Sociology and Religion Field Work Assignment

This assignment is designed to stimulate and stretch your powers of observation. Using the Protocol below, write a 4-5-page, double-spaced, and typed essay describing a religious worship service that you attended with the class. The key to this assignment is detail. Use the Protocol to write about the people you observed, who produced the religious event, how the message was delivered, and what it says. Your essay need not follow the order of the Protocol, but it must include discussion of each of the major components. This assignment is also designed to focus your attention on what is externally available to you, the observer. As we watch participants, we cannot know what they are thinking, but we can see what they are doing. The anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, wrote an influential essay titled, Thick Description, in which he stresses the importance of understanding culture as a public event rather than as something locked in people’s heads. Capture as much of those external aspects of the worship service as you can. This part must be descriptive. That is, it must be what you see and hear, not what you think about it; that comes below.

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