This is just an update on how things are going. Last week I ran out of time with doing one interview. It is perhaps the longest interview I did at about two hours. The one I did this week was an hour and twenty minutes and I managed to get started on another one. I wonder if I should try and sit down on Thursday night after work and have a go at transcribing part of the next interview. It might mean I am more settled on Friday and I will get more done. I get a lot done in very short bursts, but I am too easily distracted and I really need to get on. If I can finish the current one and get another one done next weekend then that will be all the Edgerton interviews transcribed.
However, the software I am using is still causing problems. Although I can save work! When I try and close either a document or the whole project it tends to have difficulties. Also, I am periodically needing to switch my computer off and restart it as the sound system is playing up. It goes really slowly and booming. Well it has given up completely now, I am not sure why but my guess is that by the time I next want to use it, it will be functioning fine again. I have long known computers do not like the heat and am putting it partially down to that.
Otherwise, there is really nothing to report. Oh I have found another book in the tradition I am working in. It was published after I did my literature research into the area. It is called "The Anthropology of Protestantism: Faith and Crisis among Scottish Fishermen" and is by Joseph Webster. I would say that his approach is most similar to that of Timothy Jenkins in that he looks at the whole town with all its churches and does it by spending a considerable time in Gamrie. However unlike Timothy Jenkins he does not do it from the privileged position of the Parish Vicar/Minister but as an attender. In his case he attended all Protestant churches in Gamrie something a Parish Vicar/Minister could not do. What has struck me so far is how similar his experience is to mine. He talks of falling in love with Gamrie and wooing them, that was my experience too. He talks of being mistaken for someone who was seeking ordination; again something I experienced in both congregations. As it is he sits someone between Anthony Cohen and mainstream Congregational Studies. There seems to be something intriguing here. Within Anglicanism there is a tendency quite often to have the model of the priest as anthropologist, within the British Reformed tradition there is no equivalent. Indeed most people doing it congregational studies seem to be unaware of the tradition at all and are doing it as part of their own academic tradition. Joseph Webster therefore writes as a social anthropologist doing what social anthropologists do. I have also come across a cultural geographer who has done this. So I need to be reading this as well
