Modern Homesteading in America: Negotiating Religion, Nature, and Modernity

1999 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 183-212
Author(s):  
Rebecca Kneale Gould
Keyword(s):  
American Culture ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Rural Living ◽  
Literary Source ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
The Face ◽  
Back To The Land

AbstractThis article explores the spiritual dimensions of modern back-to-the-land (or homesteading) practices in contemporary American culture. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, it examines the ways in which nature is sacralised and everyday life is ritualised by those who have chosen to lead lives of partial self-sufficiency in rural locales. Through an examination of oral and literary source material, and several case studies, this study demonstrates the ways in which nature is constructed as a source of meaning and authority for those who are disaffected from traditional religious institutions. This article also seeks to unfold the complexities involved in living `close to nature', such as the dangers in seeing 'natural living' as the only standard for the moral life and the tendency for 'back to the land' practices to be advocated by those whose class location is a privileged one. The analysis offered here is intended as a point of access into broader tensions in American culture: between traditional and alternative forms of religious practice, between the idealisation of rural life and the realities of rural living, and between the desire for freedom and the desire for self-imposed constraint in the face of modernity.

Butinage: The Art of Religious Mobility

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yonatan N Gez ◽  
Yvan Droz ◽  
Jeanne Rey ◽  
Edio Soares
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Foraging Activity ◽  
French Word ◽  
Pollinating Insects ◽  
Shed Light

Based on comparative ethnographic research in four countries and three continents, Butinage: The Art of Religious Mobility explores the notion of "religious butinage" as a conceptual framework intended to shed light on the dynamics of everyday religious practice. Derived from the French word butiner, which refers to the foraging activity of bees and other pollinating insects, this term is employed by the authors metaphorically to refer to the "to-ing and fro-ing" of believers between religious institutions.

‘A Divergence of Views: Attitude change and the religious crisis over homosexuality’

2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 88-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alasdair Crockett ◽  
David Voas
Keyword(s):  
Attitude Change ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
Panel Surveys ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
The Face ◽  
Private Matter ◽  
The Church

British attitudes towards homosexuality have changed with astonishing rapidity over recent decades. Society has managed to assimilate these shifts with relative ease. The Christian churches, however, as repositories of tradition and defenders of inherited values, have been finding it increasingly difficult to adjust to the new environment. The Church of England is internally divided in the face of an external crisis: the Archbishop of Canterbury acknowledges that the global Anglican Communion could split over the issue, and the church faces similar pressures domestically. These events raise important questions about how religious institutions come to terms with modernity. The rapidity of social change, the decline in deference to authority, the increase in tolerance of anything that seems a private matter, and the sense that sexuality is fundamental to the free expression of personal identity, all make it difficult for a church to declare that sexual orientation might disqualify one from ministry or even membership. This paper analyses empirical evidence covering two decades from the British Social Attitudes and British Household Panel surveys. It is apparent that no real consensus yet exists on basic issues of sexual morality. Society as a whole is highly polarised over the question of whether same-sex unions are wrong, with significant and increasing divisions between young and old, women and men, and religious and non-religious. Far from being better placed than others to avoid disputes, Christian churches suffer from compounded problems. The attitudes of lay Christians are starkly and increasingly polarised along the dimensions of ideology and religious practice. This gulf presents a particular problem for churches with both liberal and evangelical wings, notably the Church of England.

Narrated Photography

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-52
Author(s):  
Sarah Dunlop ◽  
Peter Ward
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Research Method ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Lived Religion ◽  
Visual Context ◽  
Textual Material ◽  
Shed Light

This article describes how a recently refined visual ethnographic research method, “narrated photography,” contributes to the study of religion. We argue that this qualitative research method is particularly useful for studies of lived religion and demonstrate this through examples drawn from a study the sacred among young Polish migrants to England. Narrated photography, which entails asking people to photograph what is personally significant to them and then to narrate the image, generates visual and textual material that mediates the subjective. Through using this method we discovered that family was considered to be sacred, both in terms of links to religious practice and a desire for a secure home which family relationships provide. Additionally, narrated photography has the potential to expand our conceptions of lived religion through the inclusion of visual material culture and the visual context of the research participants. In this case the data revealed that the Polish young people view structures within their landscape through a particularly Polish Catholic lens. These findings shed light on the religious tensions that migrants encounter in everyday life.

scholarly journals A Sense of Presence: Mediating an American Apocalypse

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Rachel Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sense Of Presence ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
To Come

Here I build upon Robert Orsi’s work by arguing that we can see presence—and the longing for it—at work beyond the obvious spaces of religious practice. Presence, I propose, is alive and well in mediated apocalypticism, in the intense imagination of the future that preoccupies those who consume its narratives in film, games, and role plays. Presence is a way of bringing worlds beyond into tangible form, of touching them and letting them touch you. It is, in this sense, that Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward observe the “re-emergence” of religion with a “new visibility” that is much more than “simple re-emergence of something that has been in decline in the past but is now manifesting itself once more.” I propose that the “new awareness of religion” they posit includes the mediated worlds that enchant and empower us via deeply immersive fandoms. Whereas religious institutions today may be suspicious of presence, it lives on in the thick of media fandoms and their material manifestations, especially those forms that make ultimate promises about the world to come.

After the Exodus: The New Catholics in Boston's Old Ethnic Neighborhoods

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regine O. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Racial Climate ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Haitian Immigrants ◽  
New Immigrants ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Catholic Churches ◽  
Residential Settlement

AbstractThis article contributes to the growing body of work on the impact of religious institutions on the identities and experiences of new immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia. Drawing from ethnographic research on Haitian immigrants in Boston, I find a relationship between initial residential settlement patterns and the location of Catholic churches. Following Gerald Gamm's Urban Exodus: Why Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed, I argue that Haitian immigrants who arrived in Boston in the 1960s were attracted to certain neighborhoods despite the racial climate because they were Catholic. In addition to the influence of rules governing membership and religious authority, I show that Haitians turned to a Catholic narrative of their experience in Boston because being Catholic was the most acceptable way of being Haitian in that social context.

Social workers’ peculiar contribution to ethnographic research

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 452-468 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald de Montigny
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Ethic Of Care ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Social Work Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Ethical Orientation ◽  
Ethical Practice ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Face

Over generations, social workers have borrowed theories from sociology. However, sociologists have generally avoided borrowing theory from social work. By beginning with social work practice wisdom, we can unfold the complex elements organizing social work practice and by extension ethnographic research. Complexity and resulting uncertainty are antidotes for theoretical purity. Practice as grounded in life, that of client’s and social workers is inherently “dirty”, i.e., messy, disorganized, confusing, unfolding, and uncertain. Understandings and practices are accomplished in a connection of self to a profession, agency/organization, mandate and purpose, and ethical orientation, in interaction with colleagues and clients. Social workers take sides as they are grounded in an ethic of care. The challenge of developing an ethical practice in the face of difference, disagreement, disjunction, and conflict lead social workers to bracket, and hence reflect on the putative coherence of a “life world.” Face-to-face work with individuals rather than being a liability provides a source of knowledge and wisdom to inform social science generally.

Tra ruralizzazione ed urbanizzazione: progetti integrati cittŕ-campagna

TERRITORIO ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 171-177
Author(s):  
Alessandra Giannini
Keyword(s):  
Urban Agriculture ◽  
Agricultural Production ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Rural Living ◽  
Marginal Areas ◽  
Country Life ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Relationship

- Country life is (and has been) the object of utopian visions, set against the rise of urban living. The paradigms of the myth of rural life can be traced back to Howard's Garden City and to Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City. These examples of the paradigm blend into a broader and trans-disciplinary contemporary discourse on the myth of rural living. Since the end of the 1990s, the subject of the relationship between the rural and the urban has developed into plans that could be called ‘country utopias'. The system of agricultural production and the countryside is evolving today towards new forms of integration and hybridisation with urban areas. Planning practices are emerging today in the definition of the characters and traits of urban agriculture designed to create town and country interaction particularly in marginal areas, strips located on the borders between town and country. These modifications are leading to the definition of new rural figures, together with plans capable of giving new life to liminal and marginal areas between town and country by creating new models of ‘rururban' living.

scholarly journals Revisiting notions of sex trafficking and victims

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 274-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriana Piscitelli
Keyword(s):  
Human Trafficking ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Sex Trafficking ◽  
Female Sex Workers ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
International Level ◽  
Work Experiences ◽  
Brazilian Society ◽  
The Face ◽  
International Human

This article examines the migratory processes and work experiences of Brazilian female sex workers active in Spain. It is based on ethnographic research conducted over eleven months, at different moments between November 2004 and January 2012, in Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao and Granada. The principal argument is that the notions of prostitution and international human trafficking held by Brazilian sex workers clash with those found in the current public debate of these issues. Brazilian migrant sex workers' acts and beliefs defy political and cultural protocols on the national and international level, and fly in the face of the 'destiny' that Brazilian society laid out for these individuals.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document