Entrance into the Field

Abstract

This chapter contains the first impressions that the authors formulated of MSIA. Coming from different academic traditions, James R. Lewis and Diana G. Tumminia met because of their interest in research on new religious movements (NRMs). Lewis trained as a historian of religion; his many published works touched on so many sociological issues that he became an honorary sociologist in a sense. Tumminia studied sociology, critical theory, and social psychology with a particular ethnographic interest in social movements. By including the accounts of both researchers, readers can see the process by which they came to examine MSIA, using comparable methods of participant observation, interviews, and archival research. Both shared similar academic sentiments about the cultural relativism of religious expression; nonetheless, readers can also surmise that the researchers did not necessarily occupy the same social location when doing their research. At the time that Lewis began his look at MSIA in 1994, he was publishing a journal on NRMs called Syzygy and conducting studies on other alternative religions. Interested in doing an independent study, Lewis approached the MSIA as a religious scholar who would be publishing his findings and had connections with the others who would be creating academic documents about MSIA (Anonymous 1999a) for public consumption.