Sources & Evidence (jaar-sources-and-evidence)

Religious-studies scholarship rests on primary materials: scriptures and commentaries, ritual and liturgical texts, historical archives, material and visual culture, or fieldwork. JAAR judges whether your handling of these sources is careful, well-situated, and adequate to the claim. This is humanities evidence — no datasets or replication, but rigor still governs.

When to trigger

• Selecting and justifying the primary sources the argument rests on
• A reviewer questioned your translation, dating, provenance, or representativeness
• Integrating fieldwork/interviews into a humanities argument
• Deciding what is primary vs. secondary and how much to quote

Source-work standards JAAR expects

1. Cite from primary sources. Ground claims in the texts/traditions/objects themselves, not only in others' summaries; secondary literature situates, primary evidence proves.
2. Languages and translation. Work from originals where the argument depends on wording; state which edition/translation you use and why; flag contested terms (and consider transliteration conventions).
3. Provenance, dating, and context. Establish what a source is, when/where it comes from, and its genre — a claim is only as strong as the source's status supports.
4. Representativeness and selection. Be explicit about why these sources/cases; do not generalize a tradition from one atypical text without saying so.
5. Fieldwork/ethnography. Describe access, consent, and positionality; protect interlocutors; represent them fairly (this connects to jaar-theory-and-method reflexivity).
6. Disconfirming evidence. Engage sources that cut against the thesis rather than omitting them.

Quoting and apparatus

• Quote enough to let the reader see the evidence, not so much that the essay becomes a source-reader.
• Translations: provide the original where the argument turns on it; note translator.
• Images/material culture: secure permissions if reproduced; describe what the reader cannot see.

Anti-patterns

• Building a claim only on secondary summaries of primary texts
• Cherry-picking passages and ignoring counter-evidence in the same corpus
• Generalizing a whole tradition from one unrepresentative source
• Silent reliance on a translation when the argument depends on the original wording
• Ethnographic claims with no account of access, consent, or positionality

Output format

【Primary sources】what they are + why these
【Languages/editions】originals vs translations; contested terms flagged
【Provenance/context】dating, genre, status established?
【Selection/representativeness】justified? atypical cases flagged?
【Fieldwork (if any)】access, consent, positionality handled?
【Counter-evidence】engaged, not omitted?
【Next】jaar-theory-and-method

Evidence-type rigor matrix

JAAR articles run on radically different evidence — a Sanskrit manuscript, a colonial archive, a temple relief, a set of interviews — and a referee for the AAR/Oxford University Press flagship will judge each by its own craft standard. Identify your dominant evidence type and meet the column that governs it.

Worked vignette: an over-reaching textual claim, right-sized

An author argues that "Sufi poetry rejects legalism," quoting Rumi in a popular translation. A JAAR reader will resist on source grounds:

• Cite from the primary source. The claim turns on wording, so the author moves to the Persian, names the edition, and notes where the popular translation smooths a key term.
• Representativeness. One poet's verses cannot stand for "Sufi poetry"; the author narrows the claim to the corpus actually examined, or flags the case as illustrative.
• Disconfirming evidence. The author engages Sufi texts that uphold sharī'a rather than omitting them, converting an over-claim into a defensible, bounded reading (with apparatus discipline that dovetails with jaar-citation-and-style).

Source-handling pushback → the fix

• "You read translations as if they were the text" → supply the original; note edition and translator.
• "One case, whole-tradition claim" → narrow the claim or justify the selection.
• "Where is the consent / positionality account?" → add all three.

Hedged calibration: as a humanities venue JAAR has no datasets, statistics, or replication archive — rigor is sourcing rigor, not reproducibility. Specific permissions practice for reproduced images and any data-availability language for fieldwork-based work should be confirmed against the journal's current submission guidelines, which can change with publisher policy.

Supplementary resources

• ../../resources/external_tools.md — primary-source databases and tools for the study of religion
• ../../resources/official-source-map.md — JAAR scope across traditions and methods