This author event marks the appearance of Personal Knowledge and Beyond: Reshaping The Ethnography of Religion (New York University Press, February 2002), co-edited by James V. Spickard, J. Shawn Landres, and Meredith B. McGuire. One of the co-editors, Shawn Landres, and one of the authors, Melissa Wilcox, will discuss their contributions to this recently published volume of ethnographic research. Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, Personal Knowledge and Beyond will be available for purchase and signing at this event.

Book Description

Over the last decade the sociology of religion and religious studies have experienced a surge of ethnographic research. Scholars now use ethnography, as anthropologists have long done, as a valued source of knowledge from which they draw their pictures of the religious world. Yet, many researchers of religion have yet to grapple with the issues that are changing anthropologists' use of the method. Personal Knowledge and Beyond seeks to foster a cross-disciplinary rethinking of ethnography's possibilities and limits for the study of religions. It provides an overview of recent debates while also pushing them in new directions. In addition, it offers critiques of some of anthropology's reigning conceptualizations.

The volume brings together many of the best-known ethnographic researchers of religion, including Karen McCarthy Brown, Lynn Davidman, Armin Geertz, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Mary Jo Neitz, Thomas Tweed, and Melissa Wilcox. Together, they share substantively from their fieldwork and consider the consequences for the study of religion of rejecting old ethnographic myths, as well as the risks of replacing them with new ones. The volume will be of interest to students as well as to experienced scholars in the field.

About the Co-Editors and Contributors

James V. Spickard is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Redlands. J. Shawn Landres is a doctoral candidate in religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and in social anthropology at Oxford University. Meredith B. McGuire is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Trinity University. She is the author or coauthor of several books, including Religion: The Social Context and Ritual Healing in Suburban America. Melissa Wilcox, Faculty Fellow, Department of Religious Studies, UCSB is the author a Two Roads Converged: Religion and Identity among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Christians (forthcoming) and the co-editor with David W. Machacek of Sexuality and the World's Religions (ABC-CLIO, forthcoming 2002).

This event is cosponsored by the UCSB Department of Religious Studies and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.