The Mainline Sidelined: The Sociology of Religion Unbound

This paper examines an expanding focus in the content of'what members of'SSSR study and show how this change is reflected in the publications in the journal. I offerfbur ftctors that might efrct what we study: chan,ges in the world, changes in who we are, changes injfunding sources, and changes in the theoretical frames. I discuss the "cultural turn " as new? theoretical frame, which has had important implications/fbr the study of 'religion. I then retur n to the question of'changes in the world. I end with my; expectation that we will see greater vet inclusiveness in the fiture. When Bill Silverman asked me to give one of the addresses in the panels for the Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration, he was quite direct in what he wanted me to do: he asked me to talk about how the organization had shifted from being one whose primary focus was mainstream Protestants to one which now included in its purview many groups that had previously been too marginal for consideration. The assignment resonated with my personal experience at these meetings, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to think about how what we as a group study has changed. My remarks, on this occasion, will be located in my own experience. I will talk about how I see this change from where I have stood in the organization. I realize that others would tell a somewhat different story, but I hope that my telling also generates sparks of recognition. I first came to the SSSR meetings in 1981 in Baltimore. Those first years I felt like an orphan at the meetings. I had just finished my dissertation, and I had no money. I was able to come to Baltimore in part because friends of friends were letting me sleep on their sofa bed, and I could take the bus into the city for the meetings. Although I came out of a large graduate program (with fifty entering students in my cohort) I knew only one other person at these meetings, the colleague who had suggested that I come. He told me that I would find them a good place for presenting my work. I submitted a paper and brought it to the meetings. I was a young white woman, a feminist, an ethnographer, a sociologist of culture who happened to be studying born-again Catholics. I did not find in those early years many other people who shared my location or interests. In the early 1 980s, I continued to come and present papers, many of them on faith healing. I found myself in sessions with people trained in a range of disciplines anthropology, psychology, religious studies, public health, and sometimes other sociologists. We usually shared some substantive concerns although sometimes it was a stretch, we could be grouped together under a common session title. Almost never did I find myself in sessions with other feminists or ethnographers. Interesting conversations came out of those sessions, but they often felt ephemeral to my work and distant from to the central issues and debates of the meetings. I often felt as though I was doing the intellectual equivalent of tugging on people's sleeves: "You may think you are not interested in this marginal group, but see how looking at what they do helps us think about what is going on in the world...." Yet I kept attending. Out of somewhat difficult and unlikely seeming beginnings, these have become the meetings where I find my closest colleagues where I try out the most central pieces of my work. So it is my distinct experience that in the twenty years that I have been coming, SSS-R has opened up to new areas of research, to new groups of researchers and new frames.