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The Culture of Bible Belt Catholics. Edited by JON W. ANDERSON and WILLIAM B. FRIEND. New York: Paulist Press, 1995. iii + 303 pp. $14.95. Comprised of seven essays written by six authors, this edited work, sponsored by the Catholic Church Extension Society (a home mission organization founded in 1905), is a comparative ethnographic study of the Catholic experience in the Bible Belt South. Ethnography, developed by cultural anthropologists, is a " `listening science' by comparison to the structured questions of survey research" (p. 2). Its observation method attempts "to get beneath the surface of values and attitudes to examine how they are constructed, used and experienced. The Construction, use and experience organized as bodies of interpretive practices are what anthropologists understand as 'culture' " (p. 2). Historians will find these essays illuminative, yet at the same time perplexing.
Although the essays contain references to works of history and sociology, historians will be frustrated...