Personal Knowledge and beyond: Reshaping the Ethnography of Religion (Critical America Series)

I would recommend this book to anyone contemplating the study of religion using interviews and/or participant observations.-Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion"This is a rich collection in every sense of the word. It is rich in ideas, in examples, and in approaches. . . . Beautifully written and impeccably edited."-Journal of Contemporary Religion"This is a timely book on the actualdoingof ethnography, and how doing ethnography of religion demands specific attentiveness, not least to the transformations undergone by the observer herself."-Journal of Religion"This is an excellent and courageous book. It makes an important contribution to the social sciences and the sociology of religion in particular. It will help shape the way we do and think about field research and should be read by students and scholars alike."-Sociology of Religion Book Reviews"The essays in this volume persuasively argue for the value of ethnographic research, which complements and enriches statistical analysis done by more traditional quantitative social scientists."-Contemporary SociologyOver the last decade the sociology of religion and religious studies have experienced a surge of ethnographic research. Scholars now use ethnography, as anthropologists have long done, as a valued source of knowledge from which they draw their pictures of the religious world.Yet, many researchers of religion have yet to grapple with the issues that are changing anthropologists' use of the method. Personal Knowledge and Beyond seeks to foster a cross-disciplinary rethinking of ethnography's possibilities and limits for the study of religions. It provides an overview of recent debates while also pushing them in newdirections. In addition, it offers critiques of some of anthropology's reigning conceptualizations.The volume brings together many of the best-known ethnographic researchers of religion, including Karen McCarthy Brown, Lynn Davidman, Armin Geertz, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Mary Jo Neitz, and Thomas Tweed. Together, they share substantively from their fieldwork and consider the consequences for the study of religion of rejecting old ethnographic myths, as well as the risks of replacing them with new ones. The volume will be of interest to students as well as to experienced scholars in the field.