How to Analyze Your Data Without Lying About God

Despite often heroic commitments to immersion in a given field context, and despite frequent theoretical fluency in analysis, anthropologists rarely show the steps by which they analyze and interpret their data. Because of this, the validity of anthropological analyses is generally difficult to assess, the reinterpretation of existing studies is often a dubious proposition, and the ethical implications of research sampling strategies are often impossible to know. This essay makes use of a corpus of sermon data collected over a summer at a Catholic monastery to illustrate the limitations of sociocultural, ethnographic anthropology as currently practiced and offers several strategies for the interpretation, analysis, and presentation of anthropological data meant to fix these limitations.