{"id":1216,"date":"2013-03-01T12:42:30","date_gmt":"2013-03-01T17:42:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/practicalmattersjournal.ecdsdev.org\/?p=1216"},"modified":"2015-10-13T13:05:00","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T17:05:00","slug":"doing-religious-studies-dialogically","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/2013\/03\/01\/doing-religious-studies-dialogically\/","title":{"rendered":"Doing Religious Studies Dialogically"},"content":{"rendered":"
Download PDF:\u00a0Bielo, Doing Religious Studies Dialogically<\/a><\/h5>\n
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* Editors’ Note: This essay is part of the Roundtable on Ethnography and Religion.<\/em><\/p>\n

As a die-hard ethnographer, I could not be more sympathetic with the kind of religious studies Robert Orsi articulates. The \u201cdisciplined attentiveness\u201d he describes is precisely what I hope for on my best days in the field. He captures a dilemma I have confronted in the throes of ritual, in the midst of transcribing interviews, and in writing: how to represent religion-in-context without surrendering religion to context and without dissolving the most meaningful portion of a life to just another part of life.<\/p>\n

But, as with any good provocation, I was provoked by Orsi\u2019s essay. In particular, I am moved to think more about his idea of doing religious studies \u201cwith your whole body.\u201d As a counterproposal, I\u2019d like to prioritize doing religious studies as dialogically as possible. I have Bakhtin in mind, and the continual dialogue among what is, what was, what might be, and the ideological chattering that engulfs each.1<\/u>\u00a0While we certainly do ethnography with our body, our\u00a0whole<\/em>\u00a0body, we also do it with our pasts in tow, in relation to the bodies and pasts of those who populate our fieldwork, and in constant exchange with our theoretical and methodological frames. Moreover, ethnography is fundamentally relational. It is about seeking, cultivating, damaging, losing, restoring, remembering, and celebrating relationships. Our whole bodies make no sense apart from those whole bodies we are sitting among and listening to with \u201cdisciplined attentiveness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recently, I initiated my third major ethnographic project among American evangelicals. The first was a discourse-centered, comparative analysis of small group Bible study. My concerns organized around talk, reading, text, local hermeneutics, and rituals of gathering. Some of the groups had been together for decades, and they allowed me to intrude on their intimacy, tape-recorder, notepad, and all. The second was a multi-sited analysis of a movement of cultural critique (the Emerging Church), which was intent on distinguishing itself from mainstream evangelicalism and, hopefully, building an alternative evangelicalism. Mostly, I spent time with men and women who were dreaming, creating, experimenting, and gambling. They had lots of energy and lots of ideas; many of them had lots of education, but rarely the financial backing to boot.<\/p>\n

In each, a dialogical ethnographic posture seemed the most viable choice. In the Bible study work, the groups\u2019 ongoing efforts to read and be together drew me to congregational histories, the voluminous scholarly and popular debates about scriptural interpretation, the emotional and moral lives of participants, and the vividly intertextual (and always eventually idiosyncratic) repertoires that emerged. (For instance, in just one book study in one group, all of the following sources made appearances:\u00a0The Passion of the Christ<\/em>, C.S. Lewis, NPR,\u00a0Queer Eye for the Straight Guy<\/em>,\u00a0Lord of the Rings<\/em>, Stephen Hawking, Mark Twain,\u00a0The Keystone Cops<\/em>, Joel Osteen, Charles Dickens,\u00a0The Far Side<\/em>,\u00a0Forrest Gump<\/em>, Johnny Cash,\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>,\u00a0Jerry Maguire<\/em>,\u00a0The Prayer of Jabez<\/em>, Oprah, Rick Warren, and The History Channel.)<\/p>\n

In the Emerging Church work, different dialogues took center stage through different phases of the research. At first, the major exchange I had to understand was that between my consultants\u2019 present and past selves. In the stead of born-again narratives, they spoke a de-conversion narrative, detailing the trials of faith and life that left them at odds with mainstream evangelical \u201cculture.\u201d Later, I explored engagements with place. Middle-class idioms of suburban aspiration and urban danger, inextricably linked to America\u2019s post-WWII changes, were replaced by a dripping loathing for suburban isolation and deluded comfort and a desire to redeem urban existence.<\/p>\n

In both projects, I had my own dialogues to manage. In a world where models of literalism and evangelical dogmatism reign, how do I bear truth to an experience defined by lively and always searching readers? When surrounded by evangelicals who talk, read, ritualize, remember, and engage the public sphere in ways that challenge all preconceptions of who evangelicals are supposed to be, how do you write their lives? And, of course, there were the many dialogical moments with the non-human. How do I read and respond to their signs of \u201cGod moving\u201d? When the \u201cpresence of the Spirit\u201d is declared, what happens to my ethnographic presence?<\/p>\n

At present, I am immersed in an equally dialogical, yet strikingly different, work: an ethnography of a creationist theme park-in-the-making. In December 2010, the governor of Kentucky announced that a $150 million theme park was planned for an 800-acre site 40 miles south of Cincinnati. Ark Encounter is being produced by the young earth creationist ministry Answers in Genesis, the same ministry and creative team who designed the 2007 Creation Museum. The centerpiece of the park will be an all-wood Noah\u2019s Ark built to the cubit dimensions recorded in the book of Genesis. In October 2011, I was granted permission by the Ark Encounter team to observe their planning and development of this park, from the conceptual and design work they had recently begun and culminating in the park\u2019s opening. The first eight months was, looking back, very strange fieldwork.<\/p>\n

There is the contingency of it all. The park\u2019s coming to fruition entails massive fundraising. Will they ever raise it? The proposed $150 million project has already been scaled down to a roughly $40 million Phase One. If they can raise this money, when will it happen? They have pushed back a ceremonial groundbreaking several times. Will it be \u201cin God\u2019s time,\u201d as the team continually says to me and to each other? What does God\u2019s time have to do with other temporalities: social, scientific, social scientific, biblical, capitalist, and the political motions of a presidential election year?<\/p>\n

I am essentially doing ethnography by appointment. I cannot go to the creative team\u2019s office anytime I want; I must plan each visit with the administrative assistant, and they have rescheduled or cancelled numerous times. At first, I approached every visit as potentially my last. What are the limits of my access? So far, the only thing off-limits has been the ministry\u2019s monthly board meetings. But, will there come a time when the unfettered access I\u2019ve been granted is restricted or rescinded? Then, there is the seeming banality of doing office ethnography. I spend most of my time in cubicles! In a stroke of Geertzian literalism, I spend most of that time reading over shoulders\u2014not words, but images in Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Quickly, I learned that this fieldwork would thrive on mastering the art of sitting, watching, waiting, asking strategically-timed questions, and, as much as anything, not being a nuisance to workers on a clock and under deadlines.<\/p>\n

There is the office talk. To be sure, there are occasional references to \u201cmillions of years thinking,\u201d \u201csecular people,\u201d \u201cGod\u2019s timing,\u201d and reminders that \u201cthis whole thing is about showing people Jesus.\u201d But, mostly, there is an absence of marked religious language in this overtly religious context. God-talk, Jesus-talk, Bible-talk, prayer, theology, and the like are confined to passing encounters and specific moments (to open a team meeting, for example). Mostly, office talk is artistic and pragmatic. Creative team members offer impromptu feedback on a sketch of an attraction. Assessments are made in terms of being \u201ccool,\u201d \u201cinteresting,\u201d \u201cboring,\u201d \u201cfun,\u201d or \u201centertaining\u201d; not, say, inspiring, reverent, meditative, or, even, biblical. The facilities manager asks the artists for more detail in order to build, exchanges akin to, \u201cThis is a great idea, I love it. But, what do you see for the dimensions on this line here?\u201d All of this is not to say that I am waiting for the real religious work to begin. It, of course, is in full swing. I am working in the spirit of avoiding what Orsi warns against, \u201calready always know[ing] what religion is\u201d; or, for that matter, already knowing what theology, prayer, or worship are.<\/p>\n

Arguably, the weightiest dialogue surrounding my work with the Ark Encounter creative team is America\u2019s ongoing creationism-evolution battle, itself nested in our larger drama of religion-science. (Question: is a war metaphor, \u201cbattle,\u201d our best, or only, choice?) Despite the fact\u2014or, better yet, alongside the fact\u2014that most of office life appears caught up in the minutia of theme park design, the entire project is deeply embedded in the politics of public school curriculum, state and federal court rulings, election rhetoric, and, as an approved application by Ark Encounter LLC to the Kentucky State Board of Tourism shows, business tax incentives. If schools are one kind of public, leisure is another; and, in this sense, the Ark Encounter is most certainly an act of public religion. If the Ark succeeds\u2014that is to say opens, perhaps eventually profiting\u2014will this amount to a victory in the court of public entertainment?<\/p>\n

An unexpected dialogue has been the intertextual making of creationist concept art. In sitting with creative team members while they work, as well as in more formal interviews with them, it has become clear that their labor is defined by inspiration and reference. They are constantly citing artists and artworks as models. One member keeps a large cache of images saved on his desktop, which he ritually flips through to find needed sparks of invention. Bookshelves around the office are packed with art books\u2014Star Wars<\/em>,\u00a0Jurassic Park<\/em>,\u00a0Lord of the Rings<\/em>,\u00a0Chronicles of Narnia<\/em>,\u00a0Star Trek<\/em>,\u00a0Dinotopia<\/em>,\u00a0Avatar, The Last Airbender<\/em>, andKing Kong<\/em>\u2014constantly on the move from shelf to desk and back again. The team styles themselves as \u201cimagineers,\u201d a self-conscious, and not the least bit ironic or apologetic, nod to Disney\u2019s mastery in creating \u201cimmersion experiences\u201d for park guests. Their imagineering labor is dialogical to the core; they are always working relationally to model after, capture, or avoid recognizable art forms. Attending to this element of their work is not simply about being truthful to their generative intertextuality. It has also led me to an early insight about the nature of their cultural production. Whatever else they are doing, the team is engaging in a form of fantasy world-making (note the common theme among the bookshelf references listed above). Yet, they are also working with a literal view of biblical time. It seems their making of Noah\u2019s world is caught between creationist models of real history and what they consider \u201cinteresting\u201d ways to conjure a \u201cpre-Flood culture.\u201d Is there an elective affinity between creationist literalism and fantasy world-making?<\/p>\n

At least one more dialogue presses immediately on my attempt to render the work of creationist imagineers legible. I have in mind the vitriolic bias against young earth creationism. When I explain this project to colleagues, jaws drop, heads fly back in disbelief, eyes widen, and a mix of surprised and mocking laughter tumbles out. Creationists are reviled by many, and this is not a point to elide too hastily. While I certainly have no stake in defending creationists, or this ministry\u2019s choice of how best to use $150 million, I very much want to write against the grain of revilement, disdain, and easy satire. One strategy for doing so invokes another dialogue, one between contemporary Americans and our national past. From one angle, Answers in Genesis is simply the latest in a venerable tradition of trying to make leisure meaningful. Historians like Troy Messinger (Holy Leisure<\/em>), Bruce Daniels (Puritans at Play<\/em>), and Aaron Ketchell (Holy Hills of the Ozarks<\/em>) have unearthed a deep American Protestant impulse to fuse play and piety. One of America\u2019s great populist oracles, John Steinbeck, indulged a similar meditation in his 1966 non-fiction essay \u201cAmericans and the Future.\u201d2<\/u>\u00a0He concludes a laundry list of social ills with this problem of meaningful leisure:<\/p>\n

We have the things and we have not had time to develop a way of thinking about them. We struggle with our lives in the present and our practices in the long and well-learned past. We have had a million years to get used to the idea of fire and only twenty to prepare ourselves for the productive-destructive tidal wave of atomic fission. We have more food than we can use and no way to distribute it. Our babies live and we have no work for their hands. We retire men and women at the age of their best service for no other reason than that we need their jobs for younger people. To allow ourselves the illusion of usefulness we have standby crews for functions which no longer exist. We manufacture things we do not need and try by false and vicious advertising to create a feeling of need for them. We have found no generally fulfilling method for employing our leisure.3<\/u><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

*****<\/p>\n

I hope not to have strayed too far or too deep into ethnographic particularity. My aim has only been to stand by the suggestion that we do religious studies as dialogically as possible. In my first two projects, and equally so with the Ark Encounter, I have found a dialogical posture indispensable in navigating the fieldwork itself and in striving to make some sense of what I have seen.<\/p>\n

For two reasons, I will conclude with some inspiring intertextuality of my own. Orsi\u2019s stance that studying religion is apt to leave us \u201cchastened, unsettled … often distressed in some way, and exhausted\u201d makes absolute sense for his work with adult survivors of Catholic clerical sex abuse. But, it is not our only option. The Ark Encounter forces me to grapple with the idea of religious fun, an idea that many would take to be a contradiction-in-terms. This reminds me, though, of something Keith Basso wrote in reflecting on his fieldwork among the Western Apache:<\/p>\n

It is better to write of things one believes one knows something about than to anguish in high despair over the manifold difficulties of knowing things at all. And better as well, having taken the plunge, to allow oneself to enjoy it. Doing ethnography can be a great deal of fun, and disguising the fact on paper, as though it were something to be ashamed of, is less than totally honest. It may also be less than effective. Current fashions not withstanding, clenched teeth and furrowed brow are no guarantee of literary success. In crafting one\u2019s prose, as in going about one\u2019s fieldwork, it is always permissible\u2014and sometimes highly informative\u2014to smile and even to laugh.4<\/u><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps this ethnographic posture clears a path toward capturing a grandiose act of religious fun and, when the Spirit moves, to laugh with the Ark team but never at them.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

Notes<\/h4>\n
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  1. See M.M. Bakhtin,\u00a0The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays<\/em>(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) and Michael Holquist,\u00a0Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World<\/em>\u00a0(London: Routledge, 1990).<\/li>\n
  2. John Steinbeck,\u00a0America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction\u00a0<\/em>(New York: Penguin, 2002).<\/li>\n
  3. Ibid., 398.<\/li>\n
  4. Keith H. Basso,\u00a0Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache\u00a0<\/em>(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 111.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Download PDF:\u00a0Bielo, Doing Religious Studies Dialogically * Editors’ Note: This essay is part of the Roundtable on Ethnography and Religion. As a die-hard ethnographer, I could not be more sympathetic with the kind of religious studies Robert Orsi articulates. The<\/p>\n

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