Religion is an essential element of human existence. Advancing our understanding of the religious beliefs and practices as well as the meanings assigned to these beliefs and practices characterizing every culture does not result in only advancing our understanding of human Culture and cultures -the objective of cultural anthropology- but also in coming close to a holistic and near-complete understanding of the human condition, the overall aim of anthropology.

Since the inception of anthropology of religion as a separate subdiscipline, hundreds of ethnographies have attempted to provide descriptions, representations, interpretations, explanations, analyses, and comparisons of different religions. Some of these ethnographies investigate religion as an end in itself, and some examine it in relation to culture and social institutions; some completely neglect theological questions central to religion (i.e., the truth or falsity of religious claims), treating religion as influential personal and social forces, and others advocate the necessity to adopt a historical, psychological, structural, functional, or critical approach when dealing with religion, assuming that all religions are created by human beings to fulfill certain needs and achieve certain functions.

Despite the common objective of anthropologists of religion, the diversity of thoughts, theories, approaches, and methods reflects the different answers to what studying religion “anthropologically” means, and how ethnographic fieldwork that focuses on the religious aspect of human beings (the beliefs, practices, symbols, meanings, etc.) should be done? Anthropologists themselves joke that if you gather ten ethnographers in a room you will probably get eleven opinions about how fieldwork ought to be done.

Ethnography is the primary way of building representations of assigned meanings and obtaining knowledge about experienced realities. Even with consistent fundamentals, different ethnographers frame the same methodology in different ways -resulting in different definitions of what ethnography is- and occupy different postures (standpoints) when truth claims about religion are encountered during the ethnographic fieldwork, resulting in different recommendations of how “religious ethnography” should be carried out.

Drawing from these, the following paragraphs in this review summarize and comment on chapter two, Doing Religious Ethnography, from James S. Bielo’s (2015) Anthropology of Religion: The Basics. After a brief noting of the fundamentals of ethnography, the review highlights i) the three typical framings with which ethnography is defined –ethnography as science, ethnography as art, and ethnography as craft; ii) the four postures ethnographers can occupy in relation with the religion they study; and iii) the inherent challenges of doing religious ethnography.

Even with the divergent definitions, approaches, and methods within ethnography, according to the author, three fundamentals distinguish ethnography as a methodology within cultural anthropology and social sciences. First, it is about being there. It requires the researcher to “go there”, participate, and engage in the settings and with the people being studied. Second, it is extended. While exactly how much time is relative to the ethnographer, time is necessary for a near-accurate and in-depth understanding of the culture or religion being studied. Third, it relies on multiple techniques to collect data. All ethnographers use some technique that is widely practiced (e.g., interviewing) and some technique that is tailored specifically to the unique details of their own fieldwork setting (Bielo, 2015, p. 31).

Questions pertaining to these fundamentals have brought about debate between ethnographers. To what extent should the ethnographer be immersed with the cultures or religions being studied? Should he/she go native, or is remaining detached imperative? Ethnographers are called to cultural immersion, yet going native is widely considered taboo and staying native even more so (Ewing, 1994). How long should the ethnographer stay with the people being studied for his/her data to be considered reliable? And more importantly, which techniques are to be adopted and which are rejected? Ethnographers’ contrasting positions with regards to these questions, together with their differing ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions have guided them to frame ethnography, the same methodology, in different ways. Bielo (2015) categorizes these ways under three typical framings that can either be adopted singly or in combination. These typical framings are science, art, and craft.

While issues of objectivity and cultural relativism can face the three framings, advocates of the first see ethnography as a kind of science and therefore emphasize the importance of conducting ethnographic fieldwork systematically. The ethnographer, in this view, relies on a set of formal fieldwork methods to collect data and is concerned with the validity, reliability, and accuracy of these data. Accordingly, Ethnographic knowledge obtained are regarded not as absolute, but as reliable within recognizable limits.

Following Taylor’s (1985) imagery, “can knowledge of the human world be erected upon the sort of apparently firm foundation that scientific knowledge of the natural world enjoys?”, the second framing of ethnography sees it as form of social art. This view recognizes the human ways in which fieldwork produces knowledge inter-subjectively (Bielo, 2015, p. 31). In this view, anthropological knowledge is interpretative and hermeneutic rather than positive, tentative rather than conclusive, relative to time, place, and author rather than universal (Carrithers, 1990).

After the reflexive and critical turn within the social sciences (i.e., scholars questioning the objectivity of their standpoints, the accuracy of their representation, and the authenticity of their writings), anthropologists also cast a reflexive and critical eye on ethnography as a way of knowing, and critique emerged around the limitations and conventions of anthropological representation, primarily written texts (Bielo, 2015). This critical stance towards ethnography doubted such thing as perfect ethnography but, nevertheless, aimed at getting better at doing it. This view characterizes the third framing, seeing ethnography as a craft.

Unlike pre-scientific apologetic approaches, i.e., not explaining religion but explaining why religion is true (e.g., Xenophanes, Herodotus, etc.), anthropological approaches to religion take their lead from the dazzling diversity between and among religions and aim at examining each religion in its social context and its own terms and attending to how religions are practiced by real people in their real socially structured lives (Eller, 2007). Aiming at an authentic ethnographic product, anthropologists strive to achieve objectivity and cultural relativism during the process of ethnography (entry to the field, building rapport, collecting data, etc.).

Yet, when ethnography focuses on religious lives and worlds, an enduring question emerges. What does the ethnographer allow himself/herself to belief about the religion being studied? And “how do they square belief, non-belief, or ambiguity of belief with their anthropological goals of explanation, interpretation, and understanding?” (Bielo, 2015), or simply put, how does the ethnographer engage the truth claims they encounter during the process of ethnography? Engelke (2002) refers to this as “the problem of belief”, and Bielo (2015) distinguishes four postures that ethnographers of religion can occupy: methodological atheism, methodological agnosticism, methodological luddism, and methodological theism.

The first posture, methodological atheism, coined by the sociologist Peter Berger in his book The Sacred Canopy (1967), deals with the truth claims of religion only in social terms. It refers to the practice of bracketing off -or refusing to consider- for the purpose of sociological study the ultimate reality of such religious objects as God, gods, angels, etc.  assuming that all scientific explanation must be this-worldly, and therefore, never referencing supernatural or transcendental realities (Porpora, 2006). The argument behind this posture, according to Berger (1967), is that it is impossible within the frame of reference of scientific theorizing to make any affirmations, positive or negative, about the ultimate ontological status of religion, and so religious ideas and practices must be traced to a human origin, considering theological explanations irrelevant for doing ethnography.

The Methodological atheist posture has been criticized by some anthropologists as a form of inappropriate bracketing of religion. The anthropologist E. E. Evans Pritchard argues that psychological and sociological theories (two wider approaches in anthropology of religion, the third being universal approaches) that approached religion solely as solely reflecting fundamental sociological realities (referred to as epiphenomenal). He argues that anthropologist has no possibility of knowing the truth the religious claims, and since that is the case, he or she cannot take the question into consideration. Following this, Ninjan Smart (1973), forwarded methodological agnosticism as an explicit alternative and a “more appropriate” form of bracketing religious explanations declaring that these truths are unknowable.

As the case with the first posture, methodological agnosticism was also critiqued for not presenting the ethnographer with positivist or neo-positivist approaches to religion which do not offer helpful perspectives to study believers’ truth claims and experience nearness to religious phenomena. Methodological luddism is presented as an alternative point of departure, and invites fieldworkers to use their human capacity for play, the capacity to deal simultaneously and subjunctively with two or more ways of classifying reality (the ludic), by identifying temporarily, but in a serious way, with believers’ claims of true knowledge (Droogers, 2011). This posture engages religious truth claims not as a question to definitively answer, but as a role to play in which the fieldworker participates in each world as if it were absolutely real and true, and to pretend in a fully committed way but never lose sight of the fact that he or she is pretending (Bielo, 2015).

By contrast, methodological theism neither brackets off religious claims nor does it encourage anthropologists to play and pretend, it is a stridently emic perspective (the insider’s view) that argues that religious claims are true and fully knowable, and should be sought as part of doing ethnography. This posture stresses on the importance of understanding religion in local terms, with local categories, and through local experiential registers (Bielo, 2015). An epitome of this posture is provided by Islamic anthropology and the Islamization of anthropological knowledge through which Islamic anthropologists exposed the colonial and oriental misrepresentations and the ethnocentric ideologies present in wester anthropology and ethnography and aimed at deconstructing it, correcting it, and reconstructing a new anthropology in which Islam is spoke about from Islam, and is represented by Muslims.

In fact, issues of ethnocentric bias and ideological subjectivity within not only ethnography and cultural anthropology, but the social sciences in general are not raised by Islamic anthropology alone, other post-colonial, feminist, and critical race theories all demonstrated how many methodological and theoretical frameworks reproduced dominant, often oppressive, ideologies (Bielo, 2015). Following Clifford Geertz’s question “what does the anthropologist do?” a general common-sensical belief used to be that anthropologists straightforwardly conduct ethnographic fieldworks, living with members of other cultures and engaging in an ethnocentric-free, cultural relativistic participant observation, assuming that such a methodology is fairly reliable in producing objective knowledge about other cultures, and the answer stops at this point. If, however, the question was paraphrased: How does the anthropologist convey this “objective” knowledge to others? Then the answer is, obviously, by writing ethnographic works; hence Geertz’s answer “He (the ethnographer) Writes.

To highlight one example of the implications of such answer, examining colonial texts reveals how the colonizer’s used language; that is, the semiotic signs and linguistic expressions, the traditions and conventions of narration, the rhetorical strategies, and the literary means of representation –the irony, metaphors, tropes, allegories, lexical and grammatical choices— has played a key role in the “othering” and “misrepresentation” of the colonized’ culture. This goes without mentioning the implicit and often explicit imperial agendas of promoting and disseminating of the colonial ideology –through descriptions of other cultures- which justifies and legitimizes colonization under the pretext of “the civilizing mission”.

With this recognition, the set challenges integral to both doing ethnography as a product and producing a successful ethnographic product start to reveal. The author stresses of the value of being critical reflexive towards all the decisions made during ethnographic fieldwork focusing on religion. Whether to confess or not, join the ritual or stand aside, belief or not, stay or go, sit or stand, close eyes or keep them open, write the field or wait, record or remember, pray or pass, sing or hum, week or keep emotions snug to self, and countless other decisions should be carefully chosen by the ethnographer (Bielo, 2015).

The author distinguishes three broad categories that encompass these areas of reflexive inquiry, the dilemmas of participant observation, the formative nature of fieldwork relationships, and the unavoidability of fieldwork ethics (Bielo, 2015). The first questions what it means to do participant observation in religious settings? And itrefers to all pragmatic, methodological and ethical decisions pertaining to participant observation and the degree of cultural immersion required when studying religion. The second encompasses decisions pertaining to establishing, negotiating, losing and celebrating relationships with members of the religion being studied.

The third area of reflexive inquiry encompasses decisions pertaining to the ethnics of doing religious ethnography. These include ethical issues when designing research, being in the field, and more crucially, producing representations of the religions being studied. This crisis of representation is expressed in the separation of the representation (as a construct) from the thing that is represented (as a reference to reality), which can result in a distorted portrayal of religious beliefs, practices, symbols, and meanings.

Clearly, adopting a single anthropological approach or theory, or a consistent ethnographic methodology cannot succeed in capturing all of the depth of religion. While each can help sensitize us to important dimensions of religion, each still exhibits deficiencies and blind-spots that limit our field of vision and capacity to engage with the multidimensional complexities involved. It is through the diversity of these approaches, theories, methodologies and frameworks that we can contribute a portion to our final understanding of religion.

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Berger, P. (1967). The sacred canopy: Elements of a sociological theoryof religion. New York: Anchor books.

Bielo, S. J.(2015). Anthropology of religion: The basics. Routledge

Droogers, A. (1996). Methodological ludism: beyond religionism andreductionism. In Conflicts in Social Science. Anton van Harskamp, ed. pp.44–67. London: Routledge

Engelke, M. (2002). The problem of belief: Evans-Pritc.

Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo Ludens: A study of the play element inculture. Boston: Beacon Press.

Knibbe, K.E., & Droogers, A. F. (2011). Methodological ludism and the academicstudy of religion. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 23(3-4),283-303. https://doi.org/10.1163/157006811X608395

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