Description:
A close study of the rhythms and challenges of community life in an English Benedictine monastery.
Brief description: Richard D.G. Irvine is Senior Lecturer and Director of Teaching in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. His work spans the anthropology of religion and environmental anthropology, and he has carried out fieldwork in the UK and Mongolia.
Review Quotes:
'Irvine's particular contribution includes work that results from having done fieldwork inside the cloister of a male monastic community in the Western Christian tradition, which is, to my knowledge, novel in the literature. Irvine also addresses some of the social and ideological incongruities of monasticism in society - here, namely child sexual abuse - which is a sobering reality in need of greater ethnographic investigation.'
Paula Pryce, Cultural Anthropologist at the University of British Columbia