This blog shows two PowerPoint slides that move to the last Chapter of the book My Apprenticeship: An Intellectual Journey.
The last Chapter was published previously in Ethnos (1996).
Importantly, the last Chapter includes later research conducted in southern
Africa, the southeastern US, western Canada, parts of Germany and Britain. In
South Africa itself, both my husband Irving Hexham and I did field work and
life history interviews among charismatic Christians and among selected popular
writers who were Afrikaans and English speaking. As well, we conducted archival
research in the Berlin Mission for four months in 1995. In South Africa,
specifically in 1986, 1987, 1989, we did field work for four months each year.
My
approach to research became historical and global because of my reflection on
my first long field work in Zambia as described in this book.
The
two slides show that while I was deeply involved in my first fieldwork and the
initial publishing of my findings, the discipline of anthropology changed. Some
leading scholars asserted that “a new ideology was born.” I experienced a rude
awakening.
The
slide “Return from field and Changes in the Discipline” shows how Anthropology changed primarily, but
not solely, as a response to two significant, if also flawed, works – for
example, that of Edward Said and of Derek Freeman. Just as I started to
publish, it seemed as if Anthropology had made a 360 degree turn from an emphasis
on participant-observation and experiential knowledge to text-making rhetoric
and experimental writing. Like it or not, I had to address this change.
The
exercise led to many new insights of which the slide “An Example of Metonym as observed among Charismatic Christians” is
but one example. It all has to do with how language is used to convey the
reality of the believer’s experience to themselves and the listening
anthropologist. Although believers were not themselves aware of it, they used certain
figures of speech like metonym, for example, to interpret the happening of “resting
in the spirit.” Examine the slide carefully, or go to the book, or go back and
forth between the two and you will begin to understand what makes some
religious happenings real to those
who experience them in specific contexts.
 | |||
| Slide 1 |
 | |
| Slide 2 |
