Home and the Field

                The Coleman articles this week really resonated with me, despite the fact that I have safely decided on studying the ‘other’.  As I have mentioned before, the religion program at the University of Waterloo has a clear focus on both minority groups within North America and on New Religious Movements.   While learning about the Mormons, the Unification Church and the Raliens, it struck me that there are no clear ethnographic or anthropological studies of these groups.  Scholars would do the field work and write about their experiences, but their qualitative analysis had to be backed up by sociological, quantitative data.  Coleman’s thoughts on studying fundamentalist Protestants in his article “Abominations of Anthropology” helped explain to me why it is that these fringe movements are so difficult for ethnographers to study, and I even found connections with my own research on Islamic groups.

            It is amazing the sort of disdain you receive when you decide not to study either the completely alien or the very familiar.  Coleman’s article deals with the problems of a Western scholar doing field research with evangelical Christian communities.  These communities are too close to ‘home’ and because of this the scholar can come off as less than objective.  His subjects know what an anthropologist is and are able to use that knowledge to their advantage.  Also, frankly, in a modern secular society they should know better than to take the bible at its word and push their beliefs on others within the public sphere.  Any ethnographer studying these groups has to understand and be part of the practices of the congregation, as well as be an objective observer that distances himself from the group’s goal of witnessing to others.  Through the works of Gellner, Harding and Warner, Coleman clearly demonstrates the different options available to an ethnographer.  What struck me in particular, however, was the reason why these groups are so difficult to study.  They are seen as ‘unreasonable’ and repugnant because they differ from our ideal of what a true Western fairth should be.   Coleman mentions that Harding was chastised for her choice on studying Falwell, since he was an atypical Western religious figure.  We are raised into a society that is rife with Christianity, and even those of us who aren’t Christians have an idea of how Christians should act.  The groups that don’t fit this ideal are simply deviants.  They aren’t fit to study because they should ‘know better’ and act like proper Christians.

            I think the readings this week apply to more than just ethnographers studying Christian groups. Today, the distance between ‘home’ and ‘the field’ has completely collapsed.  Unlike the era of Malinowski, ethnographers now go into the field with extensive knowledge of their subjects.  They read books on their history, their practices, and their culture in order to situate their fieldwork into the grander narrative of the group.  An anthropologist who studies Islam has the entire field of the Anthropology of Islam at her disposal.  She goes into the field with preconceptions on how Islam ought to be.  She would find it impossible to study a group like Hamas or Hezbollah in isolation.  This is, I believe, why the literature on such groups is dominated by accounts on how they are deviant and wrong.  They are not proper Islam, they do not follow the ideals of an ‘Islam of Peace’.  Even if the ethnographer studies the group on its own merits, she will run into the same problems as studying Christian groups at home, since many of these groups are not the simple primitives that fieldworkers seek out.  Many of their members are educated, and many will know what an anthropologist is and challenge their relativist path to the truth.   I think that that in the last few decades the ‘field’ has shrunk dramatically, and that the ethnographer has very little hope to study anything outside the comfort of home.

            This lack of distance between subject and ethnographer damaged the latter’s claim to objectivity, and I think this is why so few qualitative, ethnographic works exist on fringe religious movements.  These groups occupy a grey area between ‘the field’ and ‘home’, and the only way of establishing a sense of authority is through the use of hard, quantitative facts.  It is in this way that the ethnographer does not come off as witnessing for these groups.