ABSTRACT
Those who tend to think that religion – or, more specifically, religious experiences and symbols – is somehow a special case, will surely wonder exactly what some of Lincoln’s work has to do with the study of religion. However, those of us who find in so-called religious practices nothing that is different from the other practices that together constitute human cultures will understand what is to be gained by reading and applying methodologies from outside the rather narrow confines of hermeneutics and phenomenology. As I previously concluded, Lincoln is therefore among the few scholars of religion I would rename as anthropologists of credibility, for his work explores the displacements of, and contests over, such things as authenticity, legitimacy, meaning, and validity. His questions are therefore not, “What does it mean?” (where this “it” can stand in for text, ritual, symbol, etc.), but the more provocative, “How, why, and for whom does something come to mean in the first place?” and “What are the practical consequences of meaning?” To answer the first question means one needs to reproduce and thereby legitimize an indigenous socio-semantic system – after all, as demonstrated in the first chapter, “What does it mean” signals, “What does it mean for a specific group at a specific time?”. Lincoln, however, is interested in accounting for how meaning works. For, as he phrases it in his thirteenth thesis on method:
When one permits those whom one studies to define the terms in which they will be understood, suspends one’s interest in the temporal and contingent, or fails to distinguish between “truths”, “truth-claims”, and “regimes of truth”, one has ceased to function as historian or scholar. In that moment, a variety of roles are available: some perfectly respectable (amanuensis, collector, friend and advocate), and some less appealing (cheerleader, voyeur, retailer of import goods). None, however, should be confused with scholarship.
