Posts ⁂ The Postmodern Terminal >_
Method is not a section you add at the end; it is the object, the operations, and the warrants that let another scholar repeat your work or argue with it.
Whose land do you live on? Hold that question; it is a question about method. I will argue that method is the part of your research that makes your claims answerable by someone else. I will make the case by separating three words people use as one, by reading Bruce Lincoln's "Theses on Method" (1996) with his critics, and by naming the four places method must appear inside an article.
Theory, methodology, and method are not synonyms. Theory tells you what counts as an object of study in the first place: religion is discourse, or practice, or a system of symbols. Methodology argues that a set of procedures fits that object. Method is the procedures themselves, what you do with your sources between Monday morning and Friday afternoon. Break it into three parts: 1) the object, a specific set of texts, people, practices, or institutions rather than "faith" or "the church"; 2) the operations, meaning you read closely, you interview, you compare, you trace a term through an archive; 3) the warrants, why those operations fit that object. Why interviews and not sermons.
Lincoln's first thesis compresses the whole thing. The "of" in "History of Religions," he writes, "is not neutral filler"; it "announces a proprietary claim and a relation of encompassment: history is the method and religion the object of study." Object named, method named, and which one is in charge. That sentence is a method statement.
The theses have a backstory. In 1995 a conference panel convened to attack his friend Brian K. Smith's book on the Vedic origins of caste; Lincoln, asked to speak for the defense, wrote thirteen theses in an afternoon, longhand, then thumbtacked them to his office door, "a weak imitation of Luther's 95." Copies kept vanishing, so he published them. Here is the twist: a decade later Lincoln conceded that the theses "are less a discussion of method than an attempt to foster an attitude." The most cited short text on method in my field is, by its author's own account, about posture. So take the attitude from Lincoln and build the method yourself.
The attitude is still worth having. Thesis four is the toolkit: who speaks here, to what audience, with what interests, and then who wins and who loses. Put that list at the top of any source, including your own field notes. Thesis eight catches the habit of mistaking a group's dominant fraction for the group, so that texts by Brahmins define "Hinduism." Whose voice are you calling "the church"? Thesis ten explains why your own ideology is hardest to see: it "renders its operations invisible."
The critics matter, because a method you cannot defend is not yet a method. Tim Fitzgerald charges that thesis one quietly assumes "religion" is a stable object awaiting history's attention, which is precisely the assumption needing examination. Hugh Urban points out that British Orientalists also claimed the last word, and that word traveled with empire; against mastery he sets Saba Mahmood's analysis as conversation. You do not have to adopt Lincoln. You have to build something that answers them.
So where does method live in a piece of writing? Four places. One sentence in the abstract, naming object, operation, and claim. One paragraph after the thesis, doing the three jobs above and citing a methodological source, since the citation shows the method has a literature and known objections. A section where you state the limits before a reviewer states them against you. And, the part most drafts miss, the verbs of the body: I read, I trace, I compare, I asked. When every paragraph says "the text shows," the method has vanished, and "descriptive" in a reviewer report almost always means the reviewer could not see what you did.
Before you submit, turn thesis four on your own article, as thesis nine tells you to anyway. Whose testimony did you treat as evidence, and whose as authority? Who wins if you persuade? If you can answer, you have a method. If you cannot, you have testimony, which is honorable and is not the same thing. And whose land do you live on? Method is the habit of asking where a thing comes from before saying what it means.
The Postmodern Terminal >_