That’s one kind of reaction to my work, I suppose. But I am curious as to why they feel so strongly that my work threatens their truth. When I was an anthropology student we used to joke about senior ethnographers who responded to theoretical arguments in seminars by interrupting, “But in my tribe people believed . . .” This kind of empiricism is still, unfortunately, with us. Many ethnographers think that they have a proper understanding of their informants’ experience (and therefore of their religious belief or disbelief) by virtue of the fact that they have spent some (limited) time with them in their form of life—as if the experience of their informants was homogeneous, complete and consistent, as if their form of life (shared briefly by the ethnographer) could be summed up in a representation reflecting an indisputable reality and was not itself an internally ambiguous interpretation, and as if their ordinary language was more authentic than the language of their theological texts.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 05:09:59 +0000
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