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It is the contention of this introduction that examples are important prisms through which both reality and anthropological analysis are thought and, equally importantly, reconfigured. The aim of the introduction is to redress the theoretical disregard for exemplification by exploring the persuasive and evocative power – positive and negative – of ‘examples’ in social and academic life while also proposing exemplification as a distinct anthropological way of theorizing. Such theorizing points to a ‘lateral’ rethinking of the relation between the particular and the general. Our central argument is that examples highlight the precarious tension between the example as ‘example’ and the example as ‘exemplar’. All contributions to this special issue, in one way or another, explore this tension between the unruliness of examples and the stability‐enhancing power of exemplarity. The introduction further proposes that the example serves to confuse ontological divides, such as the one between theory and ethnography, and also draws attention to the fact that theory is as much suggestive as descriptive.

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This article uses ethnographic studies of Orthodox Christianities as a way to investigate the concept of 'orthodoxy' as it applies to religious worlds. Orthodoxy, we argue, is to be found neither in opposition to popular religion nor solely in institutional churches, but in a set of encompassing relations among clergy and lay people that amounts to a religious world and a shared tradition. These relations are characterized by correctness and deferral-formal modes of relating to authority that are open-ended and non-definitive and so create room for certain kinds of pluralism, heterodoxy, and dissent within an overarching structure of faith and obedience. Attention to the aesthetics of orthodox practice shows how these relations are conditioned in multi-sensory, often non-linguistic ways. Consideration of the national and territorial aspects of Orthodoxy shows how these religious worlds of faith and deferral are also political worlds. n This article asks what it means to be 'orthodox' from the perspective of an ethnographic view of Orthodox Christianities. We hold that attention to orthodoxy offers a vital perspective on the relationship between religious actors and their institutions that may be missed in accounts of piety or fundamentalism and that sheds light on the continuing influence of liturgical religion and its discourses of truth and authority. A focus on the 'ortho' of orthodoxy-rightness or correctness-gives a clue as to how Orthodox Christianities construct encompassing, authoritative religious worlds in the face of moral imperfection. We investigate how deferral to authority results not in rigid verbal or textual articulations of the true, but in a notion of correctness that is carried in the living and ongoing traditions of the Church, where tradition includes oral, scriptural, aesthetic, liturgical, and other aspects taken together. Correctness thus understood cannot be encompassed by linguistic propositions but leaves open theological and ideological possibilities and modes of engagement with the sacred. We draw on ethnographic studies of (capital-O) Orthodox Christianities-and other institutionally oriented forms of Christianity-to develop Religion and Society: Advances in Research 5 (2014): 25-46 © Berghahn Books

In this paper, I explore the way in which examples are used in sermons among the pious followers of Our Lady of Soufanieh in Damascus, Syria. In the sermons, a particular logic of seriation functions to present specific models and exemplars as prisms of lives to be imitated. The framing of these lives takes place through entextualizations, whereby the life of some is made into texts that others are told to emulate. The process of making life into text and text into life is explored in the production of examples at the weekly Saturday sermons in Soufanieh. While directly related to life as lived, such sermons also stand for a broader class of life as forma vitae, that is, lives to be followed. I thus explore the example as exemplum, a particular moral story used for edification and didactic purposes, one which situates the listener at the centre of the story by integrating the miraculous happenings in Soufanieh with the response of the individual. The sermons thus serve to examine exemplification and the modelling of sainthood in Damascus in the years preceding the current civil war.