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INTRODUCTION FIELDWORK, ETHNOGRAPHY, and the HISTORY of RELIGIONS FRANK J. KOROM in Their Introductory Chapter to Anthropologica

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INTRODUCTION FIELDWORK, ETHNOGRAPHY, and the HISTORY of RELIGIONS FRANK J. KOROM in Their Introductory Chapter to Anthropologica INTRODUCTION FIELDWORK, ETHNOGRAPHY, AND THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS FRANKJ. KOROM In their introductory chapter to Anthropological Locations, Gupta and Ferguson cite two imperatives that distinguish anthropology from other disciplines. It is their first imperative that is relevant to our discussion here: The first imperative follows from the way the idea of "the field" func- tions in the micropolitical academic practices through which anthropo- logical work is distinguished from work in related disciplines such as history, sociology, political science, literature and literary criticism, reli- gious studies, and (especially) cultural studies. The difference between anthropology and these other disciplines, it would be widely agreed, lies less in the topics studied (which, after all, overlap substantially) than in the distinctive method anthropologists employ, namely fieldwork based on participant observation. (1997: 2) Little were they aware that historians of religions were grappling with the same problem of participant observation years earlier than the publication cited above in a special issue of the Journal of Ritual Studies (1988). Recent accusations against anthropologists abusing their privileged position in the field to exploit consultants for personal gain raise important questions for reflection that go beyond the discipline of anthropology. Darkness in El Dorado, Patrick Tierney's recent and controversial book concerning the ill effects of applied ethnography and epidemiological research on the Yanomama of Venezuela, calls for a renewed interest in the ethics and politics of fieldwork. Whether Tierney's investigative journalism is accurate or not-and there are lingering questions on this, as reported by John Noble Wilford in The New York Times (2000)-his assault on the profession forces all of us within academe to rethink our own work and its broader socio-politi- cal implications. This is not the first time that anthropology has been under fire for abusing the very people it wishes to defend. It is now coming to light that one of the fathers of American ethnology, Franz Boas, was censured by the American Anthropological Association for 4 a letter he published in The Nation on December 20, 1919. In it, he boldly criticized and denounced four American anthropologists who abused their expertise to engage in spying activities on behalf of the United States government in Central America during the First World War. The papers collected here continue to interrogate anthropolo- gy's hegemonic claim to be the sole custodians of fieldwork, while at the same time addressing many similar issues dealt with by fieldwork theorists within that discipline, as Rosalind Hackett suggestively ad- umbrates in her concluding essay. Indeed, the dire need for a con- tinuing dialogue with anthropology is absolutely necessary to avoid talking over each other at the expense of talking with each other. The task is especially pressing now, as the ethical dimension of our inter- ventions becomes a heated topic of debate within an interdisciplinary forum. With the exception of three (Baum, Gold, Korom), all of the essays included herein were presented on two separate panels of the Ameri- can Academy of Religion's annual meeting held during November of 1998 in Orlando. The panels were organized by Jeff Carter and Frank Korom respectively. Rosalind Hackett was invited during the planning stages of publication to provide a closing essay on the themes of this issue. Due to the important questions raised by Robert Baum in a paper he delivered at the 2000 meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Religion on the scholar of religion as "expert witness," his paper was included at the eleventh hour to round out the collection. Taken together, the papers raise a number of familiar concerns in the ethnographic study of religion that cross geographical borders from Honduras (Johnson) and Trini- dad (Korom) in the New World to Nigeria (Carter, Hackett), Egypt (Kueny), and Senegal (Baum) in Africa. The volume also moves from Russia (Bennett) in the Old World to numerous locations within India and Pakistan in South Asia (Gold, Gottschalk, Korom, McDaniel, Sarma, Schmalz) to suggest that similar issues arise in religious ethnography, regardless of location. All of the papers, to some degree, address the moral and ethical angles of "religious fieldwork," and-in one case, echoing the earlier respondent's remarks to the JARS papers mentioned above (Gill 1988)-participant-observation is rejected altogether for reasons re- lated to gender and phenomenology (Kueny). Are we all just spies, as Charlotte Allen (1997) recently asked? We hope not, but the need to refine further our observational and descriptive techniques is still .
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