Year: 2000
Type: editorial
Abstract: As a committed “culturalist” and “gender head” trained in women’s history and the history of religion in the United States, I can only applaud Andrew Rotter’s decision to attend to the role of religion in his effort to construct a culturalist diplomatic history. I puzzled, therefore, over the question of why I find his discussion of religion as a factor in U.S.-South Asian relations from 1947 to 1954 so much less satisfying than his brilliant article on “Gender Relations, Foreign Relations” in the same period.1 His earlier foray into the gendering of diplomatic history considered Western stereotypes of religion as they intersected with gendered constructions of India and Pakistan, but did not make the explicit claim that “religious thinking infuses states” and that “religious thinking in all three nations had influence on the policies each formulated toward the others.” In part, what the consideration of religion as an independent variable does, at least in this example, is to eliminate gender as a category of analysis. The admirable complexity of an argument that understood perceptions of others’ religion as inflected by gender is missing here. But it is primarily in its effort to move beyond a consideration of the impact of religion and religious stereotyping on U.S. policy alone that the essay falters.
Source: Diplomatic History
Author: Patricia R. Hill
Institution: Wesleyan University
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2020063780