“We Are Called Here to Worship Together”: Ethnographic Outsiderness and Insiderness in Religious and Popular Culture
Society for Ethnomusicology
SEM, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 4, 2012 (joint with AMS and SMT).
Material from this paper was published in “We Can Be Renewed”: Resistance, Renewal, and Worship at the Anchor Fellowship.
Abstract
Recent ethnographies of Christian cultures illustrate the ways in which interpretations of experience and the researcher’s perspective are variously co-constitutive (Butler 2002, Magolda and Ebben Gross 2009, Ingalls 2011). Studies of popular music similarly reveal the multiple frames of analysis and meaning available when observers emphasize their own and participants’ subjectivity (Thornton 1996, Leblanc 1999, Pruett 2010). What, however, can ethnographic research reveal about the relationship between religious and popular cultures, as subjectively experienced by interlocutors and observers? How might the analysis of research methods into religious and popular cultures clarify the contributions of phenomenology and stance to the evolving nature of ethnomusicological fieldwork, which increasingly intertwines and overlaps with researchers’ quotidian lives?
In this paper, based on several years of ethnographic research at the Anchor Fellowship, I address the challenges of fieldwork as a religious outsider and cultural insider. The Anchor is a non-denominational evangelical church in Nashville, Tennessee. Initially born from members’ dissatisfactions with previous church experiences, the Anchor’s theology is explicitly inclusive, valuing the spiritual gifts and needs of all Christians regardless of their backgrounds, professions, or subcultural affiliations. Live rock music is an integral component of the church’s services, in which aesthetics of charismatic worship and rock club concerts overlap. In constructing a rich description of an Anchor worship service based on my observations, those of church-goers, and formal interviews of Anchor pastors, this paper confronts the multivalence of experience and the interpretation thereof, demonstrating the importance of phenomenology to ethnography of religious and popular cultures.
Part of the organized panel Stance and the Phenomenology of Fieldwork. Panelists:
Dan Bendrups
Fredara Hadley
Deborah Justice
Andrew Mall
Panel abstract
In 1963, when the Society for Ethnomusicology annual meeting featured a comparative transcription symposium, conference chair Nicholas England concluded that “One great strength of our Society lies in the varied individual approaches that are (and have been) made toward the data of our discipline.” This assessment holds continued validity, perhaps even more so as ethnomusicology has expanded from focusing on data as transcription, recording, and artifact to encompassing process, participation, and the lived experience of ethnography. This panel contributes new insights into the ways that meaning and affect emerge in ethnography by suggesting that, rather than being an amorphous mix of micro-details and individualisms, the experience of ethnographic research has a shape and structure that can be described and analyzed.
Following a theoretical framework drawing upon phenomenology and ethnomusicologist/folklorist Harris Berger's exploration of stance, this panel juxtaposes three contrasting, yet complementary, fieldwork scenarios. In the first two papers, two ethnomusicologists interrogate the role of stance in their contrasting ethnographies of a joint worship service combining congregations from one predominantly white mainline Protestant church and a black evangelical church. The third paper demonstrates the importance of phenomenology to ethnomusicology by illustrating the various interpretations of a charismatic worship service offered by the ethnographic outsider and cultural insiders.
Taken together, these papers contribute to the long tradition of reflecting upon and analyzing ethnographic methodology and illustrate that the experience of research and the phenomenon of stance are central to ethnomusicology’s traditional theoretical concerns.