Intertextuality As Social Network

This thesis provides with specific case studies of religion-relevant events, including a national ritual event (in the form of a transcription of a live TV broadcast of the event), and a variety of ethnographic texts collected during the author's monastery fieldwork in religious institutions including temples and abbeys in Hangzhou, a city located in southern China, where the author conducted her further study and carried out her MA program. But we will look at what for many has become the standard approach to the study of religion in both religious studies and the social sciences, the phenomenological method. The method is considered to be conventionalized and even standardized mainly for it allows anthropologists of any or no religious persuasion to examine the religious beliefs and practices of others with as little comment and judgement as possible i.e. without prior assumptions and without bias (Bowie, 2000). The various religious event-texts collected by employing a phenomenological methodological approach during monastery fieldwork, will be analyzed in terms of their interrelation to each other and to other social facts. The social structure revealed or embedded in the intertextuality property, i.e. intermingling with "outsider" language, of religion-relevant texts will unfold the social dimension of religious phenomena.Religious phenomena are social in nature. They compose part of our social network and are in consistent interaction with other parts within the same "net web", linking to world and reality, to the discourse of the day. This is astonishing insofar as without a concise concept of history and tradition we are not able to explain phenomena that bear witness to continuity and permanence. Religion, as a world of discourse, is ever changing, which indicates the danger in religious studies by overlooking the crucial role constructions of history and tradition play in culture and negotiations of identity (von Stuckrad, 2003). Thus, a multi-perspective approach in doing research in this field of inquiry is called upon in the present thesis, which is illuminated by intertextuality and hybrid genre analysis in postmodern society and a deconstructive philosophical view as well, a methodological viewpoint that is able to include several different perspectives, i.e. apolyfocal approach if in von Stuckrad's (2003) phrase.