Lived Theology and Ethnographic Method: An Ecumenical Exercise

The puzzle of the relation between theology and culture is one of the defining theological problems of modernity, which has been transformed in recent decades through serious engagement with sociological and anthropological modes of inquiry. This paper takes up one trajectory of such engagement—that of Protestant theologians’ turn to ethnographic methods over the last thirty years—and places it into conversation with the needs of contemporary Orthodox ecclesiology. Does Orthodox Christianity have an internal framework within which such a deployment of ethnographic methods can produce valid theological insights? The fruitfulness of “lived theology” in an Orthodox key will be demonstrated through examples from recent ethnographic research in Cyprus, where hagiographical media provide means of self-understanding, narrative interpretation of the chaos of the world, and religiously coded resistance to exploitation and domination.