Jamie Barnes, "Stories, Senses and the Charismatic Relation: A Reflexive Ethnography of Christian Experience" (Routledge, 2020)

Summary

Stories, Senses and the Charismatic Relation: A Reflexive Ethnography of Christian Experience (Routledge, 2020) offers a uniquely intimate and auto-ethnographic exploration of Christian experience, rendering a deep, phenomenological account of how devotional worlds become real – how they are experienced, shaped, constituted and performed by those who live them.

The book starts from a reflexive exploration of the author’s own experiences of the divine, considers the spiritual journeys of family members and the ‘spiritual community’ of which he was a part, and draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the southern Balkans where that community was based. Jamie Barnes considers three main elements: firstly, the role that sensory aspects of experience play in constituting one’s lived world and one’s ideas about the kinds of beings inhabiting it; secondly, how stories and metaphors are tactically employed, not only in the process of expressing aspects of past experience but also in shaping and forming both desired worlds and future pathways; thirdly, how such sensed, narrated and lived worlds are tentatively held together - in hope, trust and love – through charismatic relationships of devotion with a divine Other.

Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India.

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Tiatemsu Longkumer

Dr. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a faculty in the Dept. of Anthropology at Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan. He specializes in 'Anthropology of Religion.' Dr. Longkumer's Ph.D. work was on Indigenous religion and Christianity among the Nagas of Nagaland: India. He is currently working on Buddhism in Bhutan.

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