Canonical communities and canonical refugees

Anthropology of religious communities demands some engagement with the question of borders: who is in the community in question, and who is not.

Religious communities themselves would answer this question in various ways: the Baptist church I grew up in would emphasise belief; traditional forms of Islam assert particular praxes of submission before Allah, and minimally circumscribe belief; and the Syriac Orthodox community I am researching emphasises blood and origins.

Of course, each of these ways of delimiting the borders of a community struggle to withstand the duress of real life. In my research, when faced with border zone dilemmas, people will discursively negotiate these principles to include those who for some reason must be included, or conceivably to exclude those who must not. The border is an analytically problematic place to start.

The notional centre, however, maybe more fruitful. A religious community is arguably a community at the centre of which resides (or is imagined to reside) a canon, written or otherwise. While a person's interior is inaccessible, their performed fidelity to a canon is a way of demonstrating a belonging to the community which judges it to be canonical. In any case, this is through the voluntary engagement of the body, minimally through listening, potentially through the performance of ritual, and in some cases through verbal profession.

But let's stay with listening. In a global religious marketplace, it becomes possible to listen - and listen well - to a range of texts, sacred or otherwise, without committing to any as canon. This is of course a qualified blessing, but it is here also that I see the emergence of the strange 20th Century opposition or 'spiritual' to religious, precisely because the former does not demand fidelity to any particular canon.

Thus I believe that researching differences in the objectification of 'the canon', expressed firstly by how people listen, provides a key to understanding the discursive creation of in-group and out-group categories through which the faithful organise the world. The key, perhaps, is that subjectivity in which people imagine the canon to be the site of a dialogue in which they are involved, as reiterators or addressees, but not as third parties. This dialogic starting point provides for open communities of practice as well as very closed dogmatic communities, for whom real listening involves verbal assent to propositions. Even for the Syriac Orthodox community, who stress the importance of being siryāni, the descendants of Aram, the inheritors of "the first Christianity", and in one person's words, "the mother" of all Middle Eastern peoples, these narratives are reinscribed through a particular normative engagement with the Bible: in this case an our Aramaic artefact, especially used in the context of our Aramaic liturgy, self-consciously performed in our language which Jesus himself spoke, alongside the saints and the angels and in the presence of God. While many Syriac Christians will read the Bible at home as well, willing addressees of the Bible in Arabic, and therefore as Arabic-speaking Christians, it is not this that demonstrates their being siryāni, but the particular relationship they have as willing addressees of the Syriac canon in all its rich material repertoire.

This calls into question the approach of academics and clerics to liberate oppressed peoples from their canon, especially by de-canonising the text and urging a hermeneutics of suspicion. Not having to assent to every biblical proposition but to be able to simply to listen to and even resist canonical propositions is a great gift, and the grounds of creative religious subjectivity. However rejection, a cessation of listening to a canon, marks a point of departure from this creative process, and thus from a religious community.

For communities in which assent has never been the important thing, the attempt to liberate people from an ancient canon either talks past the issue or encourages a flight from a particular domestic space, a particular 'interior', a particular land called home. Within Palestine, as Mitri Raheb said last week at the same conference, some Christians have been displaced from their narrative by Christian Zionist readings of the next precisely because they feel barred from listening. This is a very real displacement. Home is never perfect, indeed it is sometimes a sad and difficult place, but is nevertheless home.

But in fact, some liberationist readings of the Bible might contribute to this displacement if disuse of the Bible results. These canonical refugees are still a minority in Palestine. People still attend their masses and services and from time to time hear texts they would rather not hear. The focus on interpretation and settling upon a satisfactory exegesis however contributes to either flight or defensiveness, whereas an emphasis upon the nature of engaged listening can be liberating of people within their canonical land, freeing them to till the often unyielding soil of their canon in the knowledge that, whatever anyone else may say, it is theirs.