Missionary Impositions

Conversion, Resistance, and other Challenges to Objectivity in Religious Ethnography

Hillary K. Crane, Deana Weibel

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780739177891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Writing Religion
• 1. Flirting with Conversion: Negotiating Researcher Non-Belief with Missionaries
• 2. Chasing the Wind: The Challenges of Studying Spirit Possession
• 3. How “They” Construct “Us”: Reflections on the Politics of Identity in the Field
• 4. Revisiting The Inner Life: Self-Reflexive Ethnography and Emotional Enculturation
• 5. I’m Just a Soul Whose Intentions are Good: Observations from the Back Pew
• 6. On Being a Participant and an Observer in Religious Ethnography: Silence, Betrayal, and Becoming
• 7. Blind in a Land of Visionaries: When a Non-Pilgrim Studies Pilgrimage
• About the Contributors