Home Going: A Spirit-centered Ethnography Exploring the Transformative Journey of Documenting Gullah/Geechee Funerals

This thesis explores the transformative and spiritually-affirming impact that can occur when a folklorist of faith engages with a community's faith practice. In this case that faith practice is the tradition of "home going," or funerary mourning, within the Gullah/Geechee community in and around St. Helena Island, South Carolina. Furthermore, this thesis reveals a narrative of personal and communal healing as the author engages her own loss in the presence of grief, within a community that she has, at times, called home. "Home going" serves as the vernacular vocabulary for funerals and their associate wakes, repasts, and memorials in a contemporary, Gullah/Geechee context. "Home going" also serves as a birthplace for the concept of a Spirit-centered ethnographic journey. This thesis both defines and utilizes Spirit-centered ethnography as an ideology that intentionally moves the ethnographer through vulnerability (as defined by Ruth Behar) to a place of reciprocity and service.