{"id":1339,"date":"2013-03-01T15:35:33","date_gmt":"2013-03-01T20:35:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/practicalmattersjournal.ecdsdev.org\/?p=1339"},"modified":"2015-10-13T13:02:27","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T17:02:27","slug":"ethnography-audacious-witness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/2013\/03\/01\/ethnography-audacious-witness\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethnography Audacious Enough to Witness"},"content":{"rendered":"
Download PDF:\u00a0Scharen and Vigen<\/a><\/h5>\n
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The conversation in these pages is one marker of the growing interest in and practice of theological ethnography. Use of social science in theology and ethics is now a well-worn if contested path for academic research and writing. The noted \u201ccultural turn\u201d in theology raised the profile of the social sciences and social theory as preferred disciplinary partners to the level formerly occupied solely by philosophy.1\u00a0Our work moves beyond this more traditional position to a more novel one: ethnography as theology and ethics. That is, we argue, that the practice of attending to situations, viewing these situations as embodying substantive theological\/ethical claims, and the nature of the substantive theological\/ethical claims themselves are constitutive of theological\/ethical work.<\/p>\n

Despite the attractiveness of these developments to many, and perhaps because of them, critical questions have arisen. Our colleagues in this issue of\u00a0Practical Matters<\/em>, as well as Mark Douglas\u2019s fine review in\u00a0Practical Matters<\/em>\u00a0Issue 5, have raised a great many important questions arising from their reading of\u00a0EACTE<\/em>. Ted Smith, in his review essay in this volume, generously argues that the book \u201cclarifies the questions at stake in such a way that it opens into new conversations.\u201d Of the many critical questions emerging from these essays, we want to lift up three to respond specifically to as beginnings of such “new conversations” about theological ethnography.<\/p>\n

First, important questions encircling the notions of particularity, reflexivity, and the possibility of making normative claims recur throughout these thoughtful pieces. Douglas crisply summarizes the numerous tensions that must be deftly balanced when taking up an ethnographic method: \u00a0\u201c\u2026between a researcher being reflexively attentive and being self-absorbed; between objective and subjective methodological concerns; between gathering and interpreting data; between generalizable and contextually-specific discoveries….\u201d2\u00a0Indeed, these are key challenges every researcher necessarily confronts. Failing to attend to them (or attending poorly to them) can greatly diminish the rigor and usefulness of the project. It is all too easy to collapse the tension and land flat-footedly on one or the other side of any of these dialectics. The key is to hold them in dynamic tension\u2014to resist reaching a static or permanent resolution to any of them, but instead to \u201ckeep all the plates spinning,\u201d as it were. In other words, the less researchers try to resolve the tensions and the more they live in them, the better for the nuance of the work and for the attentiveness to complexity.<\/p>\n

For example, one of the pernicious dangers that Douglas, McClintock Fulkerson, and Reimer-Barry all point to is the temptation to romanticize research subjects and collaborators, which consequently sacrifices more honest, three dimensional depictions. Indeed, doing so might very well sell more books (akin to popular \u201cunauthorized biographies\u201d that often trade in complex stories and facts for tawdry ones). What those committed to doing careful ethnography will invariably encounter is the reality that even when there is strong common identity and experience, the members of any given or identified community often express very different experiences and interpretations. Moreover, even grouping people as a \u201ccommunity\u201d can seem like an external and artificial artifice created for the researcher\u2019s conceptual convenience. It can be too easy to force thematic coherence where there may be very little\u2014to create congruence where there is incongruence.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, as Douglas and McClintock Fulkerson also aptly perceive, the researcher might err on the side of too much caution and timidity\u2014in the name of respect and reflexivity\u2014and resist claiming as much expertise, knowledge, or normative authority as he\/she ought. Douglas is again instructive. He asks, in a sense, what it means when ethnographers make respecting the dignity of research subjects the first priority in situations where the subjects deny this dignity for themselves and the people they mock and harass (in his example, English soccer hooligans, but one can extrapolate and imagine even more threatening others\u2014e.g., warlords and impressionable youth trained to be guerrillas, perpetrators of sexual and domestic violence, white supremacists). Indeed, in such cases, truth might be that which runs wholly counter to what informants profess or perceive.<\/p>\n

In response to such concerns, it is worth underscoring the point made in several places in our book that \u201cbearing witness\u201d does not equate with\u2014or validate as \u201cTruth\u201d\u2014every\/anything that informants tell ethnographers. Numerous qualitative anthropology and sociology texts are instructive in this regard; they offer a \u201cthick description\u201d without endorsing it per se. Indeed, ethnographic descriptions can be both \u201cthick\u201d and also critical. McClintock Fulkerson makes this point in her attempts to describe the realities of racism and ableism in the congregation she studied through the bodily dispositions and language she observed. For us, the aim is to create as nuanced a narrative and picture as possible\u2014one that reveals the fullness of humanity (malformed as it may be)\u2014an instructive glimpse into its brokenness, passion, hope, fear, ache, and grit as embodied in a particular context. The original ethnographies (e.g., Browning, Jones, Reimer-Barry, Whitmore) that constitute Part Two of our book are concrete examples of this kind of arduous groping toward messy, multi-dimensional truths. Yet none offers a risk-free or \u201cguaranteed fool-proof\u201d strategy for avoiding problematic missteps. Tangible and foreboding risks\u2014of getting the story or picture wrong, of doing the research poorly, of collapsing the complexity into easily digested superficial tropes\u2014are all very real. There is no getting around it. And part of responsible ethnography is being as methodologically aware and transparent about these risks as possible. In so many respects, a researcher who attempts to study, or learn from, a person or people to whom he\/she is a relative stranger or outsider necessarily faces the risk of claiming either too much or too little knowledge with respect to what the subject(s) think, know, feel, and perceive. In light of this reality, what we most hope to offer at this juncture is the encouragement to live dynamically in the tension rather than to try to resolve it.<\/p>\n

In a second question, alluded to above, Douglas wonders about the role of researcher expertise. When might the ethnographer possess much needed skills and insight that could benefit the research subjects? In other words, is there an appropriate place for an ethnographer to move beyond simply learning from her\/his collaborators to also attempting to teach them so that, in Douglas\u2019s words, they might \u201cadvocate for themselves\u201d?3\u00a0This is a question particularly directed to the discipline of ethics. In the case of Vigen\u2019s original ethnography (Women, Ethics, and Inequality in U.S. Healthcare<\/em>), she took the approach of devoting significant space and analysis to engaging the insights and knowledge of her research subjects and another, separate space (chapter) to mounting her own ethical arguments for healthcare reform in light of, but not wholly dependent on, or in sync with, the ethnography. In other words, her normative claims incorporated learning from the ethnographic interviews, but also went beyond and outside of them in making a case for structural changes in the way U.S. healthcare is practiced, delivered, and paid for.<\/p>\n

Yet, should researchers take the additional step of trying to educate, change, or help advocate for informants? Blanket answers will not be of much use\u2014so much depends on the particular nature of the research topic and endeavor. And there is always the danger of researchers being too quick to try to \u201cfix\u201d problems and people they do not yet fully understand. \u00a0Yet, some ethnographic methods, like Participatory Action Research (PAR), make this very move and do so with great skill and care. Melissa Browning\u2019s work with Tanzanian women who are HIV positive is illustrative in this regard.4<\/p>\n

A third question raised by these review essays is put well by Mary McClintock Fulkerson: \u201cHow is ethnography properly theological?\u201d Versions of this question arise in other responses, but we\u2019ll pursue McClintock Fulkerson\u2019s framing of it. She rightly notes a key theological theme in the book: the carnal character of Christian faith implies \u201cstudy of lived, embodied practice.\u201d Drawing from Manuel Vasquez\u2019s important writing on the material and embodied character of religion, she points out that understanding Christian faith must mean more than abstract ideas.5\u00a0It must tend to \u201cbodily movement, music, chanting, visual icons, and more, essential to church practices.\u201d Describing the depth of embodied practice achieves more than a value-neutral description of reality. As a host of scholars have shown over the past few decades, such a \u201cvalue-neutral\u201d description is not possible. The \u201cview from nowhere\u201d has been challenged by \u201cviews from somewhere.\u201d6\u00a0In the case of \u201cviews from somewhere,\u201d description means finding and articulating normative claims embodied in practice. Theological ethnography is, in part, just another form of analysis operating out of value-orientations, notions of the good, and so on. The challenge, however, is to elucidate thetheological<\/em>\u00a0distinctiveness of using ethnography in this way, that is, to attend to normative claims embodied in practice.<\/p>\n

McClintock Fulkerson\u2019s response to this problem, developed briefly in her review essay and more fully elsewhere, basically posits that we only know God indirectly through signs of divine presence and work, through \u201caltered social relations that can be said to testify to Divine Presence.\u201d7\u00a0Use of theological terms alone, or to put it differently, proper God-talk alone, does not entail God. Using a logic of redemption both more subtle and more persuasive than many we\u2019ve read, McClintock Fulkerson sees both the need to apprentice oneself to context such that its particular forms of brokenness and repair can be understood and articulated and also the need to draw upon shared explicit Christian themes in doing so. She admits that this drawing upon these themes is a secondary move, after the first work of \u201cinterpreting the situation\u201d using secular lenses to \u201cread\u201d what counts as brokenness and repair. What is theological, finally, is the interpretation of particular brokenness as rooted in sin, a pervasive and interconnected social brokenness, and of particular repair as testimony to a pervasive work of God bringing about social repair.<\/p>\n

Ethnography, McClintock Fulkerson rightly notes, can help make theology carnal. Yet we want to push a bit on what she ends up with regarding what is theological in theological ethnography. In her depiction, it seems, the work of interpreting the situation is not theological, but rather involves reaching for theoretical lenses to read the situation as text. Then, as if in an act of theological translation, the interpretation is shown to have a deeper level of meaning\u2014 God\u2019s presence and action. That this is really God cannot be proven; God is not actually there, as an object, working repair in front of her eyes. Yet her testimony points to the signs of repair seemingly rooted in the character and actions of the God Christians know in Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n

But what if the situation is not a text, and our understanding of the situation comes from the theological act of giving ourselves away in surrender to the situation, becoming apprenticed to it? And what if, further, our apprenticeship to the situation tutors us bodily in the practices entailed in the situation such that we come to experience ourselves some of the brokenness and repair present there? That kind of embodied knowing allows what we mean by \u201ccarnal theology\u201d as describing the process of acquiring the fuzzy logic of the particular as a way to inhabit the world.<\/p>\n

Todd Whitmore\u2019s chapter in our book, \u201cWhiteness Made Visible,\u201d portrays these two modes of theological ethnography. On the one hand, he gives himself away to the Pabbo Internally Displaced Persons camp in Northern Uganda, and to the Acholi people living there, so that he can understand more fully (while knowing full understanding is not possible) their life and situation. Giving oneself away for the sake of understanding and loving the other is, Whitmore says, a basic task of Christian discipleship. So in that regard, his ethnography is theological in a methodological sense, shall we say, if the term \u201cmethod\u201d can be employed as entailing substantive concerns and not just \u201ctechniques.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the other hand, Whitmore\u2019s deep engagement in daily life in Pabbo (for example, washing and bathing Santos with Sister Cecilia, alongside innumerable other aspects of daily life) situate him not outside or above practice but at its \u201cpoint of production,\u201d immersing him \u201cas deeply and as durably as possible\u201d into his neighbor\u2019s world.8\u00a0Through this kind of immersion (what Pierre Bourdieu provocatively calls \u201cunderstanding as a spiritual exercise\u201d9\u00a0), Whitmore comes to understand the brokenness of relationship symbolized in his whiteness; as he says, it \u201cbecomes visible.\u201d And because of the patient and painful apprenticeship to the practice of daily life in Pabbo, he also comes to see hope in the mural of the Holy Mother, which he describes in the close of his essay. His very sight has been altered such that he can understand the cry of hope painted into this white Mary with thick hair, a wide nose, and thick lips. Mary becomes not an icon of the brokenness, but of its repair; not another nauseating instance of patronage and power, but of heavenly benediction for the displaced Acholi people.<\/p>\n

In order to make this theological point, Whitmore never leaves the context, never steps back to develop “explicitly” theological themes, but rather makes theological sense via his embodied understanding of the Christian sense made in the midst of life with the Acholi. Of course, Whitmore brings his own deep learning and Christian experience to his engagement in the practice of daily life in Pabbo. This informs his listening, living, learning, and, in the end, his understanding. But the fact that his apprenticeship offers this learning only makes it less likely that he\u2019d need an imposition of external theological categories in order to witness to the presence of God repairing the brokenness dramatically impacting nearly every facet of life with the Acholi.<\/p>\n

Other excellent questions arise over the course of these fine essays, and we hope to learn from and engage more of them over time. For example, both McClintock Fulkerson and Smith raise a question we think must be addressed more fully: \u201cCould a theological ethnographer ever make judgments that disagree with an informant\u2019s judgments?\u201d Our initial impulse might be to argue that if ethnography is based upon immersion in local settings in order to elicit fine-grained understanding of lived claims of God\u2019s transformative presence, is it not then bad faith to subsequently employ categories external to that setting’s self-understanding for the sake of critical judgment? Yet would not giving up the critical moment simply collapse the theological into the empirical, creating what Ted Smith memorably called \u201cenchanted positivism\u201d? To escape this dilemma, we might explore how to draw critical leverage in norms found embodied in shared practices, including not only the shape of their current practice but engaging \u201cthick histories of practice\u201d among other believers.10\u00a0Rarely are any communal practices idiosyncratic; their own histories in practice, so to speak, contain the seeds of their own critique and reform.<\/p>\n

In all, what we are so grateful for is the many ways in which these responses to the book show how the work of reflexivity is ongoing\u2014well beyond the point of any publication of research. Reimer-Barry is refreshingly candid about this fact in her reflections on her recent work with Mexican women and men. Indeed, when academics start to see tangible results for ourselves in terms of publications, invitations to give lectures, tenure, promotion, and sabbaticals, it really makes us think yet again about how our lives are changed by this work even as those of our research collaborators may not be.<\/p>\n

But critical reflection needs to happen on all kinds of levels. It involves periodically re-evaluating what we said, what we learned, what we got right, and what we did not. It means thinking about what we will do differently the next time and how to keep ourselves accountable\u2014to the research, to the collaborators, to the academy, even to the church and the society in which we live. At its best, ethnography as Christian theology and ethics is audacious enough to witness to what is most authentically true: to what is and what ought to be in the world.<\/p>\n

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Notes<\/h4>\n
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  1. Kathryn Tanner,Theories of Culture<\/em>\u00a0(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997).<\/li>\n
  2. Mark Douglas, “Review of\u00a0Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics”<\/em>, in\u00a0Practical Matters<\/em>\u00a05, https:\/\/practicalmattersjournal.ecdsdev.org\/issue\/5\/reviews\/ethnography-as-christian-theology-and-ethics.<\/li>\n
  3. Douglas, “Review ofEthnography as Christian Theology and Ethics<\/em>“, in\u00a0Practical Matters<\/em>\u00a05.<\/li>\n
  4. Melissa Browning,When Marriage Becomes Risky: Reflections from Tanzania on Christian Marriage in an HIV Positive World<\/em>\u00a0(Lantham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013).<\/li>\n
  5. Manuel Vasquez,A Materialist Theory of Religion<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).<\/li>\n
  6. Thomas Nagel,The View from Nowhere<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).<\/li>\n
  7. Mary McClintock Fulkerson,Places of Redemption<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); also \u201cWhen is the ‘Empirical’ also ‘Theological,’\u201d in\u00a0Perspectives in Ecclesiology and Ethnography<\/em>, ed. Pete Ward (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011).<\/li>\n
  8. Lo\u00efc Wacquant, \u201cCarnal Connections: On Embodiment, Apprenticeship, and Membership,\u201dQualitative Sociology<\/em>\u00a028, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 43.<\/li>\n
  9. Pierre Bourdieu et al.,The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society<\/em>, trans. Priscillia Parkhurst Ferguson (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 607.<\/li>\n
  10. Ted Smith models just such \u2018thick histories of practice\u2019 in his masterful\u00a0The New Measures: A Theological History of Democratic Practice<\/em>\u00a0(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

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    Download PDF:\u00a0Scharen and Vigen   The conversation in these pages is one marker of the growing interest in and practice of theological ethnography. Use of social science in theology and ethics is now a well-worn if contested path for academic<\/p>\n

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