Devotee/Ethnographer: My Struggle at the Boundary Walls of Participant Observation
This article demonstrates the difficulty of incorporating within the methodological ambit of ‘participant observation’, a possibility of the ethnographer herself staking claim in the religious truth claims of the community that constitute the subject of research. In so doing, this article provides a...
| Auteur principal: | |
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| Type de support: | Électronique Article |
| Langue: | Anglais |
| Vérifier la disponibilité: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | En cours de chargement...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Publié: |
MDPI
2022
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| Dans: |
Religions
Année: 2022, Volume: 13, Numéro: 6 |
| Sujets non-standardisés: | B
Participant Observation
B Bhakti B autoethnography B Presence B Devotion |
| Accès en ligne: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Résumé: | This article demonstrates the difficulty of incorporating within the methodological ambit of ‘participant observation’, a possibility of the ethnographer herself staking claim in the religious truth claims of the community that constitute the subject of research. In so doing, this article provides a critique of the concept of participant observation to point out that participant observation anticipates the work of the ethnographer in participating in the physical, performative lives of the community that she purports to study, but never the internal life, especially the life of accessing a register of truth. I found myself in a curious situation as a devotee, where I was accessing the truth-claim of the Krishna-worshipping Vaishnava community, even before I could attempt to participate in their communitarian lives of worship. I found, in the coupling of the devotee and ethnographer identities, that participant observation in the traditional anthropological sense became difficult. The article is, thus, a meditation on this difficult journey and the pendulum of my devotee/ethnographer self that it produces. |
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| ISSN: | 2077-1444 |
| Contient: | Enthalten in: Religions
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.3390/rel13060538 |