The Catholic Studies Reader

14. Working Toward an Inclusive Narrative: A Call for Interdisciplinarity and Ethnographic Reflexivity in Catholic Studies

14 Working Toward an Inclusive Narrative A Call for Interdisciplinarity and Ethnographic Reflexivity in Catholic Studies kristy nabhan-warren I am a non-Catholic anthropologist of religion who, until recently, has worked primarily within Mexican American Catholic communities in the Southwest, West, and Midwest. In this essay, I raise some questions and concerns that have come up for me as an ethnographer who focuses on lived Christianities in the United States. I continue to work with Mexican American Catholics and have broadened out my scope of inquiry to include Anglo American Catholics and Protestants of a variety of traditions, and I am convinced that the field of Catholic Studies can learn much from histories and ethnographies of Spanish-speaking U.S. Catholics. I am also convinced that studies of U.S. Hispanics must be interwoven with the histories of U.S. Catholicism and U.S. Christianity more broadly. It is possible to reflect the uniqueness and richness of Hispanic lived religion, but it must be interwoven with others’ histories in order to reflect common humanity and experience. U.S. Hispanic Catholic history is part of U.S. Catholic history as well as American Christian history. The risk of separating out U.S. Hispanic Catholic history from the larger narratives is that we exoticize and romanticize it, making it seem other and foreign to what other U.S. Catholics have experienced. We also risk trivializing U.S. Hispanic Catholics if we relegate their experiences to a separate chapter , thus denying universalism of experience. Since the 1980s, the American Catholic landscape has been changing in unprecedented ways as a result of influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and El Salvador . The field of Catholic Studies needs to figure out how to incorporate these new and not-so-new migrants and their stories and voices into the broader narratives of American Christian history and life so that they are not relegated to the margins. A growing body of literature 310 kristy nabhan-warren attests to the level of importance scholars are attaching to Spanishspeaking Catholics and their place in the American Catholic and larger American landscape.1 But sometimes these studies can romanticize U.S. Hispanic Catholics and make their concerns and realities seem somehow distinct—falsely—from those of other American Catholics. As scholars of religion, whether we are historians, theologians, or ethnographers, we enter the religious worlds of those we study. Ever since I began conducting fieldwork in South Phoenix, Arizona, in the fall of 1992 for my master’s thesis I have wondered what are we doing, or what are we attempting to do, when we study religious peoples and their worlds, particularly when we are encountering these communities of faith as ‘‘outsiders.’’ What are our goals as scholars who focus on American Catholicism but who must attend to the larger context of American religious history? As individuals who gain trust and levels of intimacy with those we are ‘‘studying’’ for a thesis, dissertation or book, what are our obligations to community members? These are some of the methodological, existential, and moral concerns I have had. I continue to have them as I work within U.S. Hispanic Catholic communities and branch my inquiry outward, working toward bringing a variety of religious narratives together. In order for our scholarship in the sub- field of Catholic Studies to speak to the moods and motivations of our interlocutors and to gain a more global relevance, we must attend to these broader issues. My overarching argument in this essay is that Catholic Studies must embrace interdisciplinarity in order to reflect the lived realities of U.S. Catholics. We must familiarize ourselves with a variety of subdisciplines and disciplines, including American Studies, anthropology, history, Latino Studies, political science, and Religious Studies, and we must incorporate multiple perspectives in our work. We must seek to contextualize our interlocutors’ voices and experiences (whether strictly historical or ethnographic) with other Christians. The challenges that Catholic Studies scholars face are also opportunities that will make our work richer, more textured. Some of these dual challenges and opportunities include highlighting the uniqueness of U.S. Catholicism while attending to larger issues on the American religious landscape; noting the special contributions Hispanics are making to U.S. Catholicism as well as how these men and women mirror larger trends in American Christianity; and entering deeply into the religious [3.146.152.99] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 16:52 GMT...