Seeing Religion

Toward a Visual Sociology of Religion

Roman Williams

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138897809
• eBook ISBN: 9781317677802
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The potential of visual research methods in the sociology of religion is vast, but largely untapped. This comes as a surprise, however, given the visual, symbolic, and material nature of religion and spirituality. Evidence of religious faith and practice is materially present in everything from clothing and jewelry to artifacts found in people's homes and workplaces. Not only is religion's symbolic and material presence palpable throughout society, it also informs attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of countless people worldwide. Words-and-numbers approaches to social research, however, sometimes miss important dimensions of religion and spirituality in the contemporary world. Seeing Religion is an invitation to a visual sociology of religion. Contributors draw from their current research to discuss the application of visual methods to the study of religion and spirituality. Each chapter stimulates the sociological imagination through examples of research techniques, analytical approaches, and methodological concerns.

1
Visual sociology and the sociology of religion

Roman R. Williams

An invitation

The potential of visual research methods for the sociology of religion is vast, but largely untapped. The absence of these methods is curious given the visual and material nature of religion and spirituality in the contemporary world. Material culture and human behavior are central to visual research (Pauwels 2011) and abound in the domains of religion and spirituality. Houses of worship, for example, are a prominent feature of the modern landscape (Vergara 2005; Richter 2007, 2011; Krieger 2011; Day 2014), and everyday religious faith and practice are materially present in everything from clothing and jewelry (McDannell 1995) to artifacts found in people’s homes and workplaces (Williams 2010b). Not only is the symbolic and material presence of religion palpable throughout society, religion informs behaviors, practices, and attitudes, which are embodied and enacted throughout the many domains of everyday life (McGuire 2008; Ammerman 2013). Standard research methods that rely on words and numbers alone, however, offer an incomplete picture of religion and spirituality in the contemporary cultural landscape. These visual and material dimensions of religion require an additional set of tools, an alternate way of doing the sociology of religion.

This volume explores some of these tools. It is not a comprehensive handbook, but rather a starting point for a conversation about visual methods; it is a step toward a visual sociology of religion. Instead of producing chapters with a singular focus on visual methods, contributors present findings from their current research balanced with well-documented discussions of their methodology. Each chapter aims to stimulate the visual imagination through examples of research techniques, analytical approaches, and methodological concerns important to visual sociology. Throughout the book, the purchase of these visual techniques is established through their application to research topics central to the sociology of religion. This chapter situates the book within the broader field of visual research by defining visual sociology, surveying the ways visual techniques have been used to study religion, and orienting readers to the contents of the chapters that follow.

What is visual sociology?

Howard Becker observed that “[p]hotography and sociology have approximately the same birth date, if you count sociology’s birth as the publication of Comte’s work which gave it its name, and photography’s birth as the date in 1839 when Daguerre made public his method for fixing an image on a metal plate” (1974:3). And while these two new ways of seeing were slow to integrate, photographs not only “shaped Durkheim’s ethnographic depiction of the Arrernte, but also his selection of theoretical concepts and methodological procedures” even though photographs are absent from Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Kreinath 2012:368). Early examples of images in social research appear in thirty-one articles written in the American Journal of Sociology between 1896 and 1916, but “two-thirds of the articles employed photographs in a way that contemporary visual sociologists would question” (Stasz 1979:128). Among them, twenty-three articles mention religion, but few offer more than a superficial treatment. McClintock’s photograph of “A Foot-Washing Service of the Hardshell Baptists on the Mud Fork of Island Creek” (1901:19) may be the first image to depict religion published in a sociology journal. After 1916, photographs are absent from sociology journals until much later in the twentieth century, largely because the “increasing influence of statistical methods induced an abrupt substitution of photos by formula[s], charts, and tables as the predominant form of appropriate scientific illustration” (Schnettler and Raab 2009:266; cf. Henny 1986).

Even though the use of photographs in sociological research may have been brushed aside temporarily, some sociologists of the early twentieth century recognized their potential. An important example is Middletown (1929) co-author Robert Lynd, who was influential in shaping the work of Roy Stryker and the 270,000 images made during the Great Depression by Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers (Suchar 1997). Lynd became enthusiastic while viewing FSA photographs as Stryker recalled years later, and remarked, “ ‘[t]his is a wonderful device for sociologists.’ [Lynd] then got off onto a long discourse on the need to make people really see” (Stryker and Wood 1973:8, their emphasis; cf. Suchar 1997). Apparently, the images were a little too sociological for the taste of renowned photographer Ansel Adams, who criticized FSA photographers as “a bunch of sociologists with cameras” (Stryker and Wood 1973:8). Adams’s criticism was prescient, as one FSA photographer, John Collier, Jr., went on to pioneer a technique known as photo elicitation (Collier 1957) and to make important contributions in visual anthropology (Collier 1967; Collier and Collier 1986).

The commission of the FSA and photographers’ own artistic styles of representation influenced how they depicted America during the mid-1930s and early 1940s. “While Stryker believed that religion was an integral part of American society and culture, both he and his photographers were profoundly skeptical of the ability of religious organizations to effect change in the modern world” (McDannell 2012:103). At a time when American religious life was characterized as Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish (Herberg 1955), the activities of Christians predominate the FSA collection, which contains “only a few photographs of Jews, synagogue life, or Jewish culture” (McDannell 2012:107). However understood – as artistic, sociological, skeptical, or selective – many FSA images preserve evidence of religious life (McDannell 2004) and comprise a set of data that awaits the attention of sociologists of religion.

It was not until the 1970s that visual sociology took form around a core group of sociologists, most of whom were “photographers as well as sociologists, and predisposed to field work research” (Harper 1996:71).¹ Howard Becker (1974), Erving Goffman (1976), and Jon Wagner (1979) made important contributions to this emerging field. The publication of Timothy Curry and Alfred Clarke’s (1978) textbook helped to stake out the territory of visual sociology – interestingly, it includes three full-page images of serpent handling taken from Ken Ambrose’s doctoral thesis (1978). These photographs, however, are preceded by Bennetta Jules-Rosette’s (1975) still and cinematic images of worship and ritual in an African initiated church. Her photos appear to be the earliest published examples of sociology of religion during what may be considered the renaissance of visual sociology.

An unsuccessful attempt to establish a visual sociology section of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 1980 may have seemed a setback at the time. While this could have legitimated visual sociology within the discipline, the formation of the International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA) in 1981 was serendipitous in retrospect. Curry (1986) suggests that IVSA allowed for a more international scope of participation and conferences, encouraged participation from other disciplines – anthropologists, for example, continue to participate, whereas they may not have been inclined to do so if ASA membership was required – and afforded a flexibility in annual conference sessions to accommodate the technological needs of presenters (e.g., image projection equipment). The evolution of the Visual Sociology Newsletter into its current form as Visual Studies reflects IVSA’s inclusive ethos, and maintains a high standard of scholarship and quality for printing images (Harper 1996).²

From the early days, visual sociology was built upon a conviction that images offer a new way of studying sociology. For Curry and Clarke, visual sociology represented a paradigm shift: “Just as the telescope and the microscope provided new kinds of visual information … the still camera … provides a new order of seeing, which in turn, requires a special way of analyzing information” (1978:28). The sentiment that visual social science “leads to new understandings and insights because it connects to different realities than do conventional empirical research methods” continues to echo throughout the literature (Harper 2012:4). From the early days to the present, visual sociology is frequently characterized by insiders as a different way of doing social science (Grady 1996).

The most obvious way that visual sociology is differentiated from words-and-numbers sociology is the emphasis on visual materials, including (but not limited to) photographs, film, video, print media, digital media, maps, and drawings. These visual data may be created by the researcher, a research participant, or a third party with whom the researcher may have little or no relationship. Images produced by research participants, for example, may be used in semistructured interviews to “invoke comments, memory and discussion” (Banks 2007:65). Transcripts from these interviews, in turn, may be coded for salient themes relevant to the research, as is done in other forms of qualitative data analysis. Likewise, a quantitative, visual content analysis of the same photographs may be undertaken in which the researcher explores the manifest and latent content present in the images (e.g., Goffman 1976; Bell 2003; Bock, Isermann, and Knieper 2011; Nardella 2012). And these numbers may be represented as visualizations through which the data are further explored by the researcher, or to communicate information in compelling and insightful ways to a variety of audiences (Tufte 2001, 2006; Grady 2007). It is important to underscore that while visual sociology is a different way of studying social science, an emphasis on the visual does not neglect words-and-numbers techniques traditional to the discipline (cf. Ball and Gilligan 2010:n.p.). Likewise, visual methodologies and the data they produce are not to be thought of as supplemental.

Some mistake visual sociology as a subfield of qualitative sociology. While it is true that most visual techniques seem to lie at that end of the research methods spectrum, such a view is too narrow. Others regard visual sociology as a subdiscipline in sociology analogous to the sociology of religion, but this is also an incomplete understanding – after all, it was denied such a status by failing to become an official section of the ASA. Neither a subfield nor subdiscipline, visual sociology is best understood as

a cross-cutting field of inquiry, a way of doing and thinking that influences the whole process of researching (conceptualizing, gathering, and communicating). It is not just a “sociology of the visual” (as subject), but also a method for sociology in general (whatever its field: law, religion, culture, etc.) and a way of thinking, conceptualizing, and presenting ideas and findings.

(Pauwels 2011:13)

Visual sociology, then, is something more than inserting a photograph as an illustration in a book, article, or conference paper. Instead, visual sociologists treat still and motion images as evidence, data to be analyzed, and information useful in explaining social life.

Visual methods in the sociology of religion

Visual methods are not entirely absent from the sociology of religion. In recent years, articles and book chapters have offered general overviews of visual methods (Cipriani and Del Re 2010; Dunlop and Richter 2010; Richter 2011). Other publications emphasize specific techniques (Nesbitt 1993, 2000b; Vassenden and Andersson 2010; Ammerman and Williams 2012). While these authors offer helpful methodological overviews, none present a comprehensive review of the literature. Claims of a complete literature review may be hazardous (see Williams and Whitehouse Forthcoming 2015); instead, I have assembled here a representative collection of books, articles, and postgraduate work (master’s and doctoral theses) in which visual methods are employed in the social scientific study of religion. And while in this chapter I emphasize work in the sociology of religion, the propensity for research methods to cross disciplines invites exploration beyond these borders.

To explore how sociologists (and other social scientists) use visual research techniques in their work on religion, the literature is organized around the visual medium (photography, videography, other) and its source. Visual materials fall along a continuum ranging from anonymous artifacts (a photo purchased at a thrift store or church rummage sale) to researcher-generated data (interviews videotaped by a researcher). In between these ends lie “artifacts with known provenance,” “other researcher’s data,” and “respondent-generated data” (Pauwels 2011:7). As one progresses along this spectrum, the researcher’s involvement in image production as well as their knowledge of why and how an image was produced increases. Moments of collaboration are also present in the origination of visuals in which researchers partner with respondents, other researchers, or media professionals to produce images.

Found materials

We live in a visual age, a historical period some consider to be in the midst of a “pictorial turn,” in which visual representations are increasingly important and prolific (Mitchell 1994). There is no shortage of visual information in contemporary culture. From mobile telephones equipped with camera...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of images
• List of maps
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• 1 Visual sociology and the sociology of religion
• 2 Exploring an urban ecology visually: spatial approaches to studying social contrasts along Germantown Avenue
• 3 Mapping congregational responses to re-urbanization and gentrification
• 4 Seeing Islam in global cities: a spatial semiotic analysis
• 5 Religious symbols on rearview mirrors: displays of faith or hopes for safe travel?
• 6 From backstage to front: the role of the vestry in managing clergy self-presentation
• 7 Visual experiencing and communicating: visual sociology as a truly comprehensive experience
• 8 Videographic analysis of religious and secular rituals: examples from a study on the International Holocaust Remembrance Day
• 9 Visual ethics, feminist ethnography, and the study of Holocaust memorialization
• 10 Reconfiguring stained glass: religion, domestic violence, and visual engagement
• 11 Why study religion visually?
• Index