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  • Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life by Nancy Tatom Ammerman
  • Kristy Nabhan-Warren (bio)
Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life. By Nancy Tatom Ammerman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 376pp. $31.95

Nancy Ammerman’s most recent book is a carefully researched and exceedingly thoughtful rendering of the stories people tell about the ways “religion” and “spirituality” work in their everyday lives. From the home to the workplace, to walks with their dogs and gardening in the backyard, Ammerman’s interlocutors’ stories about the ways that religion and spirituality are part of ordinary life come through quite vividly. Ammerman is a distinguished sociologist of religion who has earned a reputation as a stellar scholar who treats her subjects with respect, and who does not front load theory but sees her subjects themselves as capable of theorizing and creating deep meaning. She conveys her interlocutor’s religious perspectives with the aim of empathy and understanding, and she contextualizes their religious and spiritual meaning-making within broader trends in the American religious landscape. Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes is the latest manifestation of Ammerman’s thoughtful sociological approach and adds to her impressive portfolio. In this newest book, she builds upon her lifework in seeking to understand what people mean when they talk about religion and spirituality. And, she shows us, what they mean isn’t always what we think they mean or assume they mean.

Ammerman does not take terminology for granted, whether it is her interlocutors’ or the sociologists’ lexicons. She points to the problematics of surveys which “fail to tell us what the respondents mean” when they use terms like “religion” and “spiritual” (4). “If we are to understand the role of religion in everyday life,” she writes, “we will need to leave open the question of how religion and spirituality are related to each other and what roles are played by individual improvisation and organized religions” (4). When people talk about religion and spirituality they use the terms interchangeably and do not create the kinds of binaries of meaning that sociologists and others have ascribed to them. According to Ammerman, binary ways of thinking about “religion” and spirituality” are not very effective in helping us really understand what people mean when they talk about religion. She turns to peoples’ stories as a key way to engage with her subjects and to ascertain how they craft, experience, and live religion in the everyday. What she finds in these stories are entanglements, especially related to terms like “spirituality” and “religion.”

In order to uncover religious narratives, Ammerman and her research team relied on several modes of empirical evidence gathering. These include long one-onone “big story” interviews, site visits to religious communities, multiple one-on-one follow up visits with each interviewee, photo elicitation interviewing (PEI), and diaries (15–16). The multi-pronged research gathering is impressive as it established multiple points of communication with the men and women with whom Ammerman and her team worked for the ultimate publication of the book. The PEI and oral diary data collection are especially helpful as they allow for insights that one-on-one interviews cannot grasp. While there is no getting around the power relations involved in any kind of social science research method, the representations from PEI and recorded diaries come directly from the men and women themselves and are more free-flowing and spontaneous than providing answers in an interview setting. [End Page 294]

What we learn about religion and spirituality in the contemporary United States in this book is that it is complex. We learn that women and men are creative and do not necessarily correlate institutional religious understandings with their own, although sometimes they do. Storytelling is an important way for religious and spiritual Americans to relate their most fervent beliefs and values.

An important contribution of this book is the author’s willingness to examine empiricisms such as PEI and diaries. Here, Ammerman shows the importance of materiality—whether in visual or written form—and how women and men connect to the material. The effect of photos and diary keeping is important as it allows for her interlocutors...

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