Droogers & van Harskamp/Methods for the Study, 7. Fieldwork on Language

In Chapter 7 on spiritual language the central methodological question is: how to study forms of secular and spiritual worldview-making? In this chapter the worldview-making of a few dozen Dutch artists is the central issue. The researcher demonstrates in this chapter that a (playful) combination of ethnography and literary analysis of the language in life narratives of the research “objects” can be a fruitful methodology for arriving at two remarkable observations: first that many de-churched artists are searching for worldviews which apparently replace traditional religious worldviews; second that the seemingly unique and singular life stories of the artists can be modelled in “only” five patterns of worldview-making.