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Paper short abstract

Examining two moments from my research in Guatemala– carrying an image of a Catholic saint, and being burned by a ritual fire– this paper argues that anthropologists have much to learn from paying close attention to their own senses of hapsis (touch) and proprioception (bodily position/movement).

Paper long abstract

As Tanya Luhrmann (2010) has observed, becoming a member of a religious community entails a socialized attunement to certain subjective mind-body states as cosmologically meaningful. Over the past two decades, I have drawn on this insight and learned to pay attention to my own embodied experiences as a useful source of ethnographic data in my research on religion among Q’eqchi’-Maya people in Guatemala (Hoenes del Pinal 2022). This paper examines two key moments in my fieldwork– the first, carrying an image of a saint in a Catholic procession; the second, being burned by a fire during a ritual offering to a mountain spirit– to argue that anthropologists have much to learn from paying close attention to their own senses of hapsis (touch) and proprioception (bodily position and movement in space). I argue that committing to a fully embodied form of participant observation is a useful technique of data gathering that supplements more traditional forms such as interviews, and allows ethnographers to better document the religious life-worlds we study. Moreover, developing an analytic language to talk about the embodied experiences one has while carrying out that form of ethnographic work can serve as a means of better theorizing how it is that members of the communities we study come to experience the world in their own distinct ways.