Longing for the participatory church: power and helplessness in participatory design of research
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In the Czech Republic, known as the “most atheist country in Europe”, it is not “normal” to belong to the Church. It requires a legitimation on personal, social and political levels. Especially now, a few years after the so-called restitution law returned a considerable amount of property and financial means to churches (against the will of the majority of society) to “mitigate the damages” caused by the communist regime. In this situation, two years ago, we started an applied anthropological project in cooperation with one of the Czech dioceses. Our research team, consisting of members and non-members of the Church, explores the participation of different actors in decision-making processes in the Czech Roman Catholic Church while also seeking to support such efforts. At the same time, we are looking for ways in which the church can become more meaningfully involved in secular society. In the participatory design of the research we are both observers and observed, it is more the ascribed power to change something, to intervene at the powerful positions in the church or society which sometimes pushes us to the position of observers. And often it is anthropological theory which empowers us to return to the field with some applied output. In this paper we want to analyse the dialectics between our ethnographic openness (achievable only when acting not as pure ethnographers but also as engaged actors in the studied topic) in the field and the production of theory, between immersion, distance and re-immersion. |
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