Reframing the Taxonomic Enterprise: The Concept of Scripture As Species within A Higher Trope Of Genus
(Tina)Theresa Hannah-Munns
F. Volker Griefenhagen
September 18th, 2006
In crosscultural scholarship, no one conception of scripture is appropriate to handle the diversity of stories attributed to having a sacred nature. Besides the diversity found within humankind’s distinct cultures, each cultural grouping’s authoritative preference for differing narrative paradigms of writing, orality, iconic and/or pictorial representations explode the possibility for a specific Christian exemplar like the notion of scripture to act as a genus for crosscultural comparisons and conceptions. Add to this the confusion created by the use of multiple narrative paradigms alongside the authoritative format, and the conceptual need for change transfers from the domain of a species to that of a genus level within a larger network of polythetic-taxonomic enterprise.[i]
Needed is a genus trope that can contain such taxic indicators as scripture, sacred texts, oral narratives and the like. This need has been unconsciously assumed to have happened by such associations as “sacred texts/scripture” acting as if equivalent. William A. Graham points out the many problems around scripture as a genus category, including the fact that the word literally limits sacred narration to the “written or printed page”[ii] and, semantically-rooted, scripture means “a writing, something written.”[iii] This word formed exclusively around the conception of Judeo-Christian notions of scripture until the eighteenth century when it was expanded to include an outsider’s attempt to conceptualize the Qur’ān as sacred writing in 1734.[iv] In the nineteenth century with its periphery conquests outside of Europe, more generic equivalents were utilized such as sacred texts, sacred writings, and the like to handle the diversity of texts and became popularly interchanged with the notion of scripture.[v] This Eurocentric notion received such high esteem because of the colonizer’s ability to define and delimit other cultural knowledge in reference to Judeo-Christian foundations of belief and authority against those of the colonized. Other scriptural notions, such as kitāb from the Muslim community, are whitewashed into the Judeo-Christian scriptural notion of authoritative text rather than recognized as a complete and complex Muslim notion that includes the text as secondary to its primary use of being read out loud.[vi]
This functional primacy of scripture-in-use in the notion of kitāb is only visible within the Muslim classification system and expands crossculturally in reaction to being silenced within the euroacademic notion of scripture. This oral aspect of the notion does not enter into the notion of scripture unless both of these notions are relegated into individual tradition-based classification structures[vii] and then contrasted. The Muslim conception (kitāb) is framed within a distinct classification system from the Judeo-Christian conception (scripture) framed within its traditional classification framework. When this point of the research process is consciously recognized then crosscultural taxonomic frameworks can be created or reconceptualized to more fully compare and contrast equitable datum within equitable research processes. Scripture is delimited to its culturally-specific classification model and its identity can no longer encrypt crosscultural information as if a genus level trope. It becomes one sub-plot among many within the master narrative of the academic pursuit for knowledge rather than the “sacred text” inherent in that pursuit.
Sacred text may have some credibility as a genus trope as it does allow for multiple conceptions of textual formats, but still excludes oral forms of narration. Sacred texts can include non-canonized works published by oral traditions, great literary or theoretical works[viii] and even multi-media formats[ix] The notion of sacred text opens up the possibility to become less Eurocentric in our research process, but still emphasizes writing as normative over other mediums of narration that are being utilized to represent the sacred.
A more encompassing term is necessary for a genus trope for taxic indicators found in written, oral, iconic, and pictorial forms, along with the technological advancement of new mediums in which to communicate the sacred in imaginative ways. Polarized and didactic discriminations prevail within the medium of writing and no long works in conceptualizing human taxonomic systems. Jack Goody writes within this oppositional model that delimits knowledge into Eurocentric value systems and cultural identity formations of superior and inferior and perpetuates colonialism within academic thought and writing.[x] Scholars operating from within this limited worldview show very little socio-political or processual analyses of their own position and instead project these analyses onto their social objects, usually chosen because of their subalterness in society. It is their Otherness that makes them good objects that allows for the self-centered promotion of euroacademic methodologies and traditions of analyses that will show how the subaltern is at fault, such as Goody’s analysis of oral cultures as being “dependent upon practices that are relatively slow to adapt to new information, which in turn inhibits the accumulation of knowledge that would make change possible.”[xi]
This projection is true but not for the object of his attention but for our own self-awareness as academics. As euroacademics we have been slow to change and overly dependent on practices that inhibit new information by trying to fit crosscultural knowledges into our Christocentric constructed notions such as scripture, religion and the like. I propose that a separate genus needs to be conceptualized to handle multicultural specific data, with Christian species being delegated to tradition-based taxonomies while academics move towards a polythetic humanistic taxonomic system that privileges no one culture, race or ethnicity, but opens to greater understanding and alternative perspectives available to be attended to and conceived about humanity as a whole group of people, rather than humanity conceived as a Eurocentric construct of the privileged Academy.
[i] J.Z. Smith. (1982). Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jamestown. Chicago: University of Chicago, 8.
[ii] William A. Graham. (1987). “Scripture,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, v13. New York: Macmillan, 134.
[iii] Ibid, 135.
[iv] Ibid, 137.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] William A. Graham. (2001). “Qur’ān as Spoken Word,” Approaches to Islam in Religious Studies. Oxford: One World, 30.
[vii] Smith, 9.
[viii] See Robert Detweiler, (1985). “What is a Sacred Text?” Semeia 31.01,227-228.
[ix] For T.V. dramas as sacred text see: Quentin J. Schultze. (1990). “Television Drama as a Sacred Text,” Channels of Belief: Religion and American Commercial Television. Ames: Iowa State University.
[x] Jack Goody. (1998). “Canonization in Oral and Literate Cultures,” Canonization and Decanonization. Leiden, Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill, 3-16.
[xi] Ibid, 8.
Bibliography
