RT Article
T1 Devotee/Ethnographer: My Struggle at the Boundary Walls of Participant Observation
JF Religions
VO 13
IS 6
A1 Majumder, Atreyee
LA English
PB MDPI
YR 2022
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1809955416
AB This article demonstrates the difficulty of incorporating within the methodological ambit of ‘participant observation’, a possibility of the ethnographer herself staking claim in the religious truth claims of the community that constitute the subject of research. In so doing, this article provides a critique of the concept of participant observation to point out that participant observation anticipates the work of the ethnographer in participating in the physical, performative lives of the community that she purports to study, but never the internal life, especially the life of accessing a register of truth. I found myself in a curious situation as a devotee, where I was accessing the truth-claim of the Krishna-worshipping Vaishnava community, even before I could attempt to participate in their communitarian lives of worship. I found, in the coupling of the devotee and ethnographer identities, that participant observation in the traditional anthropological sense became difficult. The article is, thus, a meditation on this difficult journey and the pendulum of my devotee/ethnographer self that it produces.
K1 Bhakti
K1 autoethnography
K1 Devotion
K1 Participant Observation
K1 Presence
DO 10.3390/rel13060538