Re-thinking the Study of Religion: Lessons from Field Studies of Religions in Africa and the African Diaspora

Three stories, recorded from my field notes, comprise this chapter. These encounters provide insights into how I formulated my work with, and study of religion among, different societies from the African continent. The first occurred in the early 1980s in Ethiopia, when I was studying Ethiopian Jews at the beginning of my academic training. The second took place in the late 1980s, when I was about to begin my PhD fieldwork in Kenya, and the third in Israel with African Christian labor migrants, nearly 20 years later. For 30 years, I have studied Judaism, Christianity, and local religions, mainly through an anthropological and qualitative lens, in Ethiopia, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, South Sudan, Rwanda, Cameroon, and Eritrea. The three encounters served as milestones during these years, forcing me to critically reflect on my understanding of the belief systems I was studying, more specifically to re-think the relations between anthropology and religion, theory and praxis, researchers’ identities and informants’ identities, research missions and daily practicalities. In this chapter, I discuss some major challenges I have faced over the years. Two main issues have kept appearing: (1) Can researchers such as myself, who belong, or are seen as belonging, to specific groups/identities study others who are, or who are seen as, different? And (2) How close is my understanding of the religions I studied, of their manifestations and meaning to the people who believe in these religions, and to those of other researchers? My starting point was that there are more commonalities than differences when conducting fieldwork anywhere in the world, and that the “right” combination of knowledge, research tools, curiosity, empathy, sensitivity, humility, and reflexivity would enable me to conduct scientifically-grounded research, even when the gaps appeared enormous between me and the people I was researching. While writing this chapter, I kept hearing Talal Asad’s1 critique of anthropological work, in general, and anthropology that deals with other people’s