Toward an Ethnography of God

Abstract

In recent years, anthropologists and theologians have been engaging in conversation with one another. Building on, and branching out from, that conversation, this article calls for a careful ethnographic engagement with not just “God talk” (the literal meaning of theology) but also with the figure of God itself. Such a shift can take us from theology as an abstract, scholarly, discursive realm to the messy and often-unpredictable ways in which God shows up in the world. It can attune us to how God appears in concrete social, material, and historical contexts by way of divine interventions, modes of presence, and different forms of mediation. I suggest that the genre of ethnography—skilled at paying attention to the fleeting and emergent and characterized by a generous openness and curiosity—is uniquely suited for engaging with an object like God. Working through some common objections and suggesting ways forward, this article proposes as one possibility an apophatic ethnography—a humble mode of writing that does not insist on proclaiming truths but acknowledges the limits of human knowledge. Without ever being able to capture its object, an ethnography of God can offer glimpses of how the divine is entangled with social and material worlds.