The Shape of Reflexivity: A Pragmatist Analysis of Religious Ethnography

I. Introduction

In recent years, religious studies has undergone an ethnographic turn. More and more, scholars attend to the social location and significance of religious practice. This approach foregrounds the self-understandings of religious communities and practitioners and raises the question of the relation between ethnography and philosophical analysis. For instance, Saba Mahmood, in The Politics of Piety, draws from ethnographic study so as to critique philosophy’s universalizing claims regarding subjectivity, enabling a recognition of the diverse forms feminist subjectivity and political agency may take within religious traditions and practice.² Jeffrey Stout’s Blessed are the Organized likewise shifts the terrain of ethical discussion through a more ethnographic focus.³ In their work, and the broader trend their work highlights, ethnography serves to critique the philosophical study of religion, especially when divorced from concrete practice.

This turn, in my view, is all to the good. However, it raises the question of what philosophy might have to contribute to an ethnographic approach and how it could do so. While uneasy bedfellows, thick description and philosophical abstraction need not always be at odds. This essay experiments with the philosophical elaboration of ethnography, exploring both the fruits and the limits of such an endeavor. It seeks to demonstrate two points: first, that rather than imposing external rational criteria upon the self-understandings of religious communities, philosophical refection can illuminate their internal dynamics and logics. Such analysis thereby helps us to understand their respective modes of engagement with their surrounding societies. Second, such explication can demonstrate what I would term the variety of religious rationalities: the multiple discursive practices by which different communities enact refection and inferential thinking.

As a test case, this essay focuses on Paul Lichterman’s influential sociological study, Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Trying to Bridge America’s Divisions. In this work, Lichterman studies how religious groups seek to build bridges between civic organizations and their communities. When it occurs, such bridge building establishes enduring networks across racial and religious differences and thereby contributes to the civic life of the broader community. Lichterman highlights Dewey’s conception of reflexivity as the defining characteristic of successful religious bridge builders; by contrast, religious groups (both conservative and liberal) that minimized reflective activity found such bonds far more difficult to establish.⁴ On these grounds, he challenges the reigning consensus in social theory that by establishing group networks, religious groups intrinsically contribute to social capital. Rather, the “cultural patterns” and customs of religiously based groups significantly shape the tenor of their social commitment. As Lichterman puts it, “Counting connections without listening to customs and conversation gives us a partial view of civic community.”⁵

While invoking Dewey, Lichterman’s work still leaves unexamined the conditions for such reflective thinking and does not explain fully why it emerges within certain groups but not others. His work thus provides an ideal entry point for philosophical experimentation. This essay elaborates Dewey’s components of reflective thinking and examines their interplay within Lichterman’s ethnography. Furthermore, while Dewey highlights both specific practices necessary for reflexivity and the underlying dispositions that support them, he does not give a sufficient account of how reflexivity emerges, the dynamics by which it proceeds, or how individuals develop new abilities based upon prior modes of reflection. Robert Brandom’s recent work, especially his discussion of how thinking involves both extensions and rectifications of prior commitments, therefore serves to supplement Dewey’s account. Re-examining Dewey’s work in light of Brandom’s analytical pragmatism helps to clarify the conditions that enable reflexivity within religiously based groups. Articulating the different dimensions of reflexivity, and the processes of their emergence, enables us to more fully consider the differences between the groups’ customs. It thereby serves as a test case and model for how pragmatist philosophy can contribute to ethnographic study.

II. Deweyan Reflexivity: The Elements of Inquiry

Because of its role in Lichterman’s argument, let us begin by considering the central features of reflection in Dewey’s work. Reflection is the distinctive activity that characterizes thought. As Jennifer Welchman argues...