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Record W4411553694 · doi:10.1111/aman.28094

Toward an Ethnography of God

2025· article· en· W4411553694 on OpenAlexafffund
Amira Mittermaier

Bibliographic record

VenueAmerican Anthropologist · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicReligion, Society, and Development
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsEthnographySociologyAnthropologyHistory

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

ABSTRACT In recent years, anthropologists and theologians have been engaging in conversation with one another. Building on, and branching out from, that conversation, this article calls for a careful ethnographic engagement with not just “God talk” (the literal meaning of theology) but also with the figure of God itself. Such a shift can take us from theology as an abstract, scholarly, discursive realm to the messy and often‐unpredictable ways in which God shows up in the world. It can attune us to how God appears in concrete social, material, and historical contexts by way of divine interventions, modes of presence, and different forms of mediation. I suggest that the genre of ethnography—skilled at paying attention to the fleeting and emergent and characterized by a generous openness and curiosity—is uniquely suited for engaging with an object like God. Working through some common objections and suggesting ways forward, this article proposes as one possibility an apophatic ethnography—a humble mode of writing that does not insist on proclaiming truths but acknowledges the limits of human knowledge. Without ever being able to capture its object, an ethnography of God can offer glimpses of how the divine is entangled with social and material worlds.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.694
Threshold uncertainty score0.958

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.044
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.043
GPT teacher head0.402
Teacher spread0.358 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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