Sikh, wedding, Gudwara Sahib, Soho Road 2009
This paper focuses on the unique methodology employed in the photographic project ‘“Under Gods”: Stories from Soho Road’. It looks at the photographer as a researcher who sees and draws upon their evolving relationship with the urban environment - in this case the city of Birmingham, UK – and other subjects. This leads to a discussion of the use of written phenomenological methodology in fieldwork recently undertaken in Paris, in contrast to the use of image and sequence-based commentary in relation to research undertaken in Birmingham. This paper considers knowledge and knowledge exchange in relation to both fieldwork experiences and their resulting outputs. In so doing, it demonstrates that while a more expressive research methodology may encounter obstacles of subjective bias, they have the potential to offer audiences and researchers deeper insight into both the subject matter and the complex process of engagement via visual and sensory medium. This suggests the need to rethink certain categories of anthropological knowledge in light of understandings that may be accessible through more embodied research methods and expressive data.
‘Ethnographic understanding emerges from experience, bodily, sensory as much as from observational and intellectual reflection’ (Grimshaw 2001).
This paper draws on material from my completed visual research project in Birmingham and an ongoing theoretical research project in Paris, both of which examine the contemporary contexts and experiences of diasporic urban faith communities. The research explores the distinctiveness of urban ethnic enclaves in terms of religious organisation and material practice, and considers the networks and communities that shape these spaces.
My research interests stem from my social and educational background. I will commence by giving a brief account of this as I feel it is crucial for understanding what I mean by ‘my vision’. By this, I mean the kinds of knowledge or understanding that are embedded in the way I see the world, and my approach to the project that is the focus of this paper, which first utilises photographic and then written ethnographies.
I grew up as the daughter of two Anglican priests in Birmingham, one of the UK’s most culturally diverse cities, where over 90 different nationalities now live. I was the only white child in my nursery class and I have fond memories of celebrating my friends’ different religious festivals. At Brighton University I gained a BA (Hons) in Documentary Photography and then moved to Italy to study at a research and communications department for young artists and journalists. During these experiences I became aware of the particularity of my upbringing. As I reflect on this upbringing, I realise I developed a personal interest in the growth of multi-faith communities in European cities, and the complex issues of immigration, secularism and religious revival that has accompany their growth.
Between 2008 and 2009, I investigated urban faith on the two-mile stretch of Soho Road in Birmingham, with the intent of documenting photographically the co-existence of a rich diversity of religions in the city, and the reality and intensity of different lifestyles. On completing this visual study I sought a deeper theoretical understanding of my subject matter, and so began an MSc in Social Anthropology at University College London. My aim was to produce theoretically rich research and thus ground my visual work within academic discourse.
As researcher, both behind and beside the lens, I closely documented the quotidian spiritual practices (both formal and domestic) that play out on Soho Road. This two mile stretch of road is the site of some 30 religious centres each dedicated to different denominations from around the world. Whilst taking photographs for my own project I consciously sought to took functional photographs to give to my subjects in return for their time. I lived with and visited the different religious communities that exist in this street, including Sikhs, Buddhists, Hare Krishnas, Jamaican Rastafarians and The Jesus Army Evangelical Christians. A South Asian Anglican woman priest commented that:
‘On Soho Road people are conscious of their faith rather than where they came from. People used to say “Oh I am from Bangladesh, Pakistan, West Indies or Poland”. Now people say “I am a Muslim, I am a Sikh, I am a Baptist, I am a Catholic; this is my identity”’.
The landscape of Soho Road has changed over time. Its religious demography has altered, which means it is no longer a place where Anglican and nonconformist Christian churches are the only religious structures. In recent years, other faith communities with origins in the Caribbean and Asia have taken over buildings and transformed their function, or new buildings have been built to be places of worship. These buildings not only add to the local landscape, creating more variety, but also complement the ways in which the road has changed as new retail outlets and community centres have arisen in the area.
I was drawn to the explicitly religious materiality on the road, such as the items sold in the shops, and the images of Mecca hanging in the hairdressers. On the buses that travelled along the road on a Sunday, Evangelical Jesus Army members in multi-coloured camouflage-print outfits could be seen alongside large decorative hats adorning Jamaican-born ladies. During my explorations, I encountered individual Buddhist monks, Catholic nuns, and Protestant priests who would move from one faith building to another. They were fascinated, like me, by the different activities, and eager to take the opportunity to pray where they were unrecognized.
In 2010, after my first year of postgraduate anthropological training at UCL, I began ethnographic research in the Parisian quartier of ‘Belleville’. My intention was to formulate a research question for my MSc dissertation that would expand my work on urban faith communities.
The emergence of ‘third cultures’ that transcend local boundaries in the urban context is a subject that has interested many social anthropologists since the 1990s. France’s political secularity makes it a stimulating location for examining such issues, as ‘third cultures’ are articulated through means of specific religious identities. It was with this in mind that I chose Paris as the site for my field study. I became aware of the colourful, multi-ethnic neighbourhood of Belleville as a possible place on which to focus. This lively quartier is home to one of the city's two Chinatowns and one of the largest communities of the Reformed Church of France. The demographics of the neighbourhood have undergone many changes throughout the decades. While Armenians, Greeks, and Ashkenazi Jews were once the predominant ethnic groups, North Africans and, more recently, sub-Saharan Africans are displacing these former inhabitants. Algerians and Tunisian Jews arrived in the early 1960s, and during the 1980s many ‘alternative’ artists and musicians moved there, attracted by the cheap rent.
After selecting Belleville as a site to undertake my fieldwork I reviewed methodologies employed by anthropologists. I selected a highly qualitative phenomenological approach for my preliminary ethnography to produce what Geertz (1973:3-30) terms ‘thick’ description, grounded in ‘thick’ interactive data. I anticipated that phenomenology’s methodological concern with the world as it is lived and experienced (Csordas 1994; Jackson 1996; Torren 1999) could act as a bridge between my artistic vision and social scientific fieldwork and anthropological research in general. I assumed a Merleau-Pontian approach. ‘We see the things themselves, the world is what we see’, begins Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible (1964:3). This framing conveys the fundamental starting point for phenomenology, namely the world as it gives itself to us, even if only with pretensions of completeness. I have also been inspired by Lienhardt (1961) who attempted to use a Merleau-Pontian approach to phenomenology to counter the crude functionalism that was predominant in anthropological studies of religion in the late 1950s. He proposes that expressive writing, like photography and other visual media, may well prove more accessible to an audience than a more formal account of items.
In the following account, I use a phenomenological method to approach my intimate relationship with the strangers and environments with which I engaged whilst image-making. By assuming this method I attempt to unravel deeper meanings and metaphors. My primary intent is to engage in the rhythms of everyday life, and the area’s religious manifestations, in order to uncover findings for further inquiry.
On the 2nd of January 2010, the map of Belleville became my means of inquiry and examination, while my body became a research tool. The crest of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont offered a spectacular view over the landscape of the Belleville quartier and its surroundings. I observed four church spires on the horizon and noted the lack of Mosque minarets in an area so heavily populated by Muslims. As I descended into the Boulevard de Belleville, heavy scents in the cold air offered a pivotal index of racial, ethnic and cultural pluralism. I distinguished between the waft from a steamy Chinese café, an elaborately fronted Indian restaurant and a traditional French coffee bar. Ten yards from a couscous restaurant I saw a kosher restaurant, outside which Jewish men in skullcaps sat as veiled Muslim women passed by.
After numerous aimless strolls along old back streets, I excitedly came upon a traditional Parisian Catholic Church, pasted with bright, unconventional posters. The building was buzzing with enthusiastic faces of all ages engaged in joyous religious worship many of belonging to people of Chinese origin. I perched on a pew amidst families as an excited band of teenage singers took centre stage. The need to probe further overtook me and I conversed with a tiny Chinese woman. Having inspected my appearance, she dashed over to a spotty boy. His perfect English greeted me warmly. He beckoned me outside and led the way to a bohemian coffee shop two doors down. Over a bitter coffee, I asked him about the religious goings on. I gathered that many Chinese people were turning to evangelical Christianity and that this was more widely practiced than Buddhism (seemingly the only alternative) among the Chinese residents of Belleville. He explained that a few members of his church had migrated to France believing that they would have religious freedom, otherwise suppressed in China. I also discovered that an African Christian church made use of the same church building on Sunday evenings, while a traditional French Catholic mass took place in the morning. I noted how the different cultures plainly overlapped and transgressed boundaries. He excused himself to return to the celebrations and I felt invigorated by the sense that I had been able to establish a temporary, yet intimate, relationship with him.
Around Belleville Metro station, Halal shops full of bright red flesh flanked the street. An elderly French lady paraded a large cross that was pinned to her long black puffer jacket. Slightly further south, an Orthodox Jewish man with dark curly payots pushed a child through what I took to be school-like spiky gates. Different groups and individuals were living out their lives and creating different spaces on the same, single road; cultures that were seemingly worlds apart converged here along common architectural pathways.
A friend had informed me of a particular shop nearby and after searching for 30 minutes I came across its battered metal exterior. The interior was crammed with delicately carved Indian boxes. A white-bearded man wearing a white turban appeared and, as I began to mumble to him in French, his eyes glittered, and he responded in Hindi-twanged English. He seemed unperturbed by my inquisitiveness. The man handed me his photocopied business card and proceeded to argue in a rather abstract manner that there was only religious harmony in the world.
After listening to the old man’s thoughts for ten minutes or so, a gust of frosty air brought in a white-skinned man and girl, and a wrinkly woman of around 50 years old. My eyes were fixated by her jazzy red Sari, which contrasted with what I regarded as her ‘typical’ French face. Her jet-black hair was gelled down and her parting was encrusted with red glitter, which matched her red lipstick and bindhi. Gazing, unimpressed at the shop’s produce, she turned her sparkling shoulders towards the door. Unthinkingly, I ran after her, into the early evening, trying to gather my senses for a natural interaction. She did not appear discomforted by me following her, so I took this as an invitation. She seemed slightly bemused by my attention, but pleased that I was interested in Hinduism. We walked together down various alleys to a closed restaurant and I was introduced to the lady’s husband, also Indian, who was the resident chef. The restaurant smelt of fried onions mingled with vestiges of spicy cooking. I eyed a number of Hindu statues and, to my surprise, noted a technicolor image of Mecca against red wallpaper. With intense hunger, I munched crispy popadoms, while the lady explained why she had converted from Catholicism to Hinduism, in heavy French, help by her son who spoke broken English. As the conversation turned towards their recent trip to Disneyland, my brain and body strained under the overload of sensual impressions collected during one day.
I traced my way back through Belleville in a trance-like state, half-detached from my surroundings, and wondered how my presence had vibrated and lingered in the places that I had visited. The worlds of Belleville were not nearly as unknown as they had seemed but a few hours ago – my entertaining and enriching wander in body and mind had revealed something of the sensual language of this quartier.
Back in London, I obtained distance and perspective on both the Birmingham and Paris field experiences. I considered the similarities and differences between the two. The improvisation and hybridisation of religious and cultural practices within these two specific urban locations was noticeable to me. During Vietnamese Catholic church services in Birmingham, on Soho Road, the men sit on the right and the women on the left, despite the fact that this formality is no longer adhered to in Vietnam. One Sikh lady commented that she first experienced a class divide in the Sikh religion when she left India to marry her British-born Sikh husband. One of the major principles of Sikhism is a belief in the equality of all humans regardless of their caste, colour, class, culture, gender, wealth, and religion. It is interesting to ask whether the Birmingham Sikh community has in some sense incorporated aspects of the British class system. The Sikh Gurdwaras displayed clear status differentiation; Gurdwara Sahib’s car park gleamed with BMWs, and the men entering were adorned in elaborate turbans and full beards. In contrast, the mainly clean-shaven men visiting Gurdwara Babe ke further down the Soho Road wore cloths on their heads. Men in this Gurdwara commented that they felt belittled by the Gurdwara Sahib. But it was simultaneously clearly important for Sikh men to identify themselves with one or other Gurdwara. I experienced another example of British cultural adaptation when joining a Muslim family going for fish and chips as part of their Eid celebration.
In Paris, my initial findings showed similar specific adaptations. Individuals and communities from the same country of origin had markedly different attitudes to, and practices of, religion compared to those in Birmingham. Belleville inhabitants commented that my images from Soho Road conveyed a ‘real Britishness’ in the temple design, the priests’ dress and the fashion of Islamic veils, despite depicting an exoticism of Asia and Africa also on show in Belleville. More in-depth fieldwork is required to comment further on the subtle adaptations to be found in Belleville.
In directly addressing the evolving nature of urban life and its relationship with religion, the vibrant religious consumer culture, apparent in both Belleville and on Soho Road, reveals the adaptation of religious communities through the development of a distinctive urban culture. It can be seen, as Diamond (2002: 503) states, that commercialism and religious traditionalism fuse. Evidence of Diamond’s assertion can be found in Belleville and around Soho Road, for example in the development of Halal restaurants, kosher pizza parlours and boutiques selling prayer mats, diwali candles and computer software that teaches three-year-olds the Koran. Investigations into this fusion indicate ways in which material culture, often seen solely in secular terms, or indeed in terms of the local effects of an eviscerating corporate consumerism, may work to foster new forms of religious presence in urban landscapes. Layers of cultural influence and hybridisation mean that in-depth research and frequent encounters with an environment are required in order to even perceive certain signs and symbols. Being a photographer I was drawn to these very visual commodities of religious iconography and practices. Furthermore, the language of photography itself commodifies its subjects by creating images that are things to be kept, treasured, exchanged and sold.
Within two relatively small geographical urban areas, the wide range of different congregational spaces and religious practices provided evidence of creativity and improvisation in architectural form and material culture, a process that is characterised by adaptation and is differentially mediated by the resources and strategies of religious communities. Dwyer, Gilbert and Shah (2010) comment that diasporic faith communities have reworked and transformed the British landscape by adapting architectural structures. On Soho Road I discovered urban houses transformed into a Hare Krishna temple, a Vietnamese Catholic Convent and numerous mosques. In Belleville, buildings’ cellars were being used as Islamic prayer rooms, and I visited a non-orthodox Jewish synagogue on the top floor of a Parisian apartment, where the Rabbi’s children’s toys lay amongst the Ark and Torah. I heard local residents complain that Jewish inhabitants, who did not want to use electric devices on the Sabbath, had broken the electric doors on their Parisian apartment. My comparative study of Birmingham and Paris highlights the complexities of establishing significant religious, cultural and social identities and institutions. My findings are in accordance with recent literature on the subject, which argues that urban experiences of difference are produced by the structuring processes of political economy and socially constructed by multi-faceted, changing subjectivities (Bridge and Watson 2003; Eade and Mele 2002; Low 1996).
A phenomenological stroll through Belleville disclosed it as a place that is generative, and regenerative – in its power to gather religious lives and things, each with their own space and time into one arena of common engagement. Rather than being one definite entity, for example a spiritual, cultural or social location or site, a given place takes on many qualities, which lend themselves to phenomenological narration. I focused on the art of walking, thinking and operating in the world, with an undirected approach. I drew upon aspects of the location to stimulate my interaction with things and individuals. The people whom I met directed my paths, and constructed a ‘spatial story-type’ form of narrative and understanding. In a similar way, my photographs taken on the Soho Road were developed through my (as the image-maker) collaborative engagement with my subjects to the extent that I sought opinions on how they wished to be represented and allowed them to intervene in positioning themselves. As the project developed, I took fewer photographs, and recognised that to gain the most expressive and revealing images, I should spend the majority of my time engaging with people through observation and conversation. After developing an understanding of my subjects and their contexts, I would then be better placed to realise the best moment to capture my subjects photographically.
To a substantial degree, the photographic method operates on the visual plane, reflecting the highly visual nature of religious practices in both field locations. Chopra (1989: 3) notes that ‘the image itself is as a textural analysis’. I realised that analysing the images at a later date uncovered elements that I overlooked at the moment of capture. Kacauer (1960: 22) regards the expressive aesthetic value of photographs as a function of their explorative powers. One of the strengths of photography as an ethnographic tool lies in the quality of the photographic frame to propel a desire to imagine what is out of the frame. I discovered that the ongoing process of image-making and reflection opened up new forms of inquiry enabling me to conduct further visits to Soho Road. Analysing the photographs enabled me to move beyond first impressions. Taking photographs led me to engage in further discussion with the individuals about how they relate to their religious practices. Gauntlett and Holzwarth (2006) suggest that sometimes the visual piece might produce very interesting and revealing dimensions that are not articulated verbally because some topics are inconvenient to think about. People very often find it impossible to explain what they do, simply because some activities are so routine that they are not aware of exactly how they perform them (Van Veggel 2006).
I believe, as Bakhtin (1981) argues, that ethnographic fieldwork should be intuitive, empathic and reactive. It was strange to interact with the field of Belleville without my camera lens as a means of engagement and purpose. In all honesty, I felt constrained by over-theorizing my particular methodology. My visual mindset, I believe, distracted me from engaging with data collection and theoretical research on a more scientific level. In my photographic research project, I consciously separated taking photographs from engaging in conversation and analysis. In the process of photographically documenting a subject I assumed a certain mindset, which opened me up to envisaging the surrounding environment in two-dimensional images and shut off other thought processes, restricting meaningful conversation and broader observation. For the anthropologist (as for the photographer), an exercise in acquiring a ‘professional’ vision involves disciplining, selecting, re-interpreting and distancing from the objects of one’s naive and undistinguished vision (Grasseni 2007: 218).
In both methodologies, my approach is participatory in nature. To develop more collaborative relationships, I offered those I photographed favours in return for their hospitality, such as driving Thai Buddhist monks to the wholesale market at 5am (their spiritual status means they cannot drive) or babysitting for a Muslim family. I became part of the ‘kitchen team’ when living in the Hare Krishna temple and gave photography lessons to the resident devotees. Using digital camera equipment enabled me to share the results of my photographic field research and offer my subjects copies of the images I took quickly and easily; this became crucial means of building trust and sustaining a relationship with my interlocutors and access to the field. Photography therefore became the primary currency of our exchange. This notion of exchange represents the sharing not only of goods and services, but also of respect and knowledge. It provided a sense of common ground and mutual criteria of action and understanding (both moral and aesthetic), which Grasseni (2007) proposes in contexts of co-participation are socialised.
In describing things in writing we inevitably draw lines of various kinds around the knowledge of a situation that we translate to our reader (Ingold 2007a), in the same way that a photographer decides on the lines which frame and limit the scene of their image. Photography can claim to capture a moment in the field in contrast to the written word, which is inevitably a re-enactment of experience made up after the event. Commonly, a reader is presented with only the final result of the process of translation, rather than a reconstitution of the manner in which it was made (Harris 2007: 6). I attempted to capture the unfolding of the moments from fieldwork to writing-up, with the understanding that research has its own temporal sequence. However, just as writing produces one possible narrative, my highly formulated series of photographs is equally problematic. With the images, as with the written notes I collected, I could create an entirely different understanding of a situation. The knowledge acquired from both of these media must, therefore be, as Harris (2007) proposes, the product of critical reflection on what can be known and a bridging of the stages in the process. Collingwood (1946) denies that documents are ‘sources’ containing some kind of ‘authentic truth’, which the audience can interpret honestly. She proposes that without our imagination, we would be left with a bundle of disconnected traces of knowledge, for we would have no theory with which to make them meaningful, and therefore no evidence for knowing anything at all.
It is clear in all stages of my research that my strategy for exploring and translating the worlds I encountered assumed not just certain ideas but also beliefs about reality, religion, cultures, the nature of subjectivity and the status of my subject matter in the wider public realm. Both the photographs from Soho Road and my written Parisian research reveal that the landscape was coloured by my own psyche, and that I was constantly selecting and reducing the surrounding information, placing my ethnography in a whirlwind of contradictions. A field researcher cannot presume that other people hold the same certainties, doubts and truth–values (Harris 2007: 4). Although some writers speak of creating an atmosphere, a sense of place or an engaged empathy, none of them can be sure how their readers will interpret these messages. On the other hand, Herzfeld (2007: 99) argues announcing the techniques we use as writers at least offers some guidance about how these writers would like to be read. My phenomenological account, for example, refers to ‘what I regarded as a “typical” French face’. I felt it was important to include the phrase ‘I regarded’ to highlight the partiality of the written word and my presence as a writer. In delineating and translating our research findings we must ask questions. This presupposes that humans do not share the same basic understandings about the world. As I reviewed my photographic work I was drawn to evaluate the knowledge I shared with the subjects of my images, and how the level of my knowledge was reflected in the intimacy and impact of my photographs. I edited my photographs after sourcing advice and personal opinion from academics, friends, photographers and members of religious organisations about how I should do it.
I knew as a photographer, and I now see also as an anthropologist, that visual documentation or research has to be a social engagement between the author and the reader and between the reader and the subject of the ethnography, mediated through an explicit representational medium rather than as an exercise in data collection. I realised that whatever my method, I had to submit myself to the experiences of disorientation, vulnerability and ignorance and attempt to learn to see again through others’ eyes (Grimshaw 2001). Nevertheless I produced a very particular phenomenological account, which can be seen as externalizing parts of my own thought processes as a visual researcher who uses a camera. By assuming a perspective akin to that of Merleau Ponty, I produced a series of images that emerge through the written word. This exercise provided a means of reflecting on my methods and also offers the reader an insight into the process of image-making. It can therefore be seen as a practical prelude to deeper research, but is not in itself sufficient for rigorous critical analysis. Photographs and writing are equally capable of misleading the beholder, and both therefore merit close scrutiny. Harris’s (2007: 4) phrase ‘ways of knowing’ is used to remind us that any knowledge is inevitably situated in a particular place and moment – that it is inhabited by individual knowers and that it is always in a state of flux. It is important to reflect on the specific learning environment that an engagement with text or image creates, and the ways that knowledge is being shared, developed and produced. Research should leave space for an audience’s interpretation. This also requires, as Ravetz suggests (2007: 276), that there be ‘room for manoeuvre’ within ways of working. Gadamer describes the translation of fieldwork into data as a ‘merging of horizons’ that brings two minds into close convergence, at least for a short period of time, but without the need to posit absolute moral and emotional agreement (see Stueber 2002). In what I refer to as ‘the triangle of knowledge’ between myself as researcher, my audience and my informants and their environment, ways of knowing become, in Quilbert and Platts terms, ways to knowing (Quibert and Platt 2007: 13).
Expressive phenomenological research may demand of readers a more active and interpretative form of engagement. As MacDougall (1997:229) suggests, the visual offers pathways to the other senses and to social experience more generally. The results of my visual enterprise on Soho Road may not be ‘anthropological’ in terms of a fully informed and integrated theoretical position. Nonetheless, I feel that the photographs constitute important documents for the knowledge of culture. As Stoller (1992: 217) comments, ‘radical empirical’ visual anthropologists such as Rouch will ‘mix their genres, sometimes employing narrative style, sometimes employing plain style, sometimes blurring the lines between fact and fiction’. Herzfeld (2007:107) argues for similarity between artisans and anthropologists on the basis that anthropologists’ traditional methodological toolkits also shift angles of vision while adhering to a familiar set of precepts and concerns. Anthropologists write, tell stories and craft images with the aim of producing recognisable objects, which is very much the hallmark of artisanal production.
Many anthropologists address the problematic question of what the most appropriate forms of research data is in terms of knowledge (Harris 2007). This anthropological anxiety with the exchange and translation of different textures of knowing may not be new, but it shows no signs of abating (Harris 2007: 21). I suggest that a diversity of research outputs is necessary to make available different forms of knowing whilst also providing a method for self-evaluation and critique. A future direction of research could entail pursuing Thrift’s description of ‘non-representational theory’ (2008: vii), which would offer new lines of thinking about ethno-photographic representations and how these representations are articulated alongside bodily affects and sensations. This may provide a means of mediating between overly stark contrasts, and dividing image and sequence-based narratives.
Liz Hingley graduated from Brighton University with a first class BA Honors in Editorial Photography in 2007 and went onto to complete a two-year scholarship with Fabrica research and communications department in Italy. She is currently completing an MSc in Social Anthropology at University College London.
Liz has won numerous awards for her photography and has exhibited in solo and group shows worldwide. Her work has been published in international magazines and academic journals including Le Monde, the Sunday Times Magazine, and the Visual Cultures journal.
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