Embodied Research Phenomenology Ethnography

Embodied Research and Writing:
A Case for Phenomenologically

Oriented Religious
Downloaded from http://jaar.oxfordjournals.org/ at Western Michigan University on January 30, 2015

Studies Ethnographies
Kristy Nabhan-Warren*
In this article, I examine anthropological and phenomenological the-

ories and scholarship that recognize our bodies and our interlocutor’s
bodies as texts that we can “read” to better understand ourselves and
the lifeworlds our interlocutors inhabit. Drawing on my own ethno-
graphic research and taking my cue from phenomenologists, I argue
that Religious Studies ethnographers must look to their bodies as well
as their interlocutors’ bodies as sources of knowledge. When we draw
on our experiences and observations then we are truly writing empiri-
cally based scholarship. The ethnographer is grounded in her body,
and her body is entwined with her interlocutors’ bodies and, by exten-
sion, their lifeworlds. Moreover, the body can be a vehicle for compli-
cating, at times even transcending, emic (insider) and etic (outsider)
boundaries. To ignore our embodied interactions with others in the
field when we write is to occlude lived experience and how our bodies
are epistemological sites that allow us privileged access into our interlo-
cutor’s worlds. “Our” bodies are ways for understanding “others” life-
worlds. When we take a reflexive turn in our written work, we
acknowledge this embodiment and connections, and yield greater
insight into religion as it is lived.
*Kristy Nabhan-Warren, Augustana College, Rock Island, IL 61201, USA. E-mail: kristynabhan-
warren@augustana.edu. The author would like to thank Stephen Warren for all of his support and
encouragement in the writing of this article.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, June 2011, Vol. 79, No. 2, pp. 378–407
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfq079
Advance Access publication on November 24, 2010
© The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of
Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
Nabhan-Warren: Embodied Research and Writing 379
The theory of the body schema is, implicitly, a theory of perception.

We have relearned to feel our body; we have found underneath the
objective and detached knowledge of the body that other knowledge
that we have of it in virtue of its always being with us and of the fact
that we are our body. In the same way we shall need to reawaken our
experience of the world as it appears to us in so far as we are in the
world through our body, and in so far as we perceive the world with
our body. But by thus remaking contact with the body and with the
world, we shall also rediscover ourself, since, perceiving as we do with

our body, the body is a natural self and, as it were, the subject of per-
ception. (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 239)
BODIES IN THE FIELD

MY INTERESTS IN THE convergence of religion, ethnography, and
bodily interaction in fieldwork emerged in 1992 when I began fieldwork
in a barrio in South Phoenix, Arizona. I was working with Mexican
Catholics who venerated an apparition of the Virgin Mary to a middle-
aged woman named Estela Ruiz. The Catholic world of South Phoenix
included gang members and their appropriation of sacred tattoos and
gang-colored rosaries; pilgrims who journeyed to Estela’s backyard
shrine; and Mexican American Catholics who attended mass at the
parish church. I was intrigued by the Catholicisms in South Phoenix,
and the way religion was deeply embodied. Religion was lived and
experienced in, by, and through bodies in the streets, in church, and at
the shrine.
The heat of the desert climate, my own uncertainties and anxieties,
as well as the bodily nature of doing fieldwork itself planted the seeds
of wonder which eventually surfaced in my first book (Nabhan-Warren
2005). I can vividly recall how I sweated in the 100 degree plus Arizona
heat while I made the twenty-minute drive to Estela and Reyes Ruiz’s
South Phoenix backyard shrine to the Virgin Mary. When I stepped
out of the car, the coolness of the grassy shrine grounds enveloped me
and I sat for hours under mesquite trees talking with Estela about her
life as a Mexican American woman and Marian visionary. When I
think of Estela and our first conversations, I think of the way my feet
felt in the soft grass and how she moved her arms to emphasize the
enormity of her religious experiences. Surrounding her were brightly
painted statues of Our Lady of Guadalupe and Christ with outstretched
arms, as well as a flowing fountain of water “blessed” by the Virgin
herself. The smells were intoxicating: the warm, slightly acidic smell of
380 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
mesquite trees mingled with the scent of candles whose wax was
warmed by the sun.
At Estela’s invitation I began to attend the bi-weekly rosaries at the
shrine and there I touched the rosary beads, prayed, and genuflected
along with the other pilgrims. I watched as they filled empty milk con-
tainers with water from the Virgin’s holy fountain to take home to
family and friends. I saw how the water was drunk and how the sign of
the cross was made. Mexican ballads played on the loudspeaker, and

Estela’s voice, coming through the loudspeaker, read the messages of
the Virgin Mary as given to her. Religion was tasted, smelled, seen,
heard, and touched in this shrine space. It was here at the shrine space,
kneeling on a carpet remnant and holding a rosary that had been given
to me by a pilgrim that my body took on the comportment of a
pilgrim. Making the sign of the cross, kneeling, and murmuring Hail
Marys were visible signs of devotion and were dependent on body
knowledge. Religion and bodies were indelibly connected in the shrine
space and each defined the other. Hands held and moved crucifixes and
beads, eyes were directed toward the Virgin Mary, and knees touched
the ground. As an ethnographer, I needed to experience the beliefs,
rituals, and praxis that I observed with my own body to gain a better
understanding of the lived shrine Catholicism.
Religious, ethnic, and cultural borders were crossed as well as main-
tained through bodily movement and interaction at this shrine. I
struggled to become one with them through my body, but in the begin-
ning of my fieldwork, my own self-conscious comportment revealed my
liminal status as a curious anomaly. I was a non-believer among believ-
ers, a person with a distinct cultural background indelibly recorded in
my body language. My experiences at the shrine prompted me to begin
thinking about the ways in which the ethnographer’s body can be a
barrier, but also a bridge, to cultural exchange and to entering and
knowing her interlocutors’ lifeworlds, worlds of “everyday goals, social
existence, and practical activity.”1 I wanted to elucidate the rich inter-
workings of my interlocutors’ daily lives, aiming for what William
James calls “the world of pure experience” (James 1922). In order to
bridge the world of outsider and insider, I had to use my body to
experience the lifeworld I was studying.
1
Jackson provides an even fuller description of lifeworld as “that domain of everyday, immediate
social existence and practical activity, with all its habituality, its crises, its vernacular and idiomatic
character, its biographical particularities, its decisive events and indecisive strategies, which
theoretical knowledge addresses but does not determine, from which conceptual understanding
arises but on which it does not primarily depend” (Jackson 1996: 7–8).
At the time I was working on my dissertation, there were few sources

that meditated on the embodiment of ethnographic practice: how “our”
bodies interacted with and reacted to and with others’ bodies. I was inter-
ested in exploring how our bodies could be points of great insight as well
as disappointment and frustration, and how ethnographic writing would
be better, more illuminating, if we began to consider more seriously and
write reflexively about our bodies as sources of knowledge in the field.
This is when I began to think about the possibilities of a phenomenologi-

cally oriented, embodied ethnography for Religious Studies. What would
happen, I wondered, if Religious Studies ethnographers let go of deeply
held epistemological biases which constrained us, and saw our bodies as
research tools? We would have to let go of inhibitions of “proper” com-
portment, praxis, and ways of being in the field and would have to take
on our interlocutor’s comportment. Through our embodied ethnogra-
phy, I realized during my own fieldwork, we would gain a greater
appreciation for the worlds we were studying. Moreover, critically analyz-
ing both embodied breakthroughs and failures is essential for producing
an empirically informed Religious Studies ethnography—for as is the
case with all sites of knowledge, bodies are imperfect.
What I propose in this article is this: that Religious Studies scholars
who “do” ethnography turn to their bodies as sources of perception,
wisdom, and insight into their interlocutors’ lifeworlds, all the while
acknowledging the limitations of our bodies (as with all empirically
based perceptions) as sources of deep knowledge. And in addition to
using their bodies as vehicles for deep knowledge in the field, Religious
Studies ethnographers need to take embodied ethnography seriously
when they write up their findings. Engaging in ethnography offers any-
thing but a “spectator theory of knowledge,” and is deeply engaged
in our interlocutors’ worlds (Dewey 1980: 23). Although a growing
number of Religious Studies ethnographers are reflecting on their
embodiment in the field, none have formulated a comprehensive argu-
ment that calls for embodied, phenomenologically oriented ethnography
when we research and write.
This article is an attempt to provide an argument for the necessity
of embodied, phenomenologically oriented ethnography for the field of
Religious Studies. What I intend to do in the following pages is to draw
on my own ethnographic experiences and to use them as a springboard
into making larger philosophical and methodological arguments
aimed particularly at Religious Studies scholars who do ethnography.
Although the target audience is ethnographers, I hope that what I
have to say is of interest to Religious Studies scholars more generally.
Religious Studies ethnographies that are embodied can change how we
think about religion and the people who live it because they engage in
the religious worlds our interlocutors make and inhabit in a direct
emotional and physiological way. When we eat, drink, dance, and pray
alongside our interlocutors in the field, we gain an understanding of
religion as it is lived that would not be possible if we viewed our bodies
as detached and irrelevant to what we research and write.
I am indebted to phenomenologists, those philosophers who argue
for a more broadly constituted idea of knowledge, one that considers

embodiment on equal grounding with other sites that produce what we
call knowledge. I work from the phenomenological perspective that
knowledge must be empirically based on our careful, meticulous obser-
vations, but that our understanding of empiricism needs to be expanded
to include body knowledge (as well as its limitations) and the perceptions
we come to as a result of bodily knowing. Phenomenologists advocate a
“careful description of ordinary conscious experience” of how life is
lived, rather than what it should be (emphasis mine) as defined by our
prior intellectual, theoretical lenses (Hammond et al. 1991: 3).
Religious Studies ethnographers can make even greater contri-
butions to our guild and to the people we set out to study if we con-
sider our bodies as vehicles which can complicate the boundaries that
exist between the emic (insider) and etic (outsider) perspectives. While
these boundaries may never be fully transcended, in my experience they
can be made more permeable and flexible. By engaging in our interlo-
cutors’ rituals and practices with our bodies, we can come to a richer
understanding of religion as it believed, lived, and experienced.
We need to stop reifying theory and intellectually based knowledge
if we are to understand and portray religion as it is lived.2 Since much
of religion is practiced and embodied, ethnography that turns to the
body as an epistemological site makes sense. Since the publication of
David Hall’s Lived Religion in America (1997), there has been an
increased focus in Religious Studies on the religious practices of those
we study and there has been a lot of creative methodological work that
combines various disciplines and their approaches to the study of reli-
gion. Ethnographies and social histories of religion in America that
have been published since this edited volume’s debut testify to a
more nuanced and complex understanding of how people make their
religious worlds. Building on the argument made in Lived Religion in
America for increased attention to our interlocutor’s (whether living or
2
The sociologist of religion Meredith B. McGuire makes a similar argument, geared toward
sociologists (2008).
dead) religious and spiritual practices, I want to see Religious Studies

ethnographers go a step further, and understand their own bodies and
all of their sensorial perceptions as ways to better understand the beliefs
and praxis of those we work with in the field and then to reflect on this
embodied knowing when they write. My concerns are with improving
ethnographic thinking and methodology in Religious Studies. An ethno-
graphic approach to the study of religion that is phenomenological and
embodied can offer rich insights into lifeworlds and can be a real

source of connection between “us” and “them.”
ENTERING THE LIFEWORLD THROUGH EMBODIMENT

The concept of lifeworld, promoted by the philosophers–phenomen-
ologists Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, Thomas Luckmann, John
Dewey, and most recently Michael Jackson, takes seriously what
William James has called “the world experienced”—that which is
immediate, evident, and a form of doing (Husserl 1931; Schutz 1972;
Jackson 1989, 1996; Schutz and Luckmann 1989; Dewey 1905).
Focusing on the lifeworlds of our interlocutors rather than the theories
we bring with us to the field helps us to form a deeper connection with
those we encounter during the course of our ethnography. A form of
backwards design, that is, beginning with lifeworld and ending in
theory, rather than the other way around, can help us avoid the over-
intellectualizing and over-analyzing which can plague our scholarly
work and can distance us from those with whom we form connections
in the field. Moreover, our interlocutors frequently read what we write,
and we need to write something that speaks to them and their experi-
ences.3 They must recognize their worlds in our words. Though phe-
nomenologists believe that “the world cannot be put into words,” an
approach to the study of religion as it is lived that has a broad under-
standing of what constitutes knowledge can move us in the right direc-
tion (Jackson 2007: xi).
One of the ways we can get at the richness of our interlocutor’s life-
worlds is to turn to our bodies and our interlocutors’ bodies as sites of
knowledge and understanding. Ethnographic fieldwork differs from
other methodologies because it allows us a privileged entrée into the
worlds we are studying—not in a distanced, abstract way but in an
3
A vast literature exists on the ethics of doing ethnography today. For especially good
discussions of the complexity of conducting contemporary ethnography and the liminal situation
of the ethnographer, see Behar (1996), Brown (1998), Brettel (1993), Clifford and Marcus (1986),
Griffith (1997), and Rosaldo (1986).
embodied way. We do not need to imagine because we can experience.

We share meals with our interlocutors, engage in direct dialogue, play
with their children, share in their joy and grief, have our families visit
us when we are in the field—this is anything but abstract, intellectua-
lized knowledge and experience. These experiences are lived, emotive,
and embodied, and when we take a step back and analyze what Marcel
Mauss called the “techniques” of the body (our bodies and our
interlocutors’ bodies), we can discover an entrée into understanding

their lifeworld (Mauss 1968).
It can admittedly be a challenge to address and write about bodies’
interactions in the field without making this approach to the study of
religion seem reductionistic. “The body” should not replace “the mind”
as the focus of an essentialized and privileged way of knowing. I am not
arguing for “the body” to become a new paradigm (replacing a time-
honored reification of the mind with a reification of the body) but do
think, along with Michael Jackson, that by including our bodies as
epistemological sites of knowing, and by making a reflexive move in
our writing, we would be moving toward epistemological honesty.4
Ethnographic methodological reflexivity through embodied ethnogra-
phy should not be something that is an afterthought; it should be the
very basis by which fieldwork is done. When we write our embodiment
into our work, we acknowledge how the anthropologist’s and the inter-
locutor’s bodies interact; the ethnographer’s body is deeply entwined
within the lifeworld. It is precisely because of this intertwinedness of
the ethnographer and those with whom she works in the field that
clear-cut distinctions between emic/insider and etic/outsider cannot be
maintained as the ethnographer is more of a shapeshifter, one who
takes on multiple forms in the field.
It is by turning to our bodies as sites of knowledge and understand-
ing that we open up possibilities of ways we can understand our interlo-
cutors’ lifeworlds. Incorporating embodied ways of knowing and seeing
opens up vast possibilities for ethnographic research and writing in the
field of Religious Studies as religious myths, rituals, and symbols are
themselves embodied and lived by our interlocutors. A greater attention
4
It is here that I depart from the anthropologist–phenomenologist Thomas Csordas, who argues
for embodiment as a paradigm for anthropology. I agree with Csordas that it is “critical to apply
the analysis of subject and object to our distinctions between mind and body, between self, and
other, between cognition and emotion, and between subjectivity and objectivity in the social
sciences,” but I do not see the benefits of replacing one paradigm with another. My call is for a
greater inclusion of the body in how we approach research and writing in Religious Studies, not
replacing one paradigm (which is problematic) with another (equally problematic). Csordas
(1990: 36).
to embodied knowledge—ours and theirs—can lead to a more complete

understanding of the religious worlds we study and seek to understand.
Although the past decade has seen an increase in Religious Studies
ethnographies that have incorporated embodied ways of knowing, a
more radical and comprehensive epistemological shift needs to occur.
While embodied ways of knowing and understanding are mentioned
and explored in these ethnographies, phenomenologically oriented eth-
nography is not the primary vehicle for understanding religion. In

short, scholars in our field need to stop privileging mind knowledge
over body knowledge. Over the last ten years, ethnography as a method
has gained acceptance in the field of Religious Studies but it is still
viewed with some suspicion.5 As Michael Jackson writes, “What is at
issue here is the intellectualist fallacy of speaking of life as if it were
at the service of ideas” (Jackson 1989: 2). Shedding our dependence
on European intellectualist notions of what constitutes knowledge
and truth is essential of we are to effectively work with and attempt
to understand others’ worlds. The sociologist of religion Meredith
B. McGuire has recently written about the necessity for scholars of reli-
gion to rid themselves of time-worn notions of what religion is and is
not: “If we fail to recognize the contested nature of definitional bound-
aries, we risk adopting an overly institutional—and historically inaccur-
ate—view of religion. That is, we risk entertaining that religion is a
thing, an entity that exists in the real world with its distinguishing fea-
tures objectively ‘given’ and not subject to historical or cultural change”
(McGuire 2008: 43). McGuire goes on to write about the embodied
nature of religion as well as the importance for sociologists of religion
who do ethnography and qualitative research to turn to their bodies as
sources of insight and connection to those they study. Religion is some-
thing that is made and experienced and to ignore the embodied nature
of religious praxis is to miss the point of ritual, beliefs, and praxis.
Religious Studies ethnographers must become more interdisciplinary
in terms of reading current sociological and anthropological theories
that address bodies as sites of knowledge and shared experiences.
We need to read more broadly and pay closer attention to those the-
ories that prompt us to be more attentive ethnographers. A leader in
5
This suspicion stems from the idea that ethnography is not sufficiently rigorous as a
methodology and that it boils down to hanging out with and talking with people. A friend and
colleague of mine in a Religious Studies department was recently denied tenure because her book
(which has since won national awards) was not seen as academic enough because its
methodological lens is ethnography. This colleague was later granted tenure but only after a long
and exhausting process.
the field of phenomenological inquiry and ethnography, Michael

Jackson has written extensively on how phenomenological inquiry is
radical empiricism; a science of understanding others’ lifeworlds by
acknowledging our bodies’ observations, interactions, and situatedness
in the field. Jackson’s work, for example, is well known in the fields of
sociology and anthropology, but Religious Studies ethnographers as a
whole have yet to incorporate and adopt his ideas of phenomenology
and radical empiricism into their approach to studying religion.

A phenomenological approach to the study of lived worlds points
to the limitations of the concept of culture which has, since the
Enlightenment, long been used to distinguish humans from animals
and the distinctions that have been drawn rest on properties of the
mind and language. A phenomenological approach is “the scientific
study of experience” and gets beyond a fixation with order and structure
and addresses the uncertainties and inconsistencies of life (Jackson
1996: 1–3). Phenomenology is “radical empiricism; it gives incomplete-
ness and tentativeness the same analytical weight as the finished and
the fixed, and refuses to privilege and reify an epistemology that is
based on mind knowledge” (Jackson 2007: xxv). On the other hand, it
does not privilege any kind of knowing with the body but does take
embodied knowing seriously. Anyone who has engaged in ethnography
knows that what we observe and experience in the field is embodied
and lived, and cannot be easily or neatly reduced to order and structure
because we are not removed from the worlds we study. Yet we should
see this messiness not as an unfortunate hindrance but as an opportu-
nity to re-examine any theories we learned in graduate school and
beyond. Theory is useful and important for scholars as they seek to put
into words the worlds they study, but theory can be dangerous as it can
lead an ethnographer to misrepresent those she studies in order to fit
“them” into a theoretical category or box.
Ethnography forces us to rethink and re-examine our motivations as
Religious Studies scholars, and our embodied experiences can yield rich
insights into our interlocutors’ lifeworlds. When I was in my second
month of intensive fieldwork, I became quite ill. This bout with appendi-
citis and surgery was rather inauspicious in the beginning, yet my
decision to remain in the field ended up being an auspicious outlet for
my entrance into the healing discourses of the Mexican American
Catholic community in which I had immersed myself, and to a deeper
understanding of their intense devotion to the Virgin Mary and Jesus.
I learned, through discussing my own pain and discomfort, the cosmol-
ogy of healing among these particular Mexican American Catholics. I was
the subject of many prayers, and “prayings-over,” and through my illness
reached a greater understanding of some Mexican American Catholic per-

ceptions of healing and the thin line between my own body and theirs. I
gained a greater appreciation for the more charismatic elements of
Catholicism as well as the degree of cooperation between laity and clergy
who prayed with and over them. Ethnographic knowledge, as Deidre
Sklar has written, starts with the body, with the understanding that “ways
of moving” are “ways of thinking.”6 And as the ethnographer of religion
Sarah Pike has written about her experiences with neo-pagans, “by

moving into the ritual space and around the fire with other dancers, my
perceptions of the space and people around me changed” (Pike 2001:
186). For Sklar and Pike, their bodies and their interlocutors’ bodies were
mediums of knowledge and insight into Mexican American and neo-
pagan lifeworlds. Moving, seeing, smelling, and tasting with our bodies in
our interlocutor’s worlds make us neither emic nor etic but something
else that is more complicated. Both Sklar and Pike moved with and into
the ritual spaces of their interlocutors. They overcame any hard and fast
distinctions that scholars draw between insider and outsider and gained a
greater understanding of religion as it is lived. Moreover, they shelved
theory when they were in the field and came back to it later—using it
when it elucidated what they had seen, heard, felt, tasted, and smelled in
the communities in which they were immersed. Theory was useful but
only when it came after the field experiences.
TAKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH

Religious beliefs and expression are in part defined by men’s,
women’s, and children’s bodies, and it takes our bodies to understand
how and why bodies are important mediums for religious expression,
belief, and practice. When ethnographers write about their bodies—how
they felt when they had to eat and to prepare certain foods, what it was
like to pray along with others, being exhausted, sick, and happy—they
convey the world they have experienced and provide a phenomenologi-
cal description.
According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology is the search
for a philosophy which shall be a “rigorous science” but it also offers
an account of space, time, and the world as we ‘live’ them. It tries to
6
As Sklar has written: “If spiritual knowledge is as much somatic as it is textual, then clues to
faith, belief, and community would be embedded in the postures and gestures of the fiesta. How
does one move here, through what kinds of spaces, constrained by what boundaries? What does
the fiesta taste and smell like? What are its sounds? In what rhythms do people move together?
My learning, I knew, would begin with my body” (Sklar 2001: 4).
give a direct description of our experience as it is, without taking

account of its psychological origin or and the causal explanations which
the scientist, the historian, or the sociologist may be able to provide
(Merleau-Ponty 1962: vii).
Taking our cue from Merleau-Ponty, Religious Studies ethnogra-
phers can think of our participation and observation as scientific and
empirical. Everything we know is based on what we observe, smell, feel,
touch, and experience through our embodied existence. Our ethno-

graphic bodies can be thought of as geometers in that they help us
decode things that work in the world (Bourdieu 1977: 114–116). As
decoders of lifeworlds (at least partial ones), our bodies can provide us
with a rich description of lifeworlds without explaining away religious
experiences, beliefs, and practices.
As Robert Orsi has noted, it is acknowledged shared humanity that
should lead ethnographers to acknowledge our embodied relationships
that we form in the name of research and to write about them as epis-
temological research (Orsi 2002: xxviii). Anthropologists have long
focused on giving the “other,” our interlocutors, a voice. Yet we also
need to recognize our bodies and our interlocutors’ bodies and comport-
ment as a kind of voice that can yield great insights into their lifeworlds.
We must reject the “classical empiricist notions of experience as reduci-
ble to passively received sense impressions,” but rather think of experi-
ence as involving “everything that makes us human—our bodily, social,
linguistic, and intellectual being combined in complex interactions that
make up our understanding of the world” (Jackson 1989: xvi). An impor-
tant move for Religious Studies ethnographers is to abandon our privile-
ging of what constitutes knowledge and information and to widen our
perspectives on epistemological inquiry and empiricism. We can begin to
do so by allowing our bodies in the field to lead the way.
It is important to think about how bodies can be important lenses
into deeper understandings of what phenomenologists call habitus and
lifeworlds. For the past thirty years or so, anthropologists have been
searching for concepts and terminology to replace the concept of culture,
which has been used to separate and elevate humans over animals and to
distinguish some groups of people from and over others. The designation
“culture” has long been applied to people who are literate and who have
certain kinds of qualities, in contrast to those “others” who are believed
to be more akin to animals and who react instinctually and with their
bodies. Phenomenologists view the concepts habitus and lifeworlds as an
improvement over the concept of culture because they refuse to make the
assumption that we humans are better than/more sophisticated than
animals—they view our worlds as connected and interrelated.
When Religious Studies scholars turn to phenomenological works

such as Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977),
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1962), Michel
De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1988), Drew Leder’s The
Absent Body (1990), and Michael Jackson’s Paths Toward a Clearing
(1989), At Home in the World (1995), Things as They Are (1996), and
Excursions (2007), we are able to understand just how important it is to
consider including bodies as sites of knowledge and insight (“ours” and

“theirs”) in ethnographic writing. Bourdieu, Merleau-Ponty, de Certeau,
Leder, and Jackson all challenge the Cartesian model, which still has a
firm hold on how we as academics privilege “data” (and of the necessity
of transcending this way of privileging), the concept of culture, and
show how we need to transcend the mind–body dichotomy. They all
consider the landscape of knowledge to be complex, multi-layered, and
multi-dimensional and refuse to privilege one mode of understanding
over another and urge us to rethink our preconceived notions of what
constitutes our perspectives and how we make and conceive of knowl-
edge. In one of his many captivating stories, de Certeau writes about
walking in the city (Manhattan) and how bodies (eyes, mouth, feet,
hands) engage in an “erotics of knowledge” and in the “ecstacy of
reading” such a cosmos (de Certeau 1988: 92). We map out places
with our bodies and our perceptions inform us about the world.
Phenomenologists like de Certeau are wary of establishing new para-
digms but argue for a wider consideration of what constitutes knowl-
edge and understanding.
Ethnographers in various fields of discipline have, up until fairly
recently, overlooked the significance of bodily interactions in the field
much like philosophers of experience, as Leder points out, have neg-
lected to think about embodiment issues. As Leder has written,
“Through the lived body I open up to the world. This body is not then
simply a mass of matter or an obstructive force. It is a way in which we,
as part of the universe, mirror the universe” (Leder 1990: 173). The
notion of “mind over matter” sweeps the physical pain, joy, and desire
that we may experience in the field under the heavy “objective” rug.
The Cartesian split between the mind and the body can be extended to
the way in which anthropologists are taught to “do” ethnography. Since
approximately the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, a “scientific
realism” stance was adopted which essentially privileged public experi-
ence. We can relate this privileging of empirical science to the dualistic
ontology, which has been carried over into the way fieldwork is con-
ducted and written. Taking the body seriously, as an epistemological
source, is a direct challenge to the idea that anthropologists can be
“objective” because embodied experiences are taken to be subjective and

not reliable sources.
A growing number of recent ethnographies, including those in
Religious Studies, are portraying bodies as reliable texts that do indeed
yield great insight into others’ worlds. Many anthropologists and
sociologists of religion have turned toward Pierre Bourdieu’s theory
of habitus, which can be seen as a more comprehensive way of
understanding others. Habitus, according to Bourdieu, are “systems of

durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to
function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate
and organize practices and representation” (1990: 53). Bourdieu’s
notion of habitus is similar to the concept of lifeworld, but focuses
more on the overarching structures (and the “objective”) which serve as
the backdrop for the internal workings of what we can call, for lack of
better terminology, culture. As Jackson has observed, Bourdieu’s theory
of habitus has been embraced by academics much more than the
concept of lifeworld because it seems to lend itself more easily to a
dichotomization of subjectivity and objectivity (Jackson 1989: 20–21).
We like to see patterns and a larger order that give meaning to our the-
ories and the worlds of those we study. As a structuralist, Bourdieu
does not focus on individual autonomy so much as he does on the
overarching forces/structure outside of life as it is lived—but he does
focus on the intricacies of everyday life and existence (Bourdieu 1977).
Like another oft-invoked French philosopher Michel Foucault, Bourdieu
is wary of phenomenology because he sees it as solipsistic, as placing
too much emphasis on the individual/subjectivity, and not enough on
patterns outside the individual’s grasp. Habitus is a useful way of
understanding others’ lived worlds but because it can be too structurally
oriented, focused on objective realities, I do not find it as helpful as
is the concept of lifeworld in our larger quest to understand the lived
realities of our interlocutors.7 Lifeworld acknowledges the importance
and necessity of subjectivity and does not see it as incompatible with
7
While some phenomenologists would not consider Bourdieu a phenomenologist because of
his focus on objectivity and wariness of subjectivity, I find the concept of habitus to have
phenomenological leanings because it is critical of the culture concept and because in his various
writings Bourdieu is akin to Geertz’s (1977) idea of “webs of significance” and the innerworkings
“micropractices” of everyday life and take a turn toward subjectivity. While some may not agree
with my interpretation of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus or with my decision to place him with
other phenomenologists, I have placed him in the phenomenologists’ camp because in many
ways he exhibits the care and concern with broadening out our understanding of knowledge as do
phenomenologists. If anything, Bourdieu provides an important critical check on our
understandings of objectivity and subjectivity and cautions us to be wary of the self. But I do agree
with phenomenologists like Michael Jackson that Bourdieu is more structuralist-leaning (akin to
empiricism as does Bourdieu. While Bourdieu’s habitus is helpful and

is an improvement over the loaded concept of culture because it refuses
to engage in high–low dichotomization of peoples and their worlds, it
is not as sophisticated as is the concept of lifeworld, which takes into
account a wider range of perceptions—“subjective” and “objective”—
and considers them as equally viable sources of knowledge.
As I realized, through the twists and turns of my own ethno-
graphic journeys, treating our bodies and our interlocutors’ bodies

as the revealing texts that they are leads to a reflexive ethnography
that yields fresh insights into their worlds.8 We need to meditate on
our ethnographer’s body as a crucial medium through which we as
ethnographers can better understand others’ experiences. This realiz-
ation will free the ethnographer (and ethnography itself ) to trans-
cend what the anthropologist Paul Rabinow has called “corridor
talk” among anthropologists. It is crucial that we move beyond
merely chatting about what we ate, drank, felt, danced, and experi-
enced and write about it because it can yield rich insights into
others’ worlds (Rabinow 1977: 253).
In other words, ethnographers need to avoid what Michael
Jackson has called the “regrettable disturbance” of excluding the
lived experience of the observer from the field (Jackson 1989: 4).
Jackson asserts that a “radically empirical method includes the
experience of the observer and defines the experimental intersubjec-
tivity” (Jackson 1989: 4). What Jackson refers to as a “radical
empiricism” necessitates the incorporation of lived experience.
Taking a phenomenological approach that incorporates a multitude
of modalities can help us avoid ideological priorities. As the sociol-
ogist of religion Meredith McGuire has written, “the social scientific
study of religion is not well served by ideological links with power,
control, and false objectivity” (McGuire 2002: 207).
Michel Foucault) that most phenomenologists. Bourdieu does not fit neatly in any methodological
or theoretical category.
8
Many early ethnographies privileged the ethnographers’ body and mind over his/her
informants’; for instance, we see earlier works such as Evans-Pritchard’s (1935) and (1965), assume
the comportment and attitude of authority; his body (as well as the “natives”) is beneath his
esteemed mind, Pritchard represents a mechanistic view of the body which is translated into his
works. However, when we look at other early works such as Malinowski’s (1932) and (1967),
acknowledgment of the body, its trials and limits, is seen to arise. Rabinow’s (1977) and Vincent
Crapanzano’s (1980) are often cited as progressive modern ethnographies in that they incorporate
the author more directly into the final text.
MOVING BEYOND VIEWING THE BODY AS DETACHED

AND BURDENSOME
As Merleau-Ponty emphasizes, we are not born into this world as
particulars. Rather, we get a sense of ourselves through our interactions
with others (Merleau-Ponty 1962). When the bodily nature of ethno-
graphic research is approached from a phenomenological perspective,
the body constitutes the very essence of what it means to do ethnogra-
phy. Our bodies are not in and of themselves separated from other

bodies. Whether we like it or not, we are connected to a larger social
body and to other individual bodies. One’s body cannot be reduced
to an “image” or “concept” that is separated from language and time;
or the community in which one is living and working (Bourdieu
1977: 72).
An example may help to explain what I mean here. It was through
my ethnographer’s body that I gained the deepest understanding of a
world of which I was not a part, and at times my outsider-ness was the
only way I could truly grasp the importance of what the community
was doing and not take it for granted. Although I danced with my
evangelical friends during an evangelical faith course they sponsored,
I could not get beyond feeling a little silly that I was wearing a paper
crown that read “Fool for Jesus.” Yet it was precisely this awkward com-
portment that led me to enter into this lifeworld, and it was through
my embodiment that I grasped the theology underlying the week-long
faith course that this community sponsored. Because I had danced
alongside them, I had a much better idea of what these evangelical
Catholics meant when they said that they were “head over heels” in love
with Jesus and the Blessed Mother. They were overcome with joy and
wanted to let go of inhibitions and “be like children” when they danced
for the Lord.
As a scholar I, too, had to try to let go of my own inhibitions and
dance with them. Sitting on the sidelines would have reinforced emic/
etic boundaries, distinguishing me as the academic in their midst who
wanted to study them. I listened to what my body wanted to do—to
dance (the music was intoxicating)—and in moving around the back-
yard, arms linked with other faith course candidates, I gained an insight
into my interlocutors’ beliefs and desires that would have been imposs-
ible were I to have sat on the sidelines, observing and taking notes. I
experienced their happiness, and the emotional release they felt as they
bobbed and weaved through the backyard space. “Wow! Religion can be
fun!” said one of my interlocutors and I agreed with her. After dancing,
we sat, sweaty and tired, and sipped from bottles of water.
Our bodies, as the philosopher Ludwig Binswanger has noted, are

in the world and constantly attempt to maintain a hold on stability
(Binswanger 1963: 223). Several days after the backyard dancing, I
experienced the final requirement of initiation into Mary’s Ministries.
Along with the twenty or so other men and women who were making
the course, I crawled in the dirt and under the rope toward the “Holy
Spirit,” a large plaster statue of a white dove hanging suspended from
the Marian altar that was our destination. Crawling through the mud

on one’s belly was about humbling oneself to the power of the Holy
Spirit. It was also about the public demonstration of commitment and
humility before God, Mary, and Christ. If I had not participated and in
this case gotten dirty, I would not have grasped the rich complexities of
this group of Mexican Americans’ lived religious experiences. Crawling
on one’s hands and knees signified making God an integral part of
their lives. As I crawled, I focused on the white plaster dove, willing
myself to get there. I was tired, hungry, and dirty. The dove offered
peace and reconciliation to the humble, penitent crawler who sought
out a new life. While I may not have been looking for a new life in the
Spirit as were my interlocutors, my embodied experiences and later
conversations with initiates and with other Mary’s Ministries members
confirmed the crucial component of the body in reaching salvation. I,
too, experienced relief and excitement when I reached the point of des-
tination and I experienced the bonds of community with my fellow
course candidates.
Everyone I spoke with after the event talked about the power of
the Holy Spirit and how Jesus helped to move them (both literally
and metaphorically) under the rope and toward salvation. My South
Phoenix interlocutors experienced religion via their bodies and as an
ethnographer whose own existence was intertwined with theirs, it
was imperative for me to experience this, too. While my expla-
nations for how I reached the rope may have differed, my own
struggles, fatigue, hope, and reaching out to something greater than
myself to get me to the plaster dove Holy Spirit connected me to
them in a powerful way. After this exercise in humility and hope I
felt integrated in the world I was studying, not separate from, and
it was because I had decided to learn with my body. I still took
notes in my notepads, observing, but more than writing I acted by
participating in the lifeworlds of my interlocutors, patterning my
actions after theirs. My body became a primary vehicle for my eth-
nographic research and the deeper I went into the research the less
I wrote during the day. I chose to write later on in the day,
removed from what I was experiencing and where I had time and
space to reflect. As Jean-Paul Sartre has written, “our very existence

predicates others, and we derive supreme satisfaction from our inte-
grated relationship to and with the world” (Sartre 1982: 305).
We can apply Sartre’s idea of having an “integrated relationship” to
bodies interacting in fieldwork; epistemological inquiry cannot be sep-
arated from our embodiment in the field. Epistemology and pheno-
menology are deeply entwined. The ethnographer’s identity as a
participant–observer is a curious one, indeed as there is an implied

insider/outsider dichotomy from the outset of our research. And a
phenomenologically oriented, embodied ethnography can offer the
“supreme satisfaction” of connecting with others and their lived reli-
gious worlds.
FROM CARTESIAN DISEMBODIMENT TO EMBODIMENT:

THE BODY IN ETHNOGRAPHIC HISTORIOGRAPHY
When we take a historiographical look back to some early eth-
nographies, we can appreciate more fully the body as a site of
knowledge and the missed opportunities when the ethnographer’s
body is seen as a hindrance rather than a seat of knowledge. In the
famous anthropologist E. Evans-Pritchard’s early works on the Nuer
and the Azande, for example, what is striking is the intentional
and methodic disembodied nature of his writing.9 His bodily com-
portment is seen to be standing above and beyond the natives, who
though deemed ‘sophisticated’ by the master himself, are so because
they are docile in the face of a colonialist regime. Pritchard
implicitly compares his body with those of the Azande by providing
Westerners a description similar to one that could be applied to an
animal. The reader is thus able to maintain a smug satisfaction that
“we” are superior to “them.” Of course, mainstream current ethno-
graphy has moved beyond such colonialist stance, but it is still
important to reflect on ways in which bodies have been perceived
by ethnographers. We need to ask ourselves not only how far have
we come, but also how much further do we need to go.
9
Evans-Pritchard describes the Azande in a taxonomic formula: “the Azande are so used to
authority that they are docile; that it is unusually easy for Europeans to establish contact with
them; that they are hospitable, good natured, and almost always cheerful and sociable; that they
adapt themselves without undue difficulty to the new conditions of life and are always ready to
copy the behavior of those that they regard as their superiors in culture and to borrow new modes
of dress, new weapons and utensils, new words, and even new ideas and habits; and that they are
unusually intelligent, sophisticated, and progressive, offering little opposition to foreign
administration, and displaying little scorn for foreigners” (Evans-Pritchard 1965: 13).
Comparing Evans-Pritchard’s account with Bronislaw Malinowski’s

description of doing ethnography in the South Seas Islands shows a
shift in attitudes toward the body in doing ethnography:
Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone
on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy
which has brought you sails away out of site. Since you take up your
abode in the compound of some neighboring white man, trader or

missionary, you have nothing to do but to start at once on your ethno-
graphic work. Imagine further that you are a beginner, without pre-
vious experience, with nothing to guide you and no one to help you.
For the white man is temporarily absent, or else unable or unwilling to
waste any of his time on you. This exactly describes my first initiation
into fieldwork on the south coast of New Guinea. I well remember the
long visits I paid to the villages during the first weeks; the feeling of
hopelessness and despair after many obstinate but futile attempts had
entirely failed to bring me into real touch with the natives, or supply
me with any material. I had periods of despondency, when I buried
myself in the reading of novels, as a man might take to drink in a fit of
tropical depression and boredom (Malinowski 1932: 4).
The contrast between the two approaches to the body is striking,

especially given that Evans-Pritchard’s account was written over forty
years after Malinowski’s (1965 compared with 1932). What can we gain
from this comparison, in our meditation on embodied ethnography and
phenomenology? The richness of Malinowski’s depiction of his ethical,
epistemological, and existential dilemmas is entwined with his body’s
search for connections. His poignant sense of otherness combines his
skin hue, nervous disposition, anxiety at seeing the dinghy sail away,
and his knowledge of being in a world that he feared would ignore him
permanently. He underscores the irony of anthropology: that we are to
effortlessly transcend our immediate culture and enter into another, as
if disengaging ourselves from our mind, through our body, were poss-
ible. Malinowski is cognizant of the supreme difficulty of such a feat,
and his doubts loom large.10 His is an early example of an embodied
ethnography as well as an openness to phenomenology.
10
The Cartesian model’s pervasiveness is seen in Evans-Pritchard’s work, and the sample of his
work provided merely brushes the surface of this topic. This kind of ethnographic method and
comportment is critiqued by Leder who writes that a main reason to challenge it “has to do with
its far-reaching social effects. This hierarchical dualism has been used to serve projects of
oppression directed toward women, animals, nature, and ‘others’” (Leder 1990: 4).
Malinowski, like the more contemporary phenomenologists and eth-

nographers whose work is addressed in this essay, addresses complex
issues of the bodily experience, posing them as part of the larger chal-
lenge of doing fieldwork, and of dealing with existentialism. He simply
admits his own mortal shortcomings and, in turn, points to the ethno-
graphers’ embodiment as a help and hindrance to understanding our
interlocutors’ worlds. Malinowski was cognizant of how his body was a
boundary between himself and others, and he understood that his

frustrations were rooted in his inability to overcome his embodied
limitations. He grasped what Merleau-Ponty has since succinctly stated,
“the function of the living body cannot be understood, except in so
far as I am a body which rises towards the world” (Merleau-Ponty
1962: 75).
If we avoid critically addressing how our bodies are mediums of
cultural exchange and ethnographic knowledge, how can we elucidate
our connection with the lifeworld in which we were working, playing,
living—being? If we ignore ethnographic embodiment, we in turn deny
the epistemology of fieldwork. As Meredith McGuire has argued, “if
our bodily senses and our emotions are socially shaped, then a close
study of how they work may produce useful tools for intersubjective
understanding” (McGuire 2002: 209).
THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL, EMBODIED TURN

IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES
Recent religious studies ethnographies have shown greater attention
and sensitivity to how bodies are reliable mediums for understanding.
While the authors are not all acknowledged phenomenologists, the
greater openness they exhibit toward what constitutes knowledge and
method is distinctly phenomenological. What links them is that they
experiment with method, challenge Cartesian-bound rules of research
and writing, and incorporate bodily ways of knowing and understand-
ing. Moreover, they view the methodology of ethnography as more of
an art than a science, one that takes into consideration the complexities
of working in others’ worlds as well as the changing situatedness of the
ethnographer’s status and role in the communities in which she works.
One of the earliest Religious Studies ethnographies to take seriously
the role of the ethnographer’ body is David Haberman’s Journey
Through the Twelve Forests (1994). Haberman’s body is the episteme
through which he connects with his fellow pilgrims on a 200-mile pil-
grimage known as the Ban-Yatra in north-central India. Haberman’s
vivid descriptions of India and the pilgrimage process accompany
personal insight which weighs heavily on his and his interlocutors’

bodily pain and suffering in undertaking the arduous journey.
The pilgrim, as Haberman writes, undertakes the sacred journey for
certain reasons; yet the existential issues that accompany a pilgrimage
necessarily include bodily experiences. Sweaty bodies, merciless heat,
hunger, thirst, and other bodily discomforts are ingrained in a pilgrim-
age. Haberman skillfully includes his own embodied experiences, not
out of solipsism, but out of the desire to evoke the interworkings of a

pilgrimage and to make a deep connection to other bodies he is with.
Haberman weaves his own experience into the text and refuses to separ-
ate his and others’ pain and discomfort, his mind in turmoil from his
blisters, conversations with others, and Hindu cosmology because they
are interrelated. He does not keep his experiences to himself and he dis-
cusses his ailings with those around him—his body became a locus for
conversations with his interlocutors and he, in turn, learned more
about them in modeling his own movements after his Hindu compa-
triots. He learned how to be a pilgrim through watching their bodies,
talking with them about what they were doing when they prayed in
the temples, and by making his own body conform to the rhythms of
pilgrimage and Hindu cosmology and cosmogonic myths. Through
the workings of his body, Haberman learned that his “body space”
was fused with the “cosmic space” of Hindu cosmogony (Bourdieu
1977: 91).11
Since the mid-1990s, a growing number of Religious Studies
scholars have been finding merit in an ethnographic approach to the
study of religion and are turning to the body—theirs and their
interlocutors’—as an epistemic site, a source of deep knowledge and
understanding. And rather than relegate their thoughts on embodied
ways of understanding others’ lived worlds to their diaries, they are ven-
turing forth and are reflecting on embodied ways of knowing into their
published work.12 These scholars are interdisciplinary in their approach
to the study of religion and draw on anthropological, sociological, and
historical methods when they write. They question time-worn “truths”
of the various disciplines in which they are immersed, much like the
phenomenologists, and they are seeking for more nuanced ways to
11
Haberman has situated himself in a particular habitus which, as Bourdieu writes: “generate
and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes
without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations in order
to attain them” (Bourdieu 1990: 53).
12
Excellent examples of this new turn in ethnography include Bales (2005), Bender (2003),
Brown (1998), McFarland Taylor (2007), Pike (2001), and Sklar (2001).
study others’ religious worlds. Though few if any of these scholars call
themselves phenomenologists or refer explicitly to lifeworlds, they are
using the kind of approach to the study of religion that phenomenolo-
gists advocate—one that opens up the conversation on what constitutes
knowledge. Many of these Religious Studies ethnographers view their
bodies and their interlocutors’ bodies as sources of insight into lived
religious worlds.
Moreover, many of these recent Religious Studies ethnographies elu-

cidate Bourdieu’s emphasis on the logic of practical knowledge, which
is inseparable from social conditions. Bourdieu’s larger ideas of broad-
ening out what constitutes as knowledge is being taken seriously by
Religious Studies ethnographers and they are seeking new ways to
describe what they are experiencing, observing, and encountering in the
field. These ethnographers are becoming more comfortable involving
the body in a most immediate sense, and refer to their bodies as a way
of knowing. These scholars understand that writing and doing ethno-
graphy without including the body, then, shortchanges the research,
maintains a division between the mind and body, and privileges “objec-
tive” data over that which is “subjective.” As Sarah McFarland Taylor
discovered during the course of her research with “Green Nuns,” shuck-
ing garlic, mulching, weeding, and harvesting organic produce alongside
Catholic Sisters provided her with a privileged entrée into their life-
world (2007). And Susan Ridgely Bales discovered that her own embo-
died comportment—how she sat, how she wore her long curly hair—
around the children taking First Communion courses allowed her to
enter the lifeworld of these Catholic children and their adult mentors
(2005).
Yet even though Bourdieu’s concept of habitus has been discovered
and effectively used by Religious Studies ethnographers such as Taylor
and Bales, a more intensive phenomenology remains largely undiscov-
ered and underused. With an ever-increasing number of Religious
Studies ethnographies being published these days, the time seems
ripe for a more intentional turn to embodied phenomenology. Like
Haberman who felt the need to push his body to understand the
religious world in which he was immersed, I felt that I had to challenge
my body when I was at the shrine. I demonstrated my good intentions
by kneeling for as long as the rosary session, which could last for over
an hour at the backyard shrine. The problem with this was that I was
scheduled to have surgery on my knee around this time and the kneel-
ing created intense pain in my knee ligaments. The thin carpet remnant
I kneeled on did little to cushion the pain and I marveled at those
beside me who knelt without using any cushioning whatsoever. The
Ruizes, devout Catholics, all knelt during the rosary, and being an
honorary kin, a “spiritual daughter” to their family, it seemed expedient
to me that I participate and to be a “good daughter” by kneeling as
they did.
Through my kneeling and genuflecting at the shrine, I gained a
sense of other pilgrims’ experiences, and how they understood sacrifice.
Physical pain as they understood it was nothing next to the glories they
would experience in heaven. Their pain was their “cross” that they took

up to show their love and devotion for Mary and her son Jesus. For the
Ruiz family and the pilgrims who went to the shrine, discomfort and
pain were intrinsic parts of the experience and strengthened their bond
with Jesus, Mary, and the saints. What Ariel Glucklich calls “sacred
pain” connected pilgrims with each other, giving them a sense “of
belonging to a larger community” (Glucklich 2001: 6). Reyes, Estela’s
husband, would implore the audience to endure a bit of discomfort for
the “Blessed Mother,” the Virgin Mary, and I had no desire to ignore
his plea—in fact, I was so self-conscious that I felt that he was looking
directly at me when he said this. Yet I must not have been completely
off target, for my efforts were noticed, and my tenacity reaped ethno-
graphic rewards in addition to the greater understanding of pain, suffer-
ing, and sacrifice. After one particular rosary, Reyes beckoned me to an
adjacent lawnchair to discuss his upcoming pilgrimage to Medjugorge.
His offer to engage me and the subsequent invitation to stay for dinner
were a result of my bodily participation in the group prayer session—
my immersion in the lifeworld of prayer and petition. Reyes told me
that he was impressed that I had honored their faith and more impor-
tantly, he said, la Virgincita by “praying muy fuerte.” Engaging bodily
in their religious world led to a breakdown of emic and etic identities
and made the ethnographic work more complex and rewarding because
I was no longer merely an observer but a sincere participant seeking to
understand and to experience what the Ruizes and pilgrims to their
shrine were.
Embodied ethnography, then, can break down barriers of emic and
etic and can show how fluid those boundaries can be if we engage our
whole selves in our fieldwork. As my participation in the backyard
rosaries increased, so did the responsibilities that were given to me. By
the time of the fifth annual retreat for Our Lady of the Americas, I was
part of the planning and subsequent activities and was asked to be one
of the flashlight guards during the candlelight vigil to end street vio-
lence in the community. Walking on poorly lit, busy roads, I took this
job seriously and made certain that the pilgrims stayed on the sidewalks
and helped lead songs of prayer to the Virgin of Guadalupe. It was
during this time that several participants in the mile-long trek spoke
with me about their experiences with the Virgincita. These conversa-
tions were not initiated by me, it was our collective experience of
walking in the night together with the soles of our feet crunching gravel
and broken glass that made us, and our bodies, one in the procession.
In this instance, through embodied ethnography, I transcended the
insider/outsider dichotomy and walked and talked with other pilgrims.
I was simply a fellow pilgrim who was showing my respect for la Virgin

de las Americas.
The weekend-long Mary’s Ministries faith course which culminated
in the weekend celebration of the Virgin Mary’s apparitions to Estela
Ruiz was physically demanding, yet I left the retreat with a sense of
accomplishment that I had not experienced before. This stemmed
directly from my embodied involvement in the retreat. I cooked and
served food to hungry pilgrims; offered water to those who were thirsty,
walked the streets of South Phoenix at night, and helped to clean up
afterward. I did all these things with other women and men who were
devotees of the Virgin. Deidre Sklar has written about her experiences
cooking and cleaning with Mexican American women in New Mexico
and how making albondigas, meatballs, with women helped her to
understand the circularity of devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe
(Sklar 2001: 78). Like Sklar, the sociologist of religion Courtney Bender
cooked and cleaned alongside her interlocutors. She worked alongside
volunteers at a soup kitchen for AIDS victims. Her entrée into the lived
world of the kitchen and the larger aims of the nonprofit group that
ministered to those with AIDS was through her bodily engagement
(Bender 2003). Like Sklar and Bender, through my body, I gained an
entryway into cultural dialogue—I had willingly and wittingly offered
my services and what resulted was astounding. My tired body was a site
of knowledge and I returned to those embodied experiences when I
wrote up my fieldnotes and later, the book. The insights I had gained
via my bodily interactions with my interlocutors would have never been
possible through observation alone.
Carolyn D. Smith and William Kornblum’s collection of essays
show how embodied narration can yield fresh insights into lifeworlds—
and into the researchers’ positionality. The essays are reflexive, thought-
ful, and take on a phenomenological stance. Barbara Myerhoff, while
working with elderly Jews at a California Senior Citizen’s Center writes
about her constant, nagging awareness of her youth and the accompa-
nying flexibility of her body. She attempted to experience what her
elderly friends did on a daily basis by imposing bodily restrictions on
herself, voluntarily. She writes
At various times, I consciously tried to heighten my awareness of the

physical feeling state of the elderly by wearing stiff garden gloves to
perform ordinary tasks, taking off my glasses and plugging my ears,
slowing down my movements and sometimes by wearing the heaviest
shoes I could find at the center. (Myerhoff 1989: 87)
Myerhoff, in mimetic actions, experienced the panic and fear of falling,

blurred vision, and fuzzy hearing. Through attempting to put herself,
quite literally, in others’ shoes, she elucidates the enriching quality of

the bodily experience in fieldwork. With her end goal as depicting her
friends’ fears, laughter, hopes, and despair, and cosmology, she incor-
porated her body in a manner that she felt helped to understand the
lived experience of the elderly. Myerhoff found it impossible to separate
her mind from her body when she was conducting her research and
from the lived worlds of her interlocutors. She willingly embraced the
lifeworld of the Center, and involved her whole self in her interlocutors’
lifeworlds. Involving our whole selves as ethnographers is imperative
if we are to write ethnographies in which our interlocutors see
themselves.
A FINAL CALL FOR EMBODIED, PHENOMENOLOGICAL

ETHNOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES
I would like to end this article by reflecting on a final ethnographic
moment that illustrates how our bodies and our interlocutors’ bodies
are important texts that should be taken seriously as sites of knowledge
and epistemological inquiry. It was the 1998 December retreat to cele-
brate the Virgin of the Americas’ apparitions to Estela Ruiz. I had been
asked by Armando, one of Estela’s sons, to carry the statue of Santo
Niño from the Virgin’s altar to the front of the procession and was in
the process of following his request. When I stepped down from the
altar, a small group of Mexican women surrounded me, effectively pre-
venting me from walking any further. As I held the plaster statue
dressed in a golden cloak and blue velvet dress, these five women bent
down and kissed the saint, stroked it lovingly, and murmured “Santito!”
and “Santo Niño, que precioso!”13
After addressing the little saint, the women also made the sign
of the cross and bowed their heads, showing respect for him; famili-
arity did not offset their respect for Santo Niño. These women,
13
Oktavec (1995: 3–42) discusses Mexican Americans’ devotion to saints and the relationships
they form with them.
who were maintaining relationships they had forged with the saint,
were demonstrating what Kay Turner calls the “aesthetic of connect-
edness.”14 As I stood there, holding the statue surrounded by this
group of devoted women, I watched them as they cried, prayed, and
tenderly touched the statue; my body, though connected to theirs
through the statue, was part of their circle of prayers and devotion
and allowed me a privileged glimpse into their intense Catholic
devotions, one that I will never forget. Their devotion to this saint

was moving and beautiful, and literally impressed itself on me.
There are certain moments in doing ethnography that stand out
from the rest, for me, it was those in which my body was a
medium for understanding this Mexican American world. Like the
Mary’s Ministries initiation experience in which I crawled under the
rope to the “Holy Spirit,” I decided to include this experience in
the book because, like my appendicitis experience, it granted me a
fuller understanding of the religious world and, ultimately, how my
ethnographer’s body was connected to the embodied religion of
these women and men (Nabhan-Warren 2005).
Without the use of my body throughout my fieldwork experi-
ence and without understanding how faith is infused and contested
in bodies, I would have never gained a sense of the lifeworld of the
Mexican American Catholics with whom I worked. As Merleau-
Ponty asserts, we are never separated from others, and the “I” is
intimately joined to the “we.” A fieldworker does not engage in
work by herself, for she is connected, whether she fully realizes it
or not, to overarching narratives of meaning within the lifeworld.
Ethnographers engage in “thinking poetically”; “keeping alive a sense
of what it means to live in the world one struggles to understand,
rather than treat that world as a text or abstract object of contem-
plation” (Jackson 2007: xii). In our struggle to understand our inter-
locutors’ lifeworlds, and our place in it as ethnographers, turning to
our bodies is a way of thinking poetically and moreover, going
along with the rhythms of everyday life as it is lived.
Throughout this essay, I have been referring to our bodies as
mediums for our understanding of others’ worlds. I have tried to show
the particular insights of a phenomenological perspective, suggesting
that we assume a phenomenological approach to knowledge. By turning
to our bodies and our interlocutors’ bodies as sites of deep knowledge
14
Turner (1982: 310) and (1999) explores the connectedness Mexican American women form
with saints and deities.
and understanding, we can do and write better, more epistemologically

based ethnographies. Religious Studies ethnographers can gain a deeper
appreciation of the myths, rituals, and symbols we encounter in the
field if we relax our dependence on the theories we bring with us to the
field and let our hands, feet, eyes, and hearts lead the way. We need to
think poetically; our bodies and our interlocutors’ bodies are poetics,
voices through which we relate to each other, and from which we
engage in their lifeworlds. If Religious Studies ethnographers are indeed

serious about addressing “lived religion,” we must learn from our
bodies and our interlocutors’ bodies, for they are sources of knowledge,
insight, and understanding. The practical effects of a greater turn
toward phenomenological, embodied ethnography will be better, more
honest studies of religion as it is lived.
Ethnography is a “hybrid textual activity” that “traverses genres
and disciplines” (Clifford and Marcus 1986: 26). The process of
writing ethnography, then, must cross inter-textual boundaries, and
thus “see” and “read” bodies as the illuminating texts that they are. I
have learned through a meditation on my own fieldwork endeavors
and by reading in a wide range of disciplines that allowing bodies—
ours and theirs—to speak and to tell, is one way in which we can
reach a phenomenological ethnography. It is one that sees “us” and
“them” as connected, for it is primarily through our flesh, bones,
and blood that we enter into relationships with others, and create
our own webs of meaning simultaneously as we enter into theirs. In
order to grasp the complex realities of our interlocutors’ lived worlds
we must turn to our own complex ways of knowing and our bodies
as one of those rich sites. The field of Religious Studies will be
greatly enriched if ethnographers are able to take that epistemological
leap of faith and trust our bodies and embodied interactions in our
interlocutors’ lifeworlds. They will be able to see their worlds more
clearly, more familiarly articulated in the kind of ethnography for
which I am advocating if we alter our methodological approach and
take on a more expansive view of knowledge.
In the end, responsible and honest scholarship begins with an atten-
tiveness to ethnography’s multifaceted methodology; we are participants
as much as we are observers. At times we are outsiders, yet at others,
we are insiders. We are never fully “outside”/etic nor are we fully
“inside”/emic—ethnographic reality is more of a hybrid of the two. We
must pay attention to what our bodies and our interlocutors’ bodies are
telling us if we are to write ethnographies that come closer to the truths
of our interlocutors and their lifeworlds, as well as our own intentions
and agendas.
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Embodied Research and Writing:

A Case for Phenomenologically

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In this article, I examine anthropological and phenomenological the-

The theory of the body schema is, implicitly, a theory of perception.

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BODIES IN THE FIELD

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At the time I was working on my dissertation, there were few sources

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dead) religious and spiritual practices, I want to see Religious Studies

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ENTERING THE LIFEWORLD THROUGH EMBODIMENT

embodied way. We do not need to imagine because we can experience.

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to embodied knowledge—ours and theirs—can lead to a more complete

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the field of phenomenological inquiry and ethnography, Michael

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reached a greater understanding of some Mexican American Catholic per-

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TAKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH

give a direct description of our experience as it is, without taking

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When Religious Studies scholars turn to phenomenological works

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“objective” because embodied experiences are taken to be subjective and

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empiricism as does Bourdieu. While Bourdieu’s habitus is helpful and

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MOVING BEYOND VIEWING THE BODY AS DETACHED

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Our bodies, as the philosopher Ludwig Binswanger has noted, are

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space to reflect. As Jean-Paul Sartre has written, “our very existence

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FROM CARTESIAN DISEMBODIMENT TO EMBODIMENT:

Comparing Evans-Pritchard’s account with Bronislaw Malinowski’s

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The contrast between the two approaches to the body is striking,

Malinowski, like the more contemporary phenomenologists and eth-

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THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL, EMBODIED TURN

personal insight which weighs heavily on his and his interlocutors’

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At various times, I consciously tried to heighten my awareness of the

Myerhoff, in mimetic actions, experienced the panic and fear of falling,

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A FINAL CALL FOR EMBODIED, PHENOMENOLOGICAL

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and understanding, we can do and write better, more epistemologically

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1965 Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the

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Leder, Drew The Absent Body. Chicago, IL: University of

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Rabinow, Paul Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley:

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