“Non farla difficile!". Il metodo abduttivo, il disincanto e lo studio etnografico delle religioni

Studying cultures, and in particular religions as cultural phenomena, entails the researcher’s decentralized and disenchanted (although not necessarily skeptical) gaze. Doing ethnographic research in cultural contexts different from the researchers’ ones (in this article I present examples of my fieldwork in Syria), the decentralization of the gaze is a paramount. Furthermore, in a long-term anthropological fieldwork experiential data often emerge that the researchers were not looking for; the abductive method consists in deepening the study of such unexpected data, possibly opening up new research paths.