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  • Illuminating Women's Religious Authority through Ethnography
  • Karen Pechilis (bio)

Ethnography undertaken from within the study of religion is a relatively recent methodological phenomenon.1 Many of the issues involved were identified by Karen McCarthy Brown in her groundbreaking and now classic ethnography, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn.2 Brown's emphasis on issues such as the academic and religious significance of personal experience, ethnography as a contextualized corrective to a received master narrative, the limitations of the ethnographic "present," and women's religious authority as constituted through healing rituals and a constructed matrilineal lineage remain core issues in ethnographic study of religion and female leaders in religion today. Critical discussions of ethnography as a method in the study of religion have expanded in the ensuing years, in ways summarized by Paul C. Johnson:

Ethnography is where disciplinary boundaries dividing anthropology, sociology, and religious studies have become blurred. This is not surprising since ethnography has been central in moving beyond modern grand narratives of "world religions." It pushes researchers to attend to lived practices rather than only ideal claims, to subaltern actors rather than elites who typically produce sacred texts and "history," and to the [End Page 93] fluidity and flux of religious boundaries rather than their oft-presumed integrity and continuity. Yet ethnography is also an embattled method, implicated historically in colonial domination, and reliant upon a claim to authority—"I was there"—that at its worst places a naïve faith in the observing self. Ethnography provides the test arena where social sciences are battered by the postmodern mantra that all knowledge is situated and all truths are perspectival. The ethnography of religion is particularly central to such debates. The study of genealogies and material culture may present no epistemological crisis, since "native knowledge" is not different in kind from ethnographic knowledge, perhaps merely recorded in a different genre (texts), or less comparative in intent. By contrast, the ethnographic study of religion has often sought to translate informants' cosmologies and meaning-worlds into an Enlightenment cosmology and meaning-world, raising hoary questions of why, and on what basis, the scholar's truth is more valid than that of the religion being studied. Along with such questions comes a pragmatic and ethical one: Is the recording and translating process a "good" or emancipatory one, and for whom?3

Reflections on the nature and significance of personal experience in ethnographies of religion have been to the fore, describing and assessing—at times controversially—the power relations among gender, ethnicity, race, class, and national identity that contour the encounter.4

The history of religions' method of study has traditionally been dominated by textual criticism.5 The identification of the field as "history" contributes to the bias; texts from many centuries ago have survived, including those that seem to be reliable copies of very ancient texts. The Vedas of Hinduism are oral texts that have been meticulously preserved for millennia through controlled oral transmission. Works of art used in ritual, such as Buddha images at stupas (memorial [End Page 94] structures over Buddhist relics), images of Jinas on monastery walls, and Hindu sculptures of deities in temples are also extant from past centuries and help us imagine the history of religions in South Asia. These locations where images are found also often contain inscriptions carved into the rock, which also contribute to our historical knowledge.

Scholars who work with historical materials certainly travel to the regions under study, such as locations where there are manuscripts or copies of texts, places where certain events happened in the past, and sites where monuments and religious buildings are extant. But the method of performing fieldwork at a site, in which the inquiry and analysis are primarily based on what people say about their culture and identity through word and deed as they live within them, is less well represented traditionally in the history of religions field. That ethnography is a growing field in the history of religions invites us to reflect on what historians of religions distinctively bring to the method.

The method of ethnography involves fieldwork at a given time that is the "present" for both ethnographer and informant in the...

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