A colleague, who has also done extensive research on religious sects, and I have often pondered on why as nonbelievers we have been so captivated by religion as a research topic. In my own case, I believe that in part my fas- cination with religious groups derives from my attempt to come to terms
with my gradual break from Catholicism during my twenties. Nonethe- less, while I dropped an adherence to the many doctrinal points of Catholi- cism, I did not drop the concern for social justice that somehow the good nuns and priests imparted to me in the process of my religious socializa- tion. The 1960s, alienation from my work as an engineer in the aircraft industry in Connecticut and Washington state, and my search for under- standing the world and hope for playing a part in improving it prompted me to study anthropology. I became intrigued especially with communi- tarian societies in American society because at some level they attempted to construct alternatives to the mainstream culture. In the early 1970s, I conducted sporadic research on a Hutterite colony in South Dakota (Baer 1976b). The Hutterites fascinated me because they are the longest-existing communitarian movement in Western society. While the Eskdale com- mune dates back to 1955, I initially was interested in determining what fac- tors had allowed it to survive longer than the majority of communal groups. In time I also became fascinated by the emergence of the Aaronic Order as a revitalization movement responding to social transformations in Mormonism and the larger American political economy. In conducting ethnographic research among the Levites, I hoped to examine in detail one more small-scale experiment in what Stanley Diamond (1974) terms the “search for the primitive” characteristic of civilized societies. As Marcus and Fischer (1986:133) assert, “The task of ethnographic cultural critique is to discover the variety of modes of accommodation and resistance by indi- viduals and groups to their shared social order. It is a strategy for discov- ering diversity in what appears to be an ever homogeneous world.”
As a critical anthropologist, I have tended at some level to empathize with the little peoples of the world, among whom I count the Levites and the members of Spiritual churches. For this reason, I have been troubled by the generally negative Levite assessment of my interpretation of their history and community. As noted before, the Levites generally disagree with my contention that the Aaronic Order emerged as a revitalization movement that attempted to resurrect the egalitarian and communitarian goals that its initial members believed Mormonism had lost during the twentieth century. The Levites expected me to write an account that pre- sented their view of reality. Indeed, the Chief High Priest told me in December 1986 that he had wished that I had written an account of them that more resembled the work of a social scientist that tends to heavily use such an approach in his ethnographic studies of various religious groups. Apparently many Spiritual people who read my book wish I had used the same approach in writing about their movement. While I attempted to provide an inside, or emic, perspective of their respective worlds in my various writings, I have emphasized a social scientific, or etic, perspective. McGuire succinctly captures the dilemma that I faced as a social scientist:
There is a fundamental difference of perspective, however, between a sociologist and a believer, in that sociologist as sociologist does not accept the believer’s taken-for-granted meanings as a given, but rather as an object of study. This per- spective sometimes implies that the reason members believe is not only because of the truth value of the belief system. Furthermore, sociology must necessarily bracket the crucial religious question—to what extent is the action also from God? (McGuire 1982:20)
If I had been more of an insider, as was Ammerman (1987) in her ethno- graphic study of a Fundamentalist congregation, I may have been able to present a more accurate emic view of the Levite and Spiritual movements. Yet even Ammerman (1987:10), who as a “reborn” Christian (but not a Fundamentalist per se) and as a member of the congregation’s choir, may in the long run also offend some of her subjects because she also analyzes the group in terms of “secular sociology.” The dilemma that I faced in my research endeavor was that many of the subjects wanted me to go native by joining the Aaronic Order or one of a variety of Spiritual churches. Given my perspective, feigning conversion would have been unethical and exploitative, although I realize that it might have provided me with additional insights into the Order or the Spiritual movement. In retro- spect, perhaps I should have been more forthright with the Levites and Spiritual people about my philosophical and political views, although I did not systematically conceal these. Perhaps I should have pursued a strategy of what Gordon (1987:269) terms “empathetic disagreement”— that is “‘getting close (i.e., creating rapport and maintaining field relation- ships)’ . . . by ‘staying distant’ (i.e., highlighting differences between observer and observed).” While to a certain degree I did this, I did not carry it to its logical conclusion, perhaps because I feared that the Levites would have asked me to terminate my study of them and also because at the time I was still a novice fieldworker. I did not ask the Levites what they thought about my working hypothesis that their organization emerged as a revitalization movement or Mormon sect. In light of this admission, it indeed seems ironic that in the spring of 1975 a middle-aged Levite man said to me during an interview, “I wish I could read your mind: I wonder if you think that the Aaronic Order is like early Mormonism.” The remarks that I quoted from Eskdale’s high school principal and the comments of Eskdale’s Acting Priest suggest that at least some Levites may have been more open to empathetic disagreement than I recognized during the period of 1973–76.
In the case of my research on Spiritual churches, I became more open with their members about my perspective in the later stages of my research on their movement. Ironically, it was the pastor and the members of a Spir- itual congregation—one that I had never even heard about—that prompted me to engage in such dialogue. It is difficult to say to what
degree we could engage in the type of dialogue that I was able to establish with the pastor and members of the Redeeming Church of Christ in Chicago. One incident suggests to me that the potential exists for such an ongoing dialogue of empathetic disagreement with many, but by no means all of the, religious groups that form the objects of our social scientific research, ethnographic or otherwise. This was made apparent to me again in an in-depth conversation that I had in August 1987 with Dr. Logan Kearse, the president of the Metropolitan Spiritual Churches of Christ and the pastor of the Cornerstone Church of Christ in Baltimore. While he dis- agreed with much of the interpretation presented in my book about the Spiritual movement, we were able to engage in a lively and open discus- sion on a topic of mutual interest. In the final analysis, my conversation with him and experiences with other Spiritual people and the Levites of the inability of ethnographers to “inhabit indigenous minds . . . is a permanent, unresolved problem of ethnographic method” (Clifford 1988:47).
NOTE
1. For examples of this emergent interdisciplinary phenomenon, see Vidich, Bensman, and Stein (1964); Spindler (1970); Glazer (1972); Freilich (1977); Georges and Jones (1980); Messerschmidt (1981); Marcus and George (1986); Van Maanen (1988); Rose (1989); Smith and Kornblum (1989); Atkinson (1990); Sanjek (1990); DeVita (1992).
REFERENCES
Ammerman, N. Tatom. 1987. Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Atkinson, P. 1990. The Ethnographic Imagination: Textual Construction of Reality. Lon- don: Routledge.
Baer, H. 1976a. “The Levites of Utah: The Development of and Recruitment to a Small Millenarian Sect.” (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Utah).
———. 1976b. “The Effect of Technological Innovation on Hutterite Culture.”
Plains Anthropologist 21:187–97.
———. 1977. “The Levites of Utah: A Twentieth-Century Attempt to Rejuvenate Mormonism.” Proceedings of the Central States Anthropological Society, Selected
Papers 3:9–16.
———. 1978. “A Field View of Religious Conversion: The Levites of Utah.” Review
of Religious Research 19:279–74.
———. 1979. “The Aaronic Order: The Development of a Mormon Sect.” Dialog: A
Journal of Mormon Thought 122:57–71.
———. 1980. “An Anthropological View of Black Spiritual Churches in Nashville, Tennessee.” Central Issues in Anthropology 20:58–68.
———. 1981. “Prophets and Advisors in Black Spiritual Churches: Therapy, Pal- liative, or Therapy?” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 5:145–70.
———. 1984. The Black Spiritual Movement: A Religious Response to Racism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
———. 1985. “Black Spiritual Israelites in a Small Southern City: Elements of Protest and Oratory.” Southern Quarterly 23(3):103–24.
———. 1988a. Recreating Utopia in the Desert: A Sectarian Challenge to Modern Mor-
monism. Albany: State University of New York Press.
———. 1988b. “The Metropolitan Spiritual Churches of Christ: The Socio- Religious Evolution of the Largest of the Black Spiritual Associations.”
Review of Religious Research 30:140–50.
Baer, H., and M. Singer. 1981. “Toward a Typology of Black Sectarianism as a Response to Racial Stratification.” Anthropological Quarterly 54:1–14. ———, eds. 1988. Black Religion in the Twentieth Century. Special Issue of Review of
Religious Research 29(4).
———. 1992. African American Religion in the Twentieth Century: Varieties of Protest
and Accommodation. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Barker, E. 1984. The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Bastide, R. 1978. The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpretation
of Civilization (trans. H. Sebbzk). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Buchanan, F., and L. Stott. 1974. “The Eskdale Commune: Desert Alternative to Secular Schools.” Intellect: Magazine of Educational and Social Affairs 102:226–30.
Clifford, J. 1986. “On Ethnographic Allegory.” Pp. 98–122 in Writing Culture: The
Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by J. Clifford. and G. Marcus.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature,
and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Conrad, T. 1990. Review of Recreating Utopia in the Desert: A Sectarian Challenge to Modern Mormonism by H. Baer. Western Historical Review (May):245–46. Crane, J., and M. Angrosino. 1984. Field Projects in Anthropology: A Student Hand-
book (2nd edition). Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
Crapanzano, V. 1976. “On the Writing of Ethnography.” Dialectical Anthropology 2:69–73.
Davidman, L. 1991. Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism. Berkeley: University of California Press.
DeVita, P., ed. 1992. The Naked Anthropologist: Tales from around the World. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Diamond, S. 1974. In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Fauset, A. 1971. Black Gods of the Metropolis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva- nia Press.
Freilich, M., ed. 1977. Marginal Natives at Work: Anthropologists at the Field. Cam- bridge, MA: Schenkman.
Georges, R., and M. Jones. 1980. People Studying People: The Human Element in
Fieldwork. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Glazer, M. 1972. The Research Adventure: Promise and Problems of Fieldwork. New York: Random House.
Gordon, D. 1987. “Getting Close by Staying Distant: Fieldwork with Proselytizing Groups.” Qualitative Sociology 10:267–87.
Lawless, E. J. 1988. God’s Peculiar People: Women’s Voices and Folk Tradition in a Pen-
tecostal Church. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.
Lofland, J. 1977. Doomsday Cult (2nd ed.). New York: Irvington Press.
Lynch, F. 1977. “Field Research and Future History: Problems Posed from Ethno- graphic Sociologists by the ‘Doomsday Cult’ Making Good.” American Soci-
ologist 12:80–88.
Marcus, George F., and M. J. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An
Experimental Movement in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
McGuire, M. B. 1982. Pentecostal Catholics: Power, Charisma and Order in a Religious
Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Messerschmidt, D., ed. 1981. Anthropologists at Home in North America: Issues in the
Study of One’s Own Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peshkin, A. 1986. God’s Choice: The Total World of a Fundamentalist Christian School. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Richardson, J. T., M. W. Stewart, and R. B. Simmonds. 1978. “Researching a Funda- mentalist Commune.” In Understanding the New Religions, eds. J. Needle- man and G. Baker, 235–251. New York: Seabury.
Robbins, T., D. Anthony, and T. Curtis. 1973. “The Limits of Symbolic Realism: Problems of Empathetic Field Observation in a Sectarian Context.” Journal
for the Scientific Study of Religion 12:249–71.
Rochford, E. 1985. Hare Krishna in America. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univer- sity Press.
Rose, D. 1989. Patterns of American Culture: Ethnography and Estrangement. Philadel- phia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Sanjek, R., ed. 1990. Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Smith, C., and W. Kornblum. 1989. In the Field: Readings on the Field Experience. New York: Praeger.
Snow, D. 1980. “The Disengagement Process: A Neglected Problem in Participant Observation Research.” Qualitative Sociology 3(2):100–122.
Spindler, G. 1970. Being an Anthropologist: Fieldwork from Eleven Cultures. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Van Maanen, J. 1988. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Van Zandt. D. E. 1991. Living in the Children of God. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni- versity Press.
Vidich, A., J. Bensman, and M. Stein. 1964. Reflections on Community Studies. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Wagner, M. B. 1983. Metaphysics in Midwestern America. Columbus: Ohio State Uni- versity Press.
———. 1990. God’s Schools: Choice and Compromise in American Society. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Wengle, J. 1988. Ethnographers in the Field: The Psychology of Research. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Whitehead, H. 1987. Renunciation and Reformulation: A Study of Conversion in an