Rejected Knowledge Reconsidered: Some Methodological Notes on Esotericism and Marginality

E. Asprem
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引用次数: 9

Abstract

The notion that esotericism is a form of rejected knowledge has come back in style since the publication of Wouter J. Hanegraaff ’s Esotericism and the Academy in 2012. The association of esotericism with heterodoxy, deviance, opposition, and marginalization is itself old news: it has been a standard trope in insider discourses at least since the nineteenth century, and has also featured in earlier scholarly approaches to the field. In its strictest formulation, the new rejected knowledge model differs from these earlier approaches in important ways. Its central claim is that the historiographical category of “esotericism” emerged from heresiological writings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which for the first time imagined a diverse set of “heterodoxies” that we now associate with the category as “related currents.” However, I will argue that the new rejected knowledge model also comes in an inflated version, in which the distinction between the historiographic concept (“esotericism”) and its subject matter becomes blurred. The strict version represents an important contribution to the conceptual history of “esotericism.” The inflated version, by contrast, introduces a host of problems that range from how groups and individuals are represented, to how we analyze and explain the data, to how esotericism is legitimized as a relevant field of study in the academy.
被拒绝的知识被重新思考:关于深奥主义和边缘性的一些方法论注释
自2012年Wouter J. Hanegraaff的《神秘主义与学院》出版以来,神秘主义是一种被拒绝的知识形式的概念重新流行起来。神秘主义与异端、越轨、反对和边缘化的联系本身就是老生常谈:至少自19世纪以来,它一直是内部话语的标准修辞,在早期的学术研究中也有特色。在其最严格的表述中,新的被拒绝的知识模型在重要方面不同于这些早期的方法。它的核心主张是,"神秘主义"这一史学范畴从17和18世纪的异端著作中涌现出来,这些著作首次设想了一系列不同的"异教"我们现在把这一范畴称为"相关潮流"然而,我认为,新的被拒绝的知识模型也是一个膨胀的版本,在这个版本中,史学概念(“神秘主义”)和它的主题之间的区别变得模糊了。严格的版本代表了对“神秘主义”概念史的重要贡献。相比之下,夸大的版本引入了一系列问题,从如何代表群体和个人,到我们如何分析和解释数据,再到神秘主义如何在学术界被合法化为一个相关的研究领域。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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