Feminist Inquiry in the Sociology of Religion 287
Institutional ethnography carries out the project of the women’s movement. Smith
argued for a “sociology for women,” beginning with calling for the entry of women into
sociology as subjects. This relocates the sociological subject. Smith asks us to begin in the
everyday and everynight experience of ordinary women. The everyday world is neither
transparent or obvious. The organizing logic of our everyday work lies elsewhere. For
Smith, the job of sociologists is to discover how things are put together so that they
“happen” to us in the ways that they do.
Smith wants us to start from the margins and look toward the centers of institutional
power. In her early work, Smith argued that we should begin our research with “the
standpoint of women” (1987). In Smith’s usage, this did not mean that all women share
one same position. Rather, Smith was saying that analysis begins in the material world
of women, rather than with social theories and concepts which are inherently object-
fiying. When we use standard concepts we see ourselves and the worlds we study from
the outside. Smith rejects the label “standpoint theorist,” because, as the above quote
suggests, she does not see women as a group occupying a site of epistemic privilege.^12
Instead, she argues that we begin with women’s subject location as embodied beings
living in the material world, “situating the inquiry in the actualities of people’s living,
beginning in the experiences of living, and understanding that inquiry and its product
are in and of the same actuality” (1992: 90). It is a way of shifting the ground of know-
ing: Once one acknowledges that knowledge is socially organized, we can see it as an
attribute of individual consciousness (1992: 91). The experience of women is a starting
point, but not the ending point. Smith’s goal is not to analyze individual women but,
rather, to enter into institutions from the position of those who experience them.^13
Smith’s training as a Marxist is apparent in her understanding of social relations.
Social relations coordinate activities through the work that people do. Smith is con-
cerned with uncovering the organizational practices through which ordinary people
orient themselves to institutions. The social for Smith is the concerting and organizing
of activities. While Marx was concerned primarily with the organization of commod-
ity production under capitalism, Smith believes that, at this point, the production of
knowledge, ideology, and discourse constitute an essential aspect of what we need to
analyze to understand the social relations of ruling. Smith sees language as an orga-
nizer of our activities. She has become increasingly interested with how texts mediate
between actual practices (and the work that people do) and the discursive. It is often
through texts that we enter into an institutional order. Smith reminds us that texts are
crucial because power is generated and held in relations which we experience through
texts, including the forms we fill out, or others fill out about us, and the cards that we
carry (1992: 93). Smith offers a method of inquiry that starts with embodied individ-
uals in the everyday and everynight world, looks at the work that they do, and how
texts are present in their lives, mediating between them and the relations of ruling.
The sociology that comes out of this meaning of inquiry is in process. Smith uses the
metaphor of the map:
...The metaphor of the map directs us to a form of knowledge of the social that shows
the relations between various and differentiated local sites of experience without(^12) The idea of the standpoint of women as a site of epistemic privilege is clearest in Nancy
Hartsock’s (1983) feminist revision of historical materialism.
(^13) See Scott (1991) for a discussion of the dangers of focusing solely on experience.