Embodied Research and Writing: A Case for Phenomenologically Oriented Religious Studies Ethnographies

Abstract

In this article, I examine anthropological and phenomenological theories and scholarship that recognize our bodies and our interlocutor's bodies as texts that we can read to better understand ourselves and the lifeworlds our interlocutors inhabit. Drawing on my own ethnographic research and taking my cue from phenomenologists, I argue that Religious Studies ethnographers must look to their bodies as well as their interlocutors' bodies as sources of knowledge. When we draw on our experiences and observations then we are truly writing empirically based scholarship. The ethnographer is grounded in her body, and her body is entwined with her interlocutors' bodies and, by extension, their lifeworlds. Moreover, the body can be a vehicle for complicating, at times even transcending, emic (insider) and etic (outsider) boundaries. To ignore our embodied interactions with in the field when we write is to occlude lived experience and how our bodies are epistemological sites that allow us privileged access into our interlocutor's worlds. Our bodies are ways for understanding others lifeworlds. When we take a reflexive turn in our written work, we acknowledge this embodiment and connections, and yield greater insight into religion as it is lived. The theory of the body schema is, implicitly, a theory of perception. We have relearned to feel our body; we have found underneath the objective and detached knowledge of the body that other knowledge that we have of it in virtue of its always being with us and of the fact that we are our body. In the same way we shall need to reawaken our experience of the world as it appears to us in so far as we are in the world through our body, and in so far as we perceive the world with our body. But by thus remaking contact with the body and with the world, we shall also rediscover ourself, since, perceiving as we do with our body, the body is a natural self and, as it were, the subject of perception. (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 239).