Retrospect and Prospect: Sampradayas and Warwick Fieldwork in Religions and Education

The article sets a specific focus—the Warwick field studies’ disclosure of the educational initiatives of Hindu-related movements (or, we shall argue, ‘sampradayas’) within the broader framework of religions and education. We will briefly outline the successive ethnographic studies, then introduce the concept of sampradaya and the emergent salience of sampradaya—as focus and later as frame—for the Warwick studies. The fieldwork’s disclosure of changes underway in sampradayas, and our contextualization of these changes, lead into our experience of retrospective analy-sis (in this case centred on ‘spirituality’) and an overview of the interface between sampradayas and education. In the title ‘retrospect’ refers both to this article’s backward look at the Warwick field studies and to the potential of field data for periodic retrospective analysis. By way of ‘prospect’, the conclusion suggests the potential of ethnography not only for providing data for recurrent analysis, but also as an approach in illuminating education’s interfaces with religion, and the need for insights from fieldwork to inform the restructuring and content of the curriculum in religious education and religious studies.