This seminar explores the craft, ethics, and politics of ethnography, a qualitative methodology essential to the study of lived religion. Ethnographers conduct participant observation and cultivate long-term collaborative and intimate relationships with contemporary communities. By centering the genre of ethnography, we examine how research is about relationships. Research relationships are messy, rife with power dynamics, intimacies, and tensions, and contingent on bonds of trust and access. We consider how ethnographers of religion navigate spaces and histories crowded with the presences of gods, spirits, and ancestors and the work of writing about those presences.

Alyssa J. Maldonado-Estrada
Author

Kalamazoo College
Institution

Community College, Public College or University, Private College or University, Seminary
Institution Type

Syllabus
Resource Type

Intro, Undergraduate Course
Class Type

2022
Date Published

Religious Studies
Discipline

Atheism/Agnosticism/Skepticism, Buddhism, Catholic, General Comparative Traditions, Hinduism, Indigenous, Islam, Judaism, New Religious Movements, Other Christianities, Other Traditions, Protestant
Religous Tradition

Topics