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When the Extraordinary Hits Home
notions of reality and that are yet part of the experience of many peo-
ple in our own and other societies? And how to describe such expe-
riences as a researcher without doing violence to those experiences?
One novel aspect of this endeavor is that whenever I present this re-
search, the question of how I situate myself (my own beliefs) arises,
something that is rarely brought up when one is studying, say, class,
ethnicity, or race, though perhaps it should be. When the subject is
religion, as Hervieu-Léger ( 1993 , 22 ) has noted, there is no high sci-
entific ground from which to speak: whether one is religious, with-
out religion, or worse, has left religion (défroqué), one can be accused
of having a built-in bias. After working in a field where abstractions
such as ethnic group are often discussed by researchers as if they exist
as objects in nature, I now find myself working in an area where what
actors (including researchers) may experience as real is assumed to be
unreal by many in the academic world (cf. Stoller 1989 b).
A few final words on the methodology of the study: to paraphrase
Favret-Saada, ethnographers who distance themselves see their ob-
ject slip through their fingers; at the same time, participation obliges
them to take on the risks of subjectivity.^14 While adopting a largely
subjectivist, “experience-near” (Wikan 1991 ) approach that gives pri-
ority to the individual experiences of others and in which I try to use
my own experience as a basis for better understanding theirs, I have
found it extremely useful to have feedback from a part-time assistant
and several anthropologist friends who have visited the sch and met
Michel.^15 I would add that the methodology of the study includes not
only participation in Spiritualist activities but also many interviews.
Moreover, observations based on various “unobtrusive measures”
(Webb 1966 ) have their place in this type of research: for example,
counting the number of individuals present at each gathering and the
proportion by gender, observing decor, taking note of the turns of
phrase used, and so on. In any case, I see the “experience-near” (Wi-
kan 1991 ), “observation of participation” (B. Tedlock 1991 ) approach
adopted for this research as one that corresponds to its object, the
Spiritualist experience. Had my interest been, for example, the polit-
ical life of this small congregation, more distant, objective methods
might have had a greater place in the study. The question of whether
