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Force of Habit: Exploring Everyday Culture. Jonas Frykman and Orvar Lofgren. eds. Lund Studies in European Ethnology, 1. Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, 1996. 172 pp.

Christians who have undergone conversion experiences usually claim that the experience has not only strengthened their religious commitment, it has in addition transformed their lives. The idea that a person may be transformed through using a set of symbols (called an "ideology" here) is not limited to Christianity; many ideologies make similar claims. Using the example of the conversion experience, I argue that ideologies may indeed create a sense of self‐transformation in the subject. This sense arises out of the fact that the subject is able to use the ideological language to resolve enduring problems of meaning in his or her life. Such problems are not, however, resolved once and for all; rather, the discourse of informants reveals that self‐transformation is an ongoing process wherein ideological language is used to express and come to terms with persisting emotional ambivalence.

The contemporary debate over the scientific status of ethnographic inquiry is best regarded as a dispute between realist and antirealist treatments of truth and representation. Drawing on some of the work of philosopher Donald Davidson, this essay argues that both treatments are flawed. It concludes that the controversy about cross‐cultural truth claims is misconceived and unproductive when carried out in epistemological terms. In fact, the disagreements are largely moral and political and would be more productively discussed in precisely those terms.