"Knowledge in Passing:" Reflexive Anthropology and Religious Awareness

In this article,¹ I outline affinities between a Roman Catholic way of thinking in which I was raised, and the local Muslim shape of thought which I encountered during fieldwork. Thus, I engage with some of the recent literature on issues of "reflexivity" in ethnographic practice. But I go beyond a reflexive critique of my fieldwork experience and analysis, to argue that this critique can actually engender substantive comparisons between particular kinds of Catholicism and Islam. In my conclusions, I gather together my reflections to reconsider the connection between the religious beliefs of the ethnographer and his capacity to make statements about the religion of his informants. I end by sketching the ontological possibilities that emerge.

In Anthropology and Autobiography, Judith Okely argues that the ethnographer must "work through the specificity of the anthropologist's self in order to contextualize and transcend it" (Okely 1992:2). The tendency to split off or exclude the self results from a canonical stress on "neutral, impersonal, scientific" work (Okely 1992:9-10). She cites approvingly Jean-Paul Dumont's argument for a "movement back and forth [in ethnographic investigation] between experience and consciousness" (Okely 1992:13). Narrowing her discussion to the possible forms which autobiographical analysis might take, she argues for the necessity of considering the ethnographer's relations with the "others" being studied. She writes of the embodiment of fieldwork experiences, their physicality, but she does make the point that "the reflexive knowledge of fieldwork is acquired not only from an examination of outside categories, but also from more intangible inner experience" (Okely 1992:16-17). Her main concern appears to be that the fieldworker interrogate the nature of his or her interactions with the host community.

In contrast, this paper is concerned with the ways in which the fieldworker's religious categories, developed from childhood through young manhood, subsequently affected his relations with the Muslim society which he studied—and more importantly, his analysis of it. I stopped participating fully in Catholic belief and ritual seven years before beginning fieldwork. Nevertheless, I argue that Catholicism established a strange familiarity with the Muslim village in northern Nigeria where I did my fieldwork. More pointedly, my analytical reflections in writing my dissertation were shaped by memories of forcible images during fieldwork. Both memories and reflections were selective, because they drew, without my realizing it, on thought processes and deep perspectives which I attribute here to a Catholic education and home life.

I propose that there are strange resonances between the worlds of Roman Catholicism and Islam, which led me to sympathize with Islam at a very deep level.

Childhood and Youth

My experience of Catholicism was heavily affected by the age in which I grew up, the nature of the bond between my parents, and the mode of livelihood of my father. My father was an American soldier posted every few years to a new and distant place. A cradle Catholic, his religious practice had been somewhat desultory until his experience of hell in the Second World War led him to the belief that there must be some ultimate good—or, at least, that we ought to search for it through prayer, examination of conscience and the sacraments of the Church. My mother was English, but of French origin, hence Catholic. Though of very different backgrounds, they shared strong bonds of religion, humor, and a mutual experience of war. I was born in 1948 at a time when many men had emerged from the recent war and its anguish with the silent elation of a certain kind of religious discovery (see biographies of the period, for example, of the convert monk Thomas Merton and of the many military men who tried the monastic life). The world which we inhabited changed every few years with the move of the family to a new army posting, but the very architecture of churches, the presence of priests and nuns, and Catholic...