Recently, a couple of weeks after I returned to the U.S. from a two-month research internship at JUST, I had the following exchange with a hygienist at a dentist’s office:
“I’m studying religion,” I said, “Uh, comparative religion, that is.”
“Oh, okay.…What did you do this summer, anything interesting?” she replied.
“Well, I just got back from some work in Malaysia. It was incredibly eye-opening.”
“Malaysia, huh? Wow, that’s great. You were doing missionary work there?”
I exhaled sharply, incredulous that my well-meaning interlocutor, smiling down at me as she poked at my teeth, had come so naturally to such an abhorrent conclusion. The subtext of her reply was unmistakable: Why would an American with a professed interest in religion go to a “faraway land” in the “Orient,” if not to proselytize the “poor backward natives”?
Sweetly, offhandedly, and with perhaps the best of intentions, the good woman had committed a grave cultural foul. And yet I said nothing. I felt neither indignation nor pity. I was, rather, terrified. For I heard something chillingly familiar in the woman’s glib speculation, and it struck a nerve—a nerve newly hardwired to a haunting memory from my time in Malaysia….
My second week at JUST, I submitted a research proposal soliciting “Malaysian” perspectives on “Western” self-critiques of Enlightenment rationalism. Truth is, I felt—and indeed am in some measure—complicit in the American-led hegemony of which JUST is rightly critical. To ease my “liberal guilt,” I tried to locate the error of my culture’s ways—longing, like a deathbed convert, to right some terrible wrongs before it is “too late.”
I pitched the proposal to Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, who had agreed to supervise my research. He acknowledged the tenacity of my bid for “Western self-help,” which involved developing a case for an ethics of embodiment, a literal “fleshing out” of disembodied Western epistemologies. I intended to present the work of Malaysian scholar–activists of various ethno-religious backgrounds as case studies in this moral tradition, which I had traced to the work of feminist, postcolonial, and anti-oppression legal scholars from the U.S. and Europe. But I was startled when, almost without explanation, Dr. Chandra urged me to rethink my research angle. He was terse and nondirective—for reasons that I, exasperated at the time, would only later come to appreciate.
I began to think a great deal about Dr. Chandra’s dissuasion. After work that day, I went for a walk in downtown Petaling Jaya. I kept seeing passersby looking at me askance—or was I merely imagining it? I passed silently by and later reasoned with myself: “Well, they have every right to look at me that way, given the baggage of representation I bring with me wherever I go. If only I could harness that tacit critique of my ‘Westernness,’ I could finally justify my now-abandoned project ‘from the ground up’!”
And then, one feverishly hot night, as I lay prone on my bed in a rented room, it dawned on me. I began to shiver with an inner tremor, the kind that originates in the pit of your stomach, radiates across your chest, surfaces at your skin and makes it crawl. It was the “terror of otherness” come to shatter my ego’s all-consuming horizon. I felt what I had only before thought: what it is like, paraphrasing Levinas, to be demanded, disposed, obsessed, and judged by “the other.” The indictment rained down on me “from on high,” eroding the martyrdom of my self-chiding research gambit, until all that remained was the chiseled form of a face. It was Dr. Chandra’s face and the face of the woman who handed me a towel at the gym and the faces of the pedestrians who wondered what on earth I was doing in P.J. It was a prophetic face; its weathered lines foretold a trespass old as the “New World.” My self-serving agenda would have exploited the lives of my Malaysian contacts, mining them for empirical data to support my a priori theories about “embodied agency” and “religious subjectivity,” objectifying them with “the best of intentions.”
But for those faces, and the felt obligation to listen to them, to “be” as much for them as for my self, I would have seen what I had wanted to see: a social trend, a religious phenomenon, a philosophical construct to assimilate into my identity, easing my guilt and acquitting me of my complicity in a system of global hegemony. All this I would have projected onto and in place of the other, denying her the capacities for sight, sense, and salvation—the very capacities she, by the ineliminable fact of her being, always already makes intelligible and possible for me, as another self, to exercise at all.
And so I trembled in the dentist’s chair, remembering how I, no less than the hygienist who called me on my “mission,” had adopted the totalizing logic of neocolonialism. But as I learned from the balance of my research at JUST, there is more to raising human dignity than the transcendent accountability of fear and trembling. The ghostly face of the other took on positive form and immanent context in my subsequent interviews with 16 people—Islamic scholars, Buddhist laypeople, a Hindu activist, and “non-confessional” social scientists in Malaysia and Singapore. Their warmth and goodwill welled forth from the hopeful certainty that, as several of them agreed, in every way that really matters, we are all far more alike than we are different. At each interview, disparities in privilege and power invariably conspired in the background; indeed, these structural realities can and often do ward off would-be collaborators from the tables of interreligious and civilizational dialogue. Some of my interviewees chose to foreground the asymmetries at our periphery (e.g., those due to North-dominated academic discourses)—asymmetries which, if overlooked or elided, would suppress or skew the measured accountability that solidarity against hegemony would require of different parties. But however they may have dealt with our differences, all of the people with whom I spoke made at least an effort to reach across the table to embrace our commonality.
At a time when a proposed Muslim community center and prayer space in New York City elicits raw fear and blind suspicion, the prophetic terror of otherness remains a vital, but hardly sufficient, stimulus to adopting reflexive ways of being “selves” as individuals and as communities. All too often, in fact, fear stymies our soul-searching and provokes an outturned rage, a rage against the dying of an identity we cannot bear to let slip through our fingers. Terrified but also emboldened by the example of my interlocutors, I managed to “let go for dear life” this summer long enough to learn that identity need not be a zero-sum game, a missionary’s quest; that what binds us fast goes deeper than our differences, deeper than the individual or group ascriptions we covet and abhor; that it goes “all the way down” to where even terror cannot touch it, to “shared human experiences,” “eternal values.” Here, beyond the pale of the particular, there is no “self” or “other”; here we can take heart but must not linger, lest our dialogue attenuate into facile platitudes. For how can we negotiate the pressing demands of “global citizenship,” if not as situated selves, with all the historical asymmetry that entails? Solidarity, I have learned, means prizing what is universal as it necessarily manifests itself: in and through particular lives, at the meeting of real faces that are too terrified, and too captivated, to gaze with impunity or look away in shame.
By Seth P. Robinson
(robinson_seth@wheatonma.edu), research intern at JUST from June to August 2010, is currently completing an undergraduate degree in religious studies at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, USA. He plans to pursue graduate study in religious ethics with a focus on issues surrounding religious pluralism, religion and politics, and constructive responses to globalization.