Religious Exdusivists Taking Inclusive Action? Theorizing Exclusivist Practice in Muslim-Christian Relations [electronic resource].

9781369619454

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2016.

1 online resource (373 p.)

Access is available to the Yale community.

This study uses field analysis of exdusivist contention over inclusive action to critique the exclusivist logics dominant in the social sciences and develop an alternative theory of exclusivist practice. The study proposes and validates a multidimensional conceptualization of exclusivism. The relations between these dimensions provide an escape route from dominant logics. The project uses mixed methods to applying this heuristic in combination with field analysis to three cases of inclusive action: in the United States among evangelicals, Malaysia among Sunni Muslims and Iran among Shia Muslims. Several mechanisms emerge as basic to the emergence of distinct stylised religious habitus among exclusivists. First, a strong force binds theological and ethnographic struggles to shape exclusivist action toward religious others. These analytically distinct conflicts are bound together with a magnetic force that draws other disputes into its field of influence. Second, struggles over theological orthodoxy, which incorporate both doctrine and leadership orientation, confirm and contradict common observations of exclusivist influence while confounding familiar explanations. The case of American evangelicals reveals a practical affiance of Prophetic Clans, Missional and Epistemological, in a power struggle with the Priesthood of dominant orthodoxy. These alliances illuminate variations on evangelical and exclusivist religious habitus. Third, Ethnographic capital emerges out of struggles over the authority to define Islam, over claims to ethnographic acuity that empower prescription of faithful and fruitful relations with religious others. Oppositions between specialized autonomy and heteronomy more influenced by the field of power organize these conflicts. Prophetic Alliances of exclusivist against dominant exclusivist ethnographies can emerge to unsettle and invigorate ethnographic struggle. Fourth, the historical conjunctures, for example A Common Word and the Yale Response in this study, can provide opportunity to Prophetic Affiances to extend their influence into the field of power. Their interventions and resulting counter-mobilizations illuminate homologies between the field of power and more specialized religious spaces. Finally, in the contemporary context these struggles reflect competing articulations of exclusivism's "rule of difference" to political pluralism's "rule of sameness." Inclusive interventions against dominant exclusivist orthodoxy -- theologically and ethnographically constituted -- threaten to unsettle these arrangements. This is particularly true when Exclusivist Prophets accumulate sufficient insider capital behind their efforts to drive the intervention to the heart of religious fields of power.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

August 03, 2017

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2016.

Yale University.