Permission and Providence: Reflections on Fieldwork with Evangelical Street Preachers

• In Event: Faithwork, Fieldwork, Network

Abstract

This paper reflects on fieldwork conducted with three evangelical street preaching troupes working in Boulder and Denver, Colorado between June 2015 and September 2015, focusing specifically on how the traditional problems of ethnographic self-reflexivity are reworked in the tenuous relationships maintained between academics researching evangelicalism in the United States and evangelicals themselves. While researchers often position themselves in the power-laden roles of “observer,” “interviewer,” or “theorist,” the street preachers I worked with regularly observed, interviewed, and theorized back, each insisting that God’s providential hand was using my research to guide me to the preacher’s message and, in turn, my salvation. This notion of providential arrangement came to define, sustain, and eventually end my fieldwork, revealing the complicated and at times contradictory motivations that hold ethnographic relationships together. While an increasing number of scholars are drawing on notions of “lived religion” as a framework for foregrounding the messy, improvised, and embodied business of enacting religion, an honest and layered understanding of the complexities of fieldwork (as one methodological tool for accessing everyday life) lags behind. Fieldwork is itself “lived”—often awkward, unremarkable, and thrown together. Consequently, this paper suggests that in order to cultivate healthy forms of self-reflexivity, scholars must not only study how everyday life is lived, but also study how the study of everyday life is lived.

Author

• Kyle D Byron, University of Toronto