1 Notes Toward an Anthropology of Bible Reading;

As the title suggests, this is a paper trying to do two things at once. I want to start a conversation about what an anthropology of reading could look like, and although I will make particular reference to the role of Bible reading in the lives of Christians, I am interested more generally in the role of reading in people’s lives. This leads me onto the question: what kind of methods do we need to use in order to understand reading? As an ethnographer, I have various tools at my disposal: watching, participating, conversing, interviewing, etc. Are these tools sufficient for the understanding of a practice like reading? In order to deepen my understanding of what people do when they read, I have turned to a new research tool, eye-tracking, and in order to use this tool, I am working within an experimental framework. This leads me onto the second goal of my paper: I want prompt a discussion on whether an anthropologist has any business messing around with equipment like eye-trackers, and, beyond this, whether the experimental method has a place in contemporary anthropology. Learning how to rea