Spirituality is a life lived in resonance with fundamental principles and powers, often symbolized as the first, last, deepest, highest, or most central to life

Religion is spirituality organized into a tradition, system or institution

The lives of ordinary religious people haven’t been well documented or studied. Until recently, scholars have concentrated on religious leaders, founders or saints and have based their conclusions almost exclusively on hagiographic, literary or historical texts.

To understand ordinary religious practice, it helps to do interview-based field research, a situation in which lifestories are negotiated between an interviewer and interviewee. Eliciting and writing these stories is a personal, political and spiritual act.

Despite decades of theoretical and theological reflection on narrative, few religious lifestories have been written. What little reflection there has been on lives has concentrated almost exclusively on biographies and autobiographies.

However much religious studies scholars have gleaned from anthropologists, we have not yet learned much about eliciting, editing and writing the stories people tell about their spirituality or religion.

Lifestories (called life histories in anthropology) have been a persistent but marginalized feature of cultural anthropology. Accounts of interviewees’ lives have been written by anthropologists studying social structures and cultural symbols. Subjects of ethnographic lifestories were originally imagined as cultural exemplars. This search for the modal individual, driven by anthropology’s focus on collective units, came to a halt with the recognition that there is no such thing as a typical cultural member.

Even so, lifestories continue to be written on other premises. Under the impact of the writing-culture revolution instigated by James Clifford and George Marcus, lifestories are now written and read as accounts of a meeting on a cultural frontier. An empowered scholar meets on this boundary a dis-empowered or marginalized person, and the lifestory they jointly produce is an act of negotiation. Occasionally, this negotiation appears equitable; more often, it does not. Sometimes the interaction seems to be an act of exploitation or appropriation.

It is common to glimpse the fieldworker’s own quest insofar as it is initiated or transformed by an encounter with others. Reflexively inclined fieldworker-narrators tell parts of their own stories: how the encounter with their consultants affected them, how they chose themes or how fieldwork threw into question their worldviews. Sometimes the personal quest of the scholar becomes the primary subject matter, and the work becomes a fieldwork autobiography or conversion story rather than a lifestory.

Lifestories are not necessarily chronological or even factual. All narratives are constructions, if not fictions. What transpires in the field is not typically the telling of stories but engaging in conversations. Often a lifestory is a construction built from the raw material of conversations or interviews. Even people who imagine their lives as stories do not normally present all their life as a story. As presented, lives are a patchwork of proverbs, truisms, moral statements, story snippets, cracker barrel philosophy, and other genres difficult to name.

A told life can be construed by a fieldworker or reader as a story, but it is not necessarily or obviously a coherent story any more than the Bible, Koran or Talmud is. Some phases in a life are so repetitive and lacking in the drama of a beginning-middle-and-end structure that interviewees neither remember nor give account of themselves in story form. Even if some episodes of a life are narrative in structure, other episodes are more like pastiche or bricolage than stories.

In religious studies the assumptions about life stories have been largely derived from textual data or literary examples. The assumed models have been autobiographical or biographical. In the first model a reflective individual narrates and reflects on her own life and relationships; she writes an account and then seeks publication. In the biographical model a critically minded scholar, not interested in producing hagiography, secures documents, sometimes supplementing them with interviews and archival study,  to write the life of a deceased, often historically significant, individual.

The biographical and autobiographical models have been dominant. Neither is adequate to the study of lifestories elicited in the field and crafted as thickly textured accounts of an individual’s spirituality or religion.

Field-based lifestories are co-productions.

To consider the theoretical and methodological impact of writing field-based lifestories, scholars consider the whole process, which involves not only field research but teaching and publication. A lifestory is shaped by the life that it is about but also by the social forces that constrain fieldworkers, publishers and readers. Even though we know that negotiation marks one’s entry into the field, this negotiation, along with the complexity of intentions of researchers and interviewees, is often ignored in theory-making.

When a fieldworker represents a dominant ethnic group, gender or nation, an interviewee can feel dominated.

Fieldwork is never innocent.

Imagine the following fictional scenario, the features of which are culled from actual fieldwork situations encountered either by me or students working under my supervision.

Megan Baumgarten signs up for Lifestories, a graduate course cross-listed in religious studies, theology, psychology, sociology and anthropology. To fulfill the course requirements, she must locate a consultant willing to have a lifestory written.

Morris Johnson agrees to tell his story to Megan.

Despite being advised to do otherwise by her supervisor Dr. Virgil Martin, Megan asks Morris for an account of his faith, the term she is comfortable with. Morris objects that he does not have faith, although he thinks the word is a better choice than religion, a term his Mohawk teacher despises.

Morris prefers the term spirituality. He does not immediately tell Megan that he is trying to live down his childhood Catholic religion.

Morris is fifty-two and reared Catholic. A decade ago, he discovered that he had a grandmother who was a Mohawk. He soon began to appropriate or invent an indigenous heritage. His conversion precipitated a painful divorce from his wife. He found that some Native people befriended and began to teach him. Other Native people regarded him as either a wannabe or a fraud.

Megan is twenty-five years old and recently a feminist. She is inexperienced at fieldwork, so she is unsure how far to push her questions about Morris’s identity. She knows nothing about Mohawks except what she has read in an introductory anthropology text. Her only knowledge of Mohawks is from the documentary film Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance.

She grew up a virulently anti-Catholic Missouri Synod Lutheran in Saskatchewan. She feels some sense of guilt about the treatment of First Nations people. She is afraid since the Indians in the documentary carried guns and wore masks.

The university requires Megan to submit her proposal to an ethics committee for review because it deals with living people. She has no trouble agreeing to the committee’s guidelines that require confidentiality, informed consent and the right to withdraw from the project at any time.

When she asks Morris to sign the agreement, he refuses, arguing that every time Native people have signed something declared to be for their own good, they have regretted it. He prefers verbal agreements. Megan risks censure by going ahead with her research, and Morris risks having his words misused, but they agree to continue their collaboration.

The interviewer and interviewee engage in a forty or so hours of recorded conversations. More than once the batteries go dead, and an interview must be reconstructed from Megan’s memory. Despite being a self-declared technophobe, Megan ventures a video interview. The tape’s color and sound are so poor that she uses it only as a form of note taking. She never shows the videotape in public. By questioning, recording, editing, cutting out confidential portions and redundancies, Megan creates a story in chronological order. She turns their conversations into a lifestory narrative  and then the narrative into a paper that tells Morris’s story and argues a scholarly thesis.

The paper is written for Professor Martin, so both fieldworker and consultant-interviewee anticipate that a non-Native, non-Catholic, elderly Lutheran male professor will read it, along with a class of students, largely white and between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five.

Megan’s lifestory sets Morris’s life in the context of traditional Mohawk ways, Catholicism in Ontario, intertribal spirituality and the wannabe phenomenon.

The account of Morris’s spirituality-religion is informed by perspectives from contemporary anthropology, Megan’s minor. She does not use the terms religion, spirituality or faith. She uses selected scholarly writings by literary critic-theorists such as Arnold Krupat and David Brumble on the topic of Native American autobiography and biography. Although religious studies is her major field, she utilizes no religious studies perspectives because at the time they were inadequate.

Megan’s presentation is written within the constraints of a one-term, thirteen-week course and the canons that bear on student papers submitted for evaluation in a graduate university course. She is a fast learner. Reading voraciously and interviewing sensitively, she quickly overcomes her initial lack of fieldwork experience. The result is an A+ paper, which, across a two-year period, is revised for publication. Most traces of its having been written by a graduate student are erased with the help of Professor Martin.

The paper, now revised into a scholarly article, is rejected because of its length and insistent use of first-person rhetoric.

When copies of the article reach Morris, he proudly distributes them. He is not written off as a wannabe but is surprised when a Native elder feels betrayed by the knowledge revealed to the public. Morris had thought it public knowledge.

For a while, the two men do not see one another. Eventually, Morris apologizes, and they agree to continue provided any further interviews—which the elder insists amount to sacred teaching—be discussed first.

Three years later Megan, whose doctoral dissertation is nearing completion and whose article is now in print, is called into a court case bearing on the disposition of contested land near a golf course. Although neither she nor Morris feels they are expert witnesses, both are asked to testify about the relationship between cultural self-identity, Native status, and blood quotient. The court case leads to Megan’s appearance in several newspaper accounts.

A month later an interreligious television station and the communications division of a Christian church want to produce the lifestory as a film for television.  The two institutions prepare a one-hour special on the topic with Megan and Morris as narrators. The film is never shown, because  a group from a nearby reserve protests that neither Morris nor Megan is qualified to speak about their views of the land.

Motives for study. Megan’s motives are mixed, and they change throughout the course of her research and writing. When the object of study is a living person, motives are as powerful as theories in determining the outcome.

Field researchers sometimes admit they do research because their deans require it and that these obligations determine the tenor of their lifestories. Fieldworkers may want to understand lifestories but also want tenure or a break from teaching. They need publications or risk not getting tenure. They want to be recognized as innovators. Scholarly writing conventions often require the hiding of motives, mixed or otherwise, and thereby falsify descriptive accounts of fieldwork interaction.

Spirituality, religion, faith. Megan negotiates some of the most basic conceptions governing her fieldwork: spirituality, religion, faith. Her courses prepared her to define religion and faith but taught her nothing about spirituality. She tries to convince Morris to use definitions acceptable to scholars. Later, she decides to use his definitions, explicit and tacit.

Since scholars of religion teach courses about nameable religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam—students tend to look for consultants with nameable, single religious affiliations, preferably in the present, not in the past.

Fieldworkers seek out practitioners. Megan is looking for “real” religion practiced by a “real” Indian. When she becomes less than sure that she has found either, she is tempted to give up the project. To her credit, she does not. The notion of bi- or multi-religiosity is still foreign to many students of religion. As a first-year student Megan believed that one either is or is not religious. She assumed that one word or a short phrase with capital letters is proper. She thought “Native” and “Muslim” and “Christian” are distinct religions, but interviewing individuals like Morris makes havoc of her assumptions. He says his spirituality is “Indian,” not traditional Mohawk, and he retains some distinctly Catholic beliefs and practices but denies that he does so.

Identity, personal and social. Megan’s story illustrates the minefield that characterizes fieldwork in religious studies. The temptations to bifurcate reality and proliferate dualisms are manifold: male / female; Native / non-Native; Native / Christian; Protestant / Catholic; student / professor; religious / non-religious; Canadian / American; narration / analysis; feminist / non-feminist. Writers and readers of lifestories are tempted to conceptualize the pairs as subsets of some single, dominant dualism. Megan’s initial assumption  was to make “Christian” and “Indian” mutually exclusive categories. But her assumption changes, because she has to negotiate identity questions: Who is she, really? Who is Morris, really?

Fieldwork, like therapy, is characterized by transference. Fieldworkers pick people they like or do not like, interviewees whom they respect or suspect, admire or hate. They choose consultants they are ambivalent about. They interview people they would like to be, as well as people they are glad not to be. We who enter the field to elicit lifestories study individuals we consider authentic or those we judge to be fraudulent.

For field-researchers, interviewees become mothers, lovers, elders, fathers, enemies, or friends. If we are attentive, we learn to change our minds and disentangle some of the projections. If we are honest, we confess some of our mind-changing in print. The point in doing so is not to cloud lifestories with confessions but to enable readers to identify an author’s presuppositions and prejudices.

Identity questions are sometimes displayed by rhetorical strategies. One of the taboos of much scholarship is the use of first-person narrative. Use of first-person results in the rejection of Megan’s first submission. A well-known editor told Megan, “You can’t write like that. The rules of rhetoric have not changed since Seneca. So get rid of the first-person, confessional mode.”

Meanwhile, the writing-culture revolution in anthropology has opened for public view the manifold selves of both fieldworkers and their consultants. In anthropological writing and ethnographic films they interact, have bodies, and live real lives.

Accounts of people’s lives are rife with tension and complication, leaving the account impure but provocative. It matters that Megan is afraid of or enamored with Morris, and that Morris is divorced.

Not yet having taken a course in Catholic history, Megan looks down on Catholics—because of the pope’s assumed sexism. Not yet being taken with full seriousness by some Mohawk friends, Morris has become militantly anti-Catholic. He and Megan collude in minimizing Morris’s Catholicism.

Ethics review. Because research based on people (“human subjects”) has occasionally been exploitative or abusive, review committees and written ethical guidelines are now a fact of fieldwork methods. Many of the assumptions and worries that drive ethical review committees arise from the laboratory rather than the field. Some review committees insist that a human subject be anonymous, even when both fieldworker and consultant want the consultant’s name known. In fieldwork on lifestories consultants sometimes become co-authors, and their names should be visible so they can receive credit for their words and ideas.

The signing of release forms is a ceremonial act. Even when the content of written agreements between fieldworkers and their interviewees is acceptable to both parties, the high degree of formality can introduce into initial contacts a serious obstacle to research. However ethically protective they are, signed agreements can be inhibiting if not downright abusive. The required timing (sign first, interview later) forces a kind of rhythmic aggression that frightens many consultants. The signing ceremony, with its attention to fine print and its overwrought wording, can freeze the parties in the very moment when loosening up is called for. In our example, Morris’s resistance shows how historically and culturally insensitive the guidelines can be, even when one of the reasons for their existence is to counteract historic forms of exploitation.

Writing a life. We speak of biographies and autobiographies as “lives,” but they aren’t. They are as virtual (powerful, but subjunctive) as anything in cyberspace, where virtual realities are the mainstay. The most insidious problem in constructing lifestories for publication is not the obvious one of failing to see, or failing to tell, the truth. It is that of systemic distortion introduced by the fieldworker’s own lifestory and by the genre itself. If you are writing and editing according to a strict definition lifestory, you are expected by publishers to cut away whatever does not fit the genre.

Fieldwork sometimes implies a re-naming and re-defining of the genre. Interviewees often present interviewers with religious or moral ideas rather than oral autobiographies, with abstract or disembodied worldviews rather than life experience. Some consultants do so because they are uncomfortable with, or unwilling to take the risks of, speaking personally. Others consider the trivia of a single life unworthy of so much attention. It seems to them untoward to be complicit in focusing so much attention on a single individual. As a result, what students in the field typically record is neither a story nor a life. They are left to transform a nameless conglomeration into a lifestory.

Every genre has its limits. Even the presumption that one is writing something of no genre requires the editing out of what is taken to be irrelevant. Lifestories elicited in the field are shaped by the desires of consultants to portray themselves as, say, compassionate and the desires of fieldworkers to portray themselves as competent. Genre requirements and fear of negative self-disclosure conspire to produce a highly selective take on the interviewee and sometimes a cover-up of controversial or intimate dimensions of the interviewee / interviewer relationship.

Even equipment marks interactions in the field. The failure of a camera or recorder can stigmatize a fieldworker and cast doubts on her or his ability. An accurate recording can leave a consultant feeling exposed or captured. Machines require attention and sometimes act as third parties. They free an interviewer to attend to an interviewee, but they can inhibit or hype up an interaction. This ambivalent functioning is as true of pencil and paper as of video cameras and audio recorders.

Intended reception. Morris and Megan imagine how a professor will judge their collaborative work. They are tempted to address other audiences—feminists, Natives, friends, and relatives—but they know they must address Professor Martin first. They must ask whether he has respect or contempt for those who take positions counter to his. They must consider to what degree they want to please him or to prove his theories wrong. They may misjudge him, overestimating either his narrowness or his liberality, but they must nevertheless talk and write for him. He is their first audience, so the language and imagery must be such that he will find the lifestory compelling. Fieldwork with individuals is extraordinarily time-consuming. Identities are at stake, and no one wants to put in time painting a portrait that does not matter to readers or viewers.

Social and historical context. Even though our scenario features two individuals, they embody greater cultural and historical forces. Their interactions are enculturated. Morris and Megan depend on enculturation to communicate, but they must weather the distortions that enculturation brings.

As soon as Megan begins to write, she has to choose how to contextualize Morris’s story. The actual context of the interviews is not identical with the written context. Morris likes the idea of being written about as a Mohawk. A text treating him as a Mohawk will contribute to his search for legitimacy. He does not want to be labeled a wannabe. He thinks he comes by his Native identity honestly by way of his grandmother’s blood.

Megan, on the other hand, thinks blood is a metaphor. After much negotiation Morris, a generous if somewhat embattled man, grants Megan freedom to write about him from her own point of view, even when he disagrees with it.

Both Morris and Megan’s professor admire her for holding her ground, although Morris worries that he will have a hard time saving face if the term wannabe appears at all. In the end, she refrains from calling him one.

Interdisciplinary theory. Fieldwork on religious lifestories necessitates interdisciplinary theory and method. Neither anthropology nor religious studies provides sufficient theoretical scope or methodological sophistication to do the job of recording and interpreting a life. Fieldworkers, no matter how strong their dedication to their own fields, are driven to use frameworks and insights from psychology, anthropology, literary criticism, religious studies, women’s studies, Native studies, history, and other disciplines. However tightly focused a study may seem to be by virtue of its concentration on a single person, the fact that people live in contexts requires methodological synthesis. Sometimes this necessity produces good results; sometimes, not. Crossing disciplinary lines is like crossing ethnic or national boundaries. At first the trek seems deceptively easy. Later, the crossing appears impossible, since the language, history, and ethos of each discipline is distinct. Not only does each discipline have a politics, but the very choice of one discourse over another is political. Krupat and Brumble, invoked by Megan, argue that as-told-to autobiographies of Native North Americans are just as much the production of their white editors as they are of their Native tellers. In some cases white writers are not editors at all but authors. Whereas non-Native religion scholars and literary critics may view this strategy as a way of liberating indigenous voices from domination, Native scholars and critics experience it as a way of denying Native authors what little voice they have.

Megan has no apolitical alternative. If Morris should ever read any of the literary critical material on Native lifestories, he may wish he had declined to be involved in Megan’s project. Now he is caught in the historic dilemma of having a white editor receive, shape and publish the life of an indigenous storyteller. He might wonder what point there was in cooperating with a venture that, when speaking of his identity, will seem to put both “indigenous” and “author” in quotation marks.

Genre, reception, publication. What Megan is writing and who she is writing for changes. The genre of her published piece is that of the scholarly article. However, she discovers that there are important differences between a paper written for Professor Martin and a scholarly article. For Martin, she be humble and modest. For the editors of a scholarly journal, authoritative. For Martin she writes 16,000 words. For the journal, 8,000. Despite the differences between them, both term papers and articles share some common features. Authors are not free to marginalize theoretical or analytical discourse, so Megan feels pressure to marginalize Morris, her consultant. The writer of an article for a scholarly journal must ensure that argument frames and constrains narration. Narration and dialogue must not overwhelm argument. Megan resists the pressure to render Morris as an illustration of a theory, but it costs her publication in a scholarly journal.

Megan discovers that the reader is an abstraction. There are many readers, and they are of many kinds. The demands of the professorial reader differ considerably from a journal’s editor. She also realizes that an ethnographic subject who is literate in the language of a fieldworker is also a potential reader, maybe even a privileged one. Morris is not only an interviewee but also a reader and critic. Megan has to learn not only the explicit rules and forms for scholarly writing, but also the tacit ones. She has to negotiate between sources of conflicting advice. One editor advises her to preserve the plurality of indigenous voices, while another warns her against over-quoting. One advisor suggests that she suppress her own voice. Another recommends developing it more fully so readers can make inferences about her interactions with Morris.

Reception is a question that affects Morris as much, or more, than it does Megan. His mixed reception makes him wary of interviews, which now seem too little like collaboration and too much like doing someone else a favor. After publication, he realizes he must carry on a two-way negotiation, one with Megan, his interviewer, one with his community.

The process of generating, sharing and transmitting knowledge is more communal and less individualistic than either Morris or Megan originally imagined.