This page was created by Craig Dietrich.  The last update was by Will Luers.

The Father Divine Project

Methodology: Reflexive Ethnography

Contemporary studies of American religious folklore place an emphasis on describing, analyzing, and comparing the culture of communities defined by their religious belief systems. Such communities can be defined through shared geography; age; gender; economy; occupation; leisure; and medical, political, or other beliefs. Religious folklore stresses the significances of aesthetic or artistic creativity and creation; historical process; the varieties of construction of mental, verbal, or material forms; and the enduring relationship and subtle balance between utility and creativity to such forms within cultures. The methodology of religious folklife includes exhaustive historical research using all available historical sources as well as field studies including ethnographic observation, thick description, and interviewing. This method and subsequent analyses allows people to speak for themselves using their own aesthetic and classificatory systems "" at times influenced by, but often outside of, reified institutional or intellectual structures — to explain their religious beliefs and practices, and, thereby, influence those scholars who have been given the privilege to know, understand, appreciate, and learn from their religious lives. The argument being made here, growing out of the above perspective, is on the surface quite simple; namely, to study American religious communities fully, one needs to consider expressive culture first and foremost.

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