by Syed Baqar Mehdi Rizvi
Dr. Oliver Freiberger is a Professor of Asian Studies and Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His recent book, Considering Comparison (Oxford University Press, 2019), is a reflection on the comparative method in the study of religion.
Interviewer: Thank you so much, Dr. Freiberger, for taking out time for this conversation. To begin with, what made you interested in the study of religion?
Dr. Freiberger: I don’t really know. As a teenager, I read lots of books about all kinds of religions. Growing up in a Christian Lutheran environment in Germany, I did some church work as well, as a teenager. We had a very progressive minister who brought in all kinds of things from other religions, and I just always thought there’s so much out there that sounds so interesting…how people responded to these very fundamental questions of life, and why did they respond so differently? That very basic interest led to everything.
Interviewer: As a lot of your work has been about the comparative method in the study of religion, could you shed some light on how you view the comparative method?
Dr. Freiberger: I always thought that comparison was at the very center of everything. You look at various religions and you do that because you want to compare. Why is it different and why is it similar? This is the very foundation of what religious studies does because otherwise, it’s silos. The traditions (e.g., Buddhism, Sikhism) themselves are being studied by other people. But looking at it from a comparative religious studies viewpoint puts it in a different dimension, because suddenly you can talk about things like initiation rituals, for example. Initiation ritual is not a word that appears in any Sanskrit text because it’s an English word and it means more than just, for example, Upanayana or something like that. This means there are many different ways of doing an initiation ritual all over the world. It is this religious studies perspective that you don’t get from someone who studies only the Upanayana or only the Sanskrit texts on that, or Hindi texts or whatever. And that is what I was always interested in – that you can use every religious text and every religious action and every religious source as an example for something. An example of an initiation ritual or of a myth, which becomes theorized then. What, you ask, does this category mean in theory?
When you have this mindset, then it becomes really interesting because what you are studying is just one variant, and you might be able to understand that variant much better if you also look on the other side of the world, and how they do it. They might emphasize certain things that you don’t really see because they’re sort of hidden.
Interviewer: What are some potential pitfalls of the comparative method?
Dr. Freiberger: There are a few general problems that have been identified with comparison, especially with cross-cultural comparison. The first one that always comes up is decontextualization. People say when you compare something here with something over there, then you take it out of its context, and you don’t represent it correctly anymore, because it’s sort of taken out and then put into a certain box that you are imposing onto both.
And that is a valid critique, but I believe it’s also always a problem no matter whether you compare cross-culturally or not. When you study something, no matter what it is, a piece of literature, a certain text, or a certain ritual, it’s always embedded in its context. You have to decide as a scholar how you distinguish the thing that you study from its context, and how big is the context that you should bring into the study. At what point can you stop? Because theoretically, the context is endless. As a scholar, you have to draw the boundary for this particular study. And you’re not saying that everything else doesn’t count, but you’re saying, in order to remain practical and not try to write the history of the world and everything in it, I want to focus on one thing. You have to make a decision. Once you make that decision, once you draw the boundary, you decontextualize.
No matter where you do that, you always take it out of the context because there’s always more that you could theoretically or hypothetically talk about. So, you always decontextualize, and I think this is the same thing with comparison. We always decontextualize but the point is that we have to make transparent why and how we do it, and what justifies it. You have to make a case for this, and whether or not it’s being accepted by the academic community remains to be seen. Thus, decontextualization, I think, can be dealt with by reflection and transparency.
Another main problem, and that is much more problematic, is essentialization. What I mean by that is that you decide what the essence of something is. So, you decide what’s the essence of Islam or of Buddhism. That is then generalized very often, which means that you ignore the diversity of voices. The scholar essentializes by saying, ‘this is the true essence of this phenomenon,’ and by doing that and by ignoring dissenting voices, you make a very unscholarly step because you decide as a scholar what is right, or you just believe the loudest voices. But that’s not good scholarship, I think. That’s why it’s so important to look very closely and reflect on what you’re doing and to explain how you decided to do it – to take this and not something else – and not make claims.
Interviewer: How do you think your interests have evolved over the span of your career? Do you think they have evolved in a programmatic, linear way within the broad interests that you have had in religion?
Dr. Freiberger: Certainly not planned in a systematic way. It’s a journey as they say these days. And it has so much to do with your intellectual environment. You have this very personal individual approach to things that when you read them, you find some things more interesting than the others. That has to do with your upbringing, your socialization more generally and with your culture and your language.
But the other thing really is the environment. When you are in an environment in terms of colleagues and friends, stimulating discussions with certain people lead to certain interests and very often that’s totally coincidental.
I always had this luxury of never having to think, okay, what is my next project? How will that sort of go over in the field? And I have to make a name for myself and so I pick a project that is very popular or very hot right now. I never thought like that and I’m glad that I didn’t have to and nobody told me to. That’s just a great gift I’m grateful for.
I have a good friend who in Germany wrote a big book on New Age and that was a super hot thing in the 1980s and 90s in Germany. He did not actually want to do it because it was popular, but because he was interested in it. A few years after the book was published, New Age was gone – New Age was not a term anymore that people would use! It was just not a thing anymore. He didn’t do it for that reason, but if you think, oh, I do something that is really current, by the time you’re done with it, it might not be hot anymore.
So, [as a piece of advice to graduate students too] I always think it’s better to stick to things that interest you because then you’re better at them too because you are really invested in them. If you do something great, people will recognize its greatness even if it’s not super current. So, it’s better to be good in the field that you’re good at than be mediocre in a field that is more popular at the moment, because that can change in five years.
About the Interviewer
Syed Baqar Mehdi Rizvi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Asian Studies.
