Establishing Emergent Phenomena: harnessing the multi-scalar potential of hybrid socio-anthro methodologies

• In Event: Jews of North America: a Social Sciences Perspective

Abstract

How Jews conceptualize the metapatterns of their regional or national communities can pose challenges to studying emergent phenomena that lay outside general public self-awareness. Such is the case of a resurgence of interest in and observance of mikvah immersion among non-Orthodox Jews in the United States, particularly that this resurgence is accompanied by a significant rate of reports of healing through mikvah immersion. While people within mikvah immersing communities are aware of both increasing mikvah immersion among non-orthodox Jews and that mikvah healing is real –at least on their own local levels, a researcher’s first task is to communicate the existence and scope of such emergent phenomena to wider publics who are largely unaware of it. However, documenting that an emergent phenomenon is happening is not sufficient in itself. Initiating a new subject area also requires not only substantial explanation and analysis of the phenomena itself but also accounting for its emergence. Thus, initiating a new subject of inquiry requires the skill sets of both sociology to document the scope of the emergent phenomenon and anthropology to account for its emergence in this specific contemporary moment. Moreover, bringing both these disciplines together creates a generative space wherein additional disciplinary approaches can be brought to bear in understanding emergent ritual phenomena. In this presentation I will outline how I integrated sociological macro-data and ethnographic micro-data with grounded theory and anthropological embodiment methodologies, and historical interpretive frameworks to create a comprehensive multi-scalar study that establishes an emergent phenomenon as a real and substantive subject of inquiry.

Author

• Isobel-Marie Johnston, 6520 S McAllister Ave