| During the 1960s, when state institutions of higher education in the United States began developing Religious Studies departments, scholars of religion began making a distinction between the study of religion and the study about religion. In general, the former has been linked to a confessionally-oriented perspective, labeled as an "insider" position. The latter has been associated with an objectivist, neutral perspective, classified as an "outsider" position. As Taiwan, the Republic of China, began to reform and model its higher education system after Western institutions during the latter half of the twentieth century, the secularization of the study of religion at universities and colleges inherited this distinction, despite having a long cultural history in which such a perspectival difference between "scholar" and "practitioner" did not exist.; The present study confronts and questions the insider/outsider dichotomy through an ethnographic study of three religious adherents in Taiwan's academic community. The three informants are: Lu Huixin, an associate professor, former research fellow, and Buddhist lay person; Venerable Dharma Master Zhaohui, an adjunct instructor, author, political activist, and Buddhist nun, and Huang Ruizhen, a doctoral student and Daoist priestess. The life histories of these three individuals uniquely contextualize the problems and questions raised by the Western discourse of the insider/outsider dichotomy in Taiwan's Chinese culture. The three life histories also demonstrate the characteristics and general utility of the category "scholar-practitioner" for delineating the phenomenon of people who research, theorize, and teach the religious traditions of which they practice. |
