Representing Practice: An Assist from Dwight Conquergood, Part 2

Part 1 is here.
Conquergood provides four different ways of representing the practice of others, drawn in the service of a “moral mapping of performative stances towards the other” (p. 5).
First is “The Custodian’s Rip-Off.” When we characterize practice in this way, we are taking away from others rather than being curious about them. We look for something in them that is illustrative for our own purposes, say, instead of being sufficiently patient with the confusion of the actual practice.
Second, “The Enthusiast’s Infatuation” is present when we rhapsodize about others and paint their practice in mono-color strokes which, instead of keeping the bright distinctiveness of the other, end up making things too gray. We are so invested in valorizing the others’ practice that we cannot be caught up short by our inquiry. We try too hard to emphasize our rightness by hastily cleaning up the reflection of the other’s ways.
“The Curator’s Exhibitionism” is a third way to avoid. This happens when we pull out a practice of others that is aimed to surprise, shock, or scandalize our audience. Look how extreme she is! Or — his saintly life is what we all should live even though none of us really can! The others’ practice is then foreign to anything we might actually do, because it is so extreme in its goodness, badness, or weirdness.
Finally, “The Skeptic’s Cop-Out” is a way of saying that we don’t even deign to engage with the practice of this other because it is so obviously out of bounds. To do so would contaminate what we really want to say about practice, or more important, how we really want to be seen as arbiters of the question to begin with. This “purity argument” is ever ready to hand for members of “the dominant culture,” because there is little social cost for dismissing others’ practice.
I have experienced all four stances in my own theological work when I have represented others’ practices, and I can think of ways that my own work has been used by others in all four ways. It would be interesting and perhaps helpful for me to try to rewrite them from my own work and from how I have seen my work used by others. I don’t think I would use Conquergood’s language exactly, of course, but his basic ideas make a lot of sense to me as I think about how people’s practices are characterized in theological work. I appreciate that he wrote them out of many years of considered experience and nuanced reflection. Do they resonate for you?
I also appreciate Conquergood’s framing of these ways of performing others’ practices as moral matters, as occasions of ethical relation to the persons whose lives are being excerpted in our theologizing in writing, song, teaching, preaching, meditation, exhortation.
I’ll conclude this short series with a final post on Conquergood’s proposal for a way forward that is more ethically responsible.
Tom Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York