Hopefully the changes done

Daffodils bought by a colleague Sue to mark the fact I had permission to submit

This weekend has actually gone pretty well despite the kettle dying on me. Kettle dying is a major calamity as it makes it hard to make the copious amounts of tea, herbal teas and coffee I drink while working on my thesis. So yesterday I had an unexpected trip down to Waitrose to buy a new one. I know that at times both of the small local supermarkets sell them but I could not recall any recently and it is not quite the time of year for them.

Friday I did the bit I could not do last weekend because I did not have the books. It was quite fun and as always the nuanced take in the book had been vastly simplified by the literature around. So while I did not need to alter my argument I did need to alter precisely what I said about this author.  I also think I made other corrections to the worship chapter than my supervisor wanted.

So yesterday and today were making changes to the next but last chapter. I found today I have lost an article I read, it was definitely by Fredrik Barth, it was fairly recent 1989-2005 I would guess, and it dealt with boundaries and the negotiated nature with boundaries. What makes it stand out from other work from him is that it included an account of the renegotiation of a boundary by a woman who had struggled. I remember her story and the way she was able to define herself in a different way particularly vis-a -vis her mother-in-law. However it is not in any of the four books/articles I have to hand that are clearly by Fredrik Barth.  I have a possible place of one but that is £70 and while if I knew it was the right one I might pay that, for something so chancy I am not.So I have altered the text.

Any way the major work was making explicit when I was using ideas from the flows chapter to work later in my thesis. This can be done a number of ways. I have opted at the moment for putting references back to the chapter and using the language deliberately when I am using the ideas. However my supervisor may want me to do a section on flows. Other than that it was making the corrections my supervisor wanted and generally tidying up. One funny story, I had to put a page reference in for a "Religion since 1945: Believing but not Belonging" by Grace Davie, I started hunting for it and found a section that would do. Then realised the book I was looking at was "Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates" also by Grace Davie. So I got out the right book and found the section which was a lot easier to find.

I have also this evening have emailed my volunteer proof-editors (James, Ruth and Margo) checking where they are up to, sending a copy of the belonging chapter as it had lots of small changes to it and hopefully Ruth has not started it yet. Also I emailed them the form that has to be signed by them and handed in with my thesis. As I know their character I also sent in a copy of the regulations that requires it.

So next weekend I take pedantry to the next level when I set about creating the submission version of my thesis.

Week 29 : Preliminary Draft of Community Chapter Produced

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	52,368
Words typed this week:	2670
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	2670
Days I managed to write this week:	4

Well progress has been made this week. Admittedly some of that only because I have a supervision next week. If thesis writing was hiking then this week has been scrambling over a bolder strewn rise. It has not been sticky like mud but there were just so many challenges to get over to make progress. The work has been tough but progress has been made. I am slowly getting the feel of this thesis and this last week there have been several "aha" moments when I have stumbled on something and realised that it was important for my thesis. On the other hand I have had to try and digest a couple more theorist who have applications for my thesis.

One of the real oddities of this thesis is that while I am working with fairly small local groups/organisations called "congregations" quite a bit of the stuff I am drawing on with respect to identity is normally used for groups such as nationality. This time I have been looking at the work of Fredrik Barth a Norwegian anthropologist who in looking at ethnicity changed the focus from the individuals to the actions that sustained the identity. So I have two Barths in my thesis, from different strands and I am using an anthropologist as a theorist rather than a methodologist. I think the thesis is the stronger for it. Actually the whole theory region I am using is mid-way between psychotherapy and theorists of Nationality and I seem to work with pretty broad brush across the whole range of those although there are a couple of sociologist in there who do not seem to have done too much work in either camp.

The one group that I seem to be light on is the theorists of sociology of Religion whether congregational studies or ethnography of religion. With the Congregational Studies people I know to some extent why it is. The area has a broad stream of rather simple approaches from organisational studies. The problem is that the simplicity of many of them makes me cautious. This is less so of UK ones than American. It is also not true that all organisations studies are simple, I have also been looking at the work of the Tavistock Consultancy who work psychotherapeutic models to understand how organisations work, in particular the early work of Eliot Jacques and  the nursing studies of Isabel Menzies-Lyth.

Oh well the papers went off for supervision today and this week I will need to try to write about the tradition. I expect I will spend the next bank holiday I will be doing a major redraft of this chapter.