I conducted ethnographic research on ritual, race, evangelical faith, and southern civil religion in the rural West Tennessee community of Bald Eagles. I asked: What can death rituals disclose about Southern evangelical Christianity, civil religion, and the racial politics of this American town? The American public and some scholars fail to recognize the distinctive forms of Evangelical faith, the racialized nature of Evangelical faith and civil religion, and civil religion and how it functions in different communities. Rituals, I suggest, sacralize public and private spaces in this locale. I study how members of two institutions, the Church and civil religion, employ death rituals to reinforce their political understanding.
Death rituals such as American military ceremonials, U.S. civic holidays, and other practices pay homage to ancestry by venerating the dead. In that way they exemplify the faith and civil religious practices of townsfolk. I seek to explain how non-traditional death rituals are central to the functioning of civil religion and to show how evangelical faith undergirds its operation. To do this I used three research methods.
First, I created a macro-level case study of two congregationsone white, the other black. Second, I employed Don Brownings concept of a critical hermeneutic theory of society to generate a thick description of these rituals. Third, I used a (")revised critical correlational(") method to bring psychological and anthropological discourses about ritual spaces into conversation and to enhance each. Five important findings emerged from this empirically-based, social psychological study. I show how these public and private rituals answer the question: (")How should we live?(")
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-03262012-180740 |
| Date | 10 April 2012 |
| Creators | Phillips, Nichole Renee |
| Contributors | Volney P. Gay, William L. Partridge, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Lewis V. Baldwin, Thomas A. Gregor |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-03262012-180740/ |
| Rights | restricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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