The ethnography of religion is fundamentally built on processes of communication between researchers and their subjects. But communication is not always straightforward. Among others, it is complicated by differing cultural expectations, by the political regimes under which it occurs, and the often delicate and idiosyncratic interpersonal negotiations of meaning. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in Nepal, Switzerland, the United States, and St. Lucia, these authors problematize the interrelated concepts of talk, listening, voice, stance and discourse to shed critical light on how anthropologists of religion might better analyze and theorize ethnographic interlocutions.
In this paper I consider how practitioners of Buddhist insight meditation use language to change how they relate to their bodies and minds. While insight meditation has been productively explored as a non-discursive practice, my fieldwork with a North American insight meditation community demonstrates how linguistic practices play a significant part in the affective and embodied transformations sought by meditators. I draw on two concepts from linguistic anthropology to help make this case: voice and stancetaking. I argue that in order for practitioners to change how they relate to their mental life, they must first come to understand their thoughts as not personal and idiosyncratic, but as the typifiable voice of “the mind.” This voice and its metapragmatic qualities establish the mind as the subject of an ethical relationship, but it is through practices of stancetaking that practitioners work to transform the mind.
I was in Nepal researching the phenomenon of people returning from death when I met Tashi, a woman whose husband had undergone this revenant experience. He was living abroad, but Tashi was a willing collaborator until our relationship fell apart in an unspoken argument about the shape of the biography we were crafting. In seeking to discover what “really” happened, I marginalized Tashi’s vision of the narrative. If “the story is not the goal. The goal… is the relationship out of which the story emerges,” my time with Tashi was a failure.[1] This paper is an ethical exercise in listening to Tashi to understand the social creation of extraordinary individuals, why people develop faith in unbelievable events, and how religious meanings sustain people through the struggles of everyday life.
[1] Lindsay French, “Refugee Narratives; Oral History and Ethnography; Stories and Silence,” The Oral History Review 46, 2 (2019): 275.
In this presentation we explore how listening is a critical activity within ethnographic research. While listening is implicitly understood to occur in ethnographic projects it is rarely explicitly discussed. How and why we listen impacts the ways knowledge is produced and how relational ethics are understood. Drawing upon our collective experience of ethnographic research with immigrant and refugee communities in Switzerland and New York City, and informed by feminist ethnography and critical theory, we explore listening as a key element in ethnographic research. We will consider 1) how listening shapes the relationships an ethnographer cultivates in their fieldsite and 2) how listening presents ethical challenges to presenting data and generating knowledge.
| Lauren Leve | lgleve@unc.edu | View |