Religiously Engaged Ethnography: Reflections of a Christian Anthropologist Studying Hindus in India and Nepal

ABSTRACT

Anthropology has rejected religiously based thought in its analysis from its inception. Now, due to developments in the anthropology of Christianity, ‘theologically engaged anthropology’ is inviting mutually productive interdisciplinary dialogue between anthropology and theology. What might anthropology look like, going forward, if the religious views of ethnographers were to be included in the production of ethnographies? Those in reflexive ethnography have already acknowledged that ethnographers’ cultural backgrounds enter into representations of other cultures, and those in ‘the ontological turn’ are challenging anthropology’s ontological assumptions through the serious consideration of their interlocutors’ views. I suggest that there is value for the discipline in permitting discourses of ethnography and analysis that reflect the multiple, sometimes religiously-based, ontologies of ethnographers as well.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnography
• religion
• ontology
• theology
• science

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I thank Brian Howell for his chapter in Meneses and Bronkema (2017), entitled, ‘Mystery: To Know and Be Known inEthnography’ (33–53), which served as a model for this article.

2 http://research.franklin.uga.edu/tea/content/center-theologically-engaged-anthropology

3 There is also a related question: How might I have leveraged the asymmetrical circumstances of the ethnographic encounter to assist these friends in their very real difficulties. Those in ‘engaged anthropology’ are calling for more responsible action on the part of ethnographers who encounter violence, injustice, and abuse (Scheper-Hughes 1995; Sanford & Angel-Ajani 2008; Kosmatopoulos 2010).

4 Gibson (2017b:94) estimates just 50,000 in 1990 based on church records.

5 It is true that, especially since Geertz, there have been significant efforts made to represent religion phenomenologically, rather than reductively. However, even now some of the most vigorous attempts to ‘explain’ religion are the most reductive in anthropology’s history, such as the cognitive evolutionary approach of Pascal Boyer (2002). Note the title of his article, ‘Religious Thought and Behavior as By-Products of Brain Function’ (2003).

6 The full quote is,

Maintaining an Other’s values implicit does not mean celebrating some numinous mystery that they might hide but rather amounts to refusing to actualize the possibilities expressed by indigenous thought – opting to sustain them as possible indefinitely, neither dismissing them as the fantasies of others, nor by fantasizing ourselves that they may gain their reality for us.

7 I am not suggesting here that the ethnographer’s commitments are permanently fixed or are never altered by the encounter with others. It is certainly true that engaging others’ views commonly produces an ambivalence about our own views, along with the possibility of change. But I am particularly addressing the existence in all of us of a priori commitments to ontological assumptions that are relatively stable at the time of the ethnographic encounter and therefore influence the analysis.

8 Smith suggests that the restrictions placed on the American public by ‘secular rationalism’ result in a political discourse that is so shallow that it cannot provide a way forward on pressing issues. As a result, religious beliefs and values are smuggled in by all sides to construct arguments that have the force needed to make important decisions.