Download or read book Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics written by Aana Marie Vigen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-10-31 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can qualitative research methods be a tool for social change? Echoing the 'scandal of particularity' at the heart of the Christian tradition, theologians and ethicists involved in ethnographic research draw on the particular to seek out answers to core questions of their discipline. This new edition features a dynamic selection of nuanced and provocative voices in this area of ethics and theology, showing how, in the past decade, the kinds of qualitative methodologies employed have become more varied and sophisticated. The leading and emerging scholars featured in this book have much to share how they approach this kind of work, what they are learning in the process, and what sorts of change is possible as a result. This volume also pays tribute to the life and work of a pathbreaker in qualitative methods for the sake of theological imagination and social change, the Rev. Dr. Melissa D. Browning (1977-2021).
Download or read book Occasions of Faith written by Lawrence J. Taylor and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1995-04 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Devotional "occasions" or experiences by Irish Catholics form the crux of this powerful, first book-length anthropological study of Irish Catholicism. Rich in ethnographical material, wide-ranging archival sources, insightful cultural observations, vivid accounts of individual experiences, and thoughtful scrutiny of religious questions and theories illuminate twenty years of ethnographic fieldwork. From these varied resources Lawrence Taylor creates a memorable account of the forces that shape local forms of Catholicism in southwest Donegal.
Download or read book An Ethnography of Faith written by Caroline Jeannerat and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2023-01-05 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research into the history of Christian missions in the context of colonialism has focused primarily on missions as institutions and on the ways in which people were integrated into the economic, political and ideological spheres of imperial powers. Reduced to an experience occurring within a person, faith was deemed unapproachable by scientific methods. This has, in effect, constituted a silence regarding the everyday experience of religiosity amongst those drawn to Christianity. Ethnography of Faith is a detailed study of the ways in which people engage with and experience the religious in order to recognise and understand this suppressed voice of religiosity. In her analysis of the Lutheran church in the Soutpansberg of early twentieth century South Africa, Caroline Jeannerat listens closely to how people describe their own faith and that of others in the archive: in accounts of work done, in texts written for mission publications, in songs composed for church services, in letters and newspaper articles and in oral memories. A careful reading of this archive for breaks, for misunderstandings and oppositions, for sentiments of agreement, praise, compatibility and claims of shared experiences identifies negotiations of meaning which give indications of conceptualisations of faith that stand in distinction to those of the missionaries and their expectations. Caroline Jeannerat holds a PhD in history and anthropology from the University of Michigan (2007).
Download or read book Faith in Flux written by Devaka Premawardhana and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-04-20 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropologist Devaka Premawardhana arrived in Africa to study the much reported "explosion" of Pentecostalism, the spread of which has indeed been massive. It is the continent's fastest growing form of Christianity and one of the world's fastest growing religious movements. Yet Premawardhana found no evidence for this in the province of Mozambique where he worked. His research suggests that much can be gained by including such places in the story of global Christianity, by shifting attention from the well-known places where Pentecostal churches flourish to the unfamiliar places where they fail. In Faith in Flux, Premawardhana documents the ambivalence with which Pentecostalism has been received by the Makhuwa, an indigenous and historically mobile people of northern Mozambique. The Makhuwa are not averse to the newly arrived churches—many relate to them powerfully. Few, however, remain in them permanently. Pentecostalism has not firmly taken root because it is seen as one potential path among many—a pragmatic and pluralistic outlook befitting a people accustomed to life on the move. This phenomenon parallels other historical developments, from responses to colonial and postcolonial intrusions to patterns of circular migration between rural villages and rising cities. But Premawardhana primarily attributes the religious fluidity he observed to an underlying existential mobility, an experimental disposition cultivated by the Makhuwa in their pre-Pentecostal pasts and carried by them into their post-Pentecostal futures. Faith in Flux aims not to downplay the influence of global forces on local worlds, but to recognize that such forces, "explosive" though they may be, never succeed in capturing the everyday intricacies of actual lives.
Download or read book Introducing Cultural Anthropology written by Brian M. Howell and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the role of culture in human experience? This concise yet solid introduction to cultural anthropology helps readers explore and understand this crucial issue from a Christian perspective. Now revised and updated throughout, this new edition of a successful textbook covers standard cultural anthropology topics with special attention given to cultural relativism, evolution, and missions. It also includes a new chapter on medical anthropology. Plentiful figures, photos, and sidebars are sprinkled throughout the text, and updated ancillary support materials and teaching aids are available through Baker Academic's Textbook eSources.
Download or read book The Old Faith and the Russian Land written by Douglas Rogers and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Old Faith and the Russian Land is a historical ethnography that charts the ebbs and flows of ethical practice in a small Russian town over three centuries. The town of Sepych was settled in the late seventeenth century by religious dissenters who fled to the forests of the Urals to escape a world they believed to be in the clutches of the Antichrist. Factions of Old Believers, as these dissenters later came to be known, have maintained a presence in the town ever since. The townspeople of Sepych have also been serfs, free peasants, collective farmers, and, now, shareholders in a post-Soviet cooperative. Douglas Rogers traces connections between the town and some of the major transformations of Russian history, showing how townspeople have responded to a long series of attempts to change them and their communities: tsarist-era efforts to regulate family life and stamp out Old Belief on the Stroganov estates, Soviet collectivization drives and antireligious campaigns, and the marketization, religious revival, and ongoing political transformations of post-Soviet times. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival and manuscript sources, Rogers argues that religious, political, and economic practice are overlapping arenas in which the people of Sepych have striven to be ethical—in relation to labor and money, food and drink, prayers and rituals, religious books and manuscripts, and the surrounding material landscape. He tracks the ways in which ethical sensibilities—about work and prayer, hierarchy and inequality, gender and generation—have shifted and recombined over time. Rogers concludes that certain expectations about how to be an ethical person have continued to orient townspeople in Sepych over the course of nearly three centuries for specific, identifiable, and often unexpected reasons. Throughout, he demonstrates what a historical and ethnographic study of ethics might look like and uses this approach to ask new questions of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history.
Download or read book Religion in English Everyday Life written by Timothy Jenkins and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 1999 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Starting from an ethnographic appraisal of the place of religious practices, and thereby returning to an approach more recently neglected, this book offers a detailed understanding of English everyday life. Three contemporary case studies - the life of a country church, an annual procession by the churches in a Bristol suburb, a range of linked "spiritualist" beliefs - disclose the complex patterns and compulsion of ordinary lives, including both moral and historical dimensions: the distribution of reputation and conflict, and the continuities of place and identity. At the same time, the approach revises previous accounts of English social life by giving a nuanced description of the construction of local lives in interaction with their wider setting. It demonstrates the creation of local particularity under an outside gaze, showing how actors create and cope with the forces of "modernity." In addition to the original ethnographic descriptions, the book also contributes to the history and theory of the study of complex societies.
Download or read book Direct Sales and Direct Faith in Latin America written by P. Cahn and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1990, direct sales have attracted over two million recruits in Mexico and are characterized by a belief in the power of positive thinking. Through an ethnographic portrait, Peter S. Cahn demonstrates that the quasi-religious commission of self-empowerment accounts for the explosive growth of commission-based sales in the developing world.
Download or read book Being Godless written by Roy Llera Blanes and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on ethnographic inquiry and the anthropological literature on doubt and atheism, this volume explores people's reluctance to pursue religion. The contributors capture the experiences of godless people and examine their perspectives on the role of religion in their personal and public lives. In doing so, the volume contributes to a critical understanding of the processes of disengagement from religion and reveals the challenges and paradoxes that godless people face.
Download or read book Evolution and Religion in American Education written by David E. Long and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-08-03 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evolution and Religion in American Education shines a light into one of America’s dark educational corners, exposing the regressive pedagogy that can invade science classrooms when school boards and state overseers take their eyes off the ball. It sets out to examine the development of college students’ attitudes towards biological evolution through their lives. The fascinating insights provided by interviewing students about their world views adds up to a compelling case for additional scrutiny of the way young people’s educational experiences unfold as they consider—and indeed in some cases reject—one of science’s strongest and most cogent theoretical constructs. Inevitably, open discussion and consideration of the theory of evolution can chip away at the mental framework constructed by Creationists, eroding the foundations of their faith. The conceptual battleground is so fraught with logical challenges to Creationist dogma that in a number of cases students’ exposure to such dangerous ideas is actively prevented. This book provides a detailed map of this astonishing struggle in today’s America—a struggle many had thought was done and dusted with the onset of the Enlightenment.
Download or read book The Stranger at the Feast written by Tom Boylston and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction : prohibition and a ritual regime -- A history of mediation -- Fasting, bodies, and the calendar -- Proliferations of mediators -- Blood, silver, and coffee -- Spirits in the marketplace -- Concrete, bones, and feasts -- Echoes of the host -- The media landscape -- The knowledge of the world -- Conclusion
Download or read book Words Upon the Word written by James S. Bielo and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2009-04 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James S. Bielo draws on over nineteen months of ethnographic work with five congregations to better understand why group Bible study matters so much to Evangelicals and for Evangelical culture. Through a close analysis of participants' discourse, Bielo examines the defining themes of group life--from textual interpretation to spiritual intimacy and the rehearsal of witnessing. --from publisher description.
Download or read book Faith Makes Us Live written by Margarita Mooney and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-08-10 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Margarita Mooney's path-breaking book, Faith Makes us Live, is the first-ever comparative study of how religious faith and practice affect immigrant adaptation and assimilation. Her imaginative analysis of Haitian immigrants in Miami, Montreal, and Paris shows how religious faith serves to mediate culturally between immigrants and their host societies, but also reveals that by itself faith is not enough to achieve successful integration. Host societies must also be receptive to the religious institutions that serve immigrants if integration is to be achieved. Her book is essential reading for students of both religion and immigration."—Douglas S. Massey, Princeton University "Margarita Mooney's research on Haitian Catholic immigrants in three settings is elegant in design, assiduous in execution, and compelling in presentation. Mooney's immigrants bring a deep piety with them across the ocean, but the different contexts of reception they encounter in Miami, Montreal, and Paris significantly influence their differential adaptation to their new homes in the U.S., Canada, and France. Faith Makes Us Live is an essential contribution to the growing body of literature on religion and immigration."—R. Stephen Warner, University of Illinois at Chicago "Faith Makes Us Live is one of those rare books that succeeds in making a valuable contribution on at least three fronts: it extends the literature on religion and immigration by showing how religious organizations serve as mediating structures between immigrants and their host communities, it demonstrates to scholars interested in faith-based service organizations that the larger relationships between church and state must be considered carefully through a comparative framework, and it provides students of religion with a compelling, up-close-and-personal account of how faith matters in the daily lives of Haitian immigrants."—Robert Wuthnow, Princeton University "What excites me most about Faith Makes Us Live is that it analyzes the role played by the Catholic Church in immigrant incorporation while taking into consideration the distinctive challenges met by Haitians in three societies that treat the poor, immigrants and people of color quite differently. The comparison between Miami, Paris, and Montreal is particularly felicitous given differences in the position and influence of the Church, the characteristics of the Haitian populations, and the public resources available to immigrants across these three contexts. By showing how religion sustains resilience and empowerment for a particularly vulnerable group of individuals, Mooney demonstrates the crucial role of meaning-making matters for immigrant incorporation."—Michele Lamont, Harvard University. "This book teaches us an important lesson: When immigrants are religious—and so many are—pragmatic cooperation between church and state can hasten their acculturation and improve their well-being. Faith Makes Us Live is essential reading for those who want to better understand the role of religion and religious institutions in immigrants' lives."—Mark Chaves, Duke University "An examplar of theory-driven ethnographic research. Professor Mooney provides an ambitious, comparative study at once rich in detail and grand in scope. By systematically comparing three countries on two continents, this book uncovers crucial patterns of relationships among church, state, and civil society and how they affect immigrants on the ground. This is what ethnography should be: rooted in the lived experience of everyday life and yet motivated by the need to understand human social processes in general."—Andy Perrin, University of North Carolina "Thoroughly sociological in design and analysis, this study opens new vistas for the field of religion and immigration. Leaving behind celebratory or critical accounts of the role of religious beliefs in the adaptation of immigrant minorities, Mooney makes clear that processes and outcomes depend on the interaction between religious institutions and the broader socio-political context. An original contribution, made even more valuable by its focus on one of the most downtrodden groups in the migrant world."—Alejandro Portes, Princeton University
Download or read book Faith in African Lived Christianity written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-09-16 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faith in African Lived Christianity – Bridging Anthropological and Theological Perspectives offers a comprehensive, empirically rich and interdisciplinary approach to the study of faith in African Christianity. The book brings together anthropology and theology in the study of how faith and religious experiences shape the understanding of social life in Africa. The volume is a collection of chapters by prominent Africanist theologians, anthropologists and social scientists, who take people’s faith as their starting point and analyze it in a contextually sensitive way. It covers discussions of positionality in the study of African Christianity, interdisciplinary methods and approaches and a number of case studies on political, social and ecological aspects of African Christian spirituality.
Download or read book Good Faith Collaboration written by Joseph Michael Reagle and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wikipedia is famously an encyclopedia "anyone can edit," and Reagle examines Wikipedia's openness and several challenges to it: technical features that limit vandalism to articles; private actions to mitigate potential legal problems; and Wikipedia's own internal bureaucratization. He explores Wikipedia's process of consensus (reviewing a dispute over naming articles on television shows) and examines the way leadership and authority work in an open content community.
Download or read book Missionary Impositions written by Hillary K. Crane and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of essays, anthropologists of religion examine the special challenges they face when studying populations that proselytize. Conducting fieldwork among these groups may involve attending services, meditating, praying, and making pilgrimages. Anthropologists participating in such research may unwittingly give the impression that their interest is more personal than professional, and inadvertently encourage missionaries to impose conversion upon them. Moreover, anthropologists' attitudes about religion, belief, and faith, as well as their response to conversion pressures, may interfere with their objectivity and cause them to impose their own understandings on the missionaries. Although anthropologists have extensively and fruitfully examined the role of identity in research--particularly gender and ethnic identity--religious identity, which is more fluid and changeable, has been relatively neglected. This volume explores the role of religious identity in fieldwork by examining how researchers respond to participation in religious activities and to the ministrations of missionaries, both academically and personally. Including essays by anthropologists studying the proselytizing religions of Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, as well as other religions, this volume provides a range of responses to the question of how anthropologists should approach the gap between belief and disbelief when missionary zeal imposes its interpretations on anthropological curiosity.
Download or read book The Anthropology of Christianity written by Fenella Cannell and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-07 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical “repressed” of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself as a rational, empirically based enterprise quite different from theology. The theology it repudiated was, for the most part, Christian. Cannell asserts that anthropological theory carries within it ideas profoundly shaped by this rejection. Because of this, anthropology has been less successful in considering Christianity as an ethnographic object than it has in considering other religions. This collection is designed to advance a more subtle and less self-limiting anthropological study of Christianity. The contributors examine the contours of Christianity among diverse groups: Catholics in India, the Philippines, and Bolivia, and Seventh-Day Adventists in Madagascar; the Swedish branch of Word of Life, a charismatic church based in the United States; and Protestants in Amazonia, Melanesia, and Indonesia. Highlighting the wide variation in what it means to be Christian, the contributors reveal vastly different understandings and valuations of conversion, orthodoxy, Scripture, the inspired word, ritual, gifts, and the concept of heaven. In the process they bring to light how local Christian practices and beliefs are affected by encounters with colonialism and modernity, by the opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism, and by the proximity of other religions and belief systems. Together the contributors show that it not sufficient for anthropologists to assume that they know in advance what the Christian experience is; each local variation must be encountered on its own terms. Contributors. Cecilia Busby, Fenella Cannell, Simon Coleman, Peter Gow, Olivia Harris, Webb Keane, Eva Keller, David Mosse, Danilyn Rutherford, Christina Toren, Harvey Whitehouse
