communities and our passions, and how can we use this and engage in activist ways. So that's the anthropology that I knew that I could depend on. And so simultaneously, at the same time, during this crisis, I was introduced to film. And film became the medium that I decided I wanted my work to engage with, particularly to understand ritual performance within the African diaspora.

And so coincidentally, while I was in graduate school, someone named JP Sniadecki, who actually was here at the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, he was trained here, was at my graduate school. And he taught a bunch of the graduate school students in anthropology how to make films. And we all just were so excited, and we were like, that's it. This is what we're doing. This is what we want to do.

So I learned how to make films because I wanted to make something that my family could understand, because I love them. They're never going to read my articles.

[LAUGHTER]

 

And I'm OK with that. But they are going to watch my films and they're going to be able to engage with it at a different level. And I think what that points to also is a really fundamental-- something fundamental for us to think about is how is knowledge created, and how is knowledge produced?

In academia, it's often through-- we expect the book, we expect the articles. And when I wrote my dissertation-- well, I had to write a dissertation. I couldn't do a film as a dissertation, right? So that is still the expectation even for my tenure requirements. Nobody's going to be like, oh, you got a film. Great. You got tenure. That would be wonderful.

[LAUGHTER]

 

I'm fighting for it, I should say. So kind of connecting film and the work that I do in film to my research, and my broader research, I look at Black ritual diasporic practices in the United States, in the Caribbean, in Latin America. So I come from that perspective as both a practitioner and a scholar as well, someone who is a practitioner of many of these religions that I teach as well, teach and study.

And so I became really interested in the thinking about film and ritual together and how we can represent ritual in film. And so rather than kind of showing it in an ethnographic manner, where let's say, for example, in a lot of traditions that have altars as a kind of ritual, if I were to film an altar, if I were just to do it in a kind of standard way, it doesn't actually represent the reality that's happening. It's simply showing these objects, and maybe a person's behavior around those objects, right?

And so rather than wanting to represent them in of realist terms, I thought, how can I represent ritual in a way that people experience it? So when someone builds an altar, that the ideal is that they're transcending between a physical and a spiritual world. So how can I visually represent that to actually represent the experience that someone's feeling? And so that's become one of my primary interests is thinking about how can-- that kind of metaphysical, how can that ethereal experience actually be represented through the visual?

And that, in some ways, has to become experimental rather than ethnographic, even though we might think of ethnographic as quote, unquote, "more scientific" or more so a "real representation." But I think that, that is when we start grappling with what is real, and how do we even define that, right?

So I think through film, we're able to really show what can happen with ritual, how we are able to transcend space and time so that when someone lights a candle, it's not simply the act of striking a match. It is a whole world opening. And so that's something that I got to experiment with recently for a film that I just finished.

It's a documentary film that looks at Black women's mental health and spirituality together. And it's specifically one of the things I wanted to depict in the film was an altar. And I thought, well, how can I do this? And also altars are sacred spaces. And so we don't necessarily want to represent them on camera. And so with a really amazing team of people, we used animation to kind of show an altar in the world that opens up in that altar, right?

And so this is something that I'm thinking about through my film work, but also through my scholarship as well. So my larger book project is looking at film as a kind of ritual practice, but it's also thinking about other ritual practices within the African diaspora. And so I'm looking at Haitian vodou, Lucumi. I'm looking at Obeah, and other West African practices that made their way to the Americas, and looking at how women and non-binary people, in particular, and gender queer people use ritual to create these spiritual crossings.

ANN BRAUDE: Thank you so much. Really fascinating.

[APPLAUSE]

 

And the last scholar that I'm going to introduce, I think, we're actually going to end on time. Thank you. This group is amazing to get this much content into this time slot. And we're going to conclude with Jessica Fowler, who comes to us from the University of Western Montana, who works on the Spanish Inquisition and the spread of global heresy.

Jessica, your work explores the overlap between the Spanish Inquisition and Spain's establishment of a global empire, following the prosecution of women heretics to Mexico, Peru, and the Philippines from the European context. How does the Inquisition look different when it's viewed in the context of colonial expansion? How does broadening the geographical range for studying the Inquisition advance the project of studying women and gender? Jessica.

JESSICA FOWLER: So nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition to spread heresy. Good, we're done here.

[LAUGHTER]

That's it. No, but in a slightly more fuller image of this. As the Inquisition spreads across the Spanish empire, it is the only institution in the Spanish empire that actually encompasses the entirety of the Spanish empire. We're talking three continents, two oceans, and it turns out they're excellent bureaucrats.

And so we find a group of women who are saying, maybe they don't need these Catholic men between them and God. Maybe they got this. They don't need the rituals. They don't need the prescriptions. And the Spanish Inquisition decides they must be heretics. Certainly, women are out of control once again.

And so we named them a "sect," which means they are out there. They're going to be spreading-- they're going to be spreading this news. We must wrap this up tight, friends. The problem is, these women actually don't get along. They have no statement of faith. They don't actually share common beliefs. But whatever, the people who are dictating the terms of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and have the power, and have the knowledge call them a sect.

And there we have it. We have alumbrados, "the enlightened ones." However, once you name them a sect, you've got to let everybody know to be on the lookout. And once the Inquisition spreads to Lima, to Mexico, and to Manila, suddenly inquisitors all over the global are looking for unruly women, who they could vaguely say, are a little too excited about religion and maybe are having visions and mystical experiences, and maybe some weird thing with demons. Eek.

[LAUGHTER]

 

It's a broad category. And so they suddenly wrap all these women up and call them a sect, and say, look, it's global. We got to keep talking about them. They might get away unnoticed if we don't tell people about them. And it turns out when you tell inquisitors, "good work for finding heretics," they will keep looking. And they will be like, you seem vaguely. Yes, yes, you.

[LAUGHTER]

 

And so the Inquisition manages through its own personnel paperwork and procedures to find heretics in places they never existed. It turns out the women originally named alumbrados do not move. The women who proceed to be named alumbrados across the empire and across 200 years don't move. Heretics aren't moving. Discourses about heretics are moving.

And so what the Spanish Inquisition aces as it spreads across the empire is communication. And so I'm studying how a heretical discourse spreads across the empire and how the Inquisition in its pursuit to police heretics actually will produce more of them. And so ultimately, persecution is productive, not in the great way we all like to have a good productive work day. But it does produce things.

We have no records of these women heretics except via the Inquisition. They don't exist. They don't have writings, they don't have any shared faith that we can tell. They aren't even connected to each other. But the Inquisition says they are. And so my project unravels how the kind of power knowledge nexus creates heretics and how, in persecution being productive, the Inquisition does unexpectedly spread heresy.

ANN BRAUDE: Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]

 

Well, you can imagine the conversations that we're going to be having in the carriage house as we share our work in progress. I can't tell you what a great job I have getting to work with these scholars and a new group of scholars like them every year. Thank you so much for joining us.

[APPLAUSE]

 

Have a great year.

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SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2023. The President and Fellows of Harvard College.