Ethnography is qualitative method for researchers to collect information and data, and in religious study, researchers are able to immerse themselves with religious communities, ceremonies, traditions and interactions. This methodology allows researchers to gain a deeper understanding of how religion is integrated into different aspects and fabrics of individuals’ lives and societies.
In the methodology of ethnography, researchers can observe participants in religious rituals and activities where they could also participate in. This can make them gain more qualitative data beyond interviews or surveys as they could observe the true reactions of people and understand the subjective experience of believers of a specific religion.
Ethnography could help touch on many aspects including social, historical, and political. In the method of ethnography, researchers can explore aspects in person and feel the contexts by themselves, which will help them gain a more truthful understanding. For example, if researchers can explore perspectives by themselves, they might be able to observe phenomenon driven by factors like globalization, colonialism or other socio-cultural environments. Ethnography can also enable researchers to analyze issues driven by authority, imbalanced power, hierarchy, gender, race and other aspects, and can also investigate how religion is being transformed within a culture over time throughout the history timeline.
However, the methodology of ethnography can also face challenges that researchers might be unable to get into close distance with religious communities. Besides, for researchers to gain better subjective understanding to the religious communities, they need to adjust their own beliefs and biases while taking in the perspectives of religious communities. Others, researchers might find it hard to coexist with the community but could encounter some conflicts.
Therefore, ethnology could help researchers to reach more dimensions in religions and get into more aspects of a religious community. However, this methodology requires researchers to have good personality in conducting their research to be intimate with the society to, therefore, be able to gain true understanding.
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