Essay on Christianity, modernity and ritual| anthropology of Christianity
What would it take to get a viable anthropology of Christianity off the ground? By posing this question at the outset, I of course indicate that I do not think that the anthropology of Christianity is already a going concern. This should not, I assume, be a controversial perception. But if one did want to trouble it, one could point out that we do in fact have a fair number of ethnographies of Christian people, even quite a few that focus on their religion. Moreover, one could add that there have been several pioneering edited collections that bring together anthropological studies of various Christian communities (e.g. Glazier, 1980; Hefner, 1993; James and Johnson, 1988; Saunders, 1988; Schneider and Lindenbaum, 1987). I would not dispute these points. Yet even as I would concede that there might exist something like an anthropology of Christianity in itself, or at least an ethnography of Christianity in itself, I would still hold to the point that there is certainly no anthropology of Christianity for itself. And it is precisely the grounds for establishing the anthropology of Christianity as a self-conscious, comparative project that I hope to uncover in this introduction.
One can take the measure of what is missing in the way of an anthropology of Christianity by examining the success of recent efforts to establish an anthropology of Islam. These efforts arguably began with el-Zein’s 1977 Annual Review article, entitled ‘Beyond Ideology and Theology: The Search for the Anthropology of Islam.’ In short order, others followed el-Zein in making programmatic statements, most notably, Asad with his 1986 paper, ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.’ At the same time, several prominent scholars such as Gellner (1981) and Gilsenan (2000 [1982]) followed Geertz’s (1968) lead by writing broad comparative examinations of Islam in a variety of settings. Following el-Zein’s initial pronouncement, then, it did not take long for a literature self-consciously focused on the anthropology of Islam to develop.
I will return below to one of the key debates in this literature, for it suggests a way around one of the major obstacles to establishing an anthropology of Christianity. At the moment, however, I only want to point out what the rapid establishment of the anthropology of Islam has meant for those who work in that field. By 1992, Launay (1992:2), who studied the Islamic neighborhood of Koko in Cote d’Ivoire, could write that while ‘until recently anthropologists did not set out to study Islam per se, but rather the religion of some particular culture, society, or locality,’ now anthropologists of Islam can be seen to be ‘engaged in a common enterprise and grappling with a common set of questions’ (Launay, 1992:3). This development, he notes, has created a situation in which studying ‘the religious beliefs and practices of Muslims in the neighborhood of Koko
Religion 33 (2003) 191–199
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constitutes a reasonable, valid, and significant way of contributing to the understanding of the religion of Islam’ (Launay, 1992:1).
Even the jacket of Launay’s book bears out his point: not only does it reveal that it is volume 15 in the University of California Press’s Comparative Studies on Muslim Societies series, but of the two blurbs, one is by John Bowen, an anthropologist of Islam not in West Africa but in Indonesia. It is this kind of scholarly community—one in which people working in different geographic areas publish in the same fora, read one another’s work, recognize the relevance of that work for their own projects, and seek to develop a set of shared questions to be examined comparatively—that does not yet exist in relation to the anthropological study of Christianity. The existence of such a community and the work that would follow from it would, in the terms I used above, constitute the development of an anthropology of Christianity not just in itself but also for itself.
Given that the success of the anthropology of Islam proves that it is possible to construct a viable comparative enterprise around the study of a world religion, one pressing question to ask is why an anthropology of Christianity has not yet arisen. Even recognizing that absences are notoriously hard to explain, in this case the effort to do so proves instructive. Speaking broadly, one can distinguish two kinds of factors that might have suppressed the development of an anthropology of Christianity. We can call one kind of factor cultural and the other theoretical.1
On the cultural side are all of those aspects of the culture of anthropology that make it difficult for anthropologists to study Christians. Enumerating all of these aspects would take an essay in itself—one that ranged from examining the struggles between missionary and anthropological purposes that so often takes place in the field (and in circumstances where anthropologists routinely and quite frustratingly find themselves dependent on missionary infrastructure) to considering the personal motives that bring anthropologists to the discipline in the first place. But at the heart of such an essay would have to be a discussion the curious fact that Christians, almost wherever they are, appear at once too similar to anthropologists to be worthy of study and too meaningfully different to be easily made sense of by the use of standard anthropological tools.
Christians are too similar by virtue of drawing on the same broad cultural tradition as anthropologists, and too meaningfully different by virtue of drawing on a part of that tradition that in many respects has arisen in critical dialogue with the modernist ideas on which anthropology is founded. Both the similarities and the pointed nature of the differences make Christianity more difficult than other religions for anthropologists to study. Since the traditional religion of, say, the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea does not take any position on modern claims concerning the bases of knowledge or the importance of tolerance, an anthropologist can endeavor to understand that religion on its own terms without challenging one’s own. But when studying many kinds of Christians, including Urapmin charismatics, anthropologists have to reckon with the fact that they do have universalist arguments about the bases of truth and the limits of tolerance ready to hand. Because of this, to claim, as anthropologists must, that
1 I am making this distinction between cultural and theoretical factors in a rough and ready way for the purposes of laying out the argument that follows. My usage is broadly in accordance with some anthropological folk models of this distinction. I would not want to be read as suggesting that theory is not itself culturally shaped.
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Christians make sense in their own terms is at least to admit that it is possible to argue in a reasonable way that anthropologists do not make sense in their own. Anyone who has been told in the course of fieldwork that to understand is to convert has a visceral sense of the force of such Christian challenges to the modernist tradition. Given the risks involved in recuperating this kind of world view to sense, it is not surprising that mostly anthropologists do not go out of their way to do so.
The argument that many kinds of Christians are threatening because they challenge liberal versions of modernity of the kind most anthropologists subscribe to is at the heart of Harding’s (1991) seminal discussion of the difficulties of ‘Representing Fundamentalism.’ She suggests that this threatening quality accounts for why Christians in general, and Christian fundamentalists in particular, are ‘repugnant cultural other[s]’ who, unlike those whose differences are constituted along lines of ‘race/sex/class/ethnicity/colonialism’, are not suitable subjects of anthropological attention (Harding, 1991:375). I take Harding’s article to be a crucial text to look back to in developing an anthropology of Christianity. Drawing on my point above, I would extend her argument only by pointing out explicitly something I think she leaves implicit: it is not just the otherness of Christians that makes them so difficult; it is also the similarities. It is the closeness of Christianity that makes its otherness so potent: repugnance in this case can be explained in classic anthropological terms as a response to an anomalous mixture of the similar and the different (Douglas, 1966). Neither real others nor real comrades, Christians wherever they are found make anthropologists recoil by unsettling the fundamental schemes by which the discipline organizes the world into the familiar and the foreign.
Along with these cultural factors that militate against the development of an anthropology of Christianity, there are also some theoretical factors that inhibit its growth. Chief among these is the current anthropological suspicion of all comparative projects. Fearful of resting their efforts on groundless essentialisms, anthropologists are not these days inclined to accept that there is a single thing called Christianity that they might make the object of comparative investigation. There are many kinds of Christianity, and when the number of different kinds is multiplied by the number of different situations in which they have been spread and the number of different cultures to which people have adopted them, it is hard to escape the conclusion that at best we are dealing with Christianities rather than with Christianity, and that at worst these Christianities really have rather little in common with one another.
Founded as it is on fundamental disciplinary ideas about the diversity of cultures, this kind of object-dissolving argument is always a potent force in anthropological debate. It is worth noting, however, that these arguments behave differently in different contexts. When object-dissolving arguments are applied to areas of study that already have a large literature, a set of outstanding issues to address, and some kind of institutional foothold within the discipline—areas like kinship (e.g., Schneider, 1984) or the anthropology of religion in general (e.g., Asad, 1993), for example— they often lead to an efflorescence of creative work focused on the very object they would banish. But when object-dissolving critiques are applied in areas where no sense of comparative project has ever existed—as is the case in the anthropology of Christianity—the effects can be withering and can prevent comparison from ever getting off the ground.
Another glance at the development of the anthropology of Islam can be useful at this point, for the issue of the validity of Islam as a cross-cultural category was on the table from the outset of that development. In fact, el-Zein ended his famous article on a skeptical note, claiming that Islam
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did not hold its shape sufficiently across cultures to count as an object of comparative research and proposing that anthropologists had to conceive of themselves as studying not Islam but Islams. What is most interesting in the present context is not el-Zein’s skepticism per se but rather the fact that ever since he expressed it, his position has been routinely rejected by all of the most prominent contributors to the growth of the anthropology of Islam (e.g., Asad, 1986; Bowen, 1993; Eickelman, 1987; Launay, 1992; Roff, 1987:32).
As striking as this blanket rejection of the notion that the existence of many separate Islams makes the development of an anthropology of Islam untenable has been the fact that none of the arguments against el-Zein’s position have been particularly sophisticated in theoretical terms. Indeed, none of them would count for much in a high level theoretical debate over whether or not it is possible to establish objects that can be examined cross-culturally. But then again, anyone reading this literature quickly realizes that contributing to such debates has not been the point—rather, the point has been getting on with the anthropology of Islam. Thus Asad’s (1986:14) cross-culturally portable definition of Islam as a ‘discursive tradition that includes and relates itself to the founding texts of the Qur’an and the Hadith’ might not survive careful scrutiny aimed at determining if it included just those people whom we would want to count as Muslim and none whom we would not. Similarly, Bowen’s (1993:7; see also Eickelman, 1987:20) proclamation that ‘[O]ne treats Muslim tradition as distinct local “Islams” only at the risk of overlooking both the historic connections across different Muslim societies and many Muslims’ strong sense of an external, normative reference point for their ideas and practices’ might be seen as trying to establish connection and a sense of external constraint as sufficient to define Islam without fully arguing for this position. But the fact remains that Asad and Bowen make what are very good points within the anthropology of Islam, points that allow good comparative conversations to develop. And in this literature that seems, quite rightly I think, to have been all that matters.
What the history of the anthropology of Islam teaches us is that the intellectual obstacles that confront any effort to establish the anthropology of a world religion can be overcome. What is more, they can be overcome even in the absence of fully developed theoretical arguments for why disciplinary strictures against any devaluation of local variation should be relaxed in order to allow comparison to take place in these cases.
Yet despite the fact that the intellectual obstacles can be overcome, they have not been overcome in the study of Christianity. Although so baldly phrased as to appear flip, a bit of controlled comparison might be instructive here. The anthropology of Islam clearly has not faced the same kind of cultural obstacles to its development as has the anthropology of Christianity: Islam, particularly in its non-fundamentalist forms, is in other ways that most anthropologists find naturally worthy of study. In the absence of cultural obstacles to its growth, anthropologists have been able to develop an anthropology of Islam despite the intellectual obstacles that they, like those who would establish an anthropology of Christianity, have had to face. And since the anthropologies of Islam and Christianity share intellectual obstacles but not cultural ones, one has to take the success of the anthropology of Islam as some indication that it is the cultural and not the intellectual barriers that most hold back the anthropology of Christianity today.
This conclusion suggests that the anthropology of Christianity is unlikely to move along unless the cultural factors are tackled alongside of, if not before, the intellectual ones. The question on
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the table then becomes that of how to get around the cultural barriers that hold the anthropology of Christianity back. It is a well-known social scientific finding that in the absence of a good deal of consciousness-raising people who hold stigmatized identities tend not to rush to socialize publicly with others who hold the same identities, and that they certainly do not rush to do so on the basis of their shared stigmatized status. The cultural obstacles to studying Christianity render the status of anthropologist of Christianity a stigmatized one. How many anthropologists who study Christianity have been asked, as Harding (1991:375) reports that she repeatedly has been, Are you now or have you ever been a Christian? In the face of this stigma, anthropologists who study Christianity have tended to associate most regularly with people who study other things and to pass themselves off as anthropologists of such and such a region, or of religion in general, or of history, or of language, or of capitalism or of politics, or of whatever. A first step toward for an anthropology of Christianity would be to move past this, to have anthropologists who study Christianity be able to say that whatever else they are, they are also anthropologists of Christianity. Only once they take this step can the intellectual work of establishing an anthropology of Christianity for itself begin.
For the purposes of their articles that appear here, all of the contributors have taken this step. All of them make the Christianity of the people they discuss central to their articles, and this despite the fact that in all cases they are also addressing important, mainstream topics in contemporary anthropology and could have with ease made those topics their focus. Lester, for instance, makes a substantial contribution to the study of temporality and its role in the construction of the self through narrative. Otero engages currently much discussed issues of the relationship between state projects and class and indigenous identities. Droogers offers an ambitious theoretical piece that could easily be read as an effort to use current work in cognitive anthropology to put the project of cultural comparison in general on a new footing, and Howell’s and Robbins’ pieces both contribute to heated debates surrounding processes of globalization and localization. The fact that all the contributors have been able productively to thematize the Christianity of the peoples they are discussing while at the same time taking up central topics in anthropology more generally speaks both to the possible coming of age of the anthropology of Christianity and to the contributions it can make to the discipline at large.
But the papers collected here do more to put the anthropology of Christianity on a solid footing than simply demonstrating the viability of focusing on Christianity while at the same time addressing core anthropological concerns. They all also feature explicit comparisons among Christian groups and thus make it over the many-Christianities/no-anthropology-of-Christianity hurdle that so holds back the anthropology of Christianity in theoretical terms. In several cases, contributors draw comparisons encompassing both different geographic areas and different Christian traditions (Droogers, Howell, Lester), where in others they either hold the traditions constant but vary the geographic location (Robbins) or vary the tradition but hold the location constant (Otero). The result is a set of papers that demonstrate the viability of Christianity as an object of comparative study and begin to outline a map of the kinds of topics studies focused on such comparison might be particularly well suited to discuss.
There is no space here to treat all of the areas of overlap among these papers or to draw out all of the topics they collectively put on table. Instead, I will just mention a couple of themes that appear, from the vantage of this small group of papers, to be important to an emergent
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anthropology of Christianity and let my discussion stand as an example of how comparative questions might be phrased in this field.
One major theme is the tension that the Christians discussed in almost all of these papers face between the world of daily life and the world of ultimate religious meaning. Recognition of the importance of a tension between the mundane and the transcendental order in Christianity is not new, and the fact that it marks not only Christianity but also many other world religions is central to the literature on the so called ‘axial age’ traditions (e.g., Eisenstadt, 1982; Jaspers, 1953). What is new in these papers, however, is a demonstration of how many forms this opposition can take within Christian cultures and how fruitful it can be to compare these forms across cases. For example, in both Lester’s and Robbins’ discussion the tension manifests itself in the temporal dimension, though differently in each case (see Eisenstadt, 1982:306). For the nuns Lester worked with, one must learn to live in transcendental time and to recuperate one’s past into a narrative that unfolds within that time. For the recent converts to Pentecostalism Robbins discusses, the past become identified with the mundane, and the goal is to jettison it so as to be better able to realize transcendent values in the future.
Howell’s paper is particularly intriguing for the way it reads Philippine Baptist efforts to negotiate the tension between the mundane and the transcendental as also a struggle to find a productive relationship between the local and the global—situating the conflict this time, we might say, in the dimension of space rather than that of time. It is evident from Howell’s work that the split between the orders takes on a different kind of force when the transcendental is also linked to the humanly foreign. One effect is that those in touch with foreigners also become the representatives of transcendental values, as the pastors do in Howell’s account. Another outcome of the alignment of the global and the transcendent, apparent in many cases, is that moderniza- tion and salvation become linked. Clearly, figuring out in different ethnographic cases how the transcendent and the global are related is a productive line of research for anthropologists of Christianity.
Howell’s paper is also a clarion call for more subtle accounts of the way Christianity becomes local and forms relations with the cultures with which it comes into contact, and this is another major theme that runs through many of these papers. Otero’s paper is a fine account of the inner structure of such relations, especially within the Espiritualismo tradition. In the Espiritualismo case, indigenous spirits figure importantly in possession. At the same time there are rituals in which Christian deities also appear and these rituals are more highly valued. Otero notes that this ranking of Christian above indigenous deities renders the Espiritualismo world a mirror of the hierarchical Mexican society that surrounds it and it becomes clear through his analysis that the religion’s existence in such a social context helps make sense of its complex blending of the Christian and the indigenous. It is particularly noteworthy in the context of the present volume that in making his argument Otero does not simply dismiss the Espiritualistas’ claim to be Christian on the basis of their religion’s obviously syncretic character. Instead, as Ames (1964) long ago suggested one should in dealing with cases of apparent ‘syncretism’, he attends carefully to how the Espiritualistas’ valuation of their Christian identity structures the relations between the indigenous and Christian traditions in their belief and practice. Had he not attended to the importance the Espiritualistas place on seeing their religion as Christian, he would not have been able to delineate the fine structure of the mesh of Christian and indigenous ideas or to make the
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argument he does about how that mesh reproduces the hierarchical structure of the surrounding society.
Droogers’ paper is the most geographically wide ranging in the set and the most explicitly theoretical in orientation. He proposes that anthropologists examine local Christianities along three dimensions: those of beliefs, of internal relations, and of external relations. In each of these dimensions power relations come into play, and there may also be different hierarchies of influence among the different dimensions. To this way of parsing Christianity, he adds an interest in connectionist models of culture that stress the possibility of cultural diversity and change. His account can be useful in analyzing the kinds of complex amalgams of the Christian and the local that Otero and Howell lay out, since the mix of elements may differ in different dimensions. Furthermore, his model can help to explain why one finds the mixes one does in any given case. Otero’s account, for example, could be cast in Droogers’ terms as one in which the external dimension (i.e., the relation of the church to the surrounding society) has put its stamp on the belief dimension, which has come to mirror the organization of the former. In the Pentecostal case Otero also discusses, the belief dimension has been less susceptible to influence from the external dimension, a finding that fits well with what is known generally about the way Pentecostals carefully manage their relations with the surrounding society (on this point, see also Robbins’ paper).
Droogers’ model can also extend our previous discussion of the value of comparing the different forms the mundane/transcendental tension can take in different cases. The tension itself would be, in Droogers’ terms, a result of the belief dimension claiming hierarchical precedence over the other two and attempting to subject them to its organizational designs. Lester and Howell both give vivid examples of how these claims are made by religious leaders who speak at least in part in the name of the belief dimension. At the same time part of the variation in how the tension is elaborated and expressed is the result of how the internal and external dimensions resist or otherwise shape their relation with the belief dimension and its imperious claims. In Lester’s case, it appears to be the internal dimension—the organization of the convent itself—which interacts most forcefully with the belief dimension and insists on some sort of mundane routine, even if it is highly ritualized. In the Philippine Baptist case, by contrast, it is the external dimension—represented most concretely both by the symbolic capital the wider world provides the pastors and by the promise the world offers believers that the self can develop in ways that allow it to transcend local customs and local ties—that most influences how the tension is represented in the realm of belief. As in the study of interrelations between the Christian and the local, in this case too Droogers’ model proves a useful one for those who would compare Christian cultures.
In concluding, it is worth noting one trend in these articles that needs both to be appreciated and perhaps to be taken as an indication of an area in which some caution is called for. Most of these articles focus to some extent on Pentecostal and charismatic forms of Christianity. They are the main focus of Otero’s and Robbins’ papers, and provide the main comparative cases in Howell’s and Droogers’ papers. The prominence these forms of Christianity have in this volume reflect not only their continually growing worldwide influence (Jenkins, 2002) but also the extent to which anthropologists have recently turned to studying them. Those interested in speculating on reasons for this turn should see Douglas’ (2001) detailed and compelling discussion of the course it has taken in the anthropology of Melanesia. Here, however, it is not the causes of this
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turn that are of most interest but rather, as Howell implies, the need to prevent a nascent anthropology of Christianity from becoming in practice an anthropology of the Pentecostal and charismatic tradition. The anthropology of Christianity needs to draw on the strengths of the anthropological literature on this tradition—strengths which have recently become more than ethnographic and have begun to evidence themselves in the kinds of comparative conversations that, as I noted above, mark a discipline that exists for itself as well as in itself (e.g., Corten and Marshall-Fratani, 2001). At the same time anthropological studies of other Christian traditions also need both to develop their own comparative conversations and to find ways of breaking into the Pentecostal and charismatic one. Both of these tasks are already well underway in the articles included here, and this represents another respect in which they serve to put the anthropology of Christianity on a good initial footing.
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Joel Robbins is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. He has written widely on issues of Christianity, modernity and ritual. His study of Christianity and cultural change in Papua New Guinea, entitled ‘Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society’ is forthcoming from University of California Press.
Joel Robbins Department of Anthropology (0532) University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla CA 92093-0532, USA
E-mail address: jrobbins@weber.ucsd.edu
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