Ethnographic Theology

An Inquiry into the Production of Theological Knowledge

N. Wigg-Stevenson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137387752
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

This book uses ethnography as theological practice, yielding a theology constructed at the intersection of church, academy and everyday life. Drawing on the author's research in her Baptist church, the resulting 'ethnographic theology' produces creative theological insights, while also proposing fresh alternatives for Christian thought and action.

Part I

Chapter 1

Making Space

Constructing the Theological Field

Most academic theologians would agree that theology is always already culturally located. Indeed, as theology’s foundations in reason, revelation, or notions of the self have all been shaken by the critiques extending throughout modernity, culture has become the omnipresent factor that has bearing on the content and form of what and how we know. As a result, cultural studies—the modes of inquiry that help us analyze cultural practices—has become a crucial companion discipline to theologies created in academic institutions.1 Despite this wide agreement that theology is culturally located, however, the ways in which we map that location tend to differ.

In this chapter and the next, I contend that those of us using cultural theory and ethnographic methods to engage lived Christian practice should, as we participate in this theological cartography, theorize carefully the relationship between ourselves and our fields of study. Lack of such reflexive self-awareness leads us to employ methods that are laden with unarticulated and unrecognized assumptions. This, in turn, can lead us to misrepresent the dynamics of the field and our role as cultural producers within it, and worse, to make ethical mistakes within it.2 In the first part of this chapter, I engage critically with Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of field as a semiautonomous social space made up of networked social relations in order to stake out the space within and around which an ethnographic theologian might conduct her work.

As Kathryn Tanner’s theology of culture has well demonstrated, academic theologians are already implicated in the everyday social practices that shape the questions we ask and seek to answer.3 We are not standing outside the borders of everyday theology’s territories brandishing our papers to get in. Of course, we might wander off the beaten path sometimes. But the intrinsic connection between everyday and academic theologies means that the relationship between the two, embodied by each ethnographic theologian in her own particular way, cannot be severed. How this intrinsic connection shapes what forms of knowledge ethnographic theology can produce is explored more fully in the next chapter. Here, our main interest is in how these everyday and academic theologies coconstitute each other as they compose the larger theological field of practice. Bourdieu’s notion of field as social relations thus helps us imagine the theological field as being shaped and reshaped by theological conversations taking place in multiple modes and locations across time.

Having employed Tanner’s theological continuum to emphasize the ethnographic theologian’s location within a theological field of practice, I narrow my attention to my own particular field of study in the second part of this chapter. Here I draw on conversations with my research partners to sketch maps of three distinctly different spatial imaginations for the theological field of practice, any combination of which could be operative within our classroom conversations at any given time.4 These maps chart the locations in which people who think, write, speak, and act—all along the theological continuum—might do so in relation, competition, and cooperation with each other. The first map is temporally and spatially grand, plotting the broad geographic and historical movement of expanding institutions. The second is small and intimate, attending to how theologies become mapped onto our bodily ways of being in the world. The third bridges these two, pressing for a theology done in the mode of not only thinking or talking but also of acting.

A Field Guide for Theological Conversation

Put most simply, for Bourdieu, “to think in terms of field is to think relationally.”5 For English speakers, as Patricia Thomson points out, the metaphor of field tends to conjure the agricultural space of a meadow or a field of wheat. But this is an accident of translation of Bourdieu’s term, le champ, which is more specifically related to the social space of practice in which relations marked by competition are played out (e.g., the field on which a game is played).6 In this way, a field of practice does not highlight an actual physical space, but rather it demarcates an interrelated network of social positions that different agents can take up in different ways.

Like the field on which a game like soccer, for example, is played, certain behavior-governing rules are in effect before the players even arrive. By the very act of showing up in the game, players enter into an implicit contract to honor these rules as they play and as each stakes out different positions that will allow each to shape or, hopefully, contribute to winning the game.7 The desire to win, or at least to compete, crucially marks these social relations for Bourdieu, perhaps because class struggle functions as one of the dominant paradigms by which he interprets social relations. Competition thus trumps cooperation as the characteristic of how he sees social change catalyzed, a characteristic I challenge in my own experiments with conversing across theological difference later in the text.

Bourdieu uses the concept of field to analyze fields of practice as diverse as those related to education, gender relations, kinship practices, aesthetics, law, literature, religion, housing, television and more. Each of these is much too complex to be fully described according to a precise set of governing rules, as is possible with a game like soccer. And so, field, for Bourdieu, also transcends this one key example for understanding it. Unlike a game, he argues, a social field “is not the product of a deliberate act of creation” because it “follows rules or, better, regularities, that are not explicit and codified.”8 Therefore, whereas the rules for a soccer game are explicitly articulated and can be consulted and imposed, the regularities at play in a social field are more implicit. Players learn them slowly and then know them tacitly on an intuitive or dispositional level, without necessarily being able to bring them to words.9 Take the academic field, for example, in which it can take years to figure out the path to success, if one ever figures it out at all. The rules of play are certainly not printed somewhere, available for dissemination to agents as they enter the field of practice. Indeed, the competition of a social field constitutes and is constituted by different people jockeying for the chance to shape and reshape those tacit regularities for their own benefit. Social norms are constantly in flux, as they can be deployed strategically much more readily than they can be imposed overtly.10 In this way, agents can conform their behavior (consciously or unconsciously) to social norms, but they can also (again, consciously or unconsciously) work creatively with and from these norms, thereby creating new strategies of thought and action.

Doxa in the Field

These tacit regularities are related, for Bourdieu, to the ways in which knowledge is produced within a particular field of practice, and this is key for thinking about how everyday and academic forms of theological knowledge might work together to create new patterns of thought and action for Christian living. As sets of “pre-reflexive, unquestioned opinions and perceptions,” these tacit regularities determine what is taken to be “natural” for agents participating in any given field.11 Bourdieu refers to this regulating form of prereflexive knowledge as doxa—that is, the type of knowledge essential to any given field that “goes without saying because it comes without saying.”12 In other words, doxa—while structured by the practices of the field, and continually contributing to the structuring of those same practices—appears to be so natural and self-evidently true that it eludes articulation. It does not need to be brought to words or even imposed because almost everyone who participates in a given field takes it to be the way things really are. In a theological field, doxa might be composed of anything from the unarticulated metaphysical or cosmological presumptions required to hold together a particular soteriology to naturalized assumptions about how gender, family, and sexual norms undergird particular concepts of sin and redemption.

Doxa entails a form of symbolic power for Bourdieu precisely because it is so difficult to recognize accurately, let alone question or disrupt—either by those subjected to it or by those who benefit from or exert it. Part of the sociological project, for Bourdieu, entails bringing doxa to light in the hopes of questioning and even replacing it in various social fields: “The critique which brings the undiscussed into discussion,” he argues, “has as the condition of its possibility objective crisis.”13 When “the social world loses its character as a natural phenomenon,” and the self-evidence of doxa is thus undone, then social facts can begin to be questioned.14 According to Bourdieu, crisis is necessary for social change because it can lead to the articulation of doxa as heterodoxy—that is, the explicit questioning of previously unquestioned social norms by which those norms are challenged and transformed. But while it is necessary, crisis is nevertheless not sufficient for social change because it can also lead to orthodoxy—that is, as the assertion of doxa as dogma and the more explicit imposition of what were a social field’s previously unquestioned assumptions.15 Unlike heterodoxy, orthodoxy loses the innocence of doxa while nevertheless preserving it. Indeed, the process of change is driven by the ways in which crisis creates a battle between heterodox and orthodox views within a particular field of practice or power. Consider, as an expansion of one of the examples previously mentioned, not only the pseudoscientific defenses of creationism against changing scientific knowledge but also the political and cultural movements that accompany them.

Nevertheless, given the crucial catalytic role played by crisis in this model for how knowledge and social transformation are produced in a given social field of practice, we might then ask how such crises can occur. For Bourdieu, multiple fields of practice intersect with each other in any given social space. For example, at FBC, embodying the social positions of both minister and academic theologian, I negotiate a theological field that intersects with a field of religious practice and an academic field. These are certainly the most significant fields of practice to recognize for the project at hand given that my research interest is in how everyday and academic theologies might work together to create new patterns of Christian thought and action. But as this text unfolds, we will also pay attention to the ways in which fields related to gender, family, sexuality, economics, media, and more also come to bear on my ethnographic practice. All these multiple fields therefore come together and, for Bourdieu, actually compete, within a more extensive field than any one given field of practice: what he calls, the field of power.

The Field of Power

As David Swartz points out, Bourdieu’s field of power functions primarily as a “sort of ‘meta-field’ that operates as the organizing principle of differentiation and struggle through all fields.” But it also functions as a way of describing the “dominant social class.”16 The relative levels of dependence and semiautonomy of various fields in relation to each other,17 as well as the forms of capital (economic, symbolic, etc.) each produces, impact the ways in which the struggle between them plays out. At the same time, those able to deploy more capital—that is, the dominant class—within the field of power have greater access to reproducing the social field and its related knowledge (doxa, orthodoxy, heterodoxy and so on) in ways that benefit them. And so the field of power designates another social space with dynamic, permeable borders within which complex networks of relations struggle and contest implicit and explicit forms of knowledge and practice.

Indeed, this notion of struggle and contestation is central to Bourdieu’s thinking. The relationship between fields of practice within the field of power is hierarchical for him, as are the relationships between social positions within particular fields and the various ways agents come to inhabit and embody those social positions. The Jesuit theologian T. Howland Sanks has demonstrated creatively how a field of struggle and conflict shaped Roman Catholic theology in the latter part of the twentieth century. He recognizes the roles played by the Ressourcement movement of the so-called Nouvelle Théologie and the praxis-orientated, Marxist-informed movements of Liberation Theology in unseating neoscholasticism from dominance within Catholic traditions.18 In so doing, Sanks demonstrates how new (or a reclamation of old) sources and foundations can disrupt the doxa of a theological field. Yet his acceptance of Bourdieu’s focus on hierarchy and struggle leads him to shape the theological field with the same markers. Just as Bourdieu overlooks the possibility that social relations can produce new avenues of thought and action through cooperation—not just competition—so too does Sanks.

In the next section, I expand our understanding of a theological field beyond the debates that take place in academic theology—Catholic or otherwise—to include also the types of reasoning that Kathryn Tanner calls “everyday theologies” and activities she calls “everyday Christian practices.” In so doing, I endeavor to shape a theological field that not only is marked by hierarchy and struggle in the contestation of doxa and other forms of theological knowledge (although it will certainly include a fair amount of contestation and competition) but also includes cooperation and collaboration. It is the task of the remainder of this book to establish what types of theological knowledge such collaboration might yield.

Patterns and Regularities in the Theological Field

Mapping a theological field is not just a theoretical activity; it has practical implications as well. It helps me locate not only myself in relation to my field of study but also those with whom I partner for theological work within that field. By extension, it shapes the social space out of which the practical activity of my ethnographic theological methods arise. Thus, by mapping out a theological field, we find ourselves able to begin naming the types of theological knowledge that can be produced in theological community, thereby beginning also actually to produce them.

The theological field, I want to argue, contains social positions structured by both everyday Christian and academic theological (as well as other) practices within it. Kathryn Tanner’s model for theology as a cultural practice in fact situates academic theologians in the ebb and flow of Christian social practices, among which various theological conversations might happen. Indeed, Tanner argues that academic theologians interested in practice too often imagine themselves as positioned external to the ebb and flow of this action, untainted by it, as second-order reflectors on supposedly first-order events. When we make this error, we also begin to make too sharp a distinction between everyday Christian social practices and our theoretical reflection on them without acknowledging how the latter might have shaped our perception of the former.19 A false vision of coherence thus eclipses the internal messiness of the practices we study. In other words, we mistake the map of the land for the land itself. If a road has been temporarily or permanently closed, we endeavor to forge on regardless, unable to acknowledge that an alternative route is required and that our map might need to change.

Postliberal theologies perhaps offer the best example of this error. As Tanner points out, these theologians “dig underneath the messy surface of Christian practice” to unearth “some underlying body of rules or patterned order to which the theology of practice conforms despite its messiness.”20 In so doing, they impose a supposedly neutral scriptural logic that “validates the conclusions of the theologian while disqualifying the people and practices it studies from posing a challenge to those conclusions.”21 Following Bourdieu’s understanding of field-specific doxa, we might say that the symbolic power that accrues to the academic theologian allows her to articulate an orthodoxy against which nonacademic voices are silenced. Tanner argues that the construction of Christian identity and, correlatively, Christian knowledge is a matter of engagement, not agreement. It is a “hybrid, relational affair.”22 Whatever map I attempt to draw must therefore remain open to revision by all of us who might use it. For this revision to occur, so too must conversation across theological difference. Everyday Christians and academic theologians must, in fact, talk to each other if we seek to clarify, expand, or even simply recognize and articulate our shared doxa.

While endeavoring to conform practice to supposedly regulatory patterns is thus a problematic move for academic theologians, simply recognizing patterns at play in everyday Christian practice is not. The way I see it, recognizing such regularities helps us see how Christian theological histories and traditions come to be embodied, somewhere beneath the organizing principles of cognition, as the disparate elements that make up the faith in our bones. Faith and theological knowledge are produced and carried not simply in the mind but in the whole, embodied, mindful, and communally constituted self. In fact, this faith that we carry in our bones—academic and nonacademic bones alike—is not naïve and simple. Rather, it comes loaded up with a chaotic panoply of prior thought and action, both explicitly Christian and not. Access to this thought and action might only be granted to many of us at this level of prereflexive, embodied knowing (i.e., at the level of the way each of us comes to embody a field’s doxa). Our bodies are like reliquaries, housing communities of saints therein, bone to our bone, flesh to our flesh, buried within us all in messy, often inaccessible ways. Our contemporary practices always embody traces of their prior performances.

Everyday and Academic Theologies

Even though we bear all this weight of prior performances, however, the fact remains that most Christians do not need a detailed theological understanding of their religious practices to participate fully in them, as Tanner points out. This is why doxa goes unarticulated. Indeed, as many academic theologians and seminary graduates already know, too detailed an understanding can actually impede one’s ability to enjoy complete immersion in the practices of ch...