Afterword. The Cloister as an Ethnographic Challenge

This afterword discusses Francesca Sbardella’s ethnography of French Carmelite cloisters as a methodological and theoretical challenge for anthropology. The cloister appears as an almost impossible fieldsite: closed to external observation, governed by silence, bodily discipline and radical separation from ordinary social life. Yet precisely these conditions make it a privileged space for an anthropology of experience, where knowledge passes through bodily participation, discomfort and reflexive self-objectivation. The essay examines the cloister as a total institution, while also addressing the central problem of the anthropology of religion: how to understand faith, sacred presence and dialogue with God without either reducing them to illusion or “going native”.