Page:Vital New Matters - The Speculative Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender.pdf/14

Rh obstruct and perturb other things of the world. All talk of social constructivism, along with undue attention to the power of discourse, language and text, needs to be set aside and replaced by a far more inclusive constructivism, one that recognizes the contribution of many diverse objects and materials to the constitution of the world.

What objections might arise to these initial points? Two initial ones might be stated in terms of accusations of antihumanism and objectification. That is, the decentring of humans may be identified with a denigration of the human, and the characterization of humans as objects may be viewed as an invidious reduction of humans to the status of objects. Both of these points can be rather quickly dismissed. First, there is nothing in the removal of humans from the centre of analytical, interpretive and methodological frameworks that also attributes a negative value to those humans or else vacates value from the human. Second, accusations of the objectification of humans simply miss the theoretical content of the ontology that is proposed. As Harman elaborates on the matter,

"the objects of object-oriented philosophy have nothing to do with objectification. In fact, they are what resist all objectification. To objectify someone or something is to limit it, to reduce it: ‘You are nothing but slave labor – gather my crop, under penalty of death!’, ‘You, supposed mind, are nothing but a physical brain!’ ... By contrast, object-oriented philosophy is by definition an anti-reductionist philosophy. It holds that all things must be taken on their own terms. The reason for complaints about ‘objectification’ is that a false split is made between people and maybe animals who cannot be objectified, and inanimate objects which can. My thesis, by contrast, is that even inanimate objects should not and cannot be objectified. It’s not about ‘reducing people to objects’ but about raising the status of objects to the level of people."

What, then, of the status of religion and gender in these analyses? Can the specificity of either analytical term be retained when allied and combined with an object-oriented approach? A response to the religious element is perhaps the easiest of the two to formulate. The historical landscape of religious studies has numerous examples of methodological approaches which either encourage the foregrounding of objects in their analyses, or else treat religions as complex objects in their own right. Ninian Smart’s 57