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ABSTRACT
The purpose of this article is to introduce the Ecclesiology and Ethnography conversation by highlighting some of its characteristics. According to the inquiry, significant contributors to the conversation understand ethnography as a form of theology and see ethnographic and ecclesiological modes of theologising as an alternative to idealist ecclesiological accounts. The article also shows how participation is a key theological theme as well as a research approach. Two pressing issues, that are highlighted, concern normativity in relation to doctrine and tradition and the role of theology in qualitative theological and ecclesiological research. The article ends with discussions on two dilemmas in ethnographic ecclesiology and with suggestions on how to deal with them responsibly.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Ward, ‘Theology’.
2 Ibid., 155.
3 Following Pete Ward, I use the term conversation, rather than a field or a network, since it captures better the rather loose character of the phenomenon I am focusing on here. See Ward, ‘Theology’, 157.
4 Brill, Ecclesial Practices, http://www.brill.com/products/journal/ecclesial-practices (accessed July 15, 2019).
5 Ecclesiology, Ecclesiology and Ethnography, http://www.ecclesiologyandethnography.com/ (accessed June 21, 2017).
6 Ecclesiology, ‘AAR’, http://www.ecclesiologyandethnography.com/event/aar-annual-meeting/ (accessed June 21, 2017).
7 Ideström and Kaufman, What Really Matters.
8 Scharen and Vigen, Ethnography, 28.
9 Ibid.
10 Scharen and Vigen, Ethnography, 28–46. See also Phillips ‘Charting’.
11 Kaufman, ‘Mapping’, 16.
12 Whitmore, Imitating.
13 Ideström, Lokal. I discuss the use of implicit ecclesiology in my PhD-project in Ideström, ‘Implicit’.
14 Ward, ‘Introduction’, 2.
15 Colossians 1.15.
16 Ward, ‘Introduction’, 2–3.
17 ibid., 4.
18 The two examples are Mark Chaves and Stanley Hauerwas. Scharen writes: ‘One [Chaves] is descriptive, using an analytic or scientific language quite distant from the self-understanding of worshippers themselves. […] Hauerwas, a Christian theologian, comes no closer with his normative languague, drawing as he does from multiple theological traditions (narrative, virtue) that are again quite distant from the variable actual self-understandings of worshippers.’ Scharen, ‘Introduction’, 3.
19 Ward, ‘Introduction’, 5.
20 Scharen, ‘Introduction’, 3.
21 Ward, ‘Introduction’, 4.
22 The terminology is influenced by French philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist Bruno Latour whose work I introduce later in the article.
23 Healy, Church.
24 Ibid., 3.
25 Ibid., 26.
26 It is worth noting that Healy himself has articulated, in later work, a more sceptical position concerning the possibility of generating ecclesiology using ethnographic accounts. See for example Healy, ‘Ecclesiology’; ‘Practices.’ Clare Watkins gives a useful account of Healy’s arguments in Watkins, ‘Practising’.
27 Fulkerson, Places, 11.
28 Ibid., 13.
29 Ibid., 13–14.
30 Ibid., 6.
31 Ibid., 7.
32 Scharen and Vigen, ‘Ethnography’, 66.
33 Scharen, ‘Ecclesiology’.
34 Ibid., 67–70.
35 Wigg-Stevenson, ‘Trying’.
36 Ibid., 197.
37 Whitmore, Imitating, 2.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., 3.
40 Ibid., 29.
41 Bielo, ‘Anthropologist’, 154.
42 Ibid.
43 Cameron et al., Talking.
44 Watkins, ‘Practical’.
45 Watkins, ‘Reflections’, 146.
46 British theologian Elaine Graham argues that in the version of action research suggested by the ARC’s team they fall short on the criteria of a radical first person researcher reflexivity, of participation, and finally (and most importantly) of an epistemology compatible with an action research approach. See, Graham, ‘Research Report’.
47 Fiddes, ‘Ecclesiology’, 14.
48 Ibid., 15.
49 Fiddes, Participating.
50 Fiddes, ‘Ecclesiology’, 19.
51 Ibid., 26.
52 Ibid., 26.
53 Ibid., 30.
54 Ibid., 30.
55 Watkins, ‘Practicing’, 35.
56 For an extended discussion on the role of tradition and doctrine in the work of the ARCS team, see Kaufman and Ideström, ‘Why Matter?’
57 Watkins, ‘Reflections’, 147.
58 For a discussion on reflexivity in qualitative theological research, see Campbell-Reed, ‘Reflexivity’, 79–82.
59 Ideström & Kaufman, ‘Researcher’, 174–5. See also, Kaufman, ‘From the Outside’.
60 Watkins, ‘Practising’, 28.
61 Ward, ‘Theology’, 165.
62 See for example Kaufman, ‘From the Outside’.
63 Gaarden, ‘How do We Break’, 137.
64 Ibid., 136.
65 Felter, ‘Office’, 123.
66 Scharen and Vigen, Ethnography.
67 Cavanaugh, ‘Separation’, 8.
68 Cavanaugh, Theopolitical, 113.
69 von Balthasar is quoted in Cavanaugh, Theopolitical, 114.
70 See note 60 above.
71 Latour, Inquiry, 65. For theologians engaging Latour in their work, see Walton, ‘We have Never’; and Miller, Speculative.
72 His aim is ‘to propose a different formulation of the link between practice and theory that would make it possible to close the gap between them and to redesign institutions that could harbour all the values to which the Moderns hold, without crushing any one of them to the benefit of the other’. Latour, Inquiry, 100.
73 Actor-network theory is one example of a socio-material working by way of reassembling new entities, not yet gathered together, in the understanding and articulation of the social. The task of the researcher is to see how any course of action will thread a trajectory through completely foreign modes of existence. Latour, Reassembling, 71.
74 At the same time Latour’s approach does not allow for the researcher simply echo the voices of the field. The focus on how entities and actors are linked and how meaning and knowledge is mediated and translated empirically will disclose connections and relations that can add important perspectives to native self-descriptions. But they have to be articulated and described in ways that the informants themselves recognise as what they are actually doing in practice. ‘The inquiry claims to be teaching the art of speaking well to one’s interlocutors about what they are doing – what they are going through, what they are – and what they care about.’ Latour, Inquiry, 64.
75 Fiddes, ‘Ecclesiology’.
76 See Ideström, ‘Mediators’.
77 I see something of this in Mary McClintock Fulkerson’s study of Good Samaritan. She focuses on the situatedness of church and raises questions on how one can frame a situation. Following Edward Farley, she defines a situation as ‘the way various items, powers, and events in the environment gather to evoke responses from participants’. According to her, such a definition suggests a variety of elements ‘that converge relationally’. That is, they ‘evoke responses’ as opposed to unilaterally ‘causing outcomes’. By focusing on the question of which elements participate in a situation without giving any of them the role of externally causing it, the act of framing becomes fundamental. Fulkerson, ‘Interpreting’, 127.
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Jonas Ideström
Jonas Ideström is associate professor in ecclesiology in the University of Uppsala and researcher in the Church of Sweden Research and Analysis unit. His research interests are ethnographic ecclesiology, participatory ecclesiological methodology, ecclesiology and socio-material theory, church as welfare agent and church in rural areas. He co-edited Ecclesiology in the Trenches – Theory and Method under Construction (PickWick 2015) and What Really Matters – Scandinavian Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography (PickWick Publications 2018).