Durkheim, Freud and I in Aboriginal Australia, or should Anthropology contain theology?

Abstract

If it is true that ‘all of social theory is a breakdown product of a decaying theology’ (Robbins on Milbank), then social theory might be said to be both discontinuous and continuous with the theology. In this article I reflect on how anthropology distances itself from religion, yet retains broadly theological concerns. Taking my cue from Christopher Herbert's observation in Culture and Anomie that anthropological ideas about culture have evident, if difficultly acknowledged, religious origins, I reflexively consider this issue in relation to my own writing and anthropological encounters I have experienced with Indigenous informants and students. I discuss two instances of my secular‐rationalist embarrassment in the presence of divine revelation and relate these to my anthropological modelling of Aboriginal religion, suggesting reasons for the problematic disjunction between my ability to analyse this religion and my inability to properly experience it (or something like it). I also make a case for the legitimacy of Durkheim's search for ‘the elementary forms of the religious life’ in order to clarify what is essential (‘sacred’) about all morality, rejecting Milbank's characterisation of it as ‘perverse theology’. There is, I suggest, nothing intrinsically ‘perverse’ about this search, so long as we follow Robbins' suggestion and relativise the Christian mythos in order to look to a more broadly‐based anthropological conception of what it means to live gracefully in the presence of some ‘holy spirit’.

Anthropological theologies: Engagements and encounters

“…The contributors to this special issue approach this endeavour in a number of ways. Anthropology, as Malcolm Haddon () and John Morton () demonstrate, when conceived as an unconscious form of religious performance, marks a transformative instance where the secular‐rationalist boundaries between theology and anthropology coalesce and become indistinguishable. Throwing anthropological epistemologies into relief against pagan, Islamic and Christian theologies, Rachel Morgain (), Gerhard Hoffstaedter () and Philip Fountain () illuminate productive fissures and interrogate the borders separating the secular and the religious.…”

Anthropological proselytism: Reflexive questions for a Hare Krishna ethnography

“…of the possibility of living otherwise need not have anything to do with God or theology. Anthropology's ‘salvation intent’ (Argyrou, cited in Morton ) could be pursued, say, by an activist anthropologist for secular political purposes. David Graeber's () call for an anarchist anthropology probably qualifies in this respect.…”

Occupying the Ontological Penumbra: Towards a Postsecular and Theologically Minded Anthropology

“…This may not be as easy as it sounds, since anthropology's relationship with theology has, at best, been "awkward," with the result that theology's contributions to anthropology hardly goes beyond providing data [5]. Morton [48] argues that while anthropology rejected religiously inspired theology at an early stage as part of its dedication to secularism, it never actually managed to leave it behind. In spite of this, theology, even in its secular academic orientation, retained a religious and often Christian flavor and was thus largely ignored or frowned upon by secular anthropology.…”

“…In spite of this, theology, even in its secular academic orientation, retained a religious and often Christian flavor and was thus largely ignored or frowned upon by secular anthropology. Since the postsecular turn brings the religious back to the secular, both Christian and secular anthropologists have become interested again in turning toward Christian theology, albeit with different objectives [2,5,13,48,51]. While in principle such a move may be valuable, we believe that it is important to engage with theology critically, since the discipline also shares the same Judeo-Christian heritage as anthropology, and thus has a distinctly Western and Christian intellectual and epistemological tradition.…”

“…Van der Veer starts from "the theoretical premise that the secular and the religious are produced simultaneously" ( [38], p. 151); they are both part of human experience and expression. For this reason, they directly depend on each other, with the secular being differentiated from the religious by degrees ( [12,42]; [48] [43] argues that such apparently contradicting statements are in fact possible, since secularism itself tries to reshape religion by secularizing it and by rendering it into abstracted beliefs and doctrines that do not contradict the secular. In the words of van der Veer: "Secularism frames religion" ( [38], p. 144, emphasis in original).…”