Learning through Research: Students as Participant Observers of Religion/s

Author: Anja Finger, Religious Studies, University of Aberdeen

Journal Title: Discourse

ISSN: 2040-3674

ISSN-L: 1741-4164

Volume: 10

Number: 3

Return to vol. 10 no. 3 index page

This article examines the first field-work experiences of 17 third-year undergraduate students in Religious Studies at a Scottish university.1 The context is a course in the social anthropology of religions. This course had been running for several years before I came to co-ordinate, re-design and teach it for the first time in 2011. The following reflections are based on this learning-and-teaching experience. Students who opted for the elective constructed their own research questions on topics such as rituals/religious actions, embodiment, recruitment, and everyday life. Subsequently, the student-researchers went out into the 'field', became participant observers, and investigated local religious communities, usually in small groups of two to three. The heart of Social Anthropology of Religions is its fieldwork component: Small groups of students visit a local, religious community and conduct interviews and participant observation. For the students involved, this presents a chance to put the wisdom of textbooks and theories to the test of research practice and to get involved in experiential learning outside the classroom. For me as course co-ordinator and author of this article it has been a fruitful experience of re-designing an existing course and teaching to facilitate students' research. I shall reflect on these experiences by first setting out the course context and its structure. A paragraph on participant observation sheds some light on the method students learn to use before their projects are briefly introduced. The ways in which students have reflected on their fieldwork experience then precede my own account of the process to finally discuss the different perspectives and possible consequences to be drawn from them.

Course in context

The Scottish undergraduate degree takes four years, the first two at sub-honours and the other two at honours level. Students' expertise and interest between these levels can vary to a considerable extent, which is partly explained by the fact that students tend to settle for a subject or combination of subjects at an advanced stage in their studies. As a third-year course, Social Anthropology of Religions builds on the basics acquired in the first two years entailing a grasp of a number of religious traditions. Following a general overview in the first year, in the second year at Aberdeen these are currently Islam and/or Buddhism. Students should also be familiar with a range of theorists, especially but not exclusively some of the classics (Karl Marx - Max Weber - Emile Durkheim as well as Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung).

The course invites students to apply, but also to question what they have learnt in their studies so far. Practically, it also encourages them to develop a stronger attachment to the discipline of Religious Studies, since by their third year they will usually have made, or at least can be reasonably expected to have made, a conscious decision for this subject. I deliberately use the terms 'discipline' and 'subject' interchangeably, given that from a student's perspective these tend to converge and that the hybrid character of Religious Studies sets it apart from disciplines operating in a more paradigmatic manner. Aiming at its more pragmatic dimension, students in this course come to understand that Religious Studies is not, or at least not only, an aloof discipline/subject pursued somewhere in the remoteness of the academic ivory tower and dealing with deciphering ancient scripture or interpreting theories that can neither defend themselves nor run away. Since this is their first exposure to and experience of field-work the threshold for engagement has to be fairly low. One of the positive effects of having taken this course was the extent to which it boosted students' confidence, going by their own reports. At the start, quite a few of them had voiced their reservations: Expressed, for instance, through the student representative there was an anxiety of not being up to the task. Clearly, this was to be a new learning experience. By the end of the course, however, these doubts and self-doubts had been mostly resolved.

One of the hopes associated with offering a course like this is that students would not only get a fuller picture of the research process, but would also choose to do field-, rather than only text-based research for their dissertations. This hope has not been unfounded, as currently some of the students are indeed incorporating fieldwork elements in their final-year projects. Hence, this confirms that a third-year course is strategically well-placed to inspire the process of finding a topic and constructing a research question for and in fourth year.

Rather than inculcating specific [sub-]disciplinary self-identifications in students, this course engages them in learning about and applying transferable methods - and thus in questioning disciplinary boundaries and becoming aware of their historical and spatial contingencies as well as substantial overlaps between disciplines and subdisciplines. While disciplinary locations certainly define and support the construction of teaching-research linkages (see: e.g. Jenkins/Healey/Zetter 2007), there is a danger of re/presenting disciplines as distinct monolithic entities, a danger students - but not only them - may be susceptible to. After all, a fully disciplinarian worldview simplifies things. To illustrate by way of example: Some students in this course wanted a clear, unambiguous answer to the question what makes Anthropology different from Sociology. Unfortunately, for any one answer you will find at least two good reasons why it is not a sufficiently good answer: This is an inconvenient truth for struggling students, to be sure, but also food for thought and an invitation to reflexivity for those who are sure-footed in their disciplinary identities.

Course structure

The course, in its redesigned format, has been set up to first provide students with some basic understanding of theories, methodologies and methods. This is achieved through lectures and textbook-based tutorial discussions. While I usually tend to avoid assigning textbooks, for this course it proved useful and several students commented that it provided a good base. In one case, however, the status of the text was unclear: Apparently the student had read the textbook as one of the theories and hence, understandably, wanted to see more theoretical diversity. Yet, as a textbook account and précis of existing theories I feel Bowie (2006) is a useful resource. It has, however, to be read for what it is, and at least for this purpose to be complemented by reading original theories, albeit in less breadth and depth than a non-textbook course with a primarily theoretical focus would demand.

While the students tend to have some prior understanding of theories that are relevant to Religious Studies, the introductory section of the course enables them to think about anthropological and sociological approaches to religion/s through reading ethnographic and theoretical materials. Individual sessions dealt with Judith Okely's study of the Traveller Gypsies; Victor Turner's concepts of liminality (a particular favourite with the students) and Communitas; Evans-Pritchard's book on Azande witchcraft; the concept of theodicy; religion and the critique of heteronormativity; sites of pilgrimage as sites of conflicts; material culture and the meanings of ethnography; interview techniques with in-class exercises (for instance, breaking down individual research questions into interview questions and doing a writing exercise on autoethnography). This presents a deliberately broad-ranging selection of works and interests. Students also thought about research ethics, not only in terms of institutional guidelines but about the research relationship itself as an ethical challenge. Insider/outsider perspectives and their combinations were also discussed. The learning process was supported by selected audio-visual materials, which introduced students to the people behind the theories and enabled them to put faces to their names. Students were encouraged to think about skills and personal development. They were introduced to the findings of Gilliat-Ray (2005) and asked to think about additional skills they expect, anticipate or hope to acquire or develop in the course. This proved a fruitful exercise and for a seminar task students named a range of skills: Sensitivity/maturity, confidence, accuracy/respect, report-writing, note-taking, flexibility/adaptability, perseverance, presentation skills, communication skills, objectivity/reflexivity, concentration skills, IT skills, and attention to detail.

Partly overlapping with the process of more abstract familiarisation, students started thinking about their research projects. They found out about the religious landscape in a comparatively secular Scottish city. They learned about which religious communities have made their home there as well as to locate and later on to contact them.2 Using a list of broad topics, students gradually came to formulate the research question their group was to pursue, a theoretical framework for it, and a provisional questionnaire. In the past year there have been six topics, which have been chosen to represent both classic issues and more recent additions to the anthropological repertoire:

  1. Rituals/Religious Actions
  2. Sex/Gender/Sexual Orientation
  3. Embodiment/Material Culture
  4. Recruitment/Socialisation
  5. Leadership/Power
  6. Everyday Life.3

Students have been given ample time to conduct their research, in this case three weeks in addition to the Easter vacation. During this time I was on stand-by and available to answer students' questions and queries, either by email or in face-to-face meetings. Returning to the seminar room, they presented their findings in group presentations, wrote individual project reports, and sat a written exam (unfortunately, part of the assessment scheme I inherited). The exam addressed the theoretical and methodological concerns and thus revisited the initial themes of the course, now enriched by research experience.

Participant observation

Within a Religious Studies context, experiential elements can be defined as 'learning opportunities that involve students in meeting members of faith communities in their own centres and places of worship' and that 'allow for a rich and deep form of learning' (Robinson/Cush, 2010: 57; 59). Participant observation, the key method of ethnography, emphasises this experiential aspect: Patently so in its participatory dimension, but no less in reflecting on one's observations, too. Coined as a term by Chicago sociologist Eduard C. Lindeman in 1924 in a context in which the participant observer was a group member reporting back to the researcher, since the 1940s the concept has denoted the research method as it is known today. In the posthumously published 'On Fieldwork', the text of a clandestinely recorded and transcribed interview,4 Erving Goffman (1989: 125) has put it quite lyrically as a technique

of getting data ... by subjecting yourself, your own body and your own personality, and your own social situation, to the set of contingencies that play upon a set of individuals, so that you can physically and ecologically penetrate their circle of response to their social situation, or their work situation, or their ethnic situation, or whatever. So that you are close to them while they are responding to what life does to them.

Whatever - this might very well, and does in the context of this article, include the individuals' religious situation. Goffman also mentions the researcher's acting as-if, as if one could not leave at any time, but shares in the constraints felt by one's respondents. Such acting is, perhaps, a demand that cannot easily be imposed on our students. Unlike in other fieldwork learning settings, for instance fieldwork placements,5 participants remain at home and do not stay in 'their' religious community, i.e. they are not being placed there. It is also worth bearing in mind that Goffman's path-breaking research was mostly covert. While the jury is still out on the ethical status of a covert approach, we could recommend it to our students. Furthermore, Goffman's Asylums was set in the context of total institutions, especially the mental hospital, which is a context different from those the students went to do their research in.

Clifford Geertz's (1988: 77) memorable phrase of 'sailing at once in several seas', not 'going native', is found in the research manuals and at least one of my students remembered it later in the exam. Its original context is a discussion of Malinowski's diary, quite different in style and contents from your standard research monograph. Geertz (Op. cit.: 83) was interested in writing and the problems it poses for the anthropologist, in his/her creation of 'participant description'. Participant observation, by contrast, he felt 'turns out to be a wish not a method'(Ibid.). ...

The wish (or method?) is often combined with others to get a fuller picture. In this case, students conducted semi-structured interviews to complement the findings of participant observation. Participation levels generally tend to vary, and so they did in the students' projects. They bear witness to the fact that 'ethnographic fieldwork involves alternating between the insider and outsider experience, and having both simultaneously' (Spradley, 1980: 57). Spradley (Op. Cit.: 58 et seqq.) distinguishes between five types of participation, ranging from low to high degrees of involvement: No involvement is shown in Nonparticipation, and then involvement increases gradually from passive participation, via moderate, active to complete types of participation. While neither passive participation nor complete participation are viable options for this type of learning through research, both moderate and active levels of participation were what student-researchers engaged in. With the exception of one student who had to work on his own due to the sudden disappearance of his colleague, all of the students worked together in groups. Rather than becoming initiated into the tradition of the Lone Ranger approach to fieldwork, their first fieldwork experience has thus been one of team ethnography (Ericksen/Stull 1998) made possible by a collaborative research effort as well as the willing collaboration of community members. While the emphatically experiential dimension involved in this type of learning necessarily touches on the discursive and ritual practices of religious communities and individuals standing in for these, it is less about partaking in a religious experience than about the experience of research, or experiencing oneself as a researcher in one's chosen field setting.

Fieldwork projects

For their projects, students were interested in a range of religious communities, from Abrahamic/world religions to New Religious Movements. All groups reported back to the plenary by giving PowerPoint-supported presentations. The quality of these was high compared to some of those I have seen in other courses, and even students who have been shy in other circumstances seemed to be inspired by the team effort.

One group encountering a community often described as emphasising orthopraxis was interested in how ritual is actually lived on a day-to-day basis. They found that there is a lot of variation in if and how ritual obligations are observed, and that they are, as the students put it in their presentation 'translated into everyday life in Aberdeen.'

Another group chose a similarly top-down approach by focusing on orthodox beliefs supposedly guiding their community. They were surprised that their respondents seemed more open-minded and less strict than they had expected.

While these two examples clearly represent learning processes, they also serve to question the widespread 'world religions' approach that constructs separate, monolithic entities called 'religions'. My students' experience echoed Geaves's (1996) monitum that 'we may be guilty not only of distorting reality but of actually assisting in the process of constructing artificial religious boundaries and unwittingly serving the purposes of various orthodoxies'. Fieldwork forms an antidote to such preconceptions. Beyond that, those who teach Religious Studies are encouraged to re-think the ways in which they introduce the object of study to students in the first place, pre-fieldwork. Does our teaching actually sensitise our students for the ways in which religious phenomena are socially constructed? Or do we, or at least some of us, just pay lip-service to a constructionist perspective, while our teaching materials speak a completely different language, one of realist objectivism? Clearly, fieldwork courses could achieve even more if we would not have to spend a lot of time assisting our students in unlearning 'truths' that they should have never picked up in the first place.

An interesting aspect is gender, which an all-female group of students became very aware of when they sensed that male and female contacts reacted differently towards them. While the former were felt to be quite reserved or even suspicious, the latter, especially in women-only contexts, were perceived as being more relaxed and forthcoming. Men were seen as strict and adhering to literalism in reading their scripture, while women appeared to be welcoming and hospitable, for example by sharing food. Although perhaps unaware of how their account reproduced gender stereotypes, the students clearly noticed atmospheric differences between the two settings and thus showed themselves to be capable of reflecting on their own emotional involvement. Some, however, struggled to reconcile this with what they assumed a professional perspective should look like: One female participant observer felt she lost her professional distance when she was 'beleaguered' by a child. In spite of all teaching efforts to the contrary, the myth of objectivity is slow to die and lingers on in research manuals. Part and parcel of this myth is the conviction that only reserve and distance produce truth (although adherents of this approach could hardly bring themselves to admit that truth is a product). It is perpetuated by what Davies (2010: 12) calls 'codification', i.e. 'the process by which participant observation has been increasingly formalised over recent decades into a series of neat research strategies and procedures more or less positivist in orientation'. On the other hand, the fact that they are less familiar with the ins and outs of codification may enable students to cast a fresh eye on what they see and hear. And some of this did come as a surprise to students: The group interested in integration and adjustment of a community characterised by the migration background of its members found that they felt well-integrated and approvingly noted efforts being made by the secular or Christian surroundings to accommodate them and their religious needs.

Another group's research question was about an individual's place within their non-mainline church and family, and it was quickly found that a provisional answer would have to consider the gendered nature of this faith as well as different stages of the life-course. Participant observation was conducted at a service and family dinner, with the latter proving more interesting to the students, who also felt that they had become too 'active' in the process. Yet another group looked at alternative forms of Christianity. They were interested in how the Holy Spirit is believed to become embodied in practice and surveyed a range of theories of embodiment. Constructing a firm link between research and theories turned out to be a stimulating intellectual challenge to the students.

A New Religious Movement and its adherents' unique life-style was what another group set itself to explore. How an alternative life-style co-exists or conflicts with a modern Western one was the students' concern. They found that there is a range of ways of engaging with an organisation, many of which do not require a wholesale change of life-style. Students were obviously puzzled by some aspects of doctrine, e.g. ideas about food purity and self-management they encountered during the seminars and workshops they attended. A student researcher interested in Buddhism in the West looked at ritual and the modifications made to it in order to cater for a spiritually less experienced Western audience. He found that the extent of such modifications was minimal and no significant ritual 'dumbing-down' occurred at the centre he visited.

From this brief overview, we can conclude that students built on the full range of the six broad topics given to them to work with. Rituals and religious actions as well as everyday life were popular choices. Embodiment inspired one of the teams. At least one group developed an interest in socialisation during their research, and gender came up - albeit unplanned - for another one during fieldwork. The only topic students steered clear away from was leadership/power. This does not necessarily indicate a lack of concern, let alone an apolitical outlook. It seems that the other topics were given preference as they presented themselves in more concrete forms and more translatable into research terms.

Students' reflections

The novices' reflections about their experiences shed new light on the subject of a method that has often been described as oxymoronic and full of potential pitfalls: Who defines the field? How much participation is permissible or desirable? While this is a crucial question irrespective of which area of social life is at stake, it becomes even more acute if our subject matter is religion. On the other hand, does not all observation involve a certain, variable degree of participation? Yet, should the fact that a lot of scholarship on religion/s is already more affirmative than beneficial for a critical approach not caution us against reliance on over-identifying participants? Overall, students have enjoyed the hands-on experience offered by the course. In addition to the standard evaluation forms used by the university, I have given them an open questionnaire to help them reflect on the experience and to enable me to do the same.

The questionnaire consists of eight questions, encompassing the field, the team, the balance between participation and observation, what worked well and what did not, moments of awkwardness and of feeling at ease, additional topics to start on, and research stimulation. It included a section on skills based on Gilliat-Ray (2005), whose project report had been used in a lecture-and-seminar session, and Levine et al. (1980), who attest to the fact that the skills agenda is not a novelty. Completing the questionnaire was entirely voluntary and students were assured of anonymity and confidentiality. Ten out of seventeen were completed and returned to me at and after the end of the course. This represents a good response rate, given that I had stressed the voluntary nature of this in an effort to differentiate my roles as course co-ordinator and researcher. Such role differentiation is paralleled by the differentiation of student and research object/subject roles and different degrees as well as expressions of autonomy defined by each of these roles.

Students mostly reported that they feel more confident about their research and analytical skills than they did before undertaking the project. Most individuals state that their groups worked well as teams and that they managed a fair distribution of labour. Being able to choose who to work with was mentioned as a positive experience by one participant. Answers on the ratio/relation of participation and observation vary, with the most balanced account being this: I have been both, in fact, almost in equal measure. I was invited to participate in an important ritual, and not actually being privy (at the time) of the exact meaning of said ritual, I was in a strange position of simultaneously participating in and observing what was happening.

At the extreme end of full participation, there is a student who writes: 'I would say I participated fully in the group, to such an extent that at one workshop others did not know my role until I informed them late in the afternoon'. And another voice highlighted the importance of participation thus: 'Due to the nature of the community, simply observing is not an option. The practices of the community involve lots of interaction with sharing of thoughts and experiences.' Only one student wrote that the project had not stimulated his/her interest in research, whereas a fellow student gave the following answer to this question: 'Yes, it was great to be able to observe first hand instead of just reading about it.' Another one is so enthused that, ironically, the reply is rather positivist: '... you know the info is not diluted or twisted as you heard it from the source.' A balanced judgement is reached by a participant observer who praises the team effort of data reduction and analysis, yet 'felt it to be not too challenging' and nevertheless gives the following answer to the research-stimulation question: 'Definitely! I wish I would have the chance to do similar work in my other courses.' Equally enthusiastic and constructively future-orientated is this comment:

Yes, it has made me more critical of everything I read! I am now aware how fluid research findings can be. People do not fit into any neat little boxes, and any quotes or findings can be manipulated to fit a range of theories. The integrity of the researcher is very important. It has also made me think deeply about the dissertation for next year. Both topic and method are going to need to be very clearly developed.

Issues of data analysis and interpretation as well as academics' problematic expectations of people's beliefs are flagged up in this critical observation: 'Some academia is misjudged to [sic] our particular group, and sometimes the members could not explain paradoxical elements to their beliefs.'

Particularly revealing is what students have to say about moments of awkwardness in their research: They mention specific ritual contexts unfamiliar to them, gender relations, asking personal questions (repeatedly stated) and being asked by one's respondents, particularly about one's own beliefs: 'I never felt awkward except when asked what religion I followed. However I always feel awkward when I tell a religious person I don't believe.' Another student linked this question back to the participant-observer spectrum: 'One moment I felt awkward was when I was asked questions in a learning session which I did not know the answer to! I felt too much a participant at this time!'

Co-ordinator's reflections

Activities in and around this course have integrated scholarship/research and teaching in two ways: Firstly, there is the fact that students become student researchers, guided by the course co-ordinator and reflecting on the process; secondly, the course co-ordinator's feeding back of this process to the scholarly community. This is based on the assumption that research and teaching are mutually influencing each other and that students' awareness is heightened by their participation in research. Research-teaching linkages are not only about academics' research conveyed to a student audience, but also about engaging students themselves in the research process.

Students learn that research is not rocket science (except where it is), get an understanding of how the wisdom of texts and theories is created and may even wish to ponder research as a career option. In the process, they also work on a variety of skills - an aspect that has been stressed a lot by recent research into teaching (Gilliat-Ray 2005, Robinson/Cush 2010). Skills acquisition overlaps with integrating one's emotionality. Robinson/Cush's (2010) Skills Audit, based on the Subject Benchmarking Statement and the Subject Centre Employability Guide includes 'interpersonal sensitivity' and 'organisational sensitivity', both of which may benefit such integration, the first perhaps only in more immediately obvious ways than the latter and stressed the importance of assessment to check the actual acquisition of skills. Reflecting not only on thoughts but also on one's emotions and emotionality as integral part of one's research makes it stronger rather than weaker, not only in a student-research context. Perhaps the categories of sensitivity encourage a broader understanding of emotionality that is not limited to moments of crisis or outbreak and encompasses both dispositional and performative dimensions of action and reflection.

The course clarified for me the importance of teaching students how to think about the separation of interpretation from observation (Hennink/Hutter/Bailey, 2011: 184; 196), particularly in a plenary discussion after one of the group presentations. In one case, a family evening was characterised as 'indoctrinating' children and an interesting as well as passionate discussion about the value judgement implicit in this clearly interpretive, i.e. not 'merely' observational comment ensued. I do not think that a strict separation between observation and interpretation can be maintained; however we can try to mark our comments as one or the other while building on and further developing the repertoires of interpretation (Alvesson/Sköldberg, 2000: 25) available to us. Those who insist on a strict separation tend to block out that every observation contains an interpretive element. In other words: Without interpretation there is no observation, let alone any experience. Alternatively, all we would have is a mass of meaningless data (if at all), or nameless things happening to us. In a manner related to reflexive methodology, the statement about indoctrination as well as the one about the gendered setting mentioned earlier show that students took a critical approach and did not take any verbal information given at face-value. In doing so, they implicitly approximated Goffman's (1989: 131) self-revelation: 'I don't give hardly any weight to what people say, but I try to triangulate what they're saying with events'. How much weight students give to one or the other is influenced by a variety of factors beyond this course. One factor that can be narrowed down, though, is other subject/disciplinary influences they may be under. The majority of students in this course have taken Religious Studies as part of a Joint Honours degree: Whether their other subject is English or Sociology, to refer to two of the more popular combinations, may give some idea of the repertoires of interpretation they draw upon.

As Robinson/Cush (2010: 61) have noted, exposing students to lived religion may present them 'with a version of religions that diverge markedly from standard textbook portrayals and ... the dominant images of religion'. My students were acutely aware of this. Step by step, they learned to see that approaching communities with the yardstick of religious orthodoxy firmly in hand may not be the most fruitful undertaking. Questioning orthodoxy is part of the ideology-critical function of the academic study of religion. Critique of ideology encompasses critique of others as well as critique of self, which is crucial for the kind of reflexive teaching that knows where it is coming from but rather seeks to open up students' minds than to lead them exactly there.

At the other end of the participant-observer spectrum, there are examples of (not only student) research in which the researcher becomes completely absorbed by an experience interpreted and felt to be religious. One of my students found it hard to return to the form of the essay and submitted a quite disjointed, pretty non-academic, yet highly original poem about the embodying qualities of the Holy Spirit, assessment of which presented a challenge.

Finally, many students have not fully grasped the problem of defining one's field, and linking theories and research in a meaningful manner has proved difficult for several groups. The notion of the field appeared to be unproblematic to most students. They saw it as something quasi-natural that went with the presence of 'their' religious community and even the whole of the tradition studied. While this is undoubtedly a key factor in defining the field, the constructive efforts of the researchers proved to be more difficult to come to the fore - at least as far as the construction of the students' respective fields was concerned. Linking theories and research was an equally daunting task for many students, and the two challenges appear to be connected. There was a tendency in students to apply a pre-theoretical attitude to the course - ironically perhaps the result of some naive objectivism, which in itself is a theoretical choice. While clearly further work is needed on these fronts, in other respects many students have overcome the objectivist attitude and opened themselves up to a more self-reflexive stance. At least, this is what can be inferred from their presentations, essays, and reflective questionnaires - but less so from their final written exam scripts; maybe a sign of falling back into old habits on part of the students?! Definitely, however, this presents encouragement for the course co-ordinator to rethink the viability and usefulness of the exam format on top of the other assessment forms used in this course. Since there is nothing intrinsically valuable in a written exam and I have already had some good experiences with replacing it with an alternative form of assessment in one of my other courses, I have decided to drop the exam and propose two shorter writing assignments at an earlier stage in the course instead: One is to deal with the theoretical aspects previously covered by the exam, and the other one takes the form of a report 'from the field' and could be submitted to an online discussion forum. This would allow students to savour their field-work experience, share it with their fellow students, and make their return to academic routine less abrupt.

Discussion

The 'view of participant observation as a collaborative enterprise has its counterpart in teaching. Instead of treating students as empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge ("here is the truth, swallow it") and instead of students regarding themselves as passive recipients of pedagogic wisdom ('"just tell me what I've got to know"), we can try to construct learning as a mutual relationship between educator and the educated (Burawoy, 1991 : 292).

Michael Burawoy, charismatic proponent of public sociology, does not claim that this is easy, and in his own diction there is still a residual dichotomy, the one between educator on the one hand and educated on the other, which limits his vision of mutuality. Yet, the idea of e-ducation preserves an element of e-mancipation, of getting out of and beyond that what is. Social Anthropology of Religions gives students a large amount of choice and allows them to construct their own research projects. Facilitated by the course co-ordinator, students actively construct their own learning communities. As student researchers, they are practically encouraged to participate in higher education. This can be inclusive to a great extent: Students with mobility impairments, for instance, can choose to explore online communities.

During several weeks of fieldwork, students have been invited to contact me with any project-related queries they may have had. This process could be made more transparent and inter-subjective by introducing an online discussion tool, which I would like to do next year. Another remaining challenge is to overcome the split between - often 'grand' - theories on the one hand and research on the other. Skills-building, popular as it is in pedagogic research, does not really bridge that gap. Skills acquisition is clearly an important factor to consider in designing and carrying out a course like this. There is, however, the danger of sacrificing the relative openness of experience to a utilitarian framework, in which every learning outcome has to be spelled out and subsequently assessed.

The team-ethnographic approach has been relatively successful in this case. It involves a lot of work in small groups, both inside the classroom at the start and outside during the fieldwork period. However, in none of my other courses have students ever responded so well to small-group activities. All too often, these activities assume an alibi function or simply serve to keep the students busy. Activities that have predefined outcomes may limit students' creative intelligence. In this course, by contrast, students know that working - not only in but - as groups is necessary for the project as a whole. This is a truly creative process, in which none of us knows the answer beforehand. It is also a practical critique of the rampant individualism that characterises our late capitalist society. According to Erickson and Stull (1998: 27), 'individualism is more than a cult; it is the state religion of ethnography'.6 The student of Religious Studies is well-placed to formulate a critique of this religion.

Endnotes

  1. I would like to thank my audience at the 2011 PRS conference in Greenwich for their stimulating contributions, which have helped me to further develop an earlier draft of this paper.
  2. To facilitate this, students are given a letter signed by the course-coordinator and explaining the context and background of the project/s.
  3. This list is subject to change. By and large, students were happy with the amount of choice and the range of topics given to them. Asked if they wanted to add any topics, one student suggested explicitly adding diasporic religion and another one named death and lost teachings/practices.
  4. The Goffman interview dates back to 1974. Goffman had objected to publication of his remarks in a journal at the time due to their informal nature. Their posthumous publication seven years after his death in 1982 raises some interesting questions about research ethics.
  5. See, for instance, the fieldwork placements offered by Bath Spa University and the related, fascinating website: http://www.livingreligion.co.uk.
  6. Erickson and Stull (1998: 54) develop their analogy further by stating: 'The religion of academic individualism is expressed in custom and is rooted in structure'. Thus they recognise that change does neither happen overnight nor is it the result of sudden decisions. Pointing our students to this fact is another aspect of facilitating their critical self-reflexivity as student researchers, who become aware of the limits of agency and the stubbornness of structure.

Bibliography

Alvesson. M./Sköldberg, K., Reflexive Methodology: New Vistas for Qualitative Research, (London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage, 2000).

Bowie, Fiona (2006) [2000], The Anthropology of Religion: An Introduction, Second Edition (Malden, MA/Oxford/Carlton, VIC: Blackwell).

Burawoy, Michael (1991), 'Teaching Participant Observation', ch. 14 in: Id. et al. (eds.), Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press) pp. 291-300.

Davies, Charlotte Aull, Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others, 2nd edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2008).

Davies, James (2010), 'Introduction: Emotions in the Field', in: Id./Spencer, D. (eds.), Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press) pp. 1-31.

Erickson, K. and Stull, D., Doing Team Ethnography: Warnings and Advice (= Qualitative Research Methods 42) (Thousand Oaks/London/New Delhi: Sage, 1998).

Geaves, R. A. (1996), 'Baba Balaknath: an Exploration of Religious Identity', Diskus, vol. 4, no. 2 (online at: , [01 July 2011]).

Geertz, Clifford, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).

Gilliat-Ray, Sophie, 'Fieldwork Projects in the Sociology of Religion and the Development of Employability Skills', Discourse, 4 (2), (2005) pp. 120-135.

Goffman, Erving, 'On Fieldwork', Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 18; (1989) pp. 123-132.

Jenkins, A./Healey, M./Zetter, R, Linking Teaching and Research in Disciplines and Departments (York: The Higher Education Academy, 2007).

Levine, H. G./Gallimore, R./Weisner, T. S./Turner, J. L., 'Teaching Participant-Observation Research Methods: A Skills-Building Approach', Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 11 (1), (1980) pp. 38-54.

Robinson, C. and Cush, D., ' "Do They Really Believe That?": Experiential Learning Outside the Theology and Religious Studies Classroom', Discourse, 10(1), (2010) pp. 55-72.

Spradley, James P., Participant Observation (New York et al.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1980).

Return to vol. 10 no. 3 index page

Created on: December 9th 2011

Updated on: December 9th 2011