ABSTRACT
Ethnography – a method or set of methods typical of tightly focused, or ‘intrinsic’, congregational studies (see Woodhead, Guest and Tusting, this volume) – is not a matter of compiling statistics, testing hypotheses or establishing laws. Rather, ethnography is a facilitation of a more or less believable account of local or contextualized meanings. The central question ethnographers ask themselves is, ‘What does this group do and how do they make sense of what they do?’ (and doing here includes saying). It is about laying bare the processes involved in the production and expression of meaning. Moreover, doing ethnography is, as the eminent American anthropologist Clifford Geertz suggests, a matter of engaging in ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973, ch. 1), offering a detailed, nuanced account of a cultural phenomenon. In my own ethnographic research into a Quaker congregation in northern England (Collins, 1996), I found that, in attending carefully to the nuances of a Quaker Meeting, what became most striking was the economy of story-telling. The facilitation of ‘thick description’ became, in part, a recounting – a re-telling – of congregational stories, and my research an investigation into the role of these stories in the meaning-making process. This paper re-visits this research, reflecting on what became a narrative approach, and foregrounding the processes involved in the telling and receiving of stories as loci in the ongoing construction of congregational identity. I will first give an account of the theoretical underpinnings of narratology, before applying the insights of this approach in an analysis of a Quaker ministry taken from my own fieldwork. This will inform a final discussion of the value of a narrative approach in the broader study of congregations.
