Personal Knowledge and Beyond

In the past ten years, ethnographic fieldwork has become much more common in sociology of religion and religious studies. Like anthropologists, scholars in these fields now treat it as a central way of building their accounts of religious life. Many of them, however, have not yet engaged with the debates that have reshaped how anthropologists practice the method.

This collection aims to bring scholars from several disciplines into a shared reconsideration of what ethnography can and cannot do for the study of religion. Its opening chapters survey the recent arguments, and its later contributions push those arguments further. Several essays also challenge some of the core concepts that anthropology has long relied on.

The volume gathers a group of prominent ethnographers of religion, among them Karen McCarthy Brown, Lynn Davidman, Armin Geertz, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Mary Jo Neitz, and Thomas Tweed. Drawing on their own fieldwork, they examine what it means for religious studies to abandon long-held ethnographic assumptions, and what new assumptions might quietly take their place. It is written for students and for established scholars in the field.