Why Reflexive Ethnography Matters to the Study of World Christianity

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article outlines the importance of reflexive ethnography for the emerging discipline of World Christianity. Ethnographers study religion as it is lived in everyday life. This requires cross-cultural understanding, but that understanding is always shaped by the ethnographer’s own social, cultural, and intellectual locations and the perspectives they bring. Reflexivity highlights those perspectives so that we can account for their distortions. This does not undercut ethnography’s objectivity; it strengthens it. Knowing one’s own blinders helps one better describe what one can and cannot see. Ethnographers must, however, expand this social, cultural, and intellectual reflexivity to include a theological dimension. Social scientists seldom acknowledge their own theological standpoints, in part because these are more often hidden than on the surface. Scholars of religion, who are more used to recognizing their own theological assumptions, thus have something important to contribute to ethnographic reflection. The article uses examples from the author’s fieldwork.