The Christianity of Anthropology*

Abstract

This article critiques the way in which the discipline of anthropology has construed Christianity, arguing that too narrow and ascetic a model of Christianity has become standard and questioning the claims of the 'secular' social sciences to have severed themselves entirely from their Christian theological underpinnings. The article is in conversation with other writers on related themes, including Jonathan Parry on Mauss's The gift, Talal Asad, John Millbank, and Marshall Sahlins. Here, however, established anthropological assumptions on topics including transcendence, modernity, asceticism, and genealogy are reconsidered through a fieldwork-based examination of American Mormonism, a religion which posits relationships between the mortal and the divine that are unique in Christianity. Despite their strong belief in Christ, Mormons have often been labelled as 'not really Christian' by mainstream churches. It is argued here that such theological position-taking is echoed in the social sciences and that this reveals some of its (that is, our own) unrecognized orthodoxies.

Plotting belonging: interrogating insider and outsider status in faith research

“…And do accounts that skirt these issues risk becoming partial? (Cannell 2005;Lindsquist & Coleman 2008). Researchers also asked whether outsiders can really understand religious experience in the same way as an acolyte, while scholars questioned the extent to which this might matter (Turner 1992).…”

‘Indigenous Knowledge’ and ‘Science’: Reframing the Debate on Knowledge Diversity

“…Moreover, as Asad argues, secularism itself constitutes a set of beliefs about the world and there is not one but many forms of secularism that give form to scholarship. Recent work in anthropology on secularism argues for a careful consideration of the historical conditions under which secularism has become the dominant paradigm for research on culture (see Cannell 2005;Kapferer 2001;Stewart 2001, and for a contrary view see De Pina Cabral 2001). Within much writing on culture, social scientists claim reality only for the observable, and have sought to explain away the spiritual experiences of their research participants via a turn to constructionism and the experience of perception.…”

Transcendência e Antropologia do Cristianismo: linguagem, mudança e individualismo

“…Em um dos meus primeiros escritos sobre o assunto, me referi brevemente à teoria da Era Axial e argumentei que diferentes manejos da relação do transcendente com o mundano poderiam ser vistos como uma área-chave em potencial para a investigação comparativa (Robbins 2003b:196). Pouco tempo depois, Cannell (2005) argumentou firmemente que os cientistas sociais, incluindo os antropólogos, tinham se concentrado muito nos tipos de cristianismo ascético, que enfatizavam uma grande distância entre o transcendente e o mundano, negligenciando outras tendências, tais como o mormonismo e algumas formas de catolicismo, que valorizam fortemente este mundo e suas formas materiais. Entre nossas duas discussões, algo da gama das relações transcendental/mundano do cristianismo já tinha sido colocado e, em uma publicação posterior, Cannell (2006) reconhece explicitamente a variabilidade cristã na relação do transcendente e do mundano como um tema primordial para a investigação antropológica.…”