Epiphanies and Revelations: Productive “Susceptibilities” in the Anthropology of Religion

Abstract (English)

In a 1987 article, “Convicted by the Holy Spirit,” Susan Harding mapped the sequence by which she comes to recognise how the language mechanics of religious conversion work in the Fundamental Baptist community of research. Harding’s candid admission of the susceptibility of the outsider anthropologist to the language of ones’ interlocutors points to the epistemological blurring that can emerge between anthropologists and interlocutors as the former are motivated to understand the latter in their own terms, and the latter are motivated to highlight their particular visions of how to live in the world. In this fieldwork dynamic, the seeming neutrality of the anthropologist’s position is exposed as more vulnerable than not to the rhetoric and narratives of our interlocutors. This dimension of susceptibility is one that can also characterise the relationships between members of a family, community, and institutions. As much as the anthropologist is observing and listening, with senses attuned to what is happening, so too are our interlocutors observing and listening, and discerning how to live in the world, according to the prescriptions, or assumptions, teachings, and experiences that guide their decision-making.

This panel explores the double movement, of anthropologist and interlocutors, and between interlocutors themselves, that reveal the outcome of being susceptible to the other. The papers pay close attention to the sensory, the affective, the material, and immaterial that enter into decision-making and the production of knowledge. How does an attunement, in anthropologists and interlocutors, to modes of talking and narrating, feed into knowledge about someone and something else? How does an openness to the rhetoric, categories of knowledge, and ways of practice of others offer both a methodological strategy and a productive path to understanding others? These are questions of relevance for the anthropology of religion where approaching the religious lives of one’s interlocutors exclusively in their own terms does not necessarily support a critical understanding of these lives; but, neither does relying on a distanced analytical approach necessarily generate insights into the choices and actions of religious persons that are recognisable to themselves.

Tracing the emergence of susceptibilities and their outcomes, for both anthropologists and interlocutors, underscores the workings of fieldwork and of daily life to be one of movements: of moving towards comprehension of what is happening and discovering ways to connect the sequence of categories, thoughts, and actions into knowledge of what happened. Harding notes that “this space between belief and disbelief, or rather the paradoxical space of overlap, is also the space of ethnography.” This panel invites participants to dwell in the ethnographic moments and spaces where researcher and interlocutors, and interlocutors amongst themselves, come to a realisation of how their knowledge about others comes into being.