In the context of the South Indian Gaṅgamma grāmadevata (village goddess) tradition, this article asks: what can ethnographers learn by thinking theologically, an orientation that is identified as theological ethnography. Within this analytic perspective, the ethnographer looks and listens for ways in which worshipers ritually perform and narrate their own theologies about the goddess, but does not create theological analyses for that community. The article further asks what we can learn about the goddess—her agency and its limits, the ways in which she acts and moves in the human world, her desires, and her motivations to possess devotees—by listening to personal narratives of women so possessed. These narratives are forms of vernacular theology and imply a dialogic agency between humans and goddess. They help us to answer what both the goddess and humans gain (and may lose) when Gaṅgamma enters the human world through possession in/of and in the presence of human bodies. To imagine, describe, and analyze a world in which gods/goddesses are active agents is a theological move, and also one mode of good ethnography.

中文翻译：

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当女神说出她的想法时：南印度蒂鲁帕蒂 Gaṅgamma 传统中的占有、临在和叙事神学

在南印度 Gaṅgamma grāmadevata（乡村女神）传统的背景下，本文提出了以下问题：民族志学家可以通过神学思考来学习什么，这一方向被确定为神学民族志。在这种分析视角下，民族志学者观察和倾听崇拜者仪式性地表演和讲述他们自己关于女神的神学的方式，但不为该社区创建神学分析。这篇文章进一步询问了我们可以了解女神的哪些方面——她的能动性及其局限性、她在人类世界中的行为和行动方式、她的欲望以及她拥有奉献者的动机——通过聆听如此着迷的女性的个人叙述. 这些叙述是白话神学的形式，暗示了人类与女神之间的对话机构。它们帮助我们回答当 Gaṅgamma 通过拥有/拥有和存在于人体而进入人类世界时，女神和人类都会获得（和可能失去）什么。想象、描述和分析一个神/女神是活跃代理人的世界是一种神学举措，也是一种良好的民族志模式。