Sunday was one of the occasional masses in which the congregation goes forward to receive the elements. I found myself scribbling some notes just before this point in the liturgy, and was thoroughly disoriented. Did I go forward as a communicant or stay put as a researcher?
Allowing myself half a minute or so to breathe, the shrill squeal of ethnographic feedback receded and I went forward, but that participant-observer paradox is never far below the surface.
Showing posts with label ethnography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ethnography. Show all posts
Tuesday, 7 June 2011
Sunday, 17 April 2011
Palm Sunday - الشعانين
Church is packed full today, and despite extra seats being made available, many are standing in the aisles and narthex. As usual, people arrive at mass in dribs and drabs, but by around 10am, an hour into the mass liturgy, clerics are barely audible above the chatter of children and families, many of whom don't attend church regularly.
The usual mass is augmented with three circumambulations of the hykala (nave) processing a large olive branch, off which people pull a smaller branch for themselves and their families.
This is generally articulated as simply a commemoration of the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, but one man tells me afterwards that he will keep the "holy branch" until the next mass to "keep away evil things".
The usual mass is augmented with three circumambulations of the hykala (nave) processing a large olive branch, off which people pull a smaller branch for themselves and their families.
This is generally articulated as simply a commemoration of the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, but one man tells me afterwards that he will keep the "holy branch" until the next mass to "keep away evil things".
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| The first lesson |
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| Olive branches attached to a marvahtho (fan) |
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| Olive branches attached to a candle |
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| The olive branch is brought into the azhikakam (holy place) during a recitation. |
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| The branch is processed around the hykala. |
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| Abuna Butros |
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| As usual, people come up to pay their respects to the bible, and today also to an elaborate cross and book. |
Thursday, 7 October 2010
An Anthropologian?
Parables and Images will be my intellectual man drawer where I'll store fragments that seem meaningful, interesting, or just somehow hard to dispose of.
I have positioned myself here, a little playfully, as an 'anthropologian'. Unlike theologians who would recognise that their object of study is impossible to confine to a Petri dish, social scientists sometimes seem to imagine human life to be an object we can study at some kind of remove. In fact, calling ourselves 'social scientists' in the first place seems quite arbitrary bearing in mind the range of approaches to knowledge it allows for, reflecting perhaps a contemporary tendency to place scientific knowing above all other knowings. By way of contrast, we could quite easily reclaim the earlier designation of those interested in the physical world as 'natural philosophers'.
In fact I prefer this archaism. Maybe we are social philosophers, or as Tim Ingold would have it, simply practitioners of philosophy "with the people in". Human life is immanent to us as researchers, and indeed transcendent in its complexity and range. And like theologians we can recognise our task, attempting to map that which we cannot rise above, as a necessary impossibility, necessary because navigating through this immediate unknown of Us is the only way to prevent mystery becoming mere uncertainty, hope becoming frustrated desire, and our irresistible relativism becoming interminable drift.
Thinking of the researcher as an anthropologian is my way of reminding myself that I am cosubject with those whose lives I want to represent through ethnography. Academia can bestow a dubious authority on its own, but we can use this authority as a host would, to allow others into one's domain, at risk to our comfort - an elegant symmetry with the fact that we are simultaneously guests in the field subject to others' hospitality.
I have positioned myself here, a little playfully, as an 'anthropologian'. Unlike theologians who would recognise that their object of study is impossible to confine to a Petri dish, social scientists sometimes seem to imagine human life to be an object we can study at some kind of remove. In fact, calling ourselves 'social scientists' in the first place seems quite arbitrary bearing in mind the range of approaches to knowledge it allows for, reflecting perhaps a contemporary tendency to place scientific knowing above all other knowings. By way of contrast, we could quite easily reclaim the earlier designation of those interested in the physical world as 'natural philosophers'.
In fact I prefer this archaism. Maybe we are social philosophers, or as Tim Ingold would have it, simply practitioners of philosophy "with the people in". Human life is immanent to us as researchers, and indeed transcendent in its complexity and range. And like theologians we can recognise our task, attempting to map that which we cannot rise above, as a necessary impossibility, necessary because navigating through this immediate unknown of Us is the only way to prevent mystery becoming mere uncertainty, hope becoming frustrated desire, and our irresistible relativism becoming interminable drift.
Thinking of the researcher as an anthropologian is my way of reminding myself that I am cosubject with those whose lives I want to represent through ethnography. Academia can bestow a dubious authority on its own, but we can use this authority as a host would, to allow others into one's domain, at risk to our comfort - an elegant symmetry with the fact that we are simultaneously guests in the field subject to others' hospitality.
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