Ethnography of Religion

Geist- oder Wunderheiler, schamanische, spirituelle oder mediale Heiler: Viele von ihnen verstehen sich als vermittelndes Medium, um mit zumeist unsichtbaren Kräften, Strömen oder Wesen auf Hilfe suchende Klienten einzuwirken. Ehler Voss hat sich auf die Suche nach Medialen Heilerinnen und Heilern in Deutschland gemacht und ist dabei auf verschiedene Szenen des Medialen Heilens gestoßen. Channeling, Schamanismus, Reiki, Bruno Gröning und das Familienstellen nach Bert Hellinger – verschiedene Methoden verdichten sich in dieser Arbeit zu einer Kultur des Medialen Heilens.
Nach modernem Selbstverständnis handelt es sich bei dem Glauben an Geister um Relikte aus vergangenen Zeiten. Diese würden zwangsläufig mit einer fortschreitenden Zivilisierung verschwinden. Aus dieser Perspektive wirkt es zunächst überraschend, wenn auch Menschen in einem hochtechnisierten Land wie Deutschland Hilfe und Heilung in einer »Geistigen Welt« suchen. Dies wird meist als rückständig, lächerlich oder als Hinnahme eines bewussten Betruges gedeutet. Ehler Voss zeichnet in seiner Ethnographie ein differenzierteres Bild und lässt Heilerinnen und Heiler ausführlich zu Wort kommen. Die Interaktionen einzelner Akteure und Kontexte Medialen Heilens werden ausführlich beschrieben. Er folgt dabei nicht einem einheitlichen Schema, sondern arbeitet die unterschiedlichen Besonderheiten der Heilerinnen und Heiler sowie ihrer jeweiligen Situation heraus und unterzieht sie einer eingehenden ethnologischen Analyse. So bietet diese Ethnographie tiefe und vielschichtige Einblicke in die Eigenarten, Themen, Motivationen, (Un-)Sicherheiten, (Un-)Fertigkeiten und Widersprüche im Umgang mit Eigenem und Fremdem und eröffnet damit die Frage nach der menschlichen Identität.

This article is a case study of a lay Buddhist community that employs a business model called “living hall” (Shenghuo guan 生活馆) to facilitate the practice of Tibetan Buddhism among its members. The living hall model is explored in the context of the politics of religion in the People’s Republic of China (prc) and the dynamics of Tibetan Buddhism among Han Chinese in the past decades. The author investigates the model’s origin, its implementation in a contemporary Buddhist community, and its interaction with the discourse on Buddhism in the prc. The article joins a recent academic endeavor to illuminate the different modalities in which lay practitioners carry out Buddhist practice outside the sphere of institutionalized Buddhism. The article sheds light on the delicate dynamics between religion and state control in the prc and the role of entrepreneurs and materiality within lay Tibetan Buddhism.

Anthropology of Religion: The Basics is an accessible and engaging introductory text organized around key issues that all anthropologists of religion face. This book uses a wide range of historical and ethnographic examples to address not only what is studied by anthropologists of religion, but how such studies are approached. It addresses questions such as:

How do human agents interact with gods and spirits?
What is the nature of doing religious ethnography?
Can the immaterial be embodied in the body, language and material objects?
What is the role of ritual, time, and place in religion?
Why is charisma important for religious movements?
How do global processes interact with religions?

With international case studies from a range of religious traditions, suggestions for further reading, and inventive reflection boxes, Anthropology of Religion: The Basics is an essential read for students approaching the subject for the first time.

Focusing on religious creativity in an ethnography of the predominantly Flemish Wiccan community called Greencraft, I seek to problemize the notions of neo-colonialism and neo-nationalism. The group represents a particularly interesting case with regard to the development and diversification of contemporary Pagan witchcraft on the European continent. Although the network of covens draws from Celtic mythology and its literary embellishments, and hence maintains a strong link with the British Isles, Greencraft also seeks to explore the believed universal roots of ancient European nature religions. An example of the latter is the long standing interest in stone circles that are being researched by the group. Their attempt to reconcile Celtic ethnicity with Pan-European universalism not offers a very specific illustration of the tensions between traditionalism and eclecticism in Wicca, but also demonstrates the complexities surrounding the notion of neo-colonialism. In this chapter, then, I will demonstrate how Celtic mythology as the most readily available source, their earlier association with Celtic groups, and Greencraft’s choice of Robert Graves’ Celtic Tree of Life as have created a lock-in effect that draws their religious developments towards the mythistory of the British Isles, even if socially and in terms of lineage the group has come more and more independent of the Wicca family tree. The issue of authenticity, then, raised in the second part of the chapter, seems of somewhat lesser importance to Greencrafters then in many other Pagans. Adopting a psychological approach, I will explain that Greencraft’s justification of the use of specific forms of religious material is based on (1) relational coherency and (2) experiential designation, and juxtapose these to neo-nationalist motives to justify one’s ethnic identity by appropriating religious material. I will discuss these opposite tendencies by placing them in the sociocultural context and an episode of racial tension in Belgium.

When a new baby arrives among the Beng people of West Africa, they see it not as being born, but as being reincarnated after a rich life in a previous world. Far from being a tabula rasa, a Beng infant is thought to begin its life filled with spiritual knowledge. But how do these beliefs affect the ways the Beng raise their children?
In this unique and engaging ethnography of babies, Alma Gottlieb explores how Beng religious ideology affects every aspect of their childrearing practices, from bathing infants to protecting them from disease to teaching them how to crawl and walk. She shows too how widespread poverty among the Beng sets practical limits on these practices. A mother of two, Gottlieb includes moving discussions of how her experiences among the Beng changed the way she saw her own parenting. Throughout the book she also draws telling comparisons between Beng and Euro-American parenting, bringing home just how deeply culture matters to the ways we all raise our children.
Anyone interested in the culture of infancy, and vice versa, will enjoy The Afterlife Is Where We Come From.

The Tablighi Jama'at (TJ) is widely regarded as the largest movement of grassroots Islamic revival in the world yet remains significantly under-researched. This thesis examines the British branch of the movement based on sustained ethnographic fieldwork conducted over 18 months. Intensive participant observation was combined with 59 semi-structured interviews to present a detailed typology and topography of the movement's organisational structure in Britain. Further, the issue of intergenerational transmission is explored – based on an analysis of the cultural identity markers of language, clothing and food – with clear shifts identified between the first-generation 'Old Guard' and the British-born 'Avant-Garde.' The thesis argues that TJ should best be characterised as a movement in transition located within broader processes of indigenisation operative within British Islam more generally.

Theoretically, the thesis augments Berger and Luckmann's sociology of knowledge with insights derived from Bhaskar’s critical realism to propose the twin 'generative mechanisms' of secularity and spirituality from which empirically accessible social phenomena emerge. These are used to anatomise the process of 'intra-religious conversion' which emerges as a key motif of contemporary TJ experience. Turner's concept of liminality and Schutz's phenomenology of consciousness are further deployed to examine ritual and semantic dimensions of conversion that see the neophyte’s attachment to religion transition from a nominal to a passionate state. Generic theories in the sociology of religion are also consulted to explore issues of retention and post-conversion strategies of commitment-maintenance.

Finally, utilising insights from Peter Berger’s vast oeuvre, the thesis explores the intersection of 'Islamic Revival' with secularisation theory in Europe. It argues that, in the context of contemporary ‘Eurosecularity,’ the willed and conscious exercise of agency in ways which publicly affirm faith is intrinsically imbued with a disconcerting ‘debunking’ potential for those who have unthinkingly imbibed into interior consciousness the taken-for-granted suppositions of a secular nomos.

One prominent characteristic of historic Pentecostal praxis is lively, ecstatic music. After tracing the roots of Pentecostal music and its developments up to the present, this study investigates the production and experience of contemporary worship in Evangel Temple Christian Center, an Assemblies of God congregation in Springfield, Missouri. Using ethnographic interviews and months of detailed field observations, this study traces the internal dynamics of musical expression in terms of evident tensions such as the balance between processes of institutionalization with ecstatic charismatic experiences. Combining research on music, cognition, and materialist theories with firsthand ethnographic data, problematic conceptions of the human body arise. The Pentecostal body is both restrained and expressive, distrusted and celebrated. Evangel Temple is balanced carefully between processes of formalization and charismatic praxis, and due to its implementation of a range of sacred music genres, it caters to all age groups and retains vitality and vibrancy.

This chapter argues that the value of ethnography for interreligious studies lies in its its ability to complement and clarify the critiques of modernity already present within this burgeoning field. Ethnography and interreligious studies can partner together in challenging the hegemony of modernity by elevating the virtue of vulnerability. Ethnography clarifies the stakes of this challenge because, unlike dominant approaches to interreligious studies, the ethnographic approach undercuts what is arguably the bedrock ideal of the modern Western academy: its intellectualist bias. By adding an embodied, empirical, and experiential element to the project of interreligious learning, ethnography provides a particularly effective means of recognizing and also realizing the originality and profundity of interreligious studies.

Amid growing interest in mindfulness studies focusing on Buddhist and Buddhism-derived practices, this article argues for a comparative and ethnographic approach to analogous practices in different religious traditions and to their vernacular significance in the everyday lives of practitioners. The Jewish contemplative tradition identified with Chabad Hasidism is worth consideration in this context because of its long-standing indigenous tradition of contemplative practice, the recent adoption of ‘mindfulness’ practices or terminology by some Hasidim, and its many intersections with so-called Buddhist modernism. These intersections include the personal trajectories of individuals who have engaged in both Buddhist and Hasidism-derived mindfulness practices, the shared invocation and adaptation of contemporary psychology, and the promotion of secularized forms of contemplative practice. We argue that ‘Hasidic modernism’ is a better frame than ‘neo-Hasidism’ for comparative purposes, and that Hasidic modernism complicates the taxonomies of secularity in comparable but distinctive ways to those that arise in Buddhist-modernism contexts.

Cottee’s book, in essence, is a moving and empirically rich collection of tales of human suffering.  Beyond the intergenerational incomprehension hinted at by Farhad above, one also senses the basic tension of the autonomous post-Enlightenment subject struggling against the structures and strictures of religious conformity.  Yet the epiphany of disavowal proves to be a double-edged sword; the liberating wave of relief and exuberance (sometimes accompanied by bouts of gung-ho hedonism) reported by many respondents soon gives way to an aching farrago of angst.  Beyond searing stabs of guilt (for the pain caused to loved ones), festering anger (for “a crushing awareness of lost time and missed [sexual] chances” (p. 68)), frustration (at ongoing inhibitions and damaged relationships) and residual anxiety (what if I’m wrong, after all?), the prospect of inhabiting a godless universe stripped of all metaphysical telos proves, for many respondents, daunting.  Jean-Paul Sartre’s pithy maxim can well be paraphrased here: “[The ex-Muslim] is condemned to be free.”  Or, in the anguished cry of Nietzsche’s madman: “God is dead.  God remains dead.  And we have killed him.  How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”  The apostate’s existential co-ordinates, which had once seemed so precise and immovable, are now scattered across the distant reaches of nameless galaxies.

Badania etnologiczne nad kultem św. Wojciecha w polskiej kulturze ludowej w województwie warmińsko-mazurskim koncentrowały się w rejonie Pogórza Dzierzgońsko-Rychlickiego (Pomezania), a także na Warmii i Mazurach. Podobnie jak w całej Polsce, prowadzone były w kilku wybranych miejscowościach w latach 1995–1997.

This is a vivid and illuminating ethnographic account of an emerging force in contemporary Gambian social and religious life: the Tablīghī Jamā’at (TJ).  Through the prism of five detailed biographical narratives, Janson evokes the everyday lived experiences of TJ activists embedded in the socio-cultural matrix of the Gambia.  Her central objective is to dissect the ways in which youth, Islam and modernity – as distinct analytical concepts – intersect and coalesce in the lives of young Gambians seeking paths to piety through a contested arena in which tribal and reformist strands of Islam vie for primacy.  Sensitive yet scholarly, Janson’s presentation is laudable for the way in which her micro observations – the raw field data – are consistently sutured to broader theoretical frames and a comprehensive body of scholarship on the phenomenon of resurgent Islam in several international contexts.  What transpires is a multi-layered work of depth and texture that makes an important contribution to our understanding of the ways in which young women and men, inhabiting an ambivalent postcolonial space caught in the orbit of globalisation, appropriate and internalise religious experience.

This article examines the question of the researcher's bodily experience in the production of ethnographic knowledge, discussing fieldwork in the Brazilian Spiritualists Christian Order Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn). Focussing on spirit mediumship, it proposes a twofold analysis discerning local categories from those widely in use in other spiritual contexts and in the scholarly debates, and considering how they are articulated and lived through. Hence, it tackles questions such as how do mediums learn their practice? How do they discern between different categories of spirits? How does mediumistic experience inform notions of the body and the self? In doing so, it shifts the focus from belief to experience, including that of the researcher, as part of the ethnographic encounter. The process of learning spirit mediumship is hereby approached considering the cultivation of a mediumistic body as an intersubjective process of development of a specific mode of knowing, exploring how the cognitive, bodily and affective dimensions interweave. This kind of analysis demands a peculiar reflexive attention to the ethnographer's re-education of perception as a way of becoming skilled in local ways of knowing and communicating, producing common grounds of interaction in the field.

What are the social roles and discursive functions of conspiracy theories? The interpretative analysis is based on long term anthropological fieldwork in a Hungarian New Age group, a Neo-Pagan (neo-shamanistic) movement, and a Christian Charismatic (and ecumenic) fundamentalist community, organized by a vernacular prophet who lives in Transylvania (Romania). The author chose some topics and transformed them into structural models, and seeks their emergence in these different contexts. He recognizes the role of the systematic transformation of these conspiracy theories to be used for the actual purposes of the exact groups and their value-system. He demonstrates the social functions of 1. cohesion, 2. creating esoteric (immanent) language and 3. strengthen the borders of the group, besides 4. the role of engraving common values and knowledge.

En este trabajo propongo algunas ideas para reflexionar sobre el papel de la etnografía en los estudios antropológicos de la religión. Para ello se revisará la pertinencia de conceptos como experiencia, existencia, estructura, e intersubjetividad que tienen conexión con el ...

Extant academic literature on the Tablighī Jamā‘at provides the rudiments of a schema for understanding its modalities of expansion in new socio-cultural milieus. This paper first explicates these modalities in more detail and applies them to the historical development of TJ in Britain. I then test and amplify this schema utilizing fresh data generated during a 40-day fieldwork khurūj (outing) to Bulgaria as a reflexive participant observer with a British TJ group. The paper argues that the Western branch of the movement has achieved a degree of institutional robustness and autonomy from TJ’s South Asian headquarters. Finally, the paper reflects upon possible future trajectories for British TJ in relation to the author’s ongoing ethnographic fieldwork.

Researching issues ‘close to home’ is an increasingly prominent aspect of contemporary fieldwork and the complexity of (post)modern identities complicate traditional binaries of insider / outsider. The landscape of research with and about British Muslims has seen reconfigurations in recent years with an increasing number of British Muslims conducting qualitative fieldwork with communities of which they are also members.

Reflexivity has been proposed as one way in which to manage the challenging experience of conducting research on a topic or in an environment where one has a personal stake. Even ostensible ‘outsiders’ are expected to map the impact of their identity and biography upon the field. This conference proposes to gather researchers involved in such enquiry to explore these issues from a range of cross-disciplinary perspectives.

We are pleased to confirm that the conference will host Professor Ron Geaves who will deliver the keynote lecture entitled ‘The 'death' pangs of the insider/outsider dichotomy in the study of religion.’

There will also be a range of papers presented exploring reflexivity and methodology in the study of British Muslims; please see the attached programme for a list of abstracts.  If you have any questions or queries, please feel free to contact the organisers Riyaz Timol and Abdul-Azim Ahmed at reflexivity@cardiff.ac.uk.

Immer mehr Menschen wenden sich in prekären Lebenslagen Konzepten jenseits klassischer Therapieangebote zu. Auf welche Weise und mit welchen Zielen werden diese alternativen Sinnentwürfe genutzt? Inwiefern helfen sie, den Alltag neu zu strukturieren?

Der Gegenwartsschamanismus, als Kulturtechnik in diesem Sinne verstanden, wird häufig unter Oberbegriffen wie „New Age“ oder auch „Esoterik“ verhandelt – allerdings selten ohne abwertende Absicht. Dass sich die „Feldrealität“ ambivalenter, gesellschaftskritischer und bisweilen selbstironischer erweist, als gemeinhin angenommen wird, zeigen die Biographien der in diesem Buch interviewten, begleiteten und portraitierten Menschen. In 21 Fallbeschreibungen werden ganz eigene Weltsichten und Gewohnheiten formuliert sowie Hoffnungen, aber auch Zweifel zur Sprache gebracht. Letztere richten sich dabei nicht allein gegen gesellschaftliche Schieflagen oder den eigenen Lebensweg, sondern bisweilen auch gegen das Projekt einer empirischen Annäherung selbst. Somit möchte dieser Band auch einen Beitrag zur Diskussion um die Möglichkeiten ethnographischer Praxis leisten.

In this public lecture delivered at Cardiff University’s Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK, Riyaz Timol presents the findings of his doctoral research on the Tablighi Jama’at (TJ) in modern Britain.  Though widely regarded as the largest movement of grassroots Islamic revival in the world, TJ remains significantly under researched.  Based on extensive recent ethnographic fieldwork with the British branch of TJ, Riyaz explains its appeal to second and third generation Muslims raised in a predominantly secular sociocultural milieu.

Link to the lecture: Spiritual Wayfarers in a Secular Age: The Tablighi Jama’at in Modern Britain

The ‘Emerging Church’ is an American-born movement that dates to the late 1990s. It is fundamentally a movement of cultural critique in which the primary interlocutor is the dominant tradition in the United States, conservative Evangelicalism. In this article I address the phenomenon of Emerging Christianity based on historical, literary, and ethnographic analyses of Emerging Church advocates and critics. In particular, I argue that four points of dialogue characterize the status of Emerging in the United States: ‘post-foundational’ theology, ‘ancient-future’ worship, ‘missional’ evangelism, and a general posture of ‘deconversion.’ Ultimately, I present the story of the Emerging Church for its significance to two broad theoretical questions. First, how do new forms of religious identity come into being? And, second, for those working in the ‘anthropology of Christianity’: what happens when Christianities interact? In response to these questions, I stress the Janus-faced quality of Emerging Christianity and its reliance on the categories, narratives, and vocabulary of conservative Evangelicalism in constructing its thoroughgoing cultural critique.

In post-World War II America, U.S. Evangelicalism became a religion deeply entrenched with suburbanization and commercial sprawl. This article examines the growing phenomenon of middle-class white Evangelicals who are returning to the city. Since September 2008 I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork with nearly 100 Evangelicals in the post-industrial, Rust Belt cities of Cincinnati, Hamilton, and Middletown. I argue first that Evangelical re-urbanization is structured by two cultural logics: a biting cultural critique of suburban megachurches, and a desire for the “reconciliation” of urban life to “the kingdom of God.” Second, re-urbanized Evangelicals necessarily encounter the dilemmas of late modern urbanism, including structural processes like neighborhood gentrification. I stress the importance of this phenomenon for both the impact of religion on America's cities and the impact of urban restructuring on American religion.

This Introduction presents the main arguments debated in this Special Issue upon the construction of ethnographic knowledge in researching among participants of religious and spiritual groups through the lenses of bodily experience, addressing the empirical, ethical, epistemological, relational, political and analytical implications of this significant aspect of fieldwork. We ask specifically how does the ethnographer's experience of researching among these groups inform the production of ethnographic knowledge? In which way does it redefine our analytical categories, and the way we approach the experiences of participants in these groups? Up to which extent do our interlocutors expects us to know about their experiences and practices? When it comes to religious and spiritual experience these questions seem to enter an insidious territory challenging established categories, such as ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’, ‘body’, ‘self’ and ‘personhood’, ‘health’ and â€...

Contemporary Anthropology of Religion is proudly sponsored by the Society for the Anthropology of Religion,. and is co-edited by Don Seeman and Tulasi Srinivas. We seek proposals for ethnographic monographs and edited volumes that contribute broadly to the anthropological study of religious experience, cultures and practice, as well as innovative interdisciplinary works. Please see our flier for more details!

In this article, I examine how urban missional evangelicals in the United States cultivate a sense of place. Being “missional” refers to the desire to be a missionary in one's own society, an idea that has spread widely through the Emerging Church movement. Proceeding from an ethnographic analysis of two urban pastors, I argue that being an urban missional evangelical means having an intricate, nuanced, but ultimately mediate sense of place. Grounded in a cultural logic that seeks distance from suburban evangelicalism, the urban missional sense of place exists as a lived critique of modernity, which I explore through Mary Douglas's classic analysis of purity and danger.

A recent theoretical move among ethnographers of religion challenges the social scientific tendency to reduce people’s beliefs and practices to one or another religious tradition, to a religious affiliation assumed to operate as a master identity. Some scholars advancing this move draw on the insights of existential anthropology to emphasize the ambiguities and indeterminacies of religious life. The aim of this article is to argue for the relevance of existential anthropology for ethnographic approaches to the study of World Christianity. That relevance lies not only in existential anthropology’s capacity to convey the complexity of everyday religion, but also in the entanglements of existentialism itself with multiple aspects of Christian theology, past and present.

This session examines the processes through which academic knowledge production takes place about Muslim communities in Britain using, as a case study, the speaker's recently completed PhD on the British branch of the transnational Islamic movement the Tablighi Jama'at (TJ). What kind of data is generated though a social scientific approach and how do ethnographic research methods provide intimate portrayals of subjective life experience? What are the techniques through which data is analysed to reach broad, overarching theoretical conclusions about the community under study? And what are the methodological pitfalls that a researcher should be conscious of when attempting to navigate a tightrope between personal faith and rigorous social science? All these themes are unpacked in relation to the religiosity of modern TJ activists in Britain.

Despite its rituals of rupture and discourse of discontinuity, Pentecostalism does not always succeed in dislodging church participants from their pre-existing religious worlds. This paper connects the eclectic, everyday engagements of rank-and-file Pentecostals to a variety of concepts deployed in studies of religious pluralism (e.g. syncretism, hybridity, polyontology, bricolage, and especially the recently theorized butinage). Drawing on empirical evidence from Mozambique, while also glancing comparatively at Brazil, this paper aims to help open new questions regarding Pentecostal religious identity by arguing for the presence of pluralistic impulses within Pentecostalism itself.

Recent scholarship on Pentecostalism in the global South gives the impression of a singular trajectory of inexorable growth. In this chapter, I offer a counternarrative, not in denial of the widely reported statistical evidence but in affirmation of the ambivalence with which individuals behind the statistics experience novelty. In so doing, I bring existential insights to bear on such themes as rupture and discontinuity, which already, but inadequately, suffuse studies of Pentecostal conversion. Ethnographic evidence from northern Mozambique suggests that the “backsliding into heathenism” Pentecostal leaders decry is experienced locally as a capacity, a capacity for mobility and mutability, for shifting places and altering identities. The refusal of ordinary men and women to settle has long frustrated government administrators and religious reformers alike. It threatens to bewilder scholars as well unless we learn to think beyond the classificatory schemes outsiders so readily deploy and insiders so assiduously avoid.

Published in: Robert W. Jensen and Eugene Korn editors, Swords into Plowshares:  Reflections on Religion and Violence (Essays from the Institute for Theological Inquiry).  Center for Jewish and Christian Understanding and Cooperation (Kindle Edition 2014).


ABSTRACT


 
Don Seeman, the author of the chapter

“Violence, Divine Honor and the State,” has published a number

of studies touching on the relationship between the idea of divine honor and religious violence in different Jewish intellectual settings and he has also written as an anthropologist on the relationship between honor and political violence in modern Israel. Here, for the first time, he offers a synthetic reading that attempts to account for the close relationship between the anthropological and theological registers and to account in a systematic way for differences in approach between Jewish thinkers as diverse as Maimonides, R. Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto, Rav Kook, Moses Mendelssohn and Emmanuel Levinas. He begins with a phenomenological critique of the way honor and shame have been treated in recent

social science literature. He argues that honor and shame are “bridge concepts” that are applied in

classical conceptions to human beings as well as to God and that they therefore help to condition theological as well as political or anthropological conceptions of ethics and violence. After brief analyses of key biblical and rabbinic texts, Seeman argues that Jewish approaches to divine honor and violence can be divided into three dominant paradigms: vernacular, mystical and philosophical. The vernacular paradigm treats divine honor in anthropomorphic terms that are indistinguishable from those used to explain human social relations and recourse to violence. The mystical or kabbalistic paradigm builds, in a sense, on this robust vernacular sensibility, but adds a distinctive and subtle metaphysics of divine presence. This is the context in which the utter rejection of the vernacular sensibility by philosophical Judaism

—

exemplified by Maimonides and by modern thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn

—

takes on such importance. Seeman argues that the very shape of Jewish modernity has been conditioned by arguments over the nature of divine honor and by the political ramifications of those differences. The rejection of vernacular divine honor is a central theme of

Mendelssohn’s



Jerusalem

to which contemporary Jews are still implicitly or explicitly responding. We cannot understand the complex relationships between religion, violence and the state without a much better understanding of these dynamics.


"

The State of Israel was consolidated in the early twentieth century as the homeland of the Jewish people. While nominally secular, it also acknowledged in law and practice the complex , possibly inextricable relationship between ethnic, religious and national or genealogical forms of imagining what it means to be a Jew in the modern world. In one celebrated Supreme Court case, it was made clear that a "Jew," for purposes of immigration, could not include someone who clearly identified in a religious sense with Christianity. Yet the demography of Israel has been changing through mass immigration (especially from the USSR and Ethiopia) as well as strong foreign missionary efforts. In the Ethiopian case, tens of thousands of individuals immigrated over the last two decades who were considered by the state to be descendants of converts to Orthodox (or Protestant) Christianity: their case was normalized, from the state's point of view, by encouraging them to undergo a state-sponsored "return to Judaism" program that brought ethnic and religious grounds of identification back into synch. Yet this has remained contested and conflictual at both the policy level and the level of everyday, vernacular experience of Ethiopians. Moreover, a smaller but even more challenging group of Ethiopians, from the state's point of view, have begun, with other Jewish Israelis, to embrace various forms of Messianic Judaism and charismatic Christianity in Israel--making a frontal collision with the state's basic imaginary almost inevitable. My paper, grounded in ethnographic fieldwork among both groups of Ethiopian-Israelis,  begins to pry apart the  tortured relationship between Christianity and Jewishness in the Ethiopian case: its corollaries in everyday religion, distinctive practices of aversion or mimesis, and its explosive political implications for Israeli self-understanding.

일반적으로 선교는 신자가 (기독교)신의 명령을 받아 수행하는 것으로 이해된다. 그리고 기독교인에게 있어서 선교는 “하나님 나라”와 같은 대의를 이루기 위한 수단이나 때로는 목적 그 자체로 - 흔히 교회론에서 교회의 사명이나 존재의의와 같은 방식으로 - 여겨져 왔다. 하나님의 백성들의 모임인 교회는 지상명령(과 문화명령)이나 선교적 사명을 자신의 존재 이유(혹은 목적)로 믿어왔다. 그러나 어떤 대의든지 그것의 옳고 그름이나 정당성과는 별개로 그 대의를 믿고 따르는 사람들의 실제 실천이 문제가 된다. 이 대의를 올바르게, 정당하게, 제대로 실천하는 문제가 발생하지만, 나는 여기서 단지 이상과 현실의 괴리가 문제라고 말하는 것이 아니다. 추상적인 대의는 구체적이고 실제적인 인간들의 실천을 통해 비로소 대의로서 주장되고 존재하는 동시에, 이 추상적인 대의는 사람들에게 종교적인 경험의 내용과 동기라는 상징적 의미를 부여한다. 곧 이 대의를 실천하는 과정이 선교의 현재적 의미를 결정한다. 이 종교적 실천의 문제를 우리는 “선교 (행위자의) 내적 동원 메커니즘”이라고 부른다.
이 글은 이 내적 동원 메커니즘 중에서도 보다 미시적인 실천감각적 차원에서 공격적 선교 또는 개신교 신앙의 폭력성의 혐의를 포착해 보려는 간략한 시도이다. 그러나 오늘 이 자리에서 이 메커니즘 전체를 경험적으로 다룰 수는 없을 것이다. 따라서 이 글에서 인용했던 몇 가지의 사례나 담론들을 지나친 비약을 낳을 수도 있고, 또 곧바로 일관된 현상으로 일반화할 수는 없겠지만, 한국개신교의 현실을 짐작하게 하는 징후를 엿볼 수 있기를 기대한다.