Juxtaposition, Tension, Play

It is difficult to ascertain whether the concepts of ‘juxtaposition’, ‘tension’ and ‘play’ have occupied a crucial place in the study of religion or if they have been at the periphery struggling to find their way to the centre. The very exercise of determining an accurate response to this conundrum would assume that there is indeed a core and a periphery to the academic study of religion. However, what can be said with confidence is that many scholars of religion, or theorists in other fields whose work has been directly relevant to the study of religion, have adumbrated on these categories and processes and have made a strong case for the relevance of these ideas for a better understanding of the minutiae of religious experiences and hermeneutics. Be it the many writings of J. Z. Smith in which he talks about informed comparisons in order to develop a richer understanding of different religious (sub-)traditions, or D. W. Winnicott's category of the ‘personal intermediate area’ or the ‘potential space’, or Ronald Grimes’ discussion of the ‘spaces between boundaries’, or Jeffrey Kripal's ‘space’ that enables a meeting of two phenomena ‘beyond’ their respective boundaries, or Sam Gill's brilliant essay on the importance of ‘play’ in the study of religions – all these point to a particular meta-approach employed to understand issues in religious studies.

How does this meta-approach work? To begin with, it comes into play (pardon the pun!) when we, in our quest to understand a specific aspect of a particular religion, come face to face with two different, opposing or mutually exclusive categories. For J. Z. Smith, the mutual exclusivity between categories could be found in almost anything related to the study of religions – it could be between two texts, between two methods of approaching a text or between two different parts of the same text. Smith highlights the importance of constantly struggling with two opposing viewpoints in order to create an interplay between them so that the potential for a creative resolution emerges that takes our understanding of a phenomenon forward, not necessarily by resolving the opposition but through the joy of continued engagement with it. I call this the ‘potential perpetuality of play’.