Ethnography, Ecclesiology, and the Ethics of Everyday Life: A Conversation with the Work of Michael Banner

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-171
Author(s):  
Samuel Tranter ◽  
David Bartram Torrance

This article begins by introducing recent work by Michael Banner, who advocates the use of social anthropology generally (not just the anthropology of Christianity) for the Christian ethics of everyday life. His use of ethnography in Christian theological ethics is then situated in relation to recent discussions in ecclesiology and ethnography. Situated thus, Banner’s work forms the springboard for a brief discussion of what is at stake for theological ethics in turning to ethnographic research. While some dangers are highlighted, a way forward is offered for the fruitful use of ethnographic research in this field.

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-118
Author(s):  
G.C. Den Hertog

Michael Banner’s The Ethics of Everyday Life begins by sketching his understanding of contemporary moral as ‘hard cases ethics’, especially in its connections with the rise of Western European moral theology in the slipstream of the penitentials, a development which led to an estrangement from everyday life. With the help of a recently developed approach in social anthropology Banner reframes Christian ethics and brings it back toeveryday experience. He argues that intense and extensive Christian reflection within the Christian tradition on the life of Christ is a resource of prime importance for Christian moral theology, one which will stimulate the human imagination.


Author(s):  
Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

The concept of shape is widely used by musicians in talking and thinking about performance, yet the mechanisms that afford links between music and shape are little understood. Work on the psychodynamics of everyday life by Daniel Stern and on embodiment by Mark Johnson suggests relationships between the multiple dynamics of musical sound and the dynamics of feeling and motion. Recent work on multisensory and precognitive sensory perception and on the role of bimodal neurons in the sensorimotor system helps to explain how shape, as a percept representing changing quantity in any sensory mode, may be invoked by dynamic processes at many stages of perception and cognition. These processes enable ‘shape’ to do flexible and useful work for musicians needing to describe the quality of musical phenomena that are fundamental to everyday musical practice and yet too complex to calculate during performance.


Author(s):  
Anna Krawczyk

Turner syndrome (TS) is a chromosomal abnormality that affects exclusively girls and always results in a short stature . This article is based on an ethnographic research whose main objective was to look into the narratives and daily practices of Polish girls diagnosed with TS . The article describes strategies adopted towards the bodily manifes- tations of TS in everyday life of Polish teenagers diagnosed with this condition . In this paper, I explore the meanings and practices around normalization of Turner Syndrome which are being negotiated in the process of socialization of children with TS .    


2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 311
Author(s):  
Atun Wardatun

This article draws on an ethnographic research that focuses on the cultural practice of female-paid matrimonial funding, ampa co’i ndai (ACN), among semi-urban Bimanese Muslims of Eastern Indonesia. The practice takes place when the bride, with the help of her parents and female relatives, pays her marriage payment (co’i, including mahr). It is used only when the prospective groom is a government employee, for it is assumed as a social status raiser. During the declaration of marriage, the payment is announced to have come from the groom. This article uses the practice as a site to examine the particularity of practising Islamic laws in everyday life of eastern Indonesian Muslims. The narratives of nineteen Muslim women who have been involved in ACN reveal what its functions as an equalising mechanism, through which gendered power-relations is minimised while perpetuating traditional position of wives and husbands as a complementary couple within their family as well as before society. I argue that  ACN has been seen as a modified understanding of kafā’a in fiqh which means “equality” to “complementarity.” However, this local understanding of kafā’a is a testament to the complexities of gender power relations.[Artikel ini adalah penelitian etnografi tentang praktik AMPA co’i ndai (ACN) di kalangan masyarakat semi-urban muslim Bima di kawasan timur Indonesia. Budaya ini dilaksanakan dengan cara pengantin perempuan, dengan bantuan orang tua dan saudara perempuannya, menyediakan biaya pernikahan (co’i dan mahar). Tradisi ini dipraktikkan hanya ketika calon pengantin pria adalah pegawai negeri, yang diasumsikan memiliki status sosial yang lebih. Namun, saat resepsi pernikahan, deiumumkan bahwa biaya-biaya berasal dari pengantin pria. Narasi kehidupan dari sembilan belas perempuan yang terlibat mengungkapkan fungsi ACN sebagai mekanisme penyetaraan gender dengan meminimalkan relasi kuasa serta nmendudukkan pasangan untuk saling melengkapi dalam keluarga maupun masyarakat. Praktik ACN dapat dilihat sebagai bentuk lokal pemahaman konsep kafā’a, yang berarti “kesetaraan” untuk “melengkapi”. Namun, pemahaman lokal kafā’a ini merupakan bukti kompleksitas relasi kuasa dalam masalah gender.]


2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas Adelin Jørgensen

Abstract The anthropology of Christianity is claimed to be a recent innovation in the discipline of social anthropology and focuses on the study of Christian forms of life. The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to identify the nature of the anthropology of Christianity; second, to focus on converging themes in the anthropology of Christianity and missiology as academic disciplines; and third, to offer an interpretation of what such convergence might imply for the future of missiology.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 28-54
Author(s):  
Zuzana Bártová

Abstract This paper contributes to the sociological theorization of religious lifestyles in consumer culture, analyzing one of its most important identity markers: style. Based on a three-year comparative ethnographic research project into five convert Buddhist organizations in France and the Czech Republic, it finds that style is expressed through aesthetics with its adornment practices apparent in everyday life materializations of Buddhist symbols. The stylistic dimension is also found in practitioners’ attitudes towards Buddhism, as they may use the discourse of taste. Moreover, Buddhist style stands for the collective, coherent, and systematic emotional patterns expressed in Buddhist symbols, individual and collective experiences, and the ethics and behavior they display in everyday life. The paper also explores how this style is adapted to the educated, middle-class, city-dweller practitioners and how it respects dynamics of consumer culture with its emphasis on identity, style, and values of well-being, authenticity, and personal development.


Author(s):  
Noah J. Toly

In The Gardeners’ Dirty Hands: Global Environmental Politics and Christian Ethics, Noah Toly engages the resources of Christian theological ethics to identify, explore, and respond to the most salient feature of contemporary environmental challenges. In conversation with contributions to Christian ethics, Toly argues that modern environmental thought, global environmental governance, climate change, and the Anthropocene are characterized by a struggle with the tragic, which may be described as the need to give up, forego, undermine, or destroy one or more goods to possess or secure one or more other goods. Drawing upon the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Toly develops a “Cruciform imaginary” that should inform our responses to the tragic.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (10) ◽  
pp. 2119-2139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryll Ruth R Soriano ◽  
Hugh Davies ◽  
Larissa Hjorth

This article examines the use of Let’s Play (LP) in Manila, Philippines. LP is an emerging genre in which players record, narrate, and broadcast video game play online. While in Western contexts LP is predominantly viewed in domestic settings, our focus is on the distinct manner in which LP is viewed in the Philippines, resulting in unique social architectures of play that coalesce public and private practices. In particular, the arcade-style vending machine, pisonet (a conflation between the Filipino piso [currency] + inter[net]), plays a key role in shaping net cultures within everyday life. Through the pisonet, unique forms of performative play happen in and around the watching play of LP. These types of performativity around LP see intergenerational and public forms of play, spectatorship, and surveillance entangle. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Metropolitan Manila, this study aims to conceptualize how public spaces, screens, and play—through the LP on pisonets—bring about unique modes of sociality and surveillance of care. In doing so, this paper complicates established viewership models of LP, exploring how their manifestation in Manila gives rise to a particular type of Filipino sense of play.


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