Week 8 - Religion

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WEEK 8 - SUGGESTIONS FOR RITUAL WRITEUP

Our next meeting will be on Wednesday, Oct. 27. You should use this week to catch up on work leftover from previous weeks. This includes submitting revised versions of your social organization chapter, and of the economics chapter. You should also continue working on your life cycle chapter. Before the next meeting you should have completed your four personal interviews, and should have collected material on the life cycle events that are marked. Ideally you should also have observed a ritual but we realize that some of you may not have an opportunity to do this. If you have been able to observe a ritual, aim for a complete draft of the life cycle chapter for the next meeting.
Life Cycle draft should include:

• a description of the events marked by rituals and of these rituals from interviews and Ravuvu

• an analysis and description of one particular ritual you have observed

• a section dealing personal interviews into this chapter (suggestions below).

If you have not been able to observe a ritual, go ahead and write a draft of the other material, and take advantage of the opportunity to get ahead on your independent project and on your religion assignment.
Integrating personal interviews into your life cycle chapter:

You can do this in various ways depending on your interests and on the nature of the material you have collected. If you have interviewed people about their experience of life cycle rituals you can integrate this material into your descriptions of those rituals. However, in most cases, your interviews will probably contain more information on the personal experience of various social roles (e.g. daughter, wife, husband, son, mother, father etc.) than about rituals per se.

One strategy would be to focus on some particular theme running through you personal interviews (e.g. feelings about village life, or feelings about what it is like to be a woman in Fiji) to develop an argument about that theme, and then to use interview material to illustrate your argument. Ideally, there should be some link between this theme and the material you have discussed in the section on life cycle rituals. For instance, most rituals emphasize the ties between social groups (e.g. the father's family and the mother's family) and stress the way the individual is created by and embedded in these broader groupings. Similarly, a common theme in people's comments about their lives is their relationship to the community: many people say that the appreciate the way Fijians support each other but, on the other hand, feel constrained by demands placed on them by parents and other people. Thus, one possible way to integrate the personal material and the ritual material is to describe and analyze the ways that rituals draw together and stress the importance of a community, and then go on to talk about the tensions this creates in individual lives.

However, we recognize that your ability to integrate the material on rituals with your personal interviews will depend on the material you have collected. If you cannot find a way to integrate both kinds of material, you can break your analysis of rituals and your analysis of the personal interviews into two short chapters instead of making them one long chapter. But you will still need to make some argument about your interview material instead of just summarizing it. For instance, if you have interviewed women you might want to make some argument about the constraints on women's lives and the strategies they use to deal with these constraints. Or if people have talked a lot about their feelings about development or village life, you could make some argument concerning these themes.
Religion chapter

We are giving you your assignment about religion now so that you can work on this material at your own pace over the next two weeks. The final chapter (excluding conclusion) of your ethnography will be on the topic of religion. Here you want to proceed as you have done with the others, describing general orienting information at the beginning of the chapter, and then getting into some detail on specific topics related to the topic. Because you are so busy we do not want you to have to do a lot of extra interviewing etc. for this religion chapter, but as usual, the better the information you have the better the chapter will be. We think the best way to do this is to let you decide which topics to go into in some detail (based on what your best information is) but that we will suggest some topics that you might find interesting to write about. Your religion chapter should consist of the general orienting information listed below (most of which you will have collected already) plus material on at least one of the specific topics suggested below. For instance, if you decide to focus on the difference between Methodism and the other denominations like AOG (this would probably be the easiest topic on which to gather information since people talk about it a lot) you should aim for at least one in-depth interview with someone about their decision to convert from Methodism to another denomination. .

General information:

Use census and whatever info you have to suggest how many are Methodist and how many are something else.

Talk about church services, importance of religion to people generally, how they think of it, location and description of the church itself, structure of services, amounts of offerings, etc.

Here are some suggestions for specific topics:

Relation between Christianity and traditional religious beliefs. See if you can find out how a couple people feel about these beliefs and their connection to Christianity. In our village an older man was recently observed dancing naked to the moon, an obvious attempt to enlist the help of spirits to do something bad (like sorcery). Va used some odd language telling us about this, as if she knew she was not supposed to believe in these spirits, but that nevertheless people still tried to enlist their aid, and it sounded as though she herself still believed in their existence, just that she knew she was supposed to think only of God. Part of this is finding out the relation between God and spirits, to see if ancestral spirits are thought to help people with their crops, with fishing, etc. There's a whole range of issues to get into here.

Explore the topic of the life-transforming potential of converting to a religion. Here you'll also likely be addressing the topic of Methodism vs. the Other Denominations. Obviously the best thing to do here would be to get some testimony from someone about his or her conversion. Pay particular attention to the language they use, think about what their Main Message to you about this is, so as to ferret out their main argument in telling it to you. Chances are this is similar to the argument they tell themselves about their own experience. You can also just talk to other people about conversions, about whether they're effective, about whether religion is an important part of making men and women better, and so on.

The relation between religious practice and social obligations. Here you can look into how much of the going to church etc. is seen by people and just part of being a good citizen (this kind of thing we also heard from Va). Here you might also be getting into such things as trying to emulate Europeans and fashion a respectable community. Related to this is the competitive spirit that comes out in the hymn singing competitions, that the church, like rugby, is another way of setting up regimented relations of some sort between villages, based on a competitive model.

This is related to other things above, but you might want to talk specifically about a comparison of Methodism with the other options available in the villages. See if you can get someone to articulate the differences. Are the other religions (AOG, SDA, Word Fellowship, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, etc.) seen as all fundamentally similar to each other as an alternative to Methodism? Or does each have its own character?

READING FOR NEXT WEEK: finish Body, Self, and Society.

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