Abstract
I choose the term phronesis, meaning embodied wisdom, as characterizing an Asian and Asian American feminist hermeneutics because it is a way of knowing that corresponds to the way that disciples “understand.” When phronesis defines a theory of interpretation, therefore, this hermeneutics highlights the embodied aspect of interpretation. In such an embodied interpretation, the interpreter’s practice and engagement play a significant role in meaning creation.
By the term “hermeneutics” I not only mean a theoretical basis of interpretation but also suggest a reading practice that is not a method or a reading strategy. It is more like a tactic of reading that cannot be repeated because of the reader’s subjectivity and its relationship with her particular circumstances. This quality of understanding as a singular event is what I want to highlight by “doing interpretation” using phronesis.
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Notes
Tat-siong Benny Liew, What Is Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics: Reading the New Testament (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press; Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 2008), 6. This description of phantom is also relevant to discussing the story of Mark 6:45–52, in which the disciples see Jesus’s phantasma, because such perception of the ghost is precisely related to the identity question of who Jesus is. I will revisit this relationship when reading the text in Chapter 5.
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984), x; “For Women in Men’s World: A Critical Feminist Theology of Liberation,” in The Power of Naming: A Concilium Reader in Feminist Liberation Theology, ed. Elisabeth Schü ssler Fiorenza (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), 11.
Mary Ann Tolbert, “Defining the Problem: The Bible and Feminist Hermeneutics,” Semeia 28 (1983), 118; Elizabeth A. Castelli, Gary A. Phillips, and Regina M. Schwartz, eds., The Postmodern Bible: The Bible and Culture Collective (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 235.
Ivone Gebara, “A Feminist Theology of Liberation,” in Hope Abundant: Third World and Indigenous Women’s Theology, ed. Kwok Pui-lan (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010), 54.
Hyun Ju Bae, “Dancing around Life: An Asian Woman’s Perspective,” ER 56 (2004): 392.
Also see, Kwok Pui-lan, Discovering the Bible in the Non-Biblical World (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995), 39
As the West has its classics, Bae argues, so do Asians possess their cultural and religious classics. Lee calls for an Asian hermeneutics that is conscious of its cross-textual and crossscriptural context. Archie C. C. Lee, “Cross-Textual Interpretation and Its Implications for Biblical Studies,” in Teaching the Bible: The Discourse and Politics of Biblical Pedagogy, ed. Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998), 249. This is also one of the tasks of postcolonial feminist hermeneutics proposed by Kwok Pui-lan: (1) challenging the universalizing forms of Western interpretations; (2) continuing a counterhegemonic discourse; (3) placing the Bible within a multifaith context; (4) inviting women of marginalized, diaspora and indigenous peoples to voice their concerns; and (5) learning from other interpretative practices. Kwok, Discovering the Bible, 46.
Letty M. Russell, “Introduction: Crossing Bridges of No Return,” in Let the Weak Be Strong: A Woman’s Struggle for Justice, ed. Lee Sun Ai and Ahn Sang Nim (Bloomington, IN: Meyer Stone, 1988), 4.
Seong Hee Kim, Mark, Women, and Empire: A Korean Postcolonial Perspective (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010), 31. Kim takes these definitions from a Korean ecofeminist theologian, Chung Hyun Kyung, Goddess-Spell According to Hyun Kyung (Paju: Yolimwon, 2001), 236.
Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley, CA: Crossing, 1984), 110–13.
Michael Pakaluk, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 228.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2000), 314. MacIntyre also demonstrates the importance of (practical) reasoning as a virtue from an Aristotelian standpoint. While identifying theoretical reasoning as the telos and practical reasoning as phronesis, that is, “the right action to do in each particular time and place,” MacIntyre follows Gadamer in emphasizing practical reasoning as communal and traditional. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 162.
Joel Weinsheimer, Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 40.
Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1997), 67. I would even argue that the fusion of horizons, which Gadamer explicates as the event of understanding in interpreting, occurs through and in the body. Thus, it makes sense when Fulkerson identifies phronesis as practical wisdom (understanding) with habitus. What is helpful in this comparison is that one of the distinctive points in Bourdieu’s definition of habitus is to transcend the opposition between objective and subjective. The close relationship between habitus and phronesis is also seen in the common nature of their embodiedness. Mary McClintock Fulkerson, “Theology and the Lure of the Practical: An Overview,” RC 1, no. 2 (2007): 294–304.
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© 2015 Jin Young Choi
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Choi, J.Y. (2015). Asian and Asian American Feminist Hermeneutics of Phronesis. In: Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment. Postcolonialism and Religions. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137526106_4
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