Culture and Religion

An Interdisciplinary Journal

ISSN: 1475-5610 (Print) 1475-5629 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcar20

Missionary impositions: Conversion, resistance

and other challenges to objectivity in religious
ethnography

Riyaz Timol

To cite this article: Riyaz Timol (2014) Missionary impositions: Conversion, resistance and
other challenges to objectivity in religious ethnography, Culture and Religion, 15:4, 494-496,
DOI: 10.1080/14755610.2014.972089

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2014.972089

Published online: 31 Oct 2014.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 110

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcar20

Download by: [University of Lethbridge] Date: 13 June 2016, At: 17:27

 Culture and Religion, 2014
Vol. 15, No. 4, 494500

BOOK REVIEWS

Missionary impositions: Conversion, resistance and other challenges to

objectivity in religious ethnography, edited by Hillary K. Crane and Deana L.
Weibel, Plymouth, Lexington Books, 2013, vii 113 pp., 44.95 (hbk), ISBN
978-0739177884

One must allow oneself to be bent out of shape. This is part of the pain of
Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 17:27 13 June 2016

sociological field work, but also part of its craft. (84)

This slim yet pithy volume exercises the issues that arise when ethnographers
of religion engage explicitly with the personal and interpersonal nature of
fieldwork and interrogate the intersection of their own identities, biographies and
positionalities with the field. What does it mean to be bent out of shape, to
experience that which is profoundly disconcerting yet equally real when
attempting to grasp the Verstehen of ones participants? How does it feel when
ones most cherished ideals and assumptions are challenged, even publicly
ridiculed, by those one seeks to empathically understand? And how do I gauge
the influence of my personal proclivities, academic socialisation and childhood
religious experiences upon the interpretation of events that are unfolding before
my eyes? These are some of the questions explored through a series of seven
illuminating essays which retell specific field experiences with a reflexive eye.
In an incisive Introduction, James Bielo identifies the prominence of decision-
making: to confess or not, to participate or not, to believe or not, stay or go, sit or
stand (2) as the key unifying theme of a selection which begins and ends with
contributions from each editor. Hillary Crane recounts her eventual decision to
participate in chao shan, a barefoot Buddhist pilgrimage up a Taiwanese
mountainside involving repeated prostrations which left her with bleeding feet,
knees, and hands as well as a bruised forehead (14), while Deana Weibel shares a
very personal contextualisation of her fieldwork at Rocamadour, a Roman Catholic
shrine town in France, within her own biography and religiously eclectic
upbringing. Susan Kenyons examination of zar (spirit possession) in Sudan, based
on an enviable three decades in the field, reiterates how religious and fieldwork
experiences cannot be studied in a vacuum but must be considered within broader
contexts of evolving social and global conditions; a conclusion which Jennifer
Selbys subsequent chapter somewhat supports. Selby cites three incidents from her
fieldwork with Muslim women in Petit Nanterre, a predominantly North African
banlieue near Paris, to illustrate how she enters a field in which a type of reversed
Orientalism has already been at play to Otherise conceptions of the Western woman
which she as a non-Muslim Western woman is obliged to navigate. With some
 Book Reviews 495
help from her host mother, she appropriates distinctive markers of embodied
identity, such as faux fasting in Ramadan and the adoption of more modest dress
codes, to enhance her levels of social acceptability. Lisa DiCarlo, during fieldwork
with a budding evangelical Christian community in Turkey, takes this a step further
impulsively uttering the shahadah (Muslim testimony of faith) at the behest of her
elderly host. Yet this ostensible conversion to the Muslim faith bears little influence
on her subsequent field and personal identities: it was, upon reflection, simply one
of those tender fieldwork moments (78) in which, through a spontaneous
performative act, she accepted a symbolic gift from her host.
This leaves the two chapters which tell perhaps the most personal and
emotive stories. Daniel Washburn, during research with Mormons in Russia,
wept uncontrollably during the collective testimony of several senior
Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 17:27 13 June 2016

missionaries at a private dinner leading him to later question in his fieldnotes

whether he had just been touched by the presence of the Holy Spirit: The
possibility that the Church was true had now entered my reflective consciousness
(63). Katharine Wiegele, fifteen years after the fact, reveals in an academic outing
of sorts how she was slain by a chapter head of El Shaddai, a popular Catholic
charismatic movement in the Philippines:
I fell into the arms of group members who laid me gently on the floor as they sang
about the power of the Yahweh El Shaddai. It felt exactly as others have described
a growing, intense heat in the chest, a partial loss of consciousness wherein the
ability to hear was retained, and shaking, clammy hands as I gradually returned to
full consciousness. (89 and 90)
Both accounts are striking for their raw honesty and both bemoan the disciplines
as yet inability to acknowledge adequately the power of emotion in shaping
ethnographic experience: we as ethnographers feel the impulse to keep to
ourselves those field experiences that make us vulnerable (91).
So what are the key themes which emerge from these lucid retellings of
fieldwork in diverse international settings? First, and unequivocally (Wiegeles
account is a clear anomaly here), the ethnographer of religion must be prepared to
endure, as occupational hazard, intense bouts of proselytisation when
anthropological curiosity is misconstrued time and again by zealous informants
as spiritual hunger. Second, several contributors discuss the extent to which a
personal commitment to faith may help or hinder ones study of another peoples
religious practices. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, none of our contributors admit of
an open allegiance to any religious tradition and though some flirt with the idea of
conversion, the affair is never consummated. The collective field stance, rather, is
one of stoical agnosticism described variously as partially in/partially out,
betwixt and between or walking between worlds which does nothing to dispel
the positivist image of an objective, rational Westerner studying natives. Is this
stance a fruit of their own socialisation in a particular socio-cultural moment,
I wonder, and does this bespeak a deeper dilemma inherent within the very structure
of the social sciences? If religion, as scholars such as Frank Whaling or Ron Geaves
aver, is not simply a function of culture but an entity sui generis then how can it be
 496 Book Reviews
adequately accounted for within the parameters of a discipline whose foundational
epistemologies, operational methodologies and living exemplars are over-
whelmingly secular in nature? This underpins what to me is the most significant
lacuna in this rich and varied collection: the absence of a single voice which
articulates the experience of conducting ethnography from an explicitly faith-based
perspective. How would an ethnographer (and you may discern my own
positionality here) claiming allegiance to the same religious principles as her
informants navigate the physical and conceptual terrains of her field? While a
diverse subgenre of anthropological literature captures the experience of
indigenous ethnography, this volume is resoundingly silent on the issue.
Finally, I would offer that this collection of essays drives home the multiply
experienced reality that ethnographic fieldwork is a demanding enterprise
Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 17:27 13 June 2016

involving the entire selfhood intellectual, emotional, physical, psychological

and spiritual of the researcher; no part can conveniently be packed up and left
at home. The potentially transformative power of ethnography is implicated here
and this elegantly presented volume with rich bibliographies for students and
practitioners alike invites us to consider the ways that our own selves may be
reconfigured and reconstituted, even bent out of shape, in our unremitting quest
to penetrate the inner life-worlds of others.

Riyaz Timol
Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK, Cardiff University
timolr@cardiff.ac.uk
q 2014, Riyaz Timol
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2014.972089

What is religion?, by Jeppe Sinding Jensen, Durham, Acumen, 2014, xi 186

pp., US$17.95 (pbk), ISBN 978-1-84465-759-9

A critical introduction to the study of religion, by Craig Martin, Sheffield,

Equinox, 2012, xv 203 pp., US$29.95 (pbk), ISBN 978-1-84553-992-4

Both of these erudite and eminently readable volumes position themselves as

introductory texts to the study of religion (Jensen, vii; Martin, xii). However,
similarities between the volumes end there. This review will interrogate the
differences between them: doing so will tell us first something about the books
themselves, and second and perhaps more importantly, something about the field of
religious studies today, including what it thinks it is and where it thinks it is going.
Jensen summarises the introductory task as the endeavour to present religion as
part of human practice in a religiously and politically unbiased manner (viii).
However, Jensen is quick to qualify this with the claim that his book is by no means
theoretically unbiased as the main idea of this book is that religions, in all their