"How Existential Ethnography can Change the Shape of Jewish Studies Research"

How  Existential Ethnography can Change the Shape of Jewish Studies Research: On Coffee, Culture and the Moral Order among Ethiopian Jews and Pentecostals in Israel

Ethnographic methods and anthropological theory have been changing the contours of research in the academic study of religion and, to a lesser degree, Jewish studies. Don Seeman argues in this talk that a very particular kind of ethnographic study—one associated with the growing field of “existential anthropology,” promises to help revise both the content of Jewish Studies research and the kinds of questions it asks of its subject matter—ethnographic as well as textual. He describes the practice of “coffee rejection” among some Ethiopian Jews and Pentecostals in Israel as a medium for the shaping and rejection of cultural constraint. What does it say about the nature of research in Jewish Studies and anthropology that Ethiopian Jews and Pentecostals needed to be included in the analysis? Why is the study of material practice so important alongside the explicit study of religion and culture? How does an existential framework change the kinds of questions researchers ask and the kinds of answers they are able to hear from people in the field? Finally, how might this paradigm extend beyond ethnography or study of Ethiopian-Israelis to other areas of anthropological and Jewish studies research?

Bio: Don Seeman is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion and the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University. He writes extensively on the anthropology of religion, medical anthropology Jewish thought/Jewish mysticism. He is the author of One People, One Blood: Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism (Rutgers 2010) and is co-editor of the series on “Contemporary Anthropology of Religion” at Palgrave-Macmillan. He recently held a Social Science Research Council Grant as well as Mind and Life Contemplative Studies research grant for his current book project, Neighborhood Mystics: The Ethnography of Everyday Transcendence in Chabad.  He is also the co-editor (with Ariel Evan-Mayse and Daniel Reiser) of a forthcoming volume, Suffering, Renewal and Hasidism: The Holocaust and pre-Holocaust Legacy of R. Kalonymos Shapira(State University of New York Press).

Advance Reading available but not mandatory! Don Seeman, “Coffee and the Moral Order: Ethiopian Jews and Pentecostals Against Culture,” American Ethnologist 42 (2015): 734-48.

*Lunch will be provided.