Marburg Journal of Religion
https://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/ep/0004
<p>The purpose of <strong>Marburg Journal of Religion</strong> is to publish articles on empirical and theoretical studies of religion.</p>Institute for Comparative Cultural Research - Study of Religions and Anthropologyen-USMarburg Journal of Religion1612-2941Overall copyright is assigned to Marburg Journal of Religion. Authors retain copyright for individual contributions and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a <a href="/ep/0004/manager/setup/"http:/creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike</a> License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.<br />An author may give permission for an article published here to be published elsewhere, provided that the source is indicated in the form "First published in Marburg Journal of Religion, Volume 00 (year), Number 00".<br /><br /><br />Editorial
https://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/ep/0004/article/view/8692
<p>Fieldwork in Folkloristics and the Study of Religions: An Interdisciplinary Introduction</p>Matthias Egeler
Copyright (c) 2024 Matthias Egeler
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2024-03-212024-03-2125110.17192/mjr.2024.25.8692Doing Fieldwork at Home:
https://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/ep/0004/article/view/8691
<p>Doing fieldwork in one’s own community can be both interesting and complicated. In such research it is always important to be aware of one’s position, both within the community and with regards to the research project. In 2013, we researched stories of álagablettir (Eng. Enchanted Spots) in the Strandir area, Iceland. These enchanted spots are places in nature on which some form of prohibition or enchantment applies, often related to stories of the supernatural, such as hidden people. The article focuses on the methodology of the research, examining both the advantages and complications that can arise when doing fieldwork in one’s community. Mediating the findings of such research back to the community is extremely important. One should not do research on the people of a certain community, but rather with them. Such mediation can also offer an interesting continuance to the project.</p>Dagrún Ósk JónsdóttirJón Jónsson
Copyright (c) 2024 Dagrún Ósk Jónsdóttir, Jón Jónsson
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2024-03-212024-03-2125110.17192/mjr.2024.25.8691When One’s Life Becomes the Field
https://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/ep/0004/article/view/8693
<p>Autoethnography is an ethnographic research method that uses a researcher’s own experiences as data. When an autoethnographic researcher’s and ethnographic researcher’s perspectives are brought together in collaborative autoethnography (CAE), the internal dialogues generated from the researcher’s positions form more diverse analysis of the data. CAE studies personal experiences of the research subject within a culture to produce an ethnographic analysis of the cultural context and implications of the research topic. Conducting CAE demands careful ethical considerations and self-reflection. Being one’s own research subject can be personally exhausting and professionally rewarding at the same time.<br>This paper describes my autoethnographic process in a CAE project conducted with the folklorist Heidi Henriikka Mäkelä. In the case study, we examined forest yoga, affective practices, and the fracturing imageries of forest space in 2020s Finland. The study highlights personal experiences of forest yoga, and at the same time examines them in wider social contexts such as nationally interpreted forest imageries and feminism through an ethnographic dialogue.<br>In ethnographic research, the whole research process is considered a field; however, the multifaceted concept of the field in CAE has remained vague. It is important to understand and outline the field when conducting (C)AE to be able to evaluate validity, reliability, and ethical questions regarding fieldwork. This paper discusses how field(s) were outlined in the case study and outlines benefits and challenges of the method. I argue that the experience of being a research subject provides embodied affective insight on these questions that cannot be achieved otherwise. Autoethnography is a means to achieve this knowledge.</p>Lotta Leiwo
Copyright (c) 2024 Lotta Leiwo
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2024-03-212024-03-2125110.17192/mjr.2024.25.8693Sufi Devotional Aesthetics
https://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/ep/0004/article/view/8694
<p>Through an examination of visual materiality and ritual landscapes, this study takes a multidimensional approach to unraveling the nuances of Sufi devotional aesthetics. It explores the convergence of religion and aesthetics, focusing on the sensory dimensions of religious expression. In line with the methodological trends inspired by the ‘aesthetic turn,’ the aim is to shed light on various facets of ethnographic experience within contemporary Sufi communities in the Balkans. Drawing on insights from a decade of fieldwork, two case studies are presented that illustrate how an immersive, multisensory, and collaborative approach to fieldwork can be effectively used to explore the instrumental role of Sufi mystical experience in shaping devotional aesthetics in the region.</p>Sara Kuehn
Copyright (c) 2024 Sara Kuehn
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2024-03-212024-03-2125110.17192/mjr.2024.25.8694Who Am I and What Am I Doing Here?
https://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/ep/0004/article/view/8695
<p>Doing fieldwork is itself a learning process, and it can be a profoundly educational one, yet it can simultaneously be bewildering, terrifying, and the situation itself can produce an existential crisis. This modest essay talks about my own experiences with such issues. It is organized through a series of cases that include encounters with a ‘last singer’ of kalevalaic poetry in Finland, drum-dancers in East Greenland, a ram-sacrifice in the Republic of Karelia, and a perambulation into digital ethnography. Everyone’s experiences with fieldwork are unique, but these examples illustrate how your imagination of what ‘fieldwork’ is and who is qualified to do it can be a stumbling block that you unwittingly throw in front of yourself. A key point here is that anyone can do fieldwork, and, especially when you are just starting out, it is normal to feel stressed and uncertain, to blunder through situations and make mistakes. I set out my own experiences here with the hope that others can learn lessons from them more quickly than I did. The highlights of these lessons are quite basic: get permissions with full disclosure; take better notes; be aware of ethical issues; if you are there to learn from others, be prepared to find your way collaboratively; don’t underestimate the value of your experiences; and remember to breathe.</p>Frog
Copyright (c) 2024 Frog
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2024-03-212024-03-2125110.17192/mjr.2024.25.8695Spirit Possession and Exorcism in Tanzania
https://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/ep/0004/article/view/8696
<p>This article deals with two things. One, the process of ethnographic fieldwork on spiritual healing and exorcism in Tanzania is recounted from a personal perspective including some discussion of methods employed in participant observation and interviewing. Two, these methods and approaches are reflected upon critically on several levels. How does a German scholar of religion learn to do things and perceive things as a Tanzanian would? How does cross-cultural friendship help to navigate this process? The members of the group in focus, the Marian Faith Healing Ministry, were excommunicated by the Episcopal Conference of the Catholic Church in Tanzania in the 1990s, which makes it necessary to reflect on the researcher’s position in intra-ecclesial politics. And lastly, the disconnect of spirit voices, sensory perceptions and storytelling, on the one hand, and psychiatric explanations of multiple personalities, on the other hand, is reflected upon within the framework of current approaches in the aesthetics of religion.</p>Katharina WilkensAnna Daniel Sanga
Copyright (c) 2024 Katharina Wilkens, Anna Daniel Sanga
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2024-03-212024-03-2125110.17192/mjr.2024.25.8696Research on the historical, cultural and religious significance of a religious object in a museum
https://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/ep/0004/article/view/8697
<p>The focus of this article is an ancestor figure from Nias, western Indonesia, which has been in the Museum of Religions of the Philipps University Marburg since 1932. A missionary from the Rhenish Mission Society Barmen-Wuppertal, Johannes Noll, gave it to the collection on permanent loan at a time when Indonesia was still a Dutch colony. Essentially, my research has two principal foci. One focus is on the Museum of Religions’ archive in Marburg and the missionary who donated the object to the Museum. The other focus is on the island of Nias, where I conducted research for two weeks in March 2023. I was particularly interested in how the time in which ancestor figures disappeared from everyday life and rituals is remembered today. It was a time when the people of Nias had adopted the Christian faith. A third focus of my research was to find out if there is still interest in such figures and whether there is hope of their repatriation. The article opens insight in object studies in the field of religion.</p>Susanne Rodemeier
Copyright (c) 2024 Susanne Rodemeier
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2024-03-212024-03-2125110.17192/mjr.2024.25.8697Pedestrian Research or Walking as Method
https://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/ep/0004/article/view/8698
<p>In the history of religions, both places and stories play a central role: places are where human religious life plays itself out – ‘takes place’ –, while telling stories is one of the main ways how human beings communicate about the invisible others that are gods, saints, spirits, and magic powers. This article will discuss how fieldwork-based research can bring both places and stories together. A substantial category of supernatural storytelling consists in narratives that are connected to specific locations in the physical landscape, such as narratives about manifestations of supernatural entities or foundation legends. The article explains how it can be a fruitful approach to such narratives to systematically walk both the sites and the connecting routes between the sites that these stories are associated with. In analogy to the technique of a ‘close reading’ in the study of literature, a ‘close walking’ of story places can help to establish their contexts in everyday life, including aspects such as land use, economy, social frames of reference, or topography. Sometimes it can even shed light on the composition of narratives, as lines of sight in the physical topography can interrelate with the motifs used in a story.</p>Matthias Egeler
Copyright (c) 2024 Matthias Egeler
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2024-03-212024-03-2125110.17192/mjr.2024.25.8698Cycling as a Fieldwork Aid to Historical Interpretation
https://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/ep/0004/article/view/8699
<p>My focus here is on cycling and its benefits to the historian as a means of historico-geographical understanding. The contribution is intended to supplement Matthias Egeler’s piece in this volume, which emphasises the importance of walking as a fieldwork aid to the interpretation of local legends, whereas my attention is directed at a different means of non-motorised locomotion. The historical period under consideration is the fairly remote, and badly documented, time of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century, particularly as related by the ecclesiastical historian Bede (c. 730), and the setting, of course, is England, and specifically its northern reaches and the Welsh Marches.</p>Clive Tolley
Copyright (c) 2024 Maike Wachs
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2024-03-212024-03-2125110.17192/mjr.2024.25.8699Things to remember when interviewing modern Pagans
https://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/ep/0004/article/view/8700
<p>This essay offers some perspectives on fieldwork not from the usual perspective of the fieldworker, but rather from the perspective of the person being researched, and the author speaks from their experience as someone who is an active Pagan and who has held offices in Pagan groups in the UK and as such has been on the receiving end of field research and of the misconceptions that often bedevil the way that research is directed.</p>Kestrel
Copyright (c) 2024 Kestrel
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2024-03-212024-03-2125110.17192/mjr.2024.25.8700