Nancy Tatom AMMERMAN.   Studying Lived Religion  Contexts and Practices.   New York  New York University Press, 2021  255pp   ISBN 978-1-4798-0434-4  Reviewed by Daniel H. LEVINE, University of Michigan Ann Arbor MI 48109.

When my children were young, one of their favorite books (and mine) was What Do  People Do All Day, by Richard Scarry)  Filled with illustrations, the book followed all kinds of activities that “people” in Busytown  (in this case, cute animal figures)  engage in every day, from cutting hair, delivering the mail and driving cars to  managing a home, playing music, farming,  or working in an office. Everyone is busy in Busytown and all their activities are interesting.  A lot of this flies under the radar of most observers, and may seem unimportant to some, but the point is  that looking  more closely at ordinary life  we can see many things of great value that often go un noticed.

I know it may seem odd to start a review of an academic book with memories of a children’s book, but in a way, Nancy Ammerman is telling us something comparable about religion and how to find it, study it and appreciate its impact. She urges us to look beyond elites and doctrines, beyond formal institutions and affiliations, and to focus our attention on what people do every day that may also and primarily constitute religion. What they revere, how they cooperate, what symbols or objects or songs or places accompany and inform their daily actions.  Ammerman puts it very well: “The religious things people do in private often matter in public” (8) Her book lays out this argument in clear prose and provides valuable guidelines for anyone interested in studying religion in the contemporary world.

Nancy Tatom Ammerman is Professor Emerita of the Sociology of Religion at Boston University. She is the author of many influential books and papers that have done much to reshape the study of religion.  This work continues her long term interest in getting beyond institutions and formal documents to appreciate the resonance of religion in ordinary life.

Looking at, really seeing “lived religion” is of course, not automatic. One cannot just open the door or walk down the street and look around. We need some guidelines on how to find what we think will fit into “religion” in the overwhelming mass of data all around us. In other words, we need a theory. Ammerman addresses this need in a series of chapters on spirituality, materiality, emotions, embodied practice, and aesthetics.  I found her discussion of objects, places and music particularly illuminating. She has thought carefully about the narratives that people construct for themselves, how they work in personal and interpersonal life, and not least, how to get at them in a valid way.  

I wish this book had existed when I embarked on my own research on religion, society and politics in Latin America a half century ago.   At the time, I searched the literature for help on religion in Latin America, on “qualitative research and interviewing” but I found nothing of use. So, I invented my own approach as I went along.  I had to learn how to watch and listen, how to understand the terms ordinary people used to describe life, faith and commitment. I collected ephemera like flyers or pamphlets, I did life histories of ordinary people, and also of clergy and sisters.  In the end I relied heavily on community studies, life histories, lengthy interviews, observation, and a lot of listening.  I learned a lot about the meaning of religion from the people who shared their lives and stories with me.

My  home-made methodology is what Ammerman would call “qualitative”  and gibes well  with the guidelines the author lays out in her excellent final chapter:  “Concluding and Beginning: Methods for Studying Lived Religion”  This chapter includes sections on interviewing, on how to  take notes on the fly and reconstruct them later (as soon as possible) , on how to think about  participant observation, how to attune yourself to peoples’ language, on ephemeral documentation like flyers or pamphlets,  how to identify   revered objects. I found her discussion of aesthetics, music, and the materiality of religion to be particularly illuminating. This final chapter, and indeed the whole book will be useful to anyone contemplating research on religion.

On countless occasions during my active teaching career, I encountered students who insisted that there was no relation between religion and politics in the United States. Like many, they confused “church and state” with religion and politics” and never took the time simply to look around, to look with fresh eyes. No religion and politics? What about the civil rights movement, the temperance movement before it, what about religious block voting (less a reality now), anti-abortion politics, or block voting, not to mention housing coalitions, soup kitchens or a thousand other instances of religious ideas or commitments fueling action. As Yogi Berra is reputed to have reminded us, “you can see a lot by looking” Looking at everyday life tells us a lot. Nancy Ammerman is a terrific guide to the process and to the insights it can yield.