Engaging with Living Religion

A Guide to Fieldwork in the Study of Religion

Stephen E. Gregg, Lynne Scholefield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317507697
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Understanding living religion requires students to experience everyday religious practice in diverse environments and communities. This guide provides the ideal introduction to fieldwork and the study of religion outside the lecture theatre. Covering theoretical and practical dimensions of research, the book helps students learn to 'read' religious sites and communities, and to develop their understanding of planning, interaction, observation, participation and interviews. Students are encouraged to explore their own expectations and sensitivities, and to develop a good understanding of ethical issues, group-learning and individual research. The chapters contain student testimonies, examples of student work and student-led questions.

1 Why study religion off campus?

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I am a Hindu because of sculptured cones of red kumkum powder and baskets of yellow turmeric nuggets, because of garlands of flowers and pieces of broken coconut, because of the clanging of bells to announce one’s arrival to God, because of the whine of the reedy nadaswaram and the beating of drums, because of the patter of bare feet against stone floors down dark corridors pierced by shafts of sunlight, because of the arati lamps circling in the darkness, because of bhajans being sweetly sung, because of elephants standing around to bless, because of colourful murals telling colourful stories …

(Yann Martel, Life of Pi, 2002, 67)

I think that it is most important to have an understanding of religion through the eyes of its followers – it helps us learn why they follow a particular tradition, and how they live their lives.

(First-year undergraduate Religious Studies student)

Actually hearing the call to prayer in Istanbul, seeing how regular people responded to it as a part of daily routine, and then visiting the Blue Mosque, really brought Islam alive for me.

(Third-year undergraduate Religious Studies student)

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Why we are writing this book

Religion isn’t lived in textbooks; it is performed, experienced and developed by living individuals and communities. Religions are not static, but evolving, creative and dynamic subjects of study.

Engagement with religious practitioners, communities and institutions saturates our approach to the study of religion. In nearly fifty countries across seven continents, we have had the fortune to talk, walk, eat and share with people from a staggering array of traditions and cultures. Sometimes this has been within formal meetings, guided events or carefully stage-managed receptions by religious communities. More often, it has been accidental, informal or responsive engagement with people expressing the norms and ideals of their everyday existence. The latter is often more enlightening. In our travels, both in a physical sense and in a sense of understanding, we have encountered religion in everyday life, in the open and in secret, in public discourse and private practice, in serenity and in dark and dangerous places (sometimes with very real physical danger), in clearly identifiable communities and in the spaces between and within interrelated identities. We have also encountered religion and religious practice when we were not expecting it.

In so doing, we have encountered forms of religion which often defy textbook description, or which do not easily fit into the neat categories that scholars often use to describe seemingly essential aspects of religions and religious identities. This means that much of the discussion in this book questions boundaries between religions and within religious communities. We will still refer to commonly used names for major religious traditions, as these are so embedded within modern university courses on religion, but every time we use these terms, you should think of them as plurals – no such thing as Christianity exists (is it really meaningful to use a singular noun to describe people and communities as diverse as Robert Mugabe and Desmond Tutu, Unitarians and Flagellants?) but it is perfectly sensible, in our opinion, to talk of Christianities, likewise it is better to think of Hinduisms instead of Hinduism and so on. As Harvey has stated:

when we say what Christians or Buddhists, or practitioners of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean religions do, we are not saying this is all they do, or that all such people do all these things … [we should therefore ask] … whether what we talk about as happening in the United States, South Africa or Korea bears any resemblance to what happens in India, Britain or Saudi Arabia.

(2009, 5)

So, there is always historical and geographical diversity within religions; they change over time and they are different in different places. For example, there are three major divisions of Christianity: Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant. In fact, there are plenty of churches which don’t fit neatly into this categorisation such as the Anglican Church or the Coptic Church based in Egypt. Judaism changed dramatically when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. London, for example, has the most culturally diverse group of Muslims anywhere in the world, and their languages, traditions and ways of understanding Islam differ enormously.

As soon as we are studying religion in the field, we become aware of many more aspects of complexity. For example, many religious groups will claim historical continuity. In the cathedral in Toledo one can still attend a Mozarabic Christian rite that goes back to the seventh century when Muslims ruled Spain. On the banks of the Ganges there are rites of arti going back three or more thousand years. There are also claims of continuity across geographical space. There are many religious diasporas, that is people who are living outside the place where their religious tradition began or was established. It is interesting that these diaspora communities are sometimes very traditional; their identity is partly still anchored to their country of origin at the time when they left. Those in the ‘home’ country have moved on but the migrants’ religious traditions are both affected by the new culture in which they are living and also, perhaps, stuck in their imagined past.

Whenever we visit places, we engage with the past to contextualise the present. Engaging with living religion offers the opportunity to engage with the lived past. In this regard, what is true for a believer is not always what is historically accurate. The narratives of religious belonging such as modern Wicca and the Goddess movement, for example, inform lived religion now by creating an idealised reception and inheritance of lived tradition. Places also create links to identity and the lived past – sitting around a fire at Avebury on a summer solstice morning is very different from sitting around a fire in one’s own garden. Ruins and places of worship also provide a connection between the claimed past and the projection of this in the lived present.

Particular diasporic communities can also serve as good examples of this patchwork of diverse religious traditions that are sometimes cut from the same cloth, but are often related in complicated and diverse ways. Afe Adogame (2009) has written recently upon the place of African Traditional Religion both within Western Africa, and also within modern cities such as New York. Bettina Schmidt (2008) has written upon Caribbean diasporic identities, including Haitian Vodou, also in New York. Their engagement with living religious traditions, based on fieldwork and a deep involvement with real people and communities, highlights an interesting issue in the study of religions for, although they are examining traditions that share a ‘source’ in West African Traditional Religion, the contemporary manifestations of these are culturally, socially and linguistically removed, and thus changed, by the complexity and diversity of everyday lived religious practices and realities. This, for us, serves as a good example of how we must not essentialise religious traditions, or accept textbook descriptions about ‘what Indigenous practitioners do’ or ‘what Muslims believe’, but instead preference reflective and experiential writing about contemporary religious communities.

Not only is there inevitably change and diversity within religions but what we understand as religion also changes. In the history of religion what religion ‘is’ in different cultures and geographic areas, and what ‘counts’ as religion, has changed (Smith, 1998). Our understanding of religion will also shift depending on whether we focus more on affiliation and organisational aspects or on individuals and what they consider to be their religious experience and expression. These may or may not correspond to what is regarded as normative within a particular tradition. It is also the case that recently in Britain and elsewhere people have begun to talk and write more about spirituality and this is often compared favourably with religion (Heelas and Woodhead, 2004).

In this book we will focus not on institutions (although in fieldwork we must often come into contact with hierarchy and structure within the communities we are working) but on the individuals who make up these institutions. In doing this, we need to attempt to understand religions and religious life with the self-identity of religious practitioners as our starting point, not bringing in value judgements about what religion ‘should or shouldn’t be’. When we suggest that you respect religion in its many and various forms, we are asking you to take the time and effort to ‘look again’ at something, including what actually may be considered as religion or religious. This is what the word ‘respect’ means. Don’t jump to conclusions before you have had a good look. We engage with recent scholarship to move the discussion on ‘what religion is’ away from essentialising and limiting categorical definitions to a newer understanding of religion as it is performed in everyday life. In chapter 2, we will explore this in some depth but here we just want to note that fieldwork is very important in this newly emerging approach to religion. As the ‘World Religions’ paradigm for teaching and research is increasingly critiqued, we need to replace notions of texts, founders and doctrines with examinations of everyday life and communities. By focusing on lived religion in our research, we privilege the ‘everyday’ and agree with Harvey when he suggests that “real life and lived religion … might turn out to be the same thing” (2013, 9).

Of course, it is not new to suggest that students and scholars should spend time outside the lecture theatre engaging with religious communities. In the history of the study of religion, there are plenty of examples of fieldwork which have helped to develop our discipline – from early pioneers such as Bronilsaw Malinowski (1922) who lived amongst the people of the Andaman Islands in the early twentieth century to contemporary scholars examining newly emergent religious communities such as Susan Palmer (2010) and the Nuwaubian Nation of Moors. Much can be learned from reading about their experiences, but undergraduate students of religion are not going to carry out this kind of extensive research and that, more than anything, is the motivation for this book. The overwhelming number of students of religion will instead engage with religious communities and individuals as a part of a short-term research project, perhaps a final-year research dissertation, or even more likely in group visits run by their course tutors. In writing this book, therefore, we are not trying to rewrite a full-blown account of how to perform deep anthropological ethnography whilst living with remote communities for prolonged periods of time, but instead aim to provide students with the key skills to analyse and reflect upon their experiences in engaging with living religion in a variety of forms when it is found ‘outside the lecture theatre’. In so doing, we want to encourage and allow students to operate as neophyte researchers in ways which value local and everyday interactions with religion.

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Being a neophyte researcher

We like the term ‘neophyte researcher’ for someone beginning their study of living religion in the field because some definitions of the word ‘neophyte’ come from religious contexts. As you can see from this extract from the Oxford English Dictionary, the word has several meanings:

1 a new convert, esp. to a religious faith.

2 Roman Catholic Church – (a) a novice of a religious order (b) a newly ordained priest.

3 a beginner; a novice [NT Gk neophutus newly planted].

Of course we do not presume that you are, or should be, religious, but we do want to persuade (convert) you to do fieldwork. And we hope that this engagement with living religion that you are beginning to undertake will make a real difference to you and your understanding as it has for us.

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To help explain why we wrote this book, we hope it may be useful to provide some background about the authors so that you know why we are interested in studying living religion, how we have used the field with students and ways in which we have learned from studying religion in the field. We have put this in the first person, speaking about ‘I’ because as will become clear throughout this book, when we engage with living religion we do so as the people we are. We must be reflexive about the impact of this engagement on ourselves, and the ways in which we impact upon the people we are meeting.

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Approaches to writing this book

Stephen: I studied Religion as an undergraduate at a Theology and Religious Studies Department in a UK university. Although my degree was labelled Theology, a modular system allowed me to take a wide range of modules from Religious Studies, and I quickly realised the important differences between the disciplines – something which, as an 18 year old going to university, I had not appreciated. After my undergraduate degree, I registered for a PhD in Religious Studies and have remained in this area ever since (in fact, I prefer the term ‘study of religion’ to religious studies, but more on that below … ). As a lecturer, I have always preferenced tangible experiences for students in their learning which they can relate to their everyday experiences – not just the field visits and study tours which underpin much of this book, but also in working with students to appreciate contemporary media on religion, the relationship between religion and popular culture and the everyday realities of performing religious practices. Often, I seek to ensure that students are taken outside their ‘comfort zone’, both intellectually and emotionally. This often means playing the advocatus diaboli with them, perhaps with regard to ‘what religion is’, but it also means exploring troubling acts that are carried out in the name of religion, or seeking to understand views which run counter to majority cultural values – not only do I feel that this is an important way of helping students to learn, I would argue that not to do this is to do a disservice to the concept or category of religion in all its multiplicity and complexity. This approach means that I often take students outside of the lecture theatre to critique and ‘test’ what the textbooks tell them about religions and religious practitioners. Many of these experiences are referred to in this book, so I will not go into details now, but a recurring theme for me is to seek out what may be described as ‘dislocated religion’ or ‘religion at the edges’ – by seeking out religious acts and religious people in places that are beyond the obvious, we may better understand religion as an everyday lived reality.

Lynne: I have always been fascinated by what might be called ‘the spiritual’. I studied Divinity at university, became a religious education high school teacher and then a university lecturer. I have been taking students to visit places of worship and meet with religious people and communities in the locality and further afield for the last forty years because that brings the learning alive and makes the experiences of religious people real. I recently met up with some students whom I taught in the early 1980s who still talk about the impact on them of visiting places of worship in Birmingham nearly thirty years ago. I have thought a lot about how students could be helped to gain more from these kinds of experiences, particularly by paying attention to the experiential nature of the learning, and that is why I wanted to write this book.

My own understanding of a religion such as Judaism, for example, developed through attending a Shabbat meal and Passover Seder, going to synagogue, meeting and talking with Jews, studying biblical and other texts with Jews, visiting Jewish museums and going to Israel as well as through reading and lectures. Travel to different places, in my own country and abroad, enables me to experience and understand what I could never do if I stayed at home – as long as I am open to the possibilities. It is very exciting to now take university students abroad to study as well as supervising their independent fieldwork study of religion. At the end of this chapter there is a question about where you would choose to go, if you could, to study religion. At the time of writing this I have just visited Vietnam and Cambodia, and will soon be going to Togo and Benin in West Africa. One place I would love to explore but which isn’t possible at the moment is the Yemen – maybe one day...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Why study religion off campus?
• 2. Ways of studying religion off campus: academic approaches and issues
• 3. Where to study religion off campus: places of worship and beyond
• 4. Group fieldwork: short field visits and residential study tours
• 5. Independent fieldwork: reflexivity, case studies, interviews and writing up
• 6. Virtual fieldwork: engaging with religions with new (and old) media
• 7. Deepening and widening engagement with Living Religion
• Index