Religion: 6-10 pages based on Islam

Once understood to be exclusively an ethnographic essay, your final project is now a bit broader.. For those of you who were unable to get much fieldwork done, the project can now rely more on academic material (books, articles), while still being grounded in your experiences. So, your project may have been on the Hare Krishna temple; perhaps now it’s on Hare Krishnas in the United States. Your project may have been about a particular youth group in a particular Christian church; maybe now it’s on youth education—or something like that—in the American Christian landscape. Again, your work can inform the research, and you can still artfully add your edited and stylized fieldnotes, but the project will also have a much larger scope. which is now 6-10 pages.

needs to be about some facet of religious life, and it should use multiple sources (articles, books, interviews, fieldnotes, etc.). In general, you will need some sort of introduction, and for sure within a page or two you’ll want to share with the reader what the paper is about. But you don’t need a strictly explicit “thesis statement” (“I will argue…”). I like to start with something very specific–a story, a place, event, person–and then focus out to something more general. The goal in all of this is to be readable and interesting. Along the way, you’ll want to keep your reader interested, and if you have a point you want to make clear, then you should make sure you continue to attend to that point throughout the paper. Wrap it up with a conclusion that brings things together but also makes us think in some new way.

Another way to write ethnography is to read ethnography. Below are two of my articles (one of which you’ve already read). They’re very short, and you can get a sense of my expectations. But think about them in terms of component pieces. How do I use fieldnotes? How do I use quotes? When am I specific? When am I general? How do I connect paragraphs? That’s to say, how does this all work structurally? Again, these are not at all required. Read them if you want.

The first one, which you’ve already read, is the one about goddess possession in NYC. Read here

The second one is about hippies doing Hindu things in Joshua Tree, CA. Read here

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