Anthropology Matters Journal, 2003-2

Careful, you might lose something: On being disciplined into the Anthropology of Religion

Ingie Hovland (Department of Anthropology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London)

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This paper reflects on the experience of entering into the academic field of the anthropology of religion. Its reflections are prompted by a perceived division in the anthropology of religion between the Other (whose religion is the target of incessant and persistent questions) and the Self (whose religion is a fairly sensitive issue that is decidedly not questioned). The paper explores by what means the two sides of such a double phenomenon are able to coexist, and asks what repressions and exclusions are necessary in order to sustain the deceptively simple anthropological procedure where the Self examines/explains (the religion of) the Other?

In the green fields of Kilburn: Reflections on a quantitative study of irish migrants in North London

Louise Ryan (Research Fellow, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences, Royal Free and University College Medical School)

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This paper considers some of the emotional encounters experienced by the researcher while carrying out a study of Irish migrants in London. Although quantitative research takes little cognisance of the emotional impact of research, this paper suggests some of the ways in which a standardised, closed-ended questionnaire may provoke emotional responses in both the researcher and the researched. The emotional landscape of the research is intimately connected with the physical landscape in which the research is being carried out. Researching Irish migrants in areas such as Kilburn requires a consideration of the complex and dynamic spaces in which an Irish translocal community has been materially constructed and symbolically invented. Kilburn is not simply a backdrop to the research; it forms part of the emotional terrain which has to be negotiated in doing this research.

Caught in an (ethnographic) moment: Negotiating religious loyalities in and out of the field

Audrey Prost (Department of Anthropology, University College London)

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This paper examines some of the methodological and ethical dilemmas inherent to fieldwork in communities saturated by religious identification and discourses. I examine the dynamics of fieldwork along the fault lines of reflexivity, when one’s own existential ground is challenged and reformed through adopting a position of `practical empathy` with religious beliefs from which one had previously sought to distance oneself. Central to this is the idea that the ‘ethnographic moment’, i.e. the moment in which the anthropologist rises to meet a revealed problematic encapsulated in a particular instance of fieldwork, may be paralleled to the experience of religious epiphany, whereby embodied and intellectual understanding of phenomena and situation come to merge, producing a totalising understanding of the field and the “afield”

'The self' and 'the other' in disciplinary Anthropology

Paul-François Tremlett (Study of Religions Department, School of Oriental and African Studies)

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In this paper I argue that fieldwork constitutes a ‘limit-experience’ where self and other encounter and confront one another. I suggest this confrontation provides an opening for what Foucault described as knowing “how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known” (1992). It begins by outlining Foucault’s notion of ‘pastoral power’, and argues that anthropology is an explicitly pastoral discipline, whose pastoral function emerges by interrogating the opposition of ‘Self’ to ‘Other’. Drawing on early and contemporary anthropological writings, I show how the discipline constructs a knowing Self which is opposed to an Other that is actively denied selfhood whilst being simultaneously constructed as a site of instruction. I conclude by exploring how anthropology might forge a radical break with pastoral power by recasting our understanding of fieldwork and recognising that it is primarily a site for a de-centering encounter between self and other selves.

A tangle of multiple transgressions: The western gaze and the Tobelija (Balkan sworn-virgin-cross-dressers) in the 19th and 20th centuries

Aleksandra Djajic Horváth (Department of History and Civilization, European University Institute, Florence, Italy)

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This paper focuses on travelogue representations of tobelija, Balkan sworn-virgin-cross-dressers, from the second half of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The tobelija, a socially approved female-to-male cross-dresser, takes centre stage in many of these accounts, epitomising all that is exotic, strange, and primeval about the remote and mountainous regions of the Western Balkans during this period. Under the controlling and classifying gaze of the western European traveller, the tobelija materializes in verbal and visual narrative as a strong, armed, and masculinized single woman. Salient to these accounts is the travellers’ mapping of Western understandings of gender onto the local peoples: by categorising them as women, the tobelija are disciplined into binary Western gender discourses.