Fenella Cannell
Just because something is ‘‘well-known,’’
it does not always follow that it is known.—G. W. F. Hegel
What difference does Christianity
make? What difference does it make to how people at different times and in
different places understand themselves and the world? And what difference does
it make to the kinds of questions we are able to ask about social process?
Anthropology and Christianity
Propositions about the difference made by
Christianity played a critical role in the fashioning of the broad
comparativist theories of society that founded sociology and anthropology. For
Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Max Weber, each in their different ways, the
characterization of the new social sciences as distinctively secular never
precluded a clear recognition of the importance of Christianity. Mauss ([1938]
1985) considered Christianity decisive in the formation of modern Western
understandings of the self. For Durkheim, Judeo-Christian religions constituted
one important stage in the development and progressive abstraction of the
‘‘conscience collective,’’ before the humanist values he predicted would emerge
in later modernity. For Weber ([1930] 1992), while all world religions involved
features of systematization and innovative thinking that might promote social
change, the ‘‘elective affinity’’ between capitalism and Calvinist Christianity
in Europe had produced Western modernity’s distinctive forms.
Durkheim and his nephew Mauss
were, of course, both nonpracticing and agnostic members of originally Jewish
families, within a French culture divided between Catholicism and secularist
republicanism that still contained powerful anti-Semitic tendencies.∞ Weber was
an agnostic of Christian background, teaching and writing in Weimar Germany.
For all three of them, it seems, the world in which they lived appeared to be
becoming less religiously observant, and yet religious practice as the norm
also seemed a recent, almost tangible memory. This modernist sense of being
just ‘‘after’’ religion marks the tone of all three in some way, while Durkheim
and Mauss were obviously doubly outside conventional Christianity.
It is now commonplace to observe that each of
these writers was a social evolutionist, at least in the loose sense of
speaking of one form of society giving rise to another, more complex and less
‘‘primitive’’ form, over time.≥ Criticism of the evaluative aspect of social
evolutionism, which ranks one person or community as more ‘‘advanced’’ than
another, has been a constant feature of anthropological writing for many years.
It is also widely understood that such models are teleological, in that they
assume that societies are all tending toward the goal of some singular
civilization.
It is certainly true that each of
these writers invoked a sense of the development of history through successive
stages; indeed, each one proposed that Christianity played a key role in the
creation of a series of complex but definite one-way changes in social process.
It is also well recognized, however, that all three of these writers were skeptical
about the advantages of modernity; Mauss’s most famous work, The Gift ([1924]
1990), in particular is best read as a critique of capitalist ideology (see
Parry 1986), while Weber’s prose is darkly evocative of the ‘‘iron cage’’ of
contemporary work practices and bureaucratic systems that have lost sight of
the values they were intended to serve. They were not, therefore, teleologists
in the sense of assuming that society was tending toward some straightforwardly
‘‘higher’’ goal. Moreover Weber was explicit in insisting that the patterns of
historical development followed by European modernization would not necessarily
be replicated in other parts of the world.
This makes it somewhat ironic,
therefore, that anthropological and sociological approaches to Christianity
have long tended to become mired in a highly teleological reading of the
foundational anthropologists, and in particular certain kinds of readings of
Weber. The prevailing orthodoxy for several decades has been a focus on the
seeming inevitability of secularization and of the advance of global modernity,
while Christianity has been identified as, above all, a kind of secondary or
contributory aspect of such changes. In the process, there has often been a
tendency to assume that Christianity is an ‘‘obvious’’ or ‘‘known’’ phenomenon
that does not require fresh and constantly renewed examination.
Alongside the general
preoccupation with charting processes of modernization, there has been a
widespread although not total disciplinary bias within anthropology in favor of
the claim to be exercising a completely secular analytical approach. As the
theologian John Milbank has succinctly noted, this claim is a fiction: ‘‘Once
there was no ‘secular’ . . . The secular as a domain had to be instituted or
imagined’’ (1990: 9). This invention was given a distinctive form in the modern
social sciences. While this idea of a secular anthropology and sociology
certainly does derive from Durkheim, again it is ironic that the treatment of
religious topics in foundational anthropology was on the whole much less
hostile than has been the case in some later writing.∂ As a significant
minority of commentators have noted (Bowie 2002; E. Turner 1992; Engelke 2002),
anthropology sometimes seems exaggeratedly resistant to the possibility of
taking seriously the religious experiences of others. Religious phenomena in
anthropology may be described in detail, but must be explained on the basis
that they have no foundation in reality, but are epiphenomena of ‘‘real’’ underlying
sociological, political, economic, or other material causes. It is not
necessary to be a believer in any faith, or to abandon an interest in
sociological enquiry, to wonder why the discipline has needed to protest quite
so much about such widely distributed aspects of human experience.
In the context of this
disciplinary nervousness about religious experience in general, the topic of
Christianity has provoked more anxiety than most other religious topics. It has
seemed at once the most tediously familiar and the most threatening of the
religious traditions for a social science that has developed within contexts in
which the heritage of European philosophy, and therefore of Christianity, tends
to predominate. Unease about the political affiliations of some types of
Christian practice, especially in the United States in the period after the
rise of the Moral Majority, has produced the kind of situation described by
Susan Harding (1991) in her accounts of Jerry Falwell’s church, as the problem
of studying liberal anthropology’s ‘‘repugnant social other.’’ In addition, the
understandable desire to acknowledge the complex part played in European and
American history by Jewish, Islamic, and other religious traditions has
sometimes resulted in blanket suspicion of all intellectual interest in
Christianity and the variety of Christian practice around the world. As I found
when I embarked on some recent research on Mormonism in the United States, it
is surprising how many colleagues assume that a research interest in a topic in
Christianity implies that one must be a closet evangelist, or at least ‘‘in
danger’’ of being converted—an assumption that would not be made about
anthropologists working with most groups of people around the world.
For these and other reasons, I
would suggest that Christianity has functioned in some ways as ‘‘the
repressed’’ of anthropology over the period of the formation of the discipline.
And, as the repressed always does, it keeps on staging returns. The complexity
of the relationship between Christianity and anthropology has in fact been
pointed out early, well and repeatedly, if only by a few. It is noted, for
example, by E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1960), in a typically acute essay delivered
to a religious audience after his conversion to Catholicism. Both Malcolm Ruel
(1982) and Jean Pouillon (1982) analyzed the difficulties of employing the word
belief in anthropology, given the specifically Christian theological freight of
that term, which tends to distort many other kinds of religious reality. More
recently, and again from the acknowledged perspective of a Catholic convert,
Edith Turner (1992) has sought to develop an anthropological method which
allows the possibility that religious phenomena might be real, while at the
same time maintaining high standards of ethnographic accuracy. There have also,
from the earliest period of anthropology, been some ethnographers who became
fascinated by the ‘‘syncretic’’ and missionary Christianities they observed,
and who analyzed these in important accounts.
The curious fact is, however,
that these insights remained marginal to mainstream anthropology and sociology
for a long period and indeed have come to be more widely read again only
relatively recently. With a more recent wave of prestigious commentators,
including most famously two brilliant contributions by Talal Asad (1993) and
Marshall Sahlins (1996), the topic of Christianity has started to move to a
more central place again on the disciplinary agenda. Asad, drawing on Foucault,
has written of the genealogy of the idea of religion in anthropology, analyzing
elements taken from the history of both Christianity and Islam. In an important
article on the native anthropology of Western cosmology, Sahlins has observed
the extent to which assumptions about the world that inform the intellectual
frameworks in which we operate are drawn from the Christian theology of human
‘‘fallenness’’ and its consequences, including a world that exists in a state
of lack.
This book had its inception in
teaching and collegiate workshops that took place at about the time that this
new wave of writing on Christianity was beginning. The ideas presented here are
not based directly on either Asad or Sahlins, although they share more common
ground with the latter.
The book contains eleven original
essays on localities in different parts of the world where people consider
themselves to be Christians. It makes no claims to ethnographic completeness.
We have, for example, no contribution solely devoted to continental Africa.∏ It
does, however, offer a significant contribution to the range of comparative
material available explicitly addressing what it means for people to be
Christian. The authors included here argue from diverse and sometimes opposed
theoretical positions. They are united in taking the Christianity of their
informants seriously as a cultural fact and in refusing to marginalize it in
their accounts of the areas in which they work. This means setting aside the
assumption that we know in advance what Christian experience, practice, or
belief might be. We o√er eleven fresh accounts of particular, localπ
Christianities as they are lived, in all their imaginative force: a
bodybuilding Jesus, a nonimmortal God, a fetishized Bible, Scripture study as
‘‘normal science.’’ Together they begin to suggest ways anthropology might
begin to renew its thinking about a religion whose very proximity has hitherto
rendered it only imperfectly perceptible.
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