Diversity of Approaches is Strength of Emory's Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life

One of the newest efforts drawing both humanities and social scientists together is Emory's Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life (MARIAL) which studies dual wage-earning, middle class families in the South. Launched in 2000 with a $3 million grant from the Sloan Foundation, MARIAL operates as a kind of umbrella over a collection of research projects ranging from family story telling to working mothers' use of alternative medicine.

By design, researchers use both quantitative and qualitative methods, says Bradd Shore, Goodrich C. White Professor of Anthropology and MARIAL director. "Diversity of approaches is our greatest strength."

Some of MARIAL's investigations "are squarely in the tradition of the natural sciences--testing hypotheses with very large data samples," says Shore, while other work is "squarely in the 'qualitative' case-study mode." A few of the projects straddle both methods.

But Shore sees that ability "to bridge the classic divide that traditionally has separated the so-called hard and soft social sciences" as key to understanding the complex lives of the South's middle class working families.

Sloan Foundation program director Kathleen Christensen agrees. "There are crosscurrents and linkages across the research," she says. "We need to think very creatively and practically about how bridges can be built to be able to fully realize and harvest the richness of the research that's being done."