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Paper short abstract

This paper examines methodological issues in the ethnography of private rosary practice among Catholic mestizo women in Argentina. Considering interviews and micro-phenomenology as methods, it reflects on the limits and possibilities of accessing subjective devotional experience.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the methodological challenges raised by the ethnography of the private and individual practice of the rosary among Catholic mestizo women in Salta, Argentina. The rosary is a devotional practice based on the repetition of prayers alternated with the enunciation of episodes from the life of Jesus. Under the influence of Jesuit spirituality, these women make an additional effort to visualise the scenes of the evoked episode, picturing themselves as internal observer. This imaginative work is central to their devotional experience and raises specific ethnographic questions concerning access to and description of inner practices.

To explore this inner experience, I conducted a series of long, in-depth semi-structured interviews, as well as a more focused interview centred on the lived experience of meditation, inspired by micro-phenomenological approaches. I argue that while this method can provide valuable insights into the subjective experience of meditation, it is also a relatively invasive and rigid approach that risks compromising the ethnographic attention to human relationships by positioning the ethnographer in a hierarchical role akin to that of an experimental conductor. However, by adapting the method to the fieldwork context and combining it with less directive approaches, it was possible to collect innovative ethnographic data. This strategy, for instance, made it possible to map some of the visual traces that compose these mental images, including devotional artworks and fragments of semantic memory.