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Empowering and engendering ‘religion’. A critical perspective on ethnographic holism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2002

Chia Longman
Chia Longman
Affiliation:
Department of Comparative Science of Culture, Ghent University, Rozier 44, B-9000 Ghent, [email protected]
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Abstract

In this paper, the call for a reconsideration of ‘ethnographic holism’ in anthropology is critically assessed by drawing on the author's research in the field of gender and religion. Using illustrations from a study on women's religiosity in the strictly Orthodox Jewish community of Antwerp, Belgium, it is shown that an ethnographic holistic perspective was necessary in order to challenge a view of ‘religion’ as a sui generis, de-contextualised, and therefore un-gendered phenomenon. At the level of description and analysis a holistic approach is supported that moves beyond traditional classificatory schemes and crosses boundaries between categories such as ‘religion’ and ‘politics’. It is argued that a version that applies an essentialist notion of ‘culture’ as a bounded and reified ‘whole’ in both theoretical and certain politically dangerous appropriations must nonetheless be avoided.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Anthropology , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , June 2002 , pp. 239 - 247
Copyright
© 2002 European Association of Social Anthropologists

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Footnotes

This paper is both a product of and was inspired by participating in the Younger Scholars' Forum ‘Researching Religion across Categorical Divides’ held at the EASA conference in Krakow 2000. I would like to thank the other participants, J. Shawn Landres, Marcin Lubas, Anna Niedzwiedz and Bruno Riccio, for their helpful comments and support during both the preparatory workshop and the final plenary session. My special thanks goes to the convenor, Jon. P. Mitchell, who guided us through the plenary and then challenged us to think on the status of ‘ethnographic holism’ within contemporary anthropology through readings of Marcus (1989) and Thornton (1988). This paper consists of a brief answer to this challenge, by relating it to my own research in which the central questions for the forum – a reflection upon the place of ‘religion’ in ethnography and the crossing of categorical boundaries – also feature prominently.