On Interdisciplinarity at the Religion and American Culture Conference

by Gerardo Marti

Many thanks to Linford Fisher for his welcome post highlighting the 1st Biennial Religion and American Culture Conference in Indianapolis. For those interested in more, I've written a series summaries of conference sessions on my own Praxis Habitus blog -- with a few more posts coming this week.

Here, I want to quickly write about the conferences's attempt to reflect on interdisciplinarity.

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Because of the great accomplishments and expansive academic network of the Center for Religion and American Culture at IUPUI, the conference provided a unique opportunity to draw several conversations together. So, it's not surprising that the theme integrating the conference was the question of interdisciplinarity – What are the possibilities for a productive interchange between disciplines that study American religion? The question turns out to be more significant than I anticipated. Although not all fields were represented, the two-day dialogue engaged people who really care about cross-disciplinary work and who, in some degree, have already done it.

To pursue the question, the conference highlighted scholars who have made outstanding advancements in their own discipline. Yet, there is an interesting, unintended consequence of bringing in big-time academics. Here's what I mean.

To be an outstanding scholar very often means confounding the prevailing wisdom of a particular field. When professional boundaries are breached, scholars are forced to address issues and concerns often taken for granted by their own colleagues. Further, when these scholars achieve notoriety, they are caught up in debates (often defending their work) arguing and addressing issues within their own discipline. So when these scholars give 15 minute presentations catching people up to “the state of the discipline,” they end of talking about issues that lie at the very center of their own fields.

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Because panelists spend so much time talking in the context of central issues and debates within their own fields and the conversation happens in such a summary fashion, discussions that may be stimulating to historians (for example) become nearly untranslatable to me as an outsider. On the other side, I felt there was not enough sociologically sensitive discussions to address my own concerns -- at the same time I'm sure historians thought far too much was said about topics that don’t seem to matter much at all.

This has nothing to do with the value of each scholar’s contribution, only with the difficulty of addressing an academically diverse audience. Such are the perils of interdisciplinary conversation. Certainly there are challenges to continuing cross-disciplinary dialogues and making them more productive.

On a friendly note, perhaps future conferences would benefit by greater intentionality to include discussions that addresses confusions and misunderstandings that occur when scholars attempt to cross disciplinary lines. Future conversations might include scholars who explicitly address the process of learning to work the boundaries from those academics who occupy the gaps and successful researchers who have navigated their own disciplinary waters while remaining open to issues beyond their home base.

In my own case, I was sad to see how the rich contributions of sociology are being missed by many scholars of religion, and a bit of "translation work" might unlock those analytical resources. Perhaps sociologists are not doing what they can to make knowledge more accessible. How have scholars in other disciplines learned to productively mine the field?

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Other scholars can address similar issues, and I can already see the conversation from other areas that says, "You did what? Here's what you might consider next time..." With sociologists, too many scholars studying religion see Stark and Finke's "Rational Choice Approach" as THE contemporary sociological approach to religion. That's just wrong; the field is much more varied and nuanced, and the critiques against Marketplace Religion can be quite severe. Let's help each other draw out each other's analytical resources.

Besides learning to "think" better, It may also be profitable to mix in younger scholars to address today's challenges of writing, publishing, and funding across the disciplines. They can also speak to the way they have benefited by the sponsorship and mentoring of senior colleagues in the crossing between disciplines -- perhaps venture a discussion on the tensions and conflicts involved in the process.

Also, this conference smartly avoided tales of "the monograph," yet other helpful discussions could have guided us on alternative venues for creating conversational spaces (for example, this blog was mentioned), and the potential for monies of various types of research and collaboration.

These are just a few of my ideas. I'm sure many of you could add your own.

In these and other occasions, I appreciate the progressive broadening of relationships, love the encounter with ever-new streams of research literature, and progressively gain a more substantive understanding of various methodological and theoretical approaches to studying the richness of human behavior. I had a great experience at the conference and am eager for more. And I basked in the very "spirit" of the conference, a gathering of people eager to learn from one another. Whether the occasion is casual or formal, let's all do that a whole lot more.