TEXT vs. ACTION: The Great Debate between Textual Scholars and Performance Theorists

What’s wrong with the hermenuetical stance and agenda of the textual scholar?

There are two main difficulties scholars must account for when attempting to study religions. The first is the definition of religion and the second, which stems from the first, is how to understand religions as continuously changing and adjusting to the economic, social and political events. Earlier this semester we discussed the definition of religion and the different baggage which is consciously or unconsciously carried within this term. I do not wish to re-define Religion, partly because I am not entirely sure how, however I would like to address the second related issue being the changing of religious experience.

There is no religion that has remained static and has not in some way adjusted to new ideas, cultural change or political influence. The question of how to study a religion that is constantly changing (or has gone through a variety of changes in the past) is one of the questions that is addressed by performance theorists. As an example I will use Judaism. If you look at Judaism in antiquity and compare it to Medieval Judaism or even to Modern Judaism, you would see that Jewish communities from different periods understood themselves in very different ways and perhaps they would not even recognize each other as belonging to the same faith tradition. All these different variations of Judaism used the Torah. A hermeneutical approach would understand their community in light of the Torah and emphasize that the way to understand their community was the way in which the Torah was interpreted, while a scholar ascribing to performance theory would try to understand the rituals and the human actions that made up their various forms of Judaism. (Note: I hope that I do not offend when I refer to different “variations” of Judaism, I do not mean to be disrespectful I just want to differentiate between different periods, the same could be done for any religion). I use this example to outline the different ways to approach religion.

Furthermore another question is which aspects of religion should be studied? Is it the “scripture” which teaches the religion (advocated by hermenutics), or is it the religious “rituals” or perhaps it is the feelings and emotions which are experienced by the participants in the religious tradition. Catherine Bell writes that the language of performance theory is a counter-approach to the one advocated by the “scholarly tendency to approach religious activity as if it were either a type of scriptural text to be analyzed or the mere physical execution of a preexisting ideology” (Bell, 207). Performance theory, as she advocates, is a way of going beyond a textual analysis to try and “decode action as action” (Bell, 206). She would argue against Paul Ricoeur that text metaphors as a way of understanding religions is not a satisfactory way to study religions.

The main problem with the hermenutical and text-focused approach is that it imposes a limit upon studying a religion. Returning to the point I was making about religions as constantly changing, if we looked solely at a single aspect of a religion, for example a sacred text, we could easily use this text as our guidebook to the religion, even if many of the elements contained within that text are not used or thought of as important to that particular culture. Bell writes that the performance approach in religious studies stresses “the execution of a preexisting script for activity…or the explicitly unscripted dimensions of an activity in process” (Bell, 205-6). The focus therefore is upon the action, the “doing” if you will, rather than the guidebook for the action.

Final Thoughts:
While I liked the problematization of the hermeneutical approach, a problem which I had with the emphasis on performance was that it is almost impossible to use when looking at ancient religions. I study ancient Judaism and one of the difficulties which I face in my studies is trying to understand how the Jews living within a Hellenistic world understood themselves as Jews. While there are some texts which refer to specific rituals, and even some archaeological evidence which suggests certain religious rituals and experiences were being done, there is little to be known for certain. I think that performance theory does have an important role to play in shifting the focus from texts (mostly referring to written texts) towards experiences and acts, however I think that each scholar must choose whether or not this approach is possible or even valuable for one’s research on a case by case basis.