Deirdre Meinteloffers remarkably little in the way of community, as the term is gen-
erally understood (e.g., Hervieu-Léger 2001 , ch. 5 ). There are almost
no church-sponsored social activities or events other than church ser-
vices, group meetings, and other occasional events of a religious na-
ture. Yet a community of a sort is formed, especially in the closed
groups that involve repeated encounters with the same individuals.
Members of closed groups often don’t know each other’s last names,
yet they share many moments of communitas (V. Turner 1975 ), deeply
meaningful experiences that are shared with, or at least communi-
cated among, participants.
Participating in a closed group over a number of years has allowed
me to understand that such sharing, though limited to a few hours ev-
ery month, can be felt as more profound, more vital, than the economic
or social interactions usually implied by the term community. In the
closed group, one experiences and shares deeply meaningful percep-
tions that would normally be censored, even within oneself, ones that
often manifest in personal, corporeal ways (see Cataldi 1993 ). Further
contributing to the special quality of this kind of community, such
things happen in a sacred context where spirits, not normally consid-
ered to exist, are acknowledged as social actors. To what extent can
a researcher share in the intersubjectivity that links other participants
in such a context? This is the question to which we now turn.
Us and ThemThe question of alterity has generated a voluminous literature in an-
thropology over recent decades, most of it focused on representation
with little or no reference to how one does fieldwork, with a few nota-
ble exceptions such as B. Tedlock ( 1991 ) and Goulet ( 1998 ). As Ted-
lock notes, representation is not only a matter of how one represents
the Other but how one presents oneself. Experiential ethnographers
accept that it is necessary to “pay attention to their own lives, includ-
ing their inner lives” when trying to understand the experience and
belief systems of others (Goulet 1998 , 254 ). For those of us willing to
“coexperience” religious phenomena with those they study (E. Turner
1996 , xxiii), certain questions remain: how do we know how others