The main focus of Harding's article is the power of rhetoric and the role it plays in the conversion process. Towards the end of the article in the conclusion she says , "Crises, transitions, and upbringing as such do not lead you to convert; they may make you more likely to listen and anything that makes you more likely to listen, including the work of ethnography, is actually what makes you susceptible." This stood out to me because in our previous lecture we we're talking about riding the line between belief and non-belief. It got me thinking that in order for one to make the conversion to belief they must first be willing to listen and it would follow that ethnographic field work would fall into that category. It would seem that Harding and I are in agreement about this and I think it raises quite a few questions in my mind.
1. Can an ethnographer truly understand a movement or culture without going to the bring of a, what I'll call conversion-crisis?
2. If you believe the answer above is no, then is it fair to say that conversion, as in the case of evangelicalism, is an occupational hazard of being an ethnographer and that every time you go into the field you run the risk of going native?
3. And finally, do/should ethnographers set up "mental blockades"/deploy other tactics to avoid going native or riding the line in order to prevent their work from being criticized as biased?
Also, in looking at her above quote about susceptibility. It reminded me a lot of genetic predisposition, not in the sense that someone is predisposed to becoming religious, but in the way that you can be predisposed for an illness, say schizophrenia, and without the accompanying environmental stimuli never develop the disorder.
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