Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre
Abstract
As an anthropologist who studies the religious beliefs and practices of others, I have long
pondered the role that my own religious experience plays in my work, and I am similarly
curious concerning the relationship between personal belief and practice and the
anthropological study of religion in the work of my contemporaries. What follows is a
reflection of these interests. I attempt to survey some current anthropological approaches
to religion in the context of current intellectual trends, particularly in the fields of the
philosophy of language, postmodernism and science, while at the same time advancing an
argument for the distinctiveness of ethnographic fieldwork as a methodological tool that can
give a unique and immensely valuable insight in to the nature of religion as a social fact. This
rests on the premise that the embodied encounter between the anthropologist and the
‘other’, who becomes an object of study, combines internal experience and reflexivity in a
way that has the potential for successful and honest cultural translation, through recognition
of the essentially dialogical and contextual nature of knowledge
