Faith and culture: community life and the creation of a shared psychic reality

This paper discusses the links between infant observation as a research method and ethnography within social anthropology in relation to a study of a mosque congregation in which the nature of faith is explored through the activities of communal life. This observational research generates accounts of social interaction and religious speech within which patterns of inter-subjectivity can be traced. It is argued that the creation of shared imaginative worlds, and the collective processes which sustain them, can be thought of as having properties in common with psychic development.