800 words out of a thousand and half the topic not written

Its been one of those frustrating weekends thesis wise.  The task in hand is to write a thousand words on Believing and Belonging and situate my thesis against that debate. Problem one, is that while I have something to say about Belonging I have very little to say about Believing in my thesis. Problem two there is a vast and complex literature which is bigger than the papers in the topic in my discipline indicate. Problem three my thesis is primarily about the third b and that is behaving. Belonging just happens to connect with their behaviour and the topic. What is more that is an ethnographic finding.

Well due to the amount of literature I have spent quite a bit of the weekend going through and back through. Firstly I have to set up why this is relevant to my PhD, which I have done. Then I have to take each of the two concepts Belief and Belonging and discuss them as concepts. The big problem is that I would like to say "Belief" is simple and then consign it to a few lines in my thesis. However, it isn't  and I think my thesis may just have as part of the conclusion some reflection on the absence of belief statements from the context of the ethnography.

I am also beginning to puzzle out the way first person pronouns are used to signal group identity. The use of the "we" pronoun seems to signal a sphere where orthopraxy is expected by the congregation whereas "I" is used when it is acceptable for changes to occur due to the surrounding culture. The problem is that this implies that "you and me Jesus" lyrics are no longer about emotion, but rather a way of signalling wider cultural norms can be brought into the choice of music. This is interesting.

The other thing I am doing now is writing so I have enough to accurately recall the citation within the text. This will expand the literature review quite substantially and I think satisfy my examiners on that score. The interesting thing is that it might also explain why I felt so at a loss at how to engage from my thesis. Unfortunately, this also means I do close reading.  Most writers and readers are not used to this. I have already struck one significant oddity which  I have demonstrated to be odd. If you have two dimension one called "belief" and the other "belonging", then there are problems if "orthodoxy" gets into the belonging one!

Anyway I did not get as much written as I hoped and would at least like to have most on Belief written and have a rough idea where the concept of belonging is going. That means I think that I am going to claim one of my few thesis days tomorrow afternoon from work and see if I can get further on.