The Prejudice of Being Human in the Study of Non-Ordinary Realities

Abstract

Over the course of its history Religious Studies has come to use many terms to describe beings that to a certain mind frame are difficult to grasp. We have spoken of ‘non-ordinary reality’, ‘superhuman beings’, ‘non-natural entities’, ‘humanlike but non-human beings’, ‘counter-intuitive agents’, and ‘non-falsifiable alternate realities’ to name but a few. It is the contention of this paper that all these terms, whether deliberately or not, appeal to a conception of reality that presumes that the ‘believers’ under study have deviated from the ordinary and made a category mistake. The basis of this is a human prejudice: only the biological human can properly be considered a subject. Based on a phenomenological analysis I argue the human prejudice is the result of a European-centric rationalism: there is only one form of rationality (which is the European) against which all others are to be measured. The result of accepting the human prejudice, then, is that social science will consistently become the study of deviancy. To avoid this, we must reformulate the idea of ‘man’ which sits at the basis of social science.