RLST 179: SAMPLE RESPONSE PAPER
Below is a sample response paper. The subject is completely made-up: pretend that, for this class day, we were reading "To the Forest and Back Again: One Pilgrim's Journey to The Sacred Woods of Fakistan." The response is two pages long (about 650 words), the minimum length of your response. (It is also a fairly negative response: don't think you have to be critical, like Jane is of Anonyma, just respond honestly). Notice also that Jane does speak in the first-person about her own reaction, but frames it in terms of her academic response: it was "disappointing," not because of Jane's personal feelings but because of how it treated religion in general, and this pilgrimage in particular. She quotes a few times from the text (and always cites the page number of her source), but does not fill her response with quotations.
Jane R. Student
RLST 179: Pilgrimage
January 27, 2005
Response Paper #1
For class this week we read Anonyma Made-Up's first-person account of her pilgrimage to a Fictitious Burial Site in central Asia, called "To the Forest and Back Again: One Pilgrim's Journey to the Sacred Woods of Fakistan." Made-Up is a medical professional (although she never tells us exactly what kind of professional) whose family fled Fakistan during the civil war in the 1960s. Although she grew up without much contact with her native religion (Fakism), she decided as an adult to travel to the Fictitious Burial Site, where the priest Fakir received his revelation from God and was later buried, after her twin sons turned five years old. She says that she wrote this account "to deal with my conflicting feelings of alienation from and attraction to my roots: to see if I could feel 'native'" (53). The trip, mostly by bus and on foot, took her about five weeks total; the account is written like a diary, with lots of photographs and maps included.
At first I felt I lot of sympathy for Made-Up, which I think was the intent of the text: she says over and over again how her trip to Fakistan felt like a "typical American experience" of "going back to the Motherland" (14, 72, 99). We are taught that everyone in the United States comes from somewhere else, and so a lot of us grow up with a sense of belonging to the U.S. but also belonging somewhere else. But Made-Up's diary never really gave a sense of "belonging" in Fakistan. She weaves in a lot of stories about how she and her parents never got along (like the incident when she comes back from college for the first time with a nose-ring) so that, even though she makes it seem like she's doing this to feel "closer" to her parents, she never really says how visiting the Fictitious Burial Site accomplished this.
Made-Up also never really demonstrates that she has much knowledge of Fakism: I've only taken one class in religious studies ("Introduction to Fake Religions"), and even I know that Fakists don't believe in two gods, or worship the sun, or believe every non-Fakist is going to hell. I'm not sure how Made-Up could have grown up in a Fakist house, and decided to visit the most holy site of Fakism, and even participated in all of the Fake rituals she describes, and still have such a shallow understanding of the religion. When she's climbing the slope of the Tomb with all of the other pilgrims, she even talks about how she's not sure she even believes Fakir is really buried there: "Maybe it's all made up," she writes, "but I don’t think these other pilgrims have ever even considered that idea, they're so involved in their own little worlds" (103). I found the characterization of a whole religion as a "little world" to be pretty insensitive: why did she even go on this trip if she has such little respect for native Fakists?
I thought I would learn a lot about Fakist pilgrimage, especially since we saw slides of the Tomb in "Intro. to Fake Religions" and it looked old and amazing; but Made-Up's tone was so dismissive throughout her account that I ended up thinking I couldn't really trust anything she said. It made me want to read another account, to get the "real story." I think this is a shame, because some readers are going to come away thinking that only someone born in Fakistan, a "native Fakist," can really appreciate this pilgrimage; but really I think the disappointing sense of this text has a lot more to do with the author than with the ability of non-native Fakists, or even non-Fakists altogether, to participate in and appreciate this ancient pilgrimage site.