Womanist theology, epistemology, and a new anthropological paradigm

In addition to unearthing the sources of the past in order to discover fragments to create a narrative for the present and the future, womanist methodology comprises active engagement with marginalized African American women alive today. Ethnographic methodology necessitates our entering the communities of these women, constituting focus groups and utilizing their life experiences as the primary sources for the development of questions which establish a knowledge base from everyday people. These questions are then refined by the womanist scholar as she reflects on the initial conversations with her focus groups. Further refining takes place when the womanist scholar conducts a pilot study in which she ascertains whether the questions asked fit the context of poor black women and where she also learns the nuances needed for the sensibilities of the culture in which she is operating. Employing the context and knowledge base derived from the focus and pilot groups, she launches a larger and more comprehensive ethnographic research study by living among the people, thereby encountering their symbolic cosmology. In this living and learning process, these women evolve into the womanist scholar's teachers. The task thus becomes the production with integrity of the story of these poor people's lives and the reflection of their polyvalent voices. They have created space for the scholar in their communities, and now she creates space for their stories in their own words reflected in her publications. The womanist ethnographer entrusts to the reader these narratives for interpretation, assuming that many truths will emerge, transformation will occur, and readers will learn from those not usually given voice. Furthermore, the African American female scholar risks becoming emotionally connected to these people's lives as she reenters the community on a regular basis, and understands that she has familial obligations to the people about whom she writes. Thus womanist theology is a longitudinal theology.

Names associated with the emergence of womanist theology in the U.S.A. are Katie Cannon, Emilie Townes, Jacqueline Grant, Delores Williams, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Kelly Brown Douglas, Renita Weems, Shawn Copeland, Clarice Martin, Francis Wood, Karen Baker-Fletcher, Jamie Phelps, Marcia Riggs, and Cheryl Kirk-Duggan. We are university, seminary, and divinity school professors. We are ordained and lay women in all the Christian denominations. Some of us are full-time pastors; some are both pastor and professor. We are preachers and prayer warriors. We are mothers, partners, lovers, wives, sisters, daughters, aunts, nieces - and we comprise two-thirds of the black church in America. We are the black church. The church would be bankrupt without us and the church would shut down without us. We are from working-class as well as middle-class backgrounds. We are charcoal black to high yellow women. We love our bodies; we touch our bodies; we like to be touched; we claim our created beauty. And we know that what our minds forget our bodies remember. The body is central to our being. The history of the African American ordeal of pain and pleasure is inscribed in our bodies.