Key concept: belief and knowledge practice questions.

Luhrmann carried out fieldwork between 2004 and 2008 in Vineyard evangelical congregations in Chicago and California, where newcomers were taught to set aside a daily appointment for prayer, to notice which thoughts arrived unbidden, and to test those thoughts against scripture and against the judgement of more experienced members. Her account of what this training accomplished is that

• converts had been persuaded by argument that God exists well before they began to take any part in the exercises
• congregants learned a skill of attention that let them recognise certain inner experiences as God speaking
• the exercises made little difference, since what congregants professed was already settled when they arrived
• the practices are best understood as a technique for managing anxiety, which is what participants said they were for

Answer: congregants learned a skill of attention that let them recognise certain inner experiences as God speaking

Luhrmann treats belief as something learned through disciplined practice rather than as a proposition accepted in advance: the training changes what counts as evidence that God is present. Reading the case as persuasion by argument, or as therapy under another name, loses the ethnographic point that a perceptual skill was being taught and could be done well or badly.

Favret-Saada worked in the farming country of the Bocage in western France in the early 1970s. She found that people would speak about witchcraft only to someone already caught up in an affair as bewitched, bewitcher or unwitcher, and that anyone claiming to be a neutral enquirer was told there was nothing to discuss. Her conclusion about this is that

• the villagers were concealing a body of belief that a more persistent interviewer would eventually have recorded in full, given enough time in the community
• witchcraft talk was a performance staged for outsiders and matched nothing that villagers did among themselves
• knowledge of witchcraft circulated only between positions in an affair, so the researcher had to occupy one to learn anything
• participant observation cannot be used at all where the subject matter is treated as secret

Answer: knowledge of witchcraft circulated only between positions in an affair, so the researcher had to occupy one to learn anything

The point is about how such knowledge exists at all: in the Bocage there was no place from which witchcraft could be observed without being addressed, so the ethnographer's own position became the instrument of the research. Treating the silence as simple concealment assumes a neutral vantage point that the field did not offer.

Evans-Pritchard reported from Zandeland in the late 1920s that people knew perfectly well that termites eat through the supports of a granary and that a granary may in time collapse. When one fell on the particular people sitting in its shade, they attributed the misfortune to witchcraft. His analysis is that the witchcraft explanation

• replaced the observation about termites, since a cause in witchcraft rules out a natural cause
• showed that the Azande had not worked out what makes wooden supports decay over time
• supplied an account of the coincidence that the termites left unexplained: why these people, at that moment
• was a polite formula that none of those involved in the case treated as a real cause

Answer: supplied an account of the coincidence that the termites left unexplained: why these people, at that moment

Witchcraft here works alongside empirical knowledge rather than instead of it: it answers the question of particularity that a general physical cause cannot. Reading it as ignorance of natural causes is the standard misreading of this material.

In an essay published in 1966 Laura Bohannan described telling the story of Hamlet to Tiv elders in Nigeria, who corrected her at several points: a man ought to marry his dead brother's widow, and the apparition must have been an omen sent by a witch. Bohannan uses the exchange to argue that

• the sense a story makes is worked out through the categories of its hearers, not carried in the text
• the elders had missed the point because the play had been retold in an unfamiliar language
• great works are understood in the same way everywhere, once they have been accurately translated
• the elders' version should be recorded as folklore rather than treated as an interpretation of the play they were told

Answer: the sense a story makes is worked out through the categories of its hearers, not carried in the text

The elders were not failing to follow the plot; they were reading it through their own assumptions about kinship and misfortune, as Bohannan had been reading it through hers. The essay is a teaching piece about ethnocentrism in interpretation.

Turner recorded among the Ndembu of what is now north-western Zambia in the 1950s that when a person fell ill a diviner's task was to establish which quarrels in the village, and which neglected obligations to the dead, lay behind the case, and that treatment required those grievances to be spoken aloud. Turner treats the divination as

• a diagnostic technique whose accuracy could be measured against whether the patient later recovered
• a procedure that turns a private misfortune into a public statement about strained relations
• evidence that the Ndembu had no separate vocabulary for disorders of the body
• a survival from an earlier mode of thought that clinical medicine would in time replace

Answer: a procedure that turns a private misfortune into a public statement about strained relations

Turner's interest is in what the procedure accomplishes socially: the diviner's verdict names a conflict and obliges the village to deal with it. Judging such a practice by its clinical success rate answers a question nobody in the case was asking.

Douglas noted in 1966 that the Lele of the Kasai treated the pangolin as extraordinary: it is scaled like a fish yet climbs trees, and it bears one young at a time as a woman does. Rather than shunning the animal, initiates of a cult ate it ceremonially. Douglas took the case to show that

• classifications of animals follow the nutritional value of the species that happen to be available
• anomalous animals are avoided in every system of classification that has so far been recorded
• the Lele had not arrived at a consistent way of classifying the animals around them
• creatures that fall between categories may be treated as powerful rather than merely avoided

Answer: creatures that fall between categories may be treated as powerful rather than merely avoided

Her general claim is that a classification generates its own anomalies, and that what a community does with them varies: prohibition is one response, ritual concentration another. Anomaly is a property of the scheme, not of the animal.