Harding’s work fits the overall account of the anthropological approach that I offered
earlier. She got to know people well enough to be able to discuss a wide range
of topics with them and to grasp how they saw the world. She tried to start with their
concerns, rather than bringing her own categories and ideas to the field. And she did
not limit her study to one specific domain, but investigated ritual, schooling, gender
issues, and politics.
Most anthropologists of religion teaching in North America or Europe carry out
at least their initial fieldwork outside those areas, reflecting the general anthropological
emphasis on grasping the widest possible range of human experiences, practices, and
ideas. This centrifugal tendency also means that they must study and explain to their
readers the social and cultural context within which they find religion: kinship and
marriage systems, local and national political structures, and broad cosmologies and
ideologies. One could limit one’s reading to the subfield of the anthropology of religion
and nevertheless gain a good understanding of all of social anthropology