Table Of ContentContemporary Western Ethnography
and the Definition of Religion
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Continuum Advances in Religious Studies
Series Editors:
Greg Alles, James Cox, Peggy Morgan
ContemporaryWesternEthnographyandtheDefinitionofReligion,M.D.Stringer
Fourteen Contemporary Theories of Religion, Michael Stausberg
A New Paradigm of Spirituality and Religion, MaryCatherine Burgess
Religion and the Discourse on Modernity, Paul-Franc¸ois Tremlett
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Contemporary Western
Ethnography and the
Definition of Religion
M. D. Stringer
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First published2008
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Acatalogue recordfor thisbook is availablefrom the British Library.
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Libraryof Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Stringer,Martin D.
Contemporary western ethnography andthe definitionof religion /M.D.
Stringer.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographicalreferences andindex.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-9978-3 (HB)
ISBN-10: 0-8264-9978-3 (HB)
1.Anthropology ofreligion–Great Britain.2.GreatBritain–Religion. I.Title.
GN470.S77 2008
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Foreword
Chatting to Gran at her Grave
InNovember2003IvisitedChinaaspartofasmalldelegationfromthe
UniversityofBirmingham’sDepartmentofTheologyandReligion.We
toured the country, visiting a number of university departments of
philosophy or religion. We prepared three papers beforehand, and
invitedeachhosttochooseonepapertobepresentedtothemintheir
institution. One of my papers, ‘Chatting to Gran at her Grave’,
addressed the question of popular religiosity in Britain, and explored
how British people engage with the dead. This paper proved to be by
far the most popular of those we presented to the Chinese. It was the
one chosen most often, and talked about most excitedly, by our hosts.
This was because I was describing residual religious practice in a
modern Western capitalist society and also, I believe, because it spoke
so personally to many of the students in our audience. In fact, at one
universityitwasthefirsttimeinmylifeastudentleftalectureintears.
When asked what had touched him so much, he told my colleague he
had watched his own grandparents undergoing similar rituals, which
he had been taught to dismiss as ‘ignorance’ and ‘superstition’. Now,
inmylecture,hefoundaWesternscholarwhonotonlylegitimatedbut
alsocelebratedtheactionsofhisgrandparents.Itwasaveryemotional
experience for him.
Over the past half-century or so there has been a steady stream of
books, papers and theses discussing the nature of British religion, or
religioninBritain.Thevastmajorityofthesehaveaddressedquestions
resulting from the decline in attendance at mainstream Christian
churches. This decline has been known for many years, and its inter-
pretation has led the ongoing debate. Summarizing the debate
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viii Foreword
crudely,wecouldsaythatdiscussionuptotheendofthe1980sfocused
on possible reasons why church attendance was declining so fast. This
became known as the ‘secularization’ debate. From the early 1990s
onwards, however, the debate changed subtly with scholars lining up
behind either Grace Davie (1994) who, in a now classic text, argued
that the prevalence of religion in Britain had not declined, but rather
its nature had changed; or Steve Bruce (1995), who used the statistics
to show that not only had church attendance declined, but all other
measuresofreligiosityweregoinginthesamedirection.Morerecently
theargumenthaschangedagain,withaparticularfocusontheroleof
women within this decline (Brown 2001). It is not my intention in the
present text to get caught up in this wider argument.
This particular work began with an attempt to bypass the wider
debate. I am very wary of the argument, based primarily on Davie’s
work,whichsuggeststhatthenatureofreligionhaschanged.Iameven
morewaryofthestarknessofBruce’sstatisticalvision.Mymaininterest
for some years, coming from a starting point of concern for Christian
worship, has been primarily in those who have continued to attend
church, and the religion of minority mainstream Christians in our
society has been my primary focus. My dogged determination in pur-
suingthisinterest,whenallaroundmewerebecomingmoreinterested
in new spiritualities, alternative religions, Charismatic or Pentecostal
churches, the ‘New Age’, raves, or whatever, kept me looking at the
rump of the population who continued to identify themselves as
Anglicans, Methodists, Catholics or United Reformed Church mem-
bers. It is these people, primarily, who populate this book. I was sur-
prisedtofindthat,firstly,farfrombeingsetapartbytheircommitment
totraditionalchurches,suchpeoplewerenotverydifferentfromtheir
neighbours; and, secondly, that traditional churchgoers did or
believed things that many scholars might consider ‘alternative’ or
‘superstitious’.
This discovery, supported by the detailed ethnographic work of my
postgraduate students over the years, led to my paper for the Chinese
universities,andsubsequentlytothisbook.Idonotwanttoarguehere
forasignificantchangeinreligiouspracticeorbeliefinBritishsociety,
from traditional church-based religions to new or alternative spir-
itualities. I do not even want to argue for an increase in pluralism
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Foreword ix
(although this has undoubtedly occurred in British society). My argu-
ment here is one of continuity in an underlying religious sensibility that
washiddenwhenmainstreamChristianitywasthedominantreligionof
our society, but which is now being revealed by the retreat of tradi-
tional Christianity, and subsequent changes among ordinary, com-
mitted churchgoers. I will argue in my conclusion that in studying
religioninBritainwehavefundamentallymisunderstoodthenatureof
‘religion’: to understand what is going on, we need to go back to first
principles.
This work would not have been possible without the contributory
work of many of my research students – those whose work is quoted,
and the many others who are not mentioned by name. As I suggest in
Chapter Two, it is no longer possible for one academic to undertake
enoughprimaryfieldworktomakeanykindofmeaningfulgeneralized
statements about religion in Britain, or very much else. I have been
very lucky in being able to attract a number of high-quality post-
graduate research students over the years who have been keen to
undertake ethnographic fieldwork of their own in many different
communities, and this has produced a set of data that is invaluable to
the wider study of religion, as I hope to demonstrate in what follows. I
need to pay tribute to my students therefore, and to thank them for
their primary research and for their contributions to countless semi-
nars and discussions in which much of the material for this book has
been aired.
Beyondthestudents,Imustalsoacknowledgethecontributionofall
those people who made up the various communities studied by the
students.Eachprojectwascollaborativeinitsownway,drawingonthe
active participation and cooperation of those being studied, so these
people have probably contributed as much to the ideas contained in
this text as the students or myself. In my own fieldwork I must also
recognize the place of the Ardwick Deanery Young Families Project
and the work of Fr Dowden, the other clergy of the Deanery, and the
people of East Manchester who established and worked with the Pro-
ject.Asprojectworkerforfiveyears,Ifoundthatresearchwasacentral
partofmybrief,andsomeofthematerialfromthatfieldworkhasbeen
included in this text. Listening to the young mothers and the older
women of the Ancoats, Ardwick and Gorton areas of inner-city
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x Foreword
Manchester opened my eyes to the possibilities of a different way of
understanding religion and religious practice. This listening has seen
its fruition in the theories outlined below.
I must also acknowledge the contribution of those who, in more
recent years, have commented on parts of this text in a number of
different contexts. I am grateful to the Journal of the Anthropological
Society of Oxford for permission to republish a version of my paper
‘Towards a situational theory of belief’ as Chapter Two. My colleagues
Edmund Tang, Hugh McLeod, Werner Ustorf, Ian Draper, Gordon
Lynch and Matthew Guest have all contributed in different ways to
discussionsandconversationsabout thismaterial.Iam alsograteful to
colleagues at the BSA Sociology of Religion Study Group, the Open
University, Durham University, the University of Portland and, of
course, people of the various universities in China who listened to
papersbasedonelementsofthiswork.Ihavewelcomedandhopefully
engagedwiththeirmanyresponsesandcritiques,althoughIrecognize
thatanyfailingsthatremainwithintheworkareentirelymyown.Greg
Alles, James Cox and Peggy Morgan, the editors of the series ‘Con-
tinuumAdvancesinReligiousStudies’,andthestaffofContiuum,have
also made a significant contribution to the final text, and I am very
grateful for their professionalism and encouragement. I also offer my
gratitude to David, who has had to live with ‘Chatting to Gran at her
Grave’ in various forms over the years, and without whom I would
probably write very little.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this work to my father, who died
duringitsfinalstages.IamnotsurethatheeverfullyunderstoodwhyI
wasinterestedinthestrangeactivitiesofordinarypeopleingraveyards
and,asalways,hemaintainedtotheendahealthyscepticismaboutmy
more theoretical assertions. I hope he would have been amused and
intrigued by this final text.
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In memoriam Peter Stringer, 1927–2007
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