Anthropology of Religion and Culture postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every Sunday afternoon for most of my final year, I helped stack chairs in a church hall in the market town where I grew up. By then I had stopped attending services there, but I had become curious about the hall itself. Between Saturday evening and Monday morning it hosted a Pentecostal congregation that rented it from the parish, a Tamil Hindu family association holding a monthly puja, a slimming club and a toddler group. Each left traces: a folded banner, a stain of turmeric on a trestle table, a laminated sign about not moving the piano. I wanted to understand how people who did not share a theology managed to share a room.

That question became my undergraduate dissertation in Sociology and Religious Studies. I carried out eleven semi-structured interviews with users and the parish administrator, and kept fieldnotes over two months of handovers. I had expected disagreement over symbols, and there was some, mainly about whether the cross on the end wall should be covered. What I had not anticipated was how much of the negotiation happened through objects and timetables rather than conversation. The booking diary, a cupboard with labelled shelves and an unwritten rule about who mopped the kitchen did more to sustain coexistence than any formal interfaith meeting. I drew on Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger to think about why a sticky floor could provoke stronger feelings than a doctrinal difference, while trying not to overstate a framework built for very different material. My supervisor's main criticism was fair: I had treated the Hindu association too much as a single voice, partly because I had interviewed only its organisers. I would design that study differently now, and I want to learn to do fieldwork that reaches beyond the people who hold the keys.

Since graduating I have worked as an activities assistant in a residential care home. The job is not research, but it has shaped how I think about ritual. Many residents have dementia, and I have noticed that a hymn, the gesture of lighting a candle or the smell of a particular soap can bring someone into the present more reliably than conversation. One resident who rarely speaks will always fold her hands at the start of grace before lunch, though I do not know whether she attended church. I have become interested in religion as something carried in the body and in habit, which connects to my reading of Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety and her argument that cultivated practices can form the self rather than simply express inner belief. I would like to explore how that idea works in settings of memory loss and institutional care, where the choice to practise is often made by staff.

Outside work I bake for a local food bank's weekly community lunch, which began as a way to keep my weekends structured and has turned into a small education in the cuisines of the volunteers I bake alongside. I also read widely in ethnography for pleasure; Robert Orsi's work on lived religion was the book that convinced me my questions belonged to anthropology rather than to theology.

I am applying for postgraduate study because my undergraduate degree gave me sociological methods but only an introduction to ethnographic theory and to religious traditions beyond Britain. I want sustained training in participant observation, research ethics and comparative reading, particularly around material religion and shared or contested spaces. I am organised, comfortable listening to people for long stretches, and used to handling sensitive situations with discretion at work. I hope to develop a research project that takes ordinary places, such as halls, kitchens and care homes, seriously as sites where religious life is actually made.