Missionary Impositions: Conversion, Resistance, and Other Challenges to Objectivity in Religious Ethnography

Missionary Impositions is a fine collection of reflections on how a fieldworker’s relationship to religion, whether one of doubt, faith, or something else, influences their relationship to the people they encounter and the process of doing ethnography. It raises many fascinating and indeed profound questions about the nature of anthropology as knowledge, not only what implicit assumptions anthropologists make about their subjects, but also what those subjects think about anthropologists, and how their mutual misunderstandings both enable working relationships while troubling the conscience and confidence of the people involved. Many chapters also dwell on the often neglected emotional and experiential side of fieldwork, and suggest that personal involvement in the lives of one’s research community can lead to greater insight. The chapters describe a variety of types of field setting in many different kinds of religious community and many different types of research, and will contribute to ongoing debates about ethnographic practice and anthropological epistemology.

Missionary Impositions is a superb exploration of the question of identity formation and self-awareness in the field and the way these processes help shape our understanding and misunderstanding of what actually goes into anthropological fieldwork. More specifically, it raises the question of how much an anthropologist’s belief biases her/his understanding of the study of religion and relationship with those who are believers, including missionaries who may be in the field area. … Missionary Impositions shows the way toward true reflexivity and empathy with those among whom we work.

The one thing that every ethnographer brings to the field is her or his own self, complete with histories, beliefs, identities, habits, and bodily dispositions that can open ethnographic doors – or close them. With this thoughtful collection of essays, we finally have a whole book that grapples with the special challenges that this inescapable fact brings to the anthropology of religion. Reflexive without being solipsistic, sensitive without being alarmist, this book raise enough provocative questions to encourage anyone from a beginning student to a seasoned ethnographer to rethink what it means to study religion ‘in the wild.’

This collection of essays drives home the multiply experienced reality that ethnographic fieldwork is a demanding enterprise involving the entire selfhood – intellectual, emotional, physical, psychological and spiritual – of the researcher; no part can conveniently be packed up and left at home. The potentially transformative power of ethnography is implicated here and this elegantly presented volume – with rich bibliographies for students and practitioners alike – invites us to consider the ways that our own selves may be reconfigured and reconstituted, even ‘bent out of shape’, in our unremitting quest to penetrate the inner life-worlds of others.

This collection of provocative essays reveals the challenges, anxieties, and dilemmas involved in the ethnographic study of religion and faith. These are valuable and honest assessments and reflections–full of insight for those who find themselves negotiating their personal and research identities while being objects of proselytizing.