ABSTRACT
RE teachers stand to benefit from insights arising from ethnographic studies of faith communities. That is the contention of this chapter which first outlines ethnography and then addresses two questions: how does current ethnographic research influence our understanding of what constitutes a religion? And, what are the repercussions of this for resourcing Religious Education and, more fundamentally, for religious educationists’ methodology? In answering this second question we will note the implications of ethnography both for conceptualising religion and for pedagogy. As religious educationists we need to realise that there is a big difference between the lived experience of many who identify as Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs and the ‘Buddhism’, ‘Hinduism’, ‘Islam’ and ‘Sikhism’ as packaged and presented in RE.
