Glenn Hinson, in Fire in my bones,
creatively and accurately captures the essence of Holy Spirit
influence on belief and experience among members of the
“spirit-filled” or “sanctified” African
American community. Much ethnographic work tends to highlight
researchers' analytical and supposedly “objective”
reports of observed behavior; Hinson, however, takes an ingenious
phenomenological approach in which the lived selves of sanctified
members are presented through their own individual voices.
To the author's credit, attempts to “shape” or
refine participants' expressions, observations, analyses,
summaries, and so on do not appear in this work.