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Embodied Knowledge
rituals and also to the study of other aspects of people’s lives in their
home environment. They take a very different stance as to what is
the appropriate distance or standpoint from which to gain significant
knowledge about the realities we intend to investigate. In Islam Ob-
served, Geertz contended that in the study of religion, we anthropol-
ogists wait for the propitious moment to interview individuals “in a
setting about as far removed from the properly religious as it is possi-
ble to get. We talk to them in their homes, or the morning after some
ceremony, or at best while they are passively watching a ritual” ( 1971 ,
108 ). Geertz reasserts this point in a recent essay when he writes that
“one doesn’t, after all, so much ‘examine’ religion, ‘investigate’ it,
as ‘circumambulate’ it. Skulking about at the edge of the grove, one
watches as it happens” (Geertz 2005 , 13 – 14 ).
The association of moving among others in a stealthy manner to
avoid detection with scientific objectivity or interpretive clarity calls
for forms of control of self and of other. I look, always, from the out-
side. At best, I interview the Other as he walks home away from the
ritual in which he participated. Doing so, I preclude any possibility
of sharing with him the experiences that would have been mine had I
engaged with him in singing or dancing, making offerings, or calling
on the assistance of spirits. Conversely, he knows that he is speaking
to an outsider, someone who cannot speak from experience. What
will he tell me? What will I be able to understand from his account
of his experiences?
Circumambulating religion, or for that matter any social phenom-
enon, removing oneself from ritual settings as much as possible, is to
preclude the possibility of discovering what one would sense and know
from within that setting. This possibility is precisely what experien-
tial anthropologists seek to gain. Contributors to this book gain this
experience not as an end in itself, but as a means to learn firsthand
what people talk about when they describe their lived experience. This
is particularly called for when, among people, “the attitude of ‘do it
and see if it works’ is widespread” (Kawano 2005 , 1 ). Learning how
it works in the “real world” of our hosts is definitely transformative
as illustrated again and again in the following chapters.
