Joining the choir: Religious membership and social trust among transnational Ghanaians, by Nicolette D. Manglos-Weber

• Main Author: TSE, Justin Kh
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
• Subjects: Religion
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3137; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4394/viewcontent/Joining_Choir_Bkrev_pv.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Nicolette D. Manglos-Weber’s Joining the Choir is about how trust works in a transnational Ghanaian evangelical community, Evangel Ministries, between Chicago and Accra. The title is drawn from the opening anecdote in which Manglos-Weber speaks to a “colleague” at church. They are both in the choir together, and they talk about the difficulties of the interviewee’s life in Chicago as someone on leave from graduate school and driving a taxi. This anecdote showcases Manglos-Weber’s positionality as an ethnographer: she is among the trusted, a status that she deftly maneuvers within throughout the book. In so doing, Joining the Choir is not only about transnational migrants between Ghana and the United States and the religious infrastructure by which social networks among them are developed. Following Manglos-Weber on her research journey, it is also about the intellectual discipline that is required to conduct research in networks where only insiders are trusted.