This article discusses structural, logistical, and administrative issues associated with the use of participant observation assignments in teaching the anthropology of religion. Fieldwork presents extraordinary opportunities for teaching students about the nature of cultural difference, but it also poses pedagogical challenges that require careful planning and supervision. The article reviews problems including the scope and nature of the observation, student preparation and guidance, connecting with fieldsites, presentation formats, issues of ethics and confidentiality, and university administrative considerations.
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Religion through the Looking Glass
Fieldwork, Biography, and Authorship in Southwest China and Beyond
Katherine Swancutt
Euro-American scholarship more generally. I wish to extend this focus by exploring the fascination that fieldwork-based researchers and their interlocutors have with each other and with studying religion. As I show, this fascination may lead
Khaled Furani
foundational, if contestable, concepts (e.g., culture, humanity) and its constitutive practice of ethnographic fieldwork. As a result, theology does not end with anthropology; rather, it becomes reconstituted within the latter’s secular syntax. Anthropology
“Nothing Is Expensive, Everything Cheap, Nothing Explosive!”
Side Stories from Molenbeek, Brussels
Christine Moderbacher
conducted fieldwork for my PhD dissertation, “Crafting Lives in Brussels: Making and Mobility on the Margins.” Out of ten participants, it was these two middle-aged men from Tunisia and Guinea who were eager to tell me their stories. Since the end of our
From Ecuador to Elsewhere
The (Re)Configuration of a Transit Country
Soledad Álvarez Velasco
is true for its own socioeconomic conditionalities together with its paradoxical migratory policies. As soon as I began my fieldwork, a complex methodological puzzle regarding Ecuador's transit condition arose that materialized in three empirical
Kosher Biotech
Between Religion, Regulation, and Globalization
Johan Fischer
kosher-certified. The central research question here concerns how globalized kosher standards are translated into actual practice in biotechnical production. Based on fieldwork in biotech companies, I argue that while existing studies of kosher production
The Ethics of Collective Sponsorship
Virtuous Action and Obligation in Contemporary Tibet
Jane Caple
represent the contributions they themselves have made. However, during my doctoral fieldwork (2008–2009), kartik emerged as something of a ‘dirty word’ in my conversations with people (mostly monks) about monastic economic reform. It was used with
An Author Meets Her Critics
Around "Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria" by Ruth Marshall
Ruth Marshall, J.D.Y. Peel, Daniel Jordan Smith, Joel Robbins, and Jean-François Bayart
In the now very rapidly growing literature on Pentecostalism in Africa, Ruth Marshall’s book occupies a special place. In disciplinary terms, most of that literature falls under religious studies or history. The anthropologists came later, particularly those from North America, who had to get over their distaste for a religion that seemed so saturated in the idioms of the US Bible Belt. The originality of Marshall’s book is grounded in its linkage of questions derived from political theory with rich data collected through intensive and sustained fieldwork. But she insists it is not “an ethnography of the movement” (p. 5), so what exactly is it?
Introduction
Narratives, Ontologies, Entanglements, and Iconoclasms
Sondra L. Hausner, Simon Coleman, and Ruy Llera Blanes
, illustrating further Gold’s capacity to write Rajasthan into the anthropological canon, along with her poignant reflections on the nature of fieldwork, the ways in which texts and people speak to one another, and the nature of religion as lived on the ground
Portrait
Ann Grodzins Gold
Ann Grodzins Gold, Bhrigupati Singh, Farhana Ibrahim, Edward Simpson, and Kirin Narayan
back cautiously. I see a career taking circuitous paths with unexpected branchings, a career responsive to all kinds of pressures—economic and familial, interpersonal and intrapersonal. The directions I first explored through ethnographic fieldwork were