Redeeming Anthropology: A Theological Critique of a Modern Science 9780198796435, 0198796439

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R E D E E M I N G AN T H R O P O L O G Y

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Redeeming Anthropology A Theological Critique of a Modern Science

KHALED FURANI

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Khaled Furani 2019 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019947208 ISBN 978–0–19–879643–5 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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To my teacher Barbara Aswad Through whom I became an anthropologist To my mother Jamila al-Badawi Furani Through whom I am still learning whom I ought to become

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Acknowledgments Innumerable have been the persons and institutions across countries and continents who have nourished this book. My memory appears hopelessly stunted before the task of remembering them all, but I will make the attempt. I must begin by thanking my students in a 2008 class on “Fieldwork and Otherness” for daring to endure with me through its various experiments toward understanding relations between methodology and epistemology and between truth and technique in anthropology, which ignited the spark of this book’s initial questions. Other audiences whose questions helped steer the book’s iterations include those attending panels at the 111th American Anthropological Association annual meeting in Montreal, the 39th Israeli Anthropological Association annual meeting in my hometown of Haifa, the “Theologically-Engaged Anthropology” Templeton Workshop, which took place at the University of Georgia, the Anthropology Workshop at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, the last two both at Tel-Aviv University. Only an illusion of self-sovereignty could permit the unwarranted assumption that my voice alone traverses this book. First among all those whose thoughts in one way or another appear on its pages are the direct voices of numerous anthropologists, faithfully recorded by themselves or by others. I wish to especially thank those who graciously agreed to be interviewed by me, most of whom appear on this book’s pages, and wish to particularly acknowledge my debt to four anthropologists who gave to me of their time before leaving this world: Georges Balandier, Françoise Héritier, Sidney Mintz, and Sydel Silverman. Fieldwork invariably requires the assistance of numerous people and bodies in multiple ways, no less so for this intra-disciplinary “fieldwork” in three countries. I wish to thank the many people and institutions who made it possible for me to travel, conduct research in libraries and archives, connect with scholars for interviews, and negotiate various other impediments, including my fledgling French.

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In France, for funding, I wish to thank Bourses de recherche en sciences humaines et sociales at the French Embassy in Tel-Aviv, EDEN-Erasmus Mundus Academic Network, and Fondation nationale des sciences politiques. For institutional hospitality, I wish to thank Pierre Demeulenaere, Chair of Sociology, Université de ParisSorbonne; Marc Lazar, Director, Centre d’histoire, Sciences-Po; Emmanuel Loyer, Professor of History, Centre d’histoire, SciencesPo; and Maison Suger, Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme. For assistance in orienting me to the French anthropological scene, locating resources, and conducting, transcribing, and translating French interviews, I thank Michel Agier, Manal Altamimi, Romain de Bellabre, Jean Copans, Tal Dor, Jean Jamin, Noha Khalaf, Naji alKhatib, Christine Laurière, Joëlle Marelli, Laure Salzburg, Charlotte Shama, Nacira Guénif Souilamas, and Yves Wankin. In the United Kingdom, I wish to thank Lori Allen, Richard Fardon, Adam Kuper, and Yazid Sayigh for their welcoming hospitality and assistance. In the United States, I record my gratitude for the institutional hospitality and friendship of Niloofar Haeri at the Anthropology Department of Johns Hopkins University and of Osama Abi-Mershed, Fida Adley, Denise Brennan, Rochelle Davis, and Susan Terrio at Georgetown University, some at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and others at the Department of Anthropology. For their guidance and support, I also thank Louise Lennihan, Jane Schneider, and Shirley Lindenbaum at my alma mater, CUNY’s Graduate Center. For general funding and support, I thank the Institute for Social Inquiry at my home institution, the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel-Aviv University. I am also indebted to the dedication of my research assistants, Shvat Eilat, Ori Mautner, and Roy Zender. When it came to analyzing my materials and actually sitting down to write this book, I was blessed to be warmly welcomed by Tantur Ecumenical Institute on the outskirts of walled-off Bethlehem. With generosity of native biblical proportions, under the stewardship of its devoted rector, Father Russell McDougall, Tantur provided me an oasis, as it has been doing for others, with its nourishing landscape and refusal to surrender to the onslaughts of military occupation, partisanship, and global capital. While I am deeply grateful to its staff entire, I wish to especially acknowledge my debt to those staff members and friends who, in addition to Russ, eased my comings and goings and engaged me in nourishing discussion, namely Sandy

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Dides, Ryann Craig, Josh McManaway, Étienne Nodet, and David Neuhaus. Three librarians, dedicated to their calling, maintained a lifeline for this book: Jacquline Mazoyer, Sandrine Lecointre, and Trevor A. Grigoriev Dawes. To them goes a continent-crossing gratitude. I also wish to record my appreciation to colleagues and friends who graciously read and commented on drafts of chapters: David Burrell, Jean Copans, Eduardo Dullo, Matthew Engelke, Don Handelman, Richard Handler, Michal Kravel-Tovi, Derrick Lemons, Ashley Lebner, Menny Mautner, Ori Mautner, John Milbank, Mike Rynkiewich, Yehouda Shenhav, Erica Weiss, and Avital Wohlman. For their commentary on the book’s conclusions and their enduring lessons on much that came before, during, and after writing this book, I am grateful to the wisdom of Joel Robbins and Shai Lavi. In ways more than I can innumerate, Redeeming Anthropology is inspired and guided by the intellect of my teacher, Talal Asad; it aims to heed his call to uncover the ways our secular world determines anthropological comprehension. I am fortunate for having partaken in illuminating conversations with my senior colleagues in Israeli anthropology, Haim Hazan, Emmanuel Marx, and Don Handelman. Snait Gassis and Gadi Algazi helped me think about modern and medieval academic history, the philosophy of science, and the place of anthropology in them all. For remarkably patient and enthusiastic editorial support at Oxford University Press, I am indebted to Karen Raith and her production team and to anonymous reviewers. For permitting me to work on this book, often away from them and away from home, I thank my children, Mysoon, Sukayna, and Jamal, and my wider family, the ‘Abbas and Furani clans. For sustained conversations on the physics of light, I am grateful to my cousin, Anan al-Hajj. For locating havens where this book could emerge and for the innumerable ways, both painful and joyous, she helped make it what it is, there is, of course, my wife, Helene. I thank her mother, Joan Alpert, for bearing her and also for bearing with this book as it intruded on her life in ways more than kind. I also thank her late father, Hubert Alpert, who had my back as long as I had the good fortune to know him, and who would have been overjoyed to see this book come to print. Her father-in-law, the senior Jamal Furani, deserves my utmost thanks for putting up with her husband, at least most of the time. As for Helene herself, my fumbling with

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words sufficient for acknowledging her toil is perhaps best said by Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” God alone bears witness to my gratitude for her and for the encompassing mercy that permitted this book to materialize. Despite this great polyphony of assistance, I alone remain responsible for the book’s failings.

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Contents Introduction

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1. Thoth: Immuring Anthropology from Theology

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2. Eucharist: Theology Seeping into Anthropology

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3. Hubal: Idolatry in Anthropology Conclusions: Theology Revitalizing Anthropology Bibliography Index

143 174 185 199

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Verily, in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and in the difference between night and day, there are indeed signs of wonder for all who are endowed with insight. (Qur’an 2: 190)

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Introduction To experiment, rather than to persuade, is an essential aim of this book. I do not presume to convince you, but instead invite you to join in a thought experiment, or perhaps rather, experience. I mean to entice you to partake in an attempt to retrace steps and, if you will, missteps in a labyrinth of modern thinking about multiplicity, specifically within its anthropological vestibule. I use “multiplicity” as a shorthand for a range of terms anthropologists invoke in defining their realm of inquiry as the study of difference, including the other, diversity, alterity, and so forth. And I ask you to retrace steps with me in particular ways by trying to peer beyond blinders erected by secular reason, which obstruct a fuller and freer comprehension of multiplicity than currently exists. A plain argument traverses this book: anthropology has a complex relation with theology as an other that it “forgets” yet also preserves and through which it can further be criticized and revitalized.1 This argument’s underlying premise lies in plain sight for those with a modicum of familiarity with anthropology: a self can profitably interrogate its actualities and possibilities from the standpoint of its ostensible other. The profit is all the greater if this self (here, anthropology) has learned to despise, fear, distrust, ignore, or simply overlook the other (here, theology). Differently put, I proceed upon the supposition that anthropology could learn about itself from a field it has largely deemed “unhealthy” to its prevalent forms of reasoning. With eyes toward and from the vantage of theology, this My evocation of “anthropology” largely presupposes its meaning in British idiom as “social anthropology” and in American as “cultural anthropology,” and encompasses significant parts of the French “ethnologie.” My argument cannot be assumed to address anthropology in its physical or archeological branches. 1

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book constitutes an attempt to learn about the particular workings of secular reason in anthropology. It does so primarily by treating anthropology in a certain sense anthropologically: “ethnographically” collecting and interrogating stories that anthropologists narrate about their lives in and in relation to their discipline to reveal the particularity of the apparently universal, the oddity of the patently familiar, and the contingency of the seemingly inevitable. Indulge me to narrate my arrival at this task.

ENCOUNTERING PARRHESIA In a windowless basement library during my graduate training in cultural anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, then on 42nd Street across from Bryant Park and the New York City Public Library, I chanced upon a “window” that eventually led to an opening in my disciplinary formation. To combat the rigidity infusing my entombed body and mind, having spent long hours plowing through assigned course readings, I devised a particular ventilating habit. Putting aside an assignment, I would select a tome from the shelves, but not just any one. I would choose texts that indulged me with proverbial wafts of “fresh air” in lieu of its actual absence. My need for refreshment was met by revelatory writings that relayed what my discipline, like other disciplines, does not readily accommodate. These pages conveyed aspects of lives of the discipline’s founders, leaders, and sages and connected for me what had previously appeared disconnected. These texts permitted a vision that, according to Immanuel Kant, only artists could justifiably possess, a vision of the interaction of faculties that “mature reason” otherwise keeps separate, autonomous, self-sufficient, and above all, sovereign (Milbank 2006: 124). The texts I read were personal interviews conducted with famous and officially retired anthropologists, a genre opening the volumes of Annual Review of Anthropology (ARA) since 1972. In them, my discipline’s professionals profess how their scholarly desire to study the world had been covertly dissociable from their pursuit to comprehend who they were and could be. Taken together, they describe the launching moments and driving forces of diverse anthropological careers. I recall Meyer Fortes (1978) recounting his chance meeting with Bronisław Malinowski in psychoanalytic circles,

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how Sir Edmund Leach (1984) wanted all his life to walk in the footsteps of his maternal great-uncle Sir Henry Howorth, how Ernestine Friedl (1995) was enduringly moved by the ethical training she had received at Hunter College in New York City when it was still only for women, and how Audrey Smedley (2001) followed her desire to run away from racial oppression in Michigan and join black intellectuals flourishing in Paris. Through these pages, senior members of my discipline spoke perceptively and fearlessly about their lifelong engagement with anthropology. It seemed to me as if in approaching death, physically and professionally, these teachers’ need to keep in place a professional mantle also died, which until then had shrouded their accounts of themselves. Such candid speech is understandably rare among those still “within” the discipline, pursuing a career of disciplined performance.2 I do not mean to imply that nearing death simply led these anthropologists to become franker, or that younger generations of anthropologists are necessarily less frank. Sincerity of speech in relation to proximity to death is not a primary concern here. What interests me is that it appears that at an autumnal stage senior anthropologists no longer truly care to sustain the partition erected between the personal and professional. They allow their colleagues and neophytes, or simply their readers, into what their professional quests had been about for them personally. This memorable area of honesty planted the seeds for this book’s method. In dropping a powerful, far-reaching, liberal pretense—also at work in non-liberal politics—separating professional and personal speech, these anthropologists traversed the enforced divide between pure and political knowledge. The truthful and the good, fact and value, unite in many of these confessions, often disclosing what the discipline’s official language in textbooks does not tell the outside world, nor anthropology’s neophytes, nor even fellow practitioners when professional stakes remain high.3

2 For example, Berkeley anthropologist Laura Nader reflects, not without overconfidence, on her study of censorship and silencing in telling her students: “What your professors are teaching you is a result of their experiences. But they are not supposed to tell you that. Because they’re supposed to be objective, and impartial—right?—and distanced” (in Hebdon 2013: 47–8). 3 For example, this censoring took form in the life of none other than Claude LéviStrauss who, according to Marc Abélès, “said at the end of his life that he thought that he was an artist rather than a true scientist. Even though all his life he explained what he did was truly scientific” (Interview, September 16, 2014). This censorship is already

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While the discipline officially aims to “fix” certain conditions in the world, my ARA-featured “informants,” and others from a “fieldwork” I launched later, frequently spoke of pursuing anthropology as an attempt to fix themselves. There is yet to appear a textbook that presents the discipline’s pursuits as they emerge in these biographical materials: also composed of anthropologists’ attempts at selfedification. Thus, I witnessed that as curtains closed on academic lives, others opened to frank reflections, revealing careers in anthropology as not simply about interrogating human difference in cultures far away, but also about interrogating oneself, about pursuing redemption of the self along with that of the world. Indeed, these fragments display the academic undertaking of anthropology as a way for a self to walk from its actualities toward its potentialities.4 It is thus these fragments, these snippets of anthropological lives, which ignited my curiosity about anthropology’s secularity, including its relationship with a theistic other, not least because they included kinds of confession typically occluded from the official canon. Before I proceed further in explaining how I mine my “field” of remembrances and memoirs, I present preliminaries in the form of four premises that impel my argument: anthropology as an ethical quest, the need to doubt its claims to triumph, its emergence in crisis, and its secular constitution.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL LIFE AS AN ETHICAL QUEST Beginning her Berkeley training in 1929 at the encouragement of Ruth Benedict and later becoming the first woman anthropologist tenured at Harvard, Cora du Bois speaks in her autumnal ARA plainly evident at work in his memoir Tristes Tropiques (1973), which he generated at a time when, despairing of any academic future, he wanted to write whatever passed through his mind (in Eribon 1988: 86). 4 That these interviews possess a parrhesiastic quality and the content they thereby reveal may face two types of misrecognition. One type may come from a cohort for whom anthropology’s norm is primarily that of a “career,” especially as formed by the neoliberal order. The second type may come from a cohort for whom “reflexivity” is too old a tree for barking up. To the former I wish to retort: try to imagine living out fully your anthropological profession. To the latter: reflect deeper and wider, extraprofessionally.

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interview about her discipline’s scientific “impurity”: “[Anthropology] is not a social or behavioral science but a humanistic philosophy” (1980: 1). Du Bois goes on to add that anthropology is also “a philosophical humanism; it is not a pure or social science as the word science is now used . . . . It is rather a science in the earlier sense of the word . . . an attempt to understand” (1980: 9). In an equally candid autumnal reflection, Marc Augé, former president of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, who launched his anthropological career studying West Africa followed by metro stations, airports, and hotels as “non-places,” echoes this view. For him, anthropology is essentially an “attempt to understand oneself,”5 resonant of the Delphic maxim from Apollo’s Temple adopted by one of the discipline’s earliest associations: founded in 1799, La société des observateurs de l’homme (The Society for the Study of Man) declared as its motto, “Connais-toi meme (Know thyself)” (Stocking 1964: 134). With their discarding of professional mantles, such accounts reveal the academic discipline of anthropology as also enabling one’s ethical becoming. This “science” entails learning from various actualities in striving toward best potentialities for living with oneself and others. We can thus observe anthropological careers as “narratives of becoming.” Anthropology is not merely a subject that some scholars have studied; it has become their way of being in the world, going far beyond the kinds of “reflexivity” their profession demands for transparently representing this or that “foreign culture.” These reflections display scholars ultimately becoming reflexive about who they were seeking to become and had indeed become via anthropology. Famed for championing a hermeneutical approach to cultures rather than collecting facts about them, in a lecture tellingly titled “After the Fact,” Clifford Geertz professes that it was “the indivisible experience of trying to find my feet in all sorts of places . . . [that] seems to have produced whatever has appeared under my professional signature. Indeed, it has produced that signature itself” (1995: 135). Many of Geertz’s colleagues also speak of an “indivisible experience,” of the particular academic profession of anthropology providing a space for becoming and cultivating a mode of being, where one can seek 5 This statement comes from Marc Augé’s reflections on his experience conducting an ethnography of the Paris Metro in 1986, which he essentially describes as akin to a person “observing himself in his own milieu” (in Dhoquois 2008: 23).

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to improve one’s relation to oneself, as well as to one’s own or to other societies.6 At the very least, anthropology frequently provides a place for its practitioners to somehow and somewhere strive toward selfrecognition, whether before, during, or after embarking on fieldwork.7 It serves, in a word, as an ethics. For leading French anthropologist Georges Balandier, who championed studying anthropology’s relationship to political conditions, the discipline is “a way of being . . . a way of situating oneself in relation to history and to the movement of societies” (Interview, May 2, 2015). As their placement on the edges of the discipline’s literature (as well as completely outside it) suggests, these parrhesiastic accounts of academic careers often sentiently declaim themselves as “aesthetic” for they convey a sense of anthropology as an ethical liberation.8 6 American anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, who worked, among other places, in Lesu of Melanesia, described the start of an anthropological career as follows: “This is a not uncommon process of finding one’s self. A feeling of personal or social discomfort (or both) have been a prelude quite often to anthropological and sociological curiosity” (1966: 20). In his introduction to The Gift, E. E. EvansPritchard, who worked in southern Sudan, notes how French ethnologist Marcel Mauss was “asking himself not only how we can understand these archaic institutions, but also how an understanding of them helps us to better understand our own, and perhaps improve them” (1966: ix). Finally, there is anthropologist and sociologist Georges Balandier, who worked in Senegal and pioneered the study of modern politics among French anthropologists: “For me, if you will, the profession was not dissociable, my anthropological craft could not be separated from commitment to and responsibility for other peoples I have been studying” (Interview, May 2, 2015). 7 Consider these examples from the contemporary French anthropological landscape. Emmanuel Terray raises the question: “Why anthropology? Because we had a desire to leave France. That was clear. It was the reason regarding Algiers. Because we wanted to travel. We did not want to work in France. Working in France did not seem agreeable to us” (Interview, September 22, 2014). Understanding the phantom that is fieldwork, Michel Leiris opted “not only to discover the Other but to find himself as Other” (Taoua 2002: 481). And in the words of Leiris’s friend and commentator Jean Jamin, it is “the tension between oneself and oneself that renders Leiris’s work beautiful and dramatic as well as ethnographic as much as autobiographic” (1996: 23). Finally, think of Vincent Debaene’s preface to Lévi-Strauss’s work where he notes that for him anthropology was not just an acquisition of knowledge but “an experience of the self on the self ” (2008: xxi). 8 The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (Kazhdan 1991) entry for parrhesia includes: “(παρρησία), literally, ‘freedom of speech.’ In a secular context this concept came to mean (from the 4th century onward) the license allowed a privileged official or orator to offer cautious advice or reproof to an emperor, and so, by extension, the right to have access to the emperor (cf., Mirror of Princes). In a religious context, the term came to mean a confidence in dealing with God and men that is drawn from faith and a righteous life, and that belongs in particular to saints.” In modern thought,

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DOUBTING TRIUMPH From anthropologists’ parrhesiastic speech we learn not only that the discipline has given form to ethical quests, but that this kind of quest constitutes or at least promises a certain redemption. While anthropology has privately constituted a space of personal becoming, it has also been publically pronounced as a triumph of sorts: providing potential emancipation from all kinds of prejudice that seize individuals and societies alike, teaching them how to be otherwise. Anthropology’s adherents commonly perceive it as offering lessons for liberation from blindness toward various prevailing norms, whether social, intellectual, political, epistemic, or ethical. Its ability to redeem arguably explains a form of this discipline’s power.9 A few examples serve to convey the ways this sense of triumph has historically pervaded the discipline, a variety of internal doubts and critiques notwithstanding. These examples also serve to illustrate my own doubt about the triumph associated with anthropology as an ethical attainment, a doubt I find concomitant with comprehending anthropology as a secular event. Former American Anthropological Association president from the University of Chicago Fred Eggan speaks of how this sense of triumph arose early in the discipline, then over delinquencies at home: “In the 1930’s anthropology was a way of life that enabled practitioners to escape the worst features of American culture” (1974: 17). French anthropology doyen Claude Lévi-Strauss similarly depicts his calling: “For many ethnologists and not only for me, the vocation of ethnology was perhaps, actually, a refuge, against a civilization, [in] a century where one felt disquiet” (in Eribon 1988: 98). In his memoir Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss likewise confesses: “Anthropology affords me intellectual satisfaction . . . . In proposing the study of mankind, anthropology frees me from doubt . . . . It allows me to reconcile my character with my life” (1973: 58). However, such liberation, even when demanded by the discipline, does not necessarily come easy.

Michel Foucault (2001) engages with this concept in his book Fearless Speech, his translation of parrhesia. I here evoke it to mean a combination of candid, frank, fearless, and uninhibited speech in the presence of an authority. 9 Roy Wagner identifies “the power anthropology has over its converts, its evangelistic message: it draws people who want to emancipate themselves from their society” (1975: 10).

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In the United States, leading founder of academic anthropology Franz Boas points to a conundrum inherent to this ambition: “The emancipation from current thought is for most of us as difficult in science as it is in everyday life . . . . The emancipation from our own culture, demanded of the anthropologist, is not easily attained” (1962 [1928]: 206). Once attained, however, anthropological emancipation is a triumph. A diverse range of critiques does not preclude anthropology from being articulated to this day as a bold accomplishment, as triumphant, at least morally as when constituted as “cultural critique” (Marcus and Fischer 1986) and a “critique of power.” Augé proposes that the discipline is a “synonym of a certain intellectual liberty” (in Dhoquois 2008: 20). So whether anthropology is escape, refuge, emancipation, liberty, or critique of power, almost a century of disciplinary writing evokes this enduring sense of ethical triumph. This book holds as a premise that we need to revisit the sense of ethical and epistemic triumph constituting anthropology, lodged in narratives anthropologists tell of themselves and their discipline. To the extent that anthropology has been an ethical quest, we need to ask the question: how warranted are its triumphal claims? For it is another premise of this book that should these claims be duly scrutinized, we might disavow this sense of triumph and thus come to more fully grasp anthropology’s crisis as one borne by its secularity. This is where, by yet another premise of this study, theology enters the picture, to supply a critique and tools of revitalization for a discipline beholden to exercising reason in its secular guises. I bring two protagonists of modern anthropology to illustrate the need to revisit the triumphal claims enfolded in the ethical achievement that anthropology is taken for: Ruth Benedict and Claude LéviStrauss. Both induce a sense, even if fleetingly, of anthropology’s constitution as a kind of defeat, not only an accomplishment. Both evoke doubt at its modern emergence as a triumph. In a 1934 journal entry, Benedict divulges that work for her (and her work was largely anthropology but occasionally poetry) was always a distraction, even if she was never sure from what exactly she wanted to be distracted (in Mead 1959: 155). That Benedict all along sensed anthropology as a concocted distraction reveals that at least for her it was less than triumphal. More openly, Lévi-Strauss publicly disparages travelogues, barely exonerating anthropology whose ties with travelers’ memoirs were crucial for its historic formation as a modern discipline.

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He leaves us wondering if anthropology, not entirely excised from travelogues, also serves as a similar kind of escapism from Western civilization, albeit unobtainable: “Is mine the only voice to bear witness to the impossibility of escapism?” (1973: 41).10 Having emerged in a Euro-American sphere, could anthropology thus be complicit with the very maladies peculiar to Western forms of alienation that it wants to conquer? If anthropology is indeed implicated in “escapism” from alienation in Western societies then how much and what kind of ethical freedom does it promise? Could its historic emergence from these maladies amount to it merely being a symptom of them?11

ANTHROPOLOGY AS CRISIS One way to access this doubt of anthropological knowledge, when it is constituted as an ethical triumph, is to consider anthropology as a response to a crisis, not only as a discipline repeatedly facing one.12 Since the end of European world wars seven decades ago, anthropology seems to have continually adjusted its self-recognition in response to repeated waves of crisis. Indeed, we can perhaps perceive crisis as continually expanding, elliptically if not uniformly, in all national anthropological traditions, up to the moment of this writing. For example, the current moment is saturated with critiquing power because it is power (Sahlins 1999). To acquire a sense of anthropology’s crisis as constituted by the secular condition, it is first crucial to recognize a progressively 10 This question comes as part of a more extensive wondering by Lévi-Strauss: “Can it be that I . . . am the only one to have brought back nothing but a handful of ashes? Is mine the only voice to bear witness to the impossibility of escapism. Like the Indian in the myth, I went as far as the earth allows me to go . . . I felt that what I was looking for was already beyond my reach” (1973: 41–2). 11 One could argue that Leiris’s 1934 memoir L’Afrique Fantom provides a relatively early impetus for understanding anthropology as a symptom of, rather than as a cure for, modernity: “It was necessary that I take a new voyage into Africa . . . only to discover that neither ethnography nor exoticism can stand before the gravity of the social questions posed by the development of the modern world” (1981 [1934]: 13). 12 Think, for example, of anthropology’s “crisis of representation” (see Marcus and Fischer 1986) as one in a series of crises to do with concepts of civilization, evolution, history, and, of course, colonialism.

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widening radius for a sense of crisis that started during the 1950s and 1960s. In that period, a critique of anthropology identified a crisis, that is, located it, first in its adherence to a powerful theory. I am referring to functionalism, a crisis-critique dwelling within the discipline and charting ideals for it, a theoretical edifice founded upon a denial of history. In the 1970s, the sense of crisis expanded beyond internally derived theory to arrive at a powerful condition encompassing the discipline itself, namely colonialism. During the 1980s, a critique of the discipline’s entanglements in surrounding conditions of colonial power culminated in a critique of its very words, that is, of the poetic and political techniques by which anthropology represents others, a malady famously diagnosed as Orientalism. Since this affliction’s acknowledgment, anthropologists have been taking various turns to right the fraught task of writing about the other: interpretive, post-colonial, literary, linguistic, reflexive, ethical, ontological, post-humanist, and today some even speak of “postsecular.”13 But in none of these turns, twists, or critiques has anthropology itself been considered a crisis, as we might dare to do if we adequately comprehend it as a cultural event and, more specifically, as an event belonging to the history of modern kinds of alienation in the West, whose claims to ethical attainment we might care to interrogate rather than assume. If we listen carefully, not only to the current generation priding itself on being “less innocent,” “more savvy,” and “highly reflexive” about the craft of representing others, but also to earlier generations, we encounter occasions to glimpse anthropology’s constitution as a response, perhaps even symptomatically, to an event—by which I mean a cultural condition—that was itself a crisis: the modern “death of God.” Lévi-Strauss implies as much when depicting anthropology as defeat, first if not foremost also within Western societies: “A proliferating and overexcited civilization has broken the silences of the seas once and for all. The perfumes of the tropics and the pristine freshness of human beings have been corrupted by a busyness with dubious implications, which mortifies our desire and dooms us to acquire only contaminated memories” (1973: 37–8). A faithful disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss implies corruption occurring on both ends, plaguing both the ethnographically observed 13 For a review of some entrapments entailed in “post-secular” formations see Furani 2015.

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and observer. And with a certain fidelity to Lévi-Strauss, while occupying the chair named after him, Philippe Descola appears apprehensive about daunting challenges facing anthropology that might cause it to disappear altogether as “an exhausted form of humanism” (2013: xx).14 That anthropology emerges and exists symptomatically within and as a crisis internal to the Euro-American sphere of domination becomes more explicitly a possibility in pronouncements by Stanley Diamond. A Marxist anthropologist from the New School and an intellectual “grandchild” of Boas (via Paul Radin), Diamond steers clear of poetic invectives to directly identify anthropology as a symptom of a problem. Civilized culture in the West, including the emergence of anthropology within it, is a problem for itself: “We study man . . . because we must, because man in civilization is the problem . . . . Primitive peoples do not study man; it is not necessary” (Diamond 1974: 409). This sense of anthropology as itself a crisis, born out of a civilizational crisis—a response to, if not a symptom of, a crisis—rather than a sudden or gradual opening exploring a hitherto greater and undiscovered reality, is not peculiar to this particular discipline. Prior to Lévi-Strauss’s and Diamond’s pronouncements, Walter Benjamin seems to indicate that crisis underlies all modern enterprises involved in contemplating humanity: “Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (1968: 242). Benjamin’s astute observation induced my own doubts in anthropology’s lasting sense of itself as a sort of redemption. Benjamin’s revelatory (apokalyptein) observation implies that humanity’s farreaching “self-alienation” has not passed over anthropology. In other words, anthropology is plausibly a kind of destruction, not only a distraction (as it was for Benedict), taking the form of an academic profession (that also bestows a certain aesthetic pleasure) contemplating humankind’s diminishment in its own compartmentalized way. 14

In attempting to avert this disappearance, Philippe Descola initiated the project of “monist anthropology” to transcend the nature–culture opposition by being “fully respectful of the diversity of forms”—both human and nonhuman—at the “very heart of social life” (2013: xvii–xx).

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Anthropology may furthermore be undermining its central aim to comprehend multiplicity, in that it understands things finite through finite means, reason by reason only, and only this world through “worldly” tools.15 Anthropology’s multiplicity appears in various guises—evolution, man, mankind, social structure, humans, humanity, meanings, discourse, power, ethics, and, most recently, ontology—which as a primal object of study has long fed this discipline a certain pride or at least a steady stride toward perfection, but has hardly helped it acknowledge that it resides within a certain condition of perfidy. All these diverse designations, their comings and goings notwithstanding, subsist on the categorical permanence of “the cultural,” disciplinarily contested for its content and primacy, but not for its permanence, remaining to this day the paramount and emblematic way anthropology understands the other.16 However, in a way central to understanding this book’s argument, I maintain that an other understood within the finite category of “the cultural” is an other patently reduced.17 In committing itself to studying difference in or from the other’s vantage as “cultural,” anthropology has in a sense become complicit in policing the fullness of difference, such that it does not fully coincide with human faculties for willing, acting, and understanding.18 Cultural difference is locatable among humans, or perhaps among other sublunary species and even objects, a distinctly different difference from that articulated in theology—wherein the other is ultimately God. In contrast, the difference anthropology ultimately admits is limited to those measures deemed legitimate within the Enlightenment’s totalitarian proclivities, out of which it emerged, and within the political form (the 15 I believe it is in his refusal of such conflations that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s fideism has him write: “The sense of the world must lie outside of the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it, there is no value, and if there were, it would be of no value” (1922: 6.41). 16 For the purpose of my argument, “the social” can be substituted for “the cultural.” 17 I speak of “reduction” in reference to well-known critiques of humanism out of which “Man” has emerged as an object of inquiry for anthropology, among a host of other disciplines. Consider one famous example of this critique coming from Foucault: “Humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination” (1984: 85). 18 John Milbank argues that sociology (here extended to anthropology) engages in “policing the sublime,” whereby its reasoning cannot consider “categories of infinitude” nor work on “transcendence [that] is only known through immanence” (2006: 230).

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state) it has come to inhabit in the modern world.19 Inadmissible are questions, techniques, vocabularies, and even kinds of skepticism that could possibly unsettle a form of reason seeking sovereignty (as in Enlightenment thought) or a sovereignty securing reason for its quintessential political form (the state). In other words, anthropology learned from epistemic-political sovereignty regimes that all the difference that matters is the difference sovereign reason can adjudicate. Indeed, if anthropology had not trimmed down difference to “the cultural,” it may never have taken its place within the modern university. In this pruning of otherness’s fullness, anthropology has profoundly—though not necessarily procedurally due to its method of “ethnographic immersion,” as Chapter 2 demonstrates—accepted the sovereign subject as a governing paradigm for how others reason,20 but more importantly, for how it itself reasons.21 Accounts about autonomous subjects who choose rationally, resist power, construct meanings, or make history would not be legible without the cosmology of an anthropological reason that assumes self-sufficiency and nearly always finds “culture” (or “the social”) sufficient for explaining all the far and diverse realities that fall under its gaze. Thus Geertz’s borrowed adage about the omnipresence of culture—“it is turtles all the way down” (1973: 29)—continues to be vindicated even by an ontological turn that can summon thinking about testudine cultures (as in “how turtles think”), but not necessarily about why “the cultural” order of reality continues to stand sovereign within this cosmology, as a given, no matter how far down, as it were, the turtles may go. 19 A couple of inductive reminders about anthropology seeing the world profoundly as “a world of the state” come from Foucault and from Milbank, respectively. Foucault holds: “The emergence of social science cannot . . . be isolated from the rise of this new political rationality and from this new political technology . . . if man . . . became an object for several different sciences, the reason has to be sought not in ideology but in the existence of this new political technology which we have formed in our societies” (1988: 162). Milbank reminds that “the secular,” including a version of it as an epistemic social theory, “is of one with the birth of political sovereignty” (2006: 102). 20 I say “largely” because there have been, of course, diverse forms of resistance to this paradigm of the sovereign subject among anthropologists. Besides positions within post-humanism or anti-humanist structuralism, there stands a famous exception to this paradigm in Marilyn Strathern’s work on “dividual persons” (1988: 113). 21 This assumption persists despite appearances to the contrary, as when Western modern reason has been the explicit object of anthropological inquiry. For example, see Rabinow 1996.

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To speak tectonically and metonymically, anthropology has veered toward Descartes and distanced itself from Augustine as exemplars for observing difference. It upholds the autonomous subject of Descartes (“I think therefore I am”) and repudiates the porous, that is, relational, Augustinian subject connected to God (“I am therefore you are in me”) (Augustine 1993: 3).22 To be sure, the Augustinian vantage was shown by anthropologists to exist in other people’s thinking, but has never had a place in the house of proper anthropological reason; it could be native to other people’s logic but surely not to its own. This is a way—certainly one slanted toward Latin Christendom from which anthropology historically emerged—to understand how anthropology has arguably emerged as a reconstituted variation on “secular theology.”23 More vital than others’ perceptions of the discipline, should anthropology want to comprehend how it came to study “the cultural,” it ought to be curious as to how and why Descartes’s way of reasoning became far more legible, more legitimate, and more of a home to it than did Augustine’s. Indeed, a way for anthropology to learn about its choice of home and the stakes this choice avails might precisely be by examining its estrangement from Augustine. Augustine’s world can furnish the discipline with a mirror for close examination, including for inspecting the given-ness of the finite category of “the cultural” as its ultimate object of inquiry. Toward pursuing such an inspection, inevitably another broad given of the discipline— its secularity—must also be probed and not assumed.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE SECULAR ENCOUNTER As already intimated, anthropology is not merely a body of, or a means for, pursuing knowledge, but also an event, by which I mean a cultural formation, that is, a formation arising within secular Western 22 The exact syntax in English of Augustine’s words is as follows: “You must in some way be in all that is: [therefore also in me, since I am]” (1993: 3). 23 Amos Funkenstein defines “secular theology” as one that stresses “the selfsufficiency of the world and the autonomy of mankind” (1986: 346). Milbank defines it as “a discourse, which collapses together empirical discussion of finite realities and invocations of the transcendent” (2006: 55).

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cultures. It requires no more than an anthropological truism to recognize that “nothing occurs outside culture,” including the event that is modern anthropology, its emergence, and evolution.24 The particular cultural formation that has instigated anthropology renders it secular, affecting what questions it pursues and how it pursues them, as well as the discipline’s very self-recognition. A key aim in this book is to comprehend the extent of anthropology’s secular making, specifically the ramifications of its secular reason. This task follows a line of inquiry forged in 1973 with Talal Asad’s observation per anthropology’s colonial encounter, prior to his pioneering work on religion and secularism: “Anthropology does not only comprehend the world but the world also determines how it comprehends it” (1998 [1973]: 12). In a seldom-remembered phrase, Asad defines that encounter as “merely one historical moment” (1998 [1973]: 12). However, powerful as it has been, the colonial has not been the only determining formation or moment in the discipline’s making. Formidable interrelated others include capitalism (Wolf 1999) and romanticism (Stocking 1989). I propose that “the secular encounter” is another such “historical moment,” and a hugely powerful one. One testimony to its power is its ability to remain in a vast state of apparent invisibility, secure from explicit anthropological inspection or introspection of any sort.25 Only in 2003 does Asad explicitly invite anthropologists to become curious about what he calls “the secular”—a conceptual space that defines, regulates, and sequesters the religious—epistemically preceding secularism as a doctrine of governance and secularization as a process and a theory of societal differentiation.26 Anthropologists 24 In a recent introduction of anthropology to the general public, Matthew Engelke writes, “You can’t step out of culture . . . this is anthropology” (2017: 5), then adds: “Above all [anthropology] explains both how and why culture is central to our makeup as human beings” (2017: 10). 25 This book holds as a premise that “the metamorphosis” to which James Clifford refers, when he speaks of anthropology’s recognition that it is not above historical and linguistic processes, remains ongoing (in Clifford and Marcus 1986: 3–5). “The secular” is another part of “these processes” yet to be duly recognized in the discipline’s making. To paraphrase Clifford, it is yet to be adequately recognized that the science of anthropology is not simply “above” language and science, but deeply and complexly within it, and by extension within the secular. 26 In distinction from Talal Asad, “secular” anthropologists have also been employing Charles Taylor’s affine concept of “secularity.” Nuances of signification between these two concepts notwithstanding, I employ Asad’s (2003) “the secular” and Taylor’s (2007) “secularity” interchangeably to signal an epistemic-ontological

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have since produced a vast body of scholarship on the secular’s aporias and contradictions in lives they study, especially around its relations with “the religious.”27 However, as with his colonial call, Asad’s secular call entails not only an invitation to study the secular in other lives, but also in anthropologists’ own lives, including in the lives of their minds. Yet it seems that anthropologists have had a far easier time facing the colonially inscribed “mirror” than the secularly inscribed one, for while a robust field of interest has arisen to explore the ways the secular is formative in people’s lives, we hardly ever ask how it has been formative of our very discipline of anthropology as a particular site in secular reason’s provenance. A due response to Asad thus also requires a thorough introspection of anthropology’s very reason and forms of reasoning, independent of inquiry into other people’s religions or their lack. To be fair, I must recall that even prior to Asad proposing we study “the secular,” anthropologists did in fact engage with a related proposition to rethink their commitment to secularism (Stewart 2001). Discussants of this proposition at the Sixth Annual European Association of Social Anthropologists meeting in 2000 sought to comprehend and even mitigate the dissonance between anthropologists’ secular principles and their subjects’ religious persuasions.28 Theirs was an attempt to relax the effects of anthropologists’ secularist attachments on particular ethical stances, methodological procedures, and analytical positions in their study of religion. While identifying important steps for recognizing the secular’s hegemony, this group fell short of probing their discipline as a secular formation. Thus both before and curiously after Asad’s call to “more fully grasp” (2003: 22)

formation that constitutes, rather than stands for, a reality, largely by requiring that the “religious” remain exterior to an authentic fulfillment of that reality. For a perceptive discussion of the difference between “secular” and “secularity,” see Lebner 2015. See also Mahmood 2016 as an example of fusing both terms. 27 The following ethnographies all note the ways the secular affects anthropology’s observations of religious practices within Christianity or Islam (for the most part): Agrama 2010; Asad 1993, 2003; Bialecki 2008; Bowen 2010; Cannell 2005, 2006; Dole 2012; Elisha 2011; Engelke 2009; Fernando 2014; Fountain and Lau 2013; Giumbelli 2013; Green 2005; Hirschkind 2006; Keane 2007; Luehrmann 2011; Mahmood 2005; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Özyürek 2006; Rutherford 2009; Selby 2012; Starrett 2010. For a review of the state of anthropological literature on secularism see Cannell 2010. 28 For an example of papers resulting from this panel, see Pina-Cabral 2001, Yalçın-Heckmann 2001, and Kapferer 2001.

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what is implied in anthropology’s secular constitution, the discipline’s secular probing has largely aimed at helping anthropologists become better scholars of others, both religious and secular, rather than turn its gaze on itself. This book thus aims to begin addressing this lacuna, to probe who anthropologists have been, are, or might still become upon more fully grasping the secularity of their discipline and even of their own intellects. It took nearly a decade after Asad’s call for an admission about the secular’s power over anthropology to surface, noting that it was the secular’s powerful emergence that created anthropology’s very possibility (e.g., Lambeck 2012). Anthropologist Bruce Kapferer argues that “anthropology’s distinction and potential contribution” is actually founded upon a secular paradox, whereby the secular doubts the limits of its reasons and rationalities. For Kapferer, these very doubts provide the space for anthropology as a form that secularism takes for doubting itself (2001: 341–2). It is as if anthropology has, as it were, one foot within and one foot outside of “the real,” which it learned to regard as equivalent to the secular. However, whether anthropology is secularism’s doubt or defeat, debauchery or defense, dream or dedication is incidental to the point Kapferer makes that is central to this book: anthropology is itself a secular event and formation. With anthropology’s categorical anchorage in a reality or realities coinciding with the “the secular,” to whose scrutiny arguably “nonsecular” realities the world over have been subject, it stands to reason that it would patently and near-reflexively resist readjusting its inveterate optics. Our task as a discipline then is not simply to adjust our vision to better recognize “religion” or even to better recognize the presence, position, and power of our “secular spectacles.” Our task is rather to face the limits and possibilities of how our very being is wrought by wearing these “spectacles” for so long, such that the secular remains “rarely talked about as such . . . as a domain of concepts, as an approach that has implications as much for understanding others as for understanding anthropologists themselves” (Lebner 2015: 66–7). Introspection into our secularity as anthropologists is what this book aims to do and in the most anthropological of ways. It does so by attempting to look at the discipline from the vantage of an other, recalling its relation, actual and possible, with that very other demanded by its secularity, the other sometimes known as theology.

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Redeeming Anthropology ANTHROPOLOGY LOOKING IN ITS THEOLOGICAL MIRROR

In what sense is anthropology’s other “theology”? Why not instead faith, religion, or belief? As a rhetorical decision, my selecting “theology” in distinction from other related concepts derives in part from the ways anthropologists have historically distinguished their discipline from theology, epistemically and institutionally, in order to safeguard their legitimate citizenship in the modern university.29 Theology—wherein inquiry into divine otherness is viable—not only appeared as a constitutive other at anthropology’s birth, but remains durably so today.30 Precisely because it is theology that anthropologists insist they do not do in order to find its secular moorings, I feel it important to suggest theology as a place from which to interrogate what it is they do do.31 Anthropology’s curious negation of theology—an opening to nonsecular multiplicities—occurs despite, or perhaps due to, the fact that both disciplines have stakes in inquiring about an other, as a testimony from Ludwig Wittgenstein makes evident: “I wish to understand how the [human] other now bears the weight of God, shows me that I am not alone in the universe. This requires understanding the philosophical problem of the other as the trace or scar of the departure of God” (in Cavell 1999: 470).32 While God remains a real and alive Other in theology broadly speaking, God continues to be 29 E. B. Tylor charges anthropology with the following mission: “Theologians all to expose/Tis the mission of Primitive Man” (in Larsen 2014: 30). 30 Engelke holds: “Theology is often completely foreign to anthropologists” (2014: 2). Relatedly, Joel Robbins holds that one source of “awkwardness” between these modes of inquiry stems from their “find[ing] it difficult to agree on fundamental issues. That is to say . . . they find they are others to one another in the strong sense” (2013: 336). For over a decade now, Robbins (2006) has been exhorting anthropologists to remember the wider forms in which otherness has been persistently available to theologians but not to them. 31 I heed Clifford’s admonition in selecting theology as what anthropology is not, rather than the discipline’s own self-definitions: “Never accept, never take as a beginning or ending point, what the discipline says it is. Ask instead: what do anthropologists, for all their disagreements, say they are not. Then focus on the historical relationship that is being policed, or negotiated, the process of ‘disciplining’ that goes on at the edge” (2003: 8). 32 Wittgenstein goes on to say, “This descent, or ascent, of the problem of the other is the key way I can grasp the alternative process of secularization, called romanticism. And it may explain why the process of humanization can become a monstrous undertaking, placing infinite demands upon finite sources” (in Cavell 1999: 470).

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sequestered or bracketed off for the working of secular reason in anthropology, historically the “science of man” since the Enlightenment. The God question remains of interest to anthropologists, but only in so far as it interests other humans in other cultures. While the ultimate Other transcends the limits of human language in theology, the other in anthropology is, at most and most notably, contained as cultural.33 In pursuing “maturity” for its reason— autonomy, independence, sovereignty, and self-sufficiency— anthropology must remain focused on its subject of the cultural other and steer clear of the theological Other. Of course, anthropology does clearly conduct a version of “theology” in the form of describing how, for example, other cultures believe in God, but if its practitioners indulge in such beliefs themselves, they may do so only personally and privately, well outside of clearly set disciplinary bounds. Anthropologists trespassing the limits of “methodological agnosticism” do so at their own risk.34 While anthropologists need not deny, nor admit, God’s existence, they must forswear God’s relevance to their sovereign reason. There is nothing particularly anthropological about this distancing from theology and theistic reason (Barnes 2001: xi). If anything, anthropology’s journey closely echoes that of modern, sovereign secular reason writ large in learning to distrust, and even despise theology (especially in its form of a rival to academic reason), for as Marx famously announces, “theology itself has failed” (1977 [1844]: 69).35 I do not mean to imply that anthropologists fail to appreciate theology

33 Following Milbank (2006: 106), I am approaching anthropology as policing the other—the phenomenon of difference—by reducing its occurrence to finite categories, most notably the cultural. 34 For discussions of risks taken and angst accrued by Edith and Victor Turner when facing their Manchester colleagues upon the Turners’ reception into the Catholic church, see Engelke 2004 and Larsen 2014. Also, consider Mary Douglas’s implying risk of sincerity loss in her A Feeling for Hierarchy upon her hearing from a fellow anthropologist that “No anthropologist could be a sincere Catholic” (2005: 105). 35 Although evoking a philosophical sense of the term anthropology, Ludwig Feuerbach’s opening statement in his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future explicitly articulates “Man’s” ascendency as deriving from theology’s descent: “The task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of God—the transformation of and dissolution of theology into anthropology” (in Geroulanos 2010: 4). Milbank nevertheless remains able to observe the ways theology “drops out” of modern theories (2006: 27).

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when profitable for their research among particular cultures,36 yet within the “natural reserves in the modern academy” (Roberts 2002: 194), theology must accept a reduced status. However, at a time when secularism no longer seems certain about its foundational certainties in ethics, politics, and epistemology, and when the Enlightenment turns out to be not so enlightened in its visions of, for example, tradition, religion, reason, and critique (MacIntyre 1988, Milbank 2006, Asad 2009, Arendt 1961), theology is being recovered for a number of critical projects. As a Christian, post-modernist, philosophical movement, radical orthodoxy has mobilized theology to reveal what it identifies as illusory aspects of the secular (Blond 1998, Milbank 2006). Notably, in political theology, theology serves as a genealogical critique, digging into the “unconsciousness” of liberal thought ensuing from secularism, in order to probe previously unadmitted theological layers of affects, senses, metaphysics, and a host of concepts— violence, exception, will, decision, and sacrifice—in political and legal thought (Connolly 1999, Kahn 2011, Schmitt 1986 [1922], Agamben 2005), social theory (Milbank 2006), and historiography (Blumenberg 1985). While I am here similarly approaching theology as a resource for critique, I distinguish my argument from these projects in two crucial ways: I do not aim to reveal the secular as illusory, nor am I interested in excavating the theological origins of secular concepts.37 While surely useful, a theological critique can take other than genealogical forms. More than making any claims about repressed or unacknowledged theological origins in anthropology, this book fundamentally takes the approach that there remains an enduring complex relation of anthropology to theology. Although unacknowledged, theology has not been completely excised from anthropology, making the relation between the two all the more “awkward” as aptly diagnosed by Joel Robbins (2006). Its enduring latency perhaps makes it also particularly posed to offer potentially useful avenues for critique. I proceed 36 See Robbins 2006, Larsen 2014, Engelke 2014, and Carroll 2017 on the ways anthropologists appreciate theology as a source of ethnographic materials. 37 I join with political theology’s interest in “expanding the horizon for understanding the work of political imagination” (Kahn 2011: 14), assuming that an adequate expansion of political experience always reconnects to the ethical, to the common good towards which persons and polities may orient and cultivate excellence.

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upon the premise that theology is an ultimately prodigious place from which to question various givens in the anthropological enterprise. For this book’s argument, theology, in addition to standing for anthropology’s other, also serves as a broad concept signaling lived experience—among these, rational inquiry—of religion, faith, and belief, without coinciding with any particular one. How St. Anselm, Simone Weil, or Pope Francis have defined theology is therefore not directly relevant, nor must theology’s content derive from Latin Christianity nor from Christianity at all.38 Rather, theology signals a place where theistic intellect, including its concerns with multiplicity, can and does find a home. Neither doubt nor skepticism are anathemas to the working of this intellect. Augustine’s Confessions remind us of the symbiosis between faith and doubt. Before becoming institutionalized in Western universities as an academic discipline, commonly understood as meaning “the science of faith,” theology as a term carried, and still retains, ancient ambiguities to convey the word of God, as well as words about God. I thus evoke theology to also refer to an all-encompassing order of reality, perhaps imagined as spherically so, as in a celestial or ecological sphere.39

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I refer the reader to St. Anselm’s classical definition of theology appearing as a subtitle in his Proslogion: “faith seeking understanding” (fides quaerens intellectum). Simone Weil provides an instance of what I consider an “atheological” definition of theology in so for as theology is about “seeking.” By that I mean if St. Anselm before or Pope Francis after posit faith in God as an act of seeking, for Weil it is an act of waiting, her atheological position inferable in Waiting for God: “Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it . . . . We don’t obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them” (2009 [1951]: 62). Pope Francis (2013b) holds that theology “demands the humility to be ‘touched’ by God, admitting its own limitations before the mystery, while striving to investigate, with the discipline proper to reason, the inexhaustible riches of this mystery.” Ingolf Dalferth (1988: 21) holds that theology as a word first appeared in Plato’s Republic and also contends that theology in a pre-Socratic sense meant “god-talk” (as in Homer), whereas after Plato it became the science through which God or gods are inquired into. In other words, the term “logos” in theology shifts meaning with Plato, from talk of god or about gods to giving an account of God. 39 Funkenstein (1986: 4) holds that the enduring ambiguity in the term theology, as a term that means both word of God and words about God or divine discourse and discourse about the divine, was retained until the thirteenth century, after which time it began to mean “supernatural belief.” In the sixteenth century, it began to exude a sense of a profession and an academic discipline that had already begun to institutionalize in the twelfth century in Bologna, Paris, and Oxford (see also Rausch 1993).

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Given the anthropological ends of this book, I put theology to work here in ways indicative of such a sphere, calling it “theosphere.” I view this “theosphere” as a kind of a “wild exteriority” (Foucault 1981: 61) to which modern humanism—a particular secular formation— consigned the “excess” it excised in establishing sovereignty claims for human reason, mankind’s autonomy, and a regnant immanence of this world, for a transcending world is said not to exist.40 The “theosphere” I have in mind is the space of “the unreal” or the less graspable than the real, whose diminished, yet enduring, existence has enabled “the real” of the secular to attain self-recognition, which it does through a host of denials, certainties, anxieties, and affirmations comprising its victory over theology. Indeed, theology has become a kind of epistemic scrapyard in which modern secular reason has deposited various realities and domains of inquiry seen to menace its sovereignty. Theology’s excision entails that anthropology exists in a condition of “anthropodom,” whereby sovereign, secular reason alone is dedicated for interrogating an other it is able to recognize as mostly human and merely “cultural.” This domain, I contend, is one anthropologists have established for practicing their discipline, and more crucially for this book’s argument, it governs their relation with theology as exteriority. Employing anthropodom helps me to emphasize anthropology’s unacknowledged, and even unrecognized, thrall to the secular condition and investigate its relation to theology, both actual and putative. Within this modern condition of anthropodom, only recently have anthropological muscles been re-flexed for inquiry into God, revelation, Eucharist, trinity, eternity, and salvation, to name a few, which still remain largely illegitimate for the performance of rational deliberation, whether academic or vernacular. To apprehend its lassitude and accommodation to secular normalcy, anthropology requires a detached exterior space, a place where it can step outside itself into a sort of dépaysement or estrangement. I believe the theosphere offers just such a pregnant space. Within anthropological quarters, it was recently observed that “a nascent engagement” (Robbins 2013: 239) is arising between what 40 Martin Heidegger, who intimates that every form of humanism bears a metaphysics, holds: “Expelled from the truth of being, the human being everywhere now circles around himself ” (1998: 260).

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have essentially been the “science of man” (anthropology) and the “science of God” (theology), one that also contains calls for their critical reconciliation. This development should not particularly surprise given “how much theology not only has been but continues to be a conversation partner for anthropology” (Larsen 2014: 225).41 This “partnership” notwithstanding, Robbins identifies their relation as awkward (2006), asks that it remain productively so (2013), and hopes it might generate “cross-fertilization” (2013: 329), whereby we in anthropology “could clarify our relation to otherness” (2013: 335), including learning from theologians how to more fully approach it.42 Some anthropologists have even declared that reconciliation has already occurred in conjunction with the arrival of a “post-secular turn” in anthropology (Fountain 2013, Fountain and Lau 2013). However, I maintain that attending to theology as an other to anthropology enables us to reach beyond reconciliation: to inquire into the former’s suppression by the latter (e.g., Cannell 2010)43 and search for ways the two might profitably coexist. Such attention can help us do more than better understand the other, ameliorate

41 See Frank Salamone and Walter Adams as early examples of calls to take theology as an object of anthropological investigation, in their edited volumes, Explorations in Anthropology and Theology (1997) and Anthropology and Theology: Gods, Icons and God Talk (Adams and Salamone 2000). 42 Anthropology does not appear to be particularly early or alone among academic disciplines in revisiting its relation to theology in modern times. An example of an earlier rapprochement seems to exist in Ian Barbour’s 1966 Issues in Science and Religion, influenced by Karl Heim’s dimensional thinking, dedicated to just these kinds of arguments for compatibility or resonance in the aim of promoting a model for “dialogue” between sciences and theology. According to Hans Schwarz (2005: 563–70), these arguments seem to be precursors for current European efforts at renewing dialogue between theology and the sciences. 43 One reason I find the “suppression”—or for that matter “dialogue”—models not sufficiently useful for describing anthropology’s relation to theology has to do, in part, with the fact that anthropology already and arguably constitutes a certain kind of “secular theology.” Anthropology does so in that it stresses the sufficiency of the world and the autonomy of mankind. I bring two examples of such visions. First, Funkenstein observes the emergence of what he calls “a variety of anthropocentric theologies down to our century” that arose in the seventeenth century when History rather than Nature became subjects for theological discourse, leading Franz Rosenzwieg to identify in them “atheistic theology” (in Funkenstein 1986: 360). According to Milbank, constructions of modern social theory entail “neo-pagan expressions,” as in historical scholarship, humanist psychology, and transcendental philosophy, which he takes to be “theologies or anti-theologies in disguise” (2006: 6). In distinction from these two visions, I am not interested in conferring a theological identity on anthropology even though I advance an argument about the ways anthropology preserves theology.

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anthropological scholarship on religion and theology, and profitably engage with the intellectual dimensions of religious speech.44 These endeavors approach a theology–anthropology engagement largely as an end, whereas this book approaches it as a means for investigating anthropology’s secularity. Taking a cue from Robbins’s (2006) key claim that theologians are able to investigate kinds of otherness from which anthropologists are by and large deprived, I aim to measure anthropology’s collusion with secular powers by means of a theological mirror, as it were. This means that I draw on this nascent literature’s boldness or at least curiosity in not fearing reason’s other (signaled as “the theological”), yet I also assume that relinquishing that fear can teach more than how to better think anthropologically about this or that object of disciplinary inquiry. Indeed relinquishing that fear or dismissal of, repulsion by, or sheer disinterest in “the theological” by secular reason ought to have effects beyond improving anthropological performance to ultimately induce questions about the life of reason in the modern research university as a secular institution par excellence and the kinds of ethical quests it abrogates or enables. In other words, the theological mirror ought to shine on who we can become, beyond how we can think; it ought to illuminate our ethical, equally to our epistemic, fortitudes. Theology thus permits anthropology to apprehend its secularity, irrespective of any inquiry into religion or social life writ large. The complexity of the relation between these two domains demands exploring how theology comprises a realm that anthropology largely aims to “forget,” yet, perhaps unknowingly, also preserves. I also aim to consider how this realm can be a place from which to criticize anthropology, the way an other typically can, according to revered anthropological mores. Theology offers anthropology a means to revisit its very nativity, not only genealogically but also symptomatically, as symptomatic of a theistic event. To mobilize theology for interrogating anthropology’s secularity means not merely to learn about theology inhabiting anthropology’s secular roots, and thereby question its legitimacy as a progeny of a secular order or that very 44

See Meneses and Bronkema 2017 and Lemons 2018 as examples of the yield from this expanded attention to theology by mostly anthropologists, and sometimes theologians, studying mostly Christian communities arguing the profitability of theology for both anthropological theory and ethnographic fieldwork.

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order’s purity claims (all genealogical tasks), but—and this is a direct aim of this book—to learn about the consequences that excising theology has had for anthropology (a symptomatic task). For this endeavor, I now turn to Friedrich Nietzsche, who diagnosed symptoms of God’s modern death in the West.

WORKING WITH NIETZSCHE’S DIAGNOSIS: ANTHROPOLOGY AS A SYMPTOM OF DEICIDE It behooves anthropology to examine itself using tools from Friedrich Nietzsche, son of a Lutheran pastor, grandson of a theologian, a student of theology in his own right, and a singular modern thinker about multiplicity.45 Consonant with anthropology’s affirmation of human plasticity, Nietzsche promotes the life of a self ’s becoming, as opposed to a self ’s being. The risk entailed in using his tools notwithstanding, I find them—particularly the diagnostic, in distinction from the genealogical—useful for measuring the secularity of anthropology’s reason, that is, for identifying what it takes as an interior and what it relegates to an exterior, namely, to the theosphere. Approaching his proclamation about the “death of God” as a portal to critique of sovereign secular reason, I find Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the divine’s death in modernity expressly useful for re-evaluating anthropology as a cultural formation emanating from that death.46 Given Nietzsche’s contempt for theology, it may of course sound all the more paradoxical to turn to him for help with diagnosing anthropology as in some sense a theistic event.47 Yet both for the tenacity with which he unearthed theology in modern secular sediments,48 and more importantly, for making an arsenal out of it to 45 Gilles Deleuze (2006: 45) notes how, in his radical thinking about difference, Friedrich Nietzsche ceaselessly assaults equalizing and the erasing of multiplicity in the fields of atoms, numbers, values, and logic. 46 For a more in-depth discussion of approaching Nietzsche for the purposes of reevaluating modern anthropology, see Furani 2018. 47 On the indebtedness of Nietzsche’s proposition of the death of God to an established tradition of German religious thought, see Eric Von Der Luft, who urges us to regard it as “an intricate and dynamic metaphor” (1984: 263). 48 Nietzsche announces: “I have dug up the theologian’s instinct everywhere” (1968: 575).

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combat entrenched forms of enslavement in those sediments, Nietzsche helps us with examining, as it were, anthropology’s beginnings (principia) and principles. With seeming Abrahamic vigor he aimed to “philosophize with a hammer,” as he so named his final section from Twilight of the Idols, “The Hammer Speaks” (Nietzsche 1968: 563). His is the kind of vigor that allows us to reapproach anthropology, not as a burst of confident secular reason, but as a troubled transmutation of a theistic event in the West. Moreover, during a time when modern reason triumphantly declared its purge of theology, allowing it to meagerly remain only at a safe distance from “civilized” spaces in the modern academy, Nietzsche reminded, albeit disparagingly, his and subsequent generations of its enduring persistence (as a genealogist) and its endemic prevalence (as a physiologist) in modern thought. He admitted theology’s endurance, albeit transformed, with radical honesty, when a pandemic predilection to declaring its extinction prevailed in Western modernity’s self-image. Theology essentially became Nietzsche’s very means for defining the modern condition as a sickness. While other seminal philosophers adored the birth of modern state powers (Hobbes), individual autonomy (Rousseau), reason’s sovereignty (Kant), and history as a modern category (say, Hegel and Vico), ironically Nietzsche (1968: 584), who among them probably held the greatest contempt for theology, mustered theology’s words for openly announcing, if not also denouncing, “the reduction of the divine,”49 rendering it, as Stephanos Geroulanos (2010: 2) points out, a marker for the nineteenth century, which was of course the time during which anthropology was emerging as an academic discipline. Nietzsche insisted that a theistic event constitutes the modern condition; by extension, it constitutes the birth of modern anthropology. To adequately appreciate the birth and evolution of anthropology as a theistic event from Nietzschean eyes, one first must avoid conflating this deicide with a desacralizing story. We must thus recall the 49 On this divine reduction, Milbank writes that from the seventeenth century onwards in the intellectual history of the West, the word “God” came to denote merely “an ultimate causal hypothesis” (2006: 127). Relatedly Funkenstein (1986: 6) argues that in that same century “God” also ceased to be the monopoly of professional theologians, for a “system” was introduced to the organization of knowledge, whereby “system” was understood as a “set of interdependent positions,” including methods and models that could be transposed from one discourse to another.

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ways in which writers from various religious persuasions and generations in the West have essentially vindicated the theological potency of Nietzsche’s diagnosis. I will here bring in just two brief instances affirming the theological dimension within Nietzsche’s acumen. These two instances should preempt misconstruing Nietzsche’s diagnosis as espousing atheism or as assaulting belief in God.50 In fact, his notion of divine death seems to have come in handy for those who, unlike Nietzsche, appear committed to a belief in God. Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer formulates his notion of “world come of age” in tones at once highly resonant and discordant with Nietzsche’s diagnosis: “The world come of age is more godless and perhaps just because of that [it is] closer to God than the world not yet come of age,” which is perhaps more “religious,” but not any closer to God (2010: 48). Nietzsche’s leading Catholic detractor Charles Taylor thankfully serves us another example. Otherwise viewing Nietzsche’s anti-humanism as a “revolt from within unbelief” (2005: 24), Taylor paradoxically but similarly suggests that “modern unbelief is providential” (2005: 27) in modern secularist culture wherein “a closing off to God” (2005: 13) takes place. Taylor evokes a version of the divine death through his notion of “experience-far,” wherein concepts such as God are marginalized and undermined in a secular age, at a time when belief in the divine becomes an attenuated personal preference within a market of choices for human fulfillment (2007: 143).51 I also and primarily wish to suggest that Nietzsche’s “dramatic proposition” about the death of God is not only about destruction but also about construction and reconstruction. It entails an attendant rebirth of gods (Deleuze 2006: 152) and thus directly, even if faintly, intimates the consequent and symptomatic birth of the modern enterprise of anthropology. Even intimations from the very house of anthropology have been issued to this effect. A dedicated disciple of Émile Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss imputed his attraction to ethnology to “scientifically impure reasons” and “a number of our society’s dramas” (1970: 74), furnishing an occasion to ask in Nietzschean

50 See Abeysekara 2008 for a detailed assessment of Nietzsche’s diagnosis, which helps to avert such mis-conclusions. 51 In his “A Catholic Modernity?” Taylor exhorts fellow Catholics to notice what in modern society “already reflects the life of God, and the doors . . . which have been closed against it” (2005: 34).

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physiological tones: in what ways could this “greatest recent event,” as Nietzsche describes the death of God, amount to a “drama” from which anthropology was symptomatically born? Indeed, this “event” may have been anthropology’s ursprung, Martin Heidegger’s term for naming a historic decision or founding event that provides a “destiny” and “truths” from which a tradition learns to distinguish the great from the base, the meaningful from the meaningless.52 Nietzsche’s tools—recognizing the deicidal event as formative of modern culture and academy, taking a genealogical approach to inquiry, excavating the theological, and detecting idolatry—can help us be doubly alert to the ways anthropologists continue: “to be caught up in the ever-reoccurring drama of the divine death and resurrection” (Larsen 2014: 227). “Resurrection” here refers to the ways anthropology reformulates theology by replacing God as the object of study, most notably with humans, yet simultaneously preserves it by continuing, albeit not without perversion (such as in its epistemic collusion with the state), the study of difference. Nietzsche’s diagnosis may help in seeing how, perversely close to state optics, anthropology recognizes in its concept of difference only that which does not exceed the category of the cultural or one of its cognates (races, nations, societies, populations, and so forth). Furthermore, its overriding preoccupation with power as a paramount order of that reality (“the cultural”) might also derive from that optical proximity. Another deicidal symptom perhaps, Orientalism, as diagnosed by Edward Said, emerged as “a theological reconstitution” (1998: 114)— a reworking and transposing of a theological inheritance (1998: 121–2). Interest in the cultural other did not simply result from a sudden access to objective knowledge, but involved a theological inheritance’s transmutation, once God no longer had a home in Europe’s intellectual language. A cultural other came to occupy God’s vacated I find Heidegger, who read and wrote about Nietzsche’s diagnosis, as also indicating that in so far as it is an enterprise whose object is difference and whose method is representation, anthropology is a symptom of the modern deicide: “The killing means the act of doing away with the supersensory world that is in itself—an act accomplished through man. It speaks of the event wherein that which is as such does not simply come to nothing, but does indeed become different in its Being. But above all, in this event man also becomes different . . . . The uprising of man into subjectivity transforms that which is into object. But that which is objective is that which brought about to a stand through representing” (1977: 107). 52

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slot in “mature” modern reason. Thus, the cultural other, and not God, became an axis for forms of becoming condoned as “rational” in endeavors to establish “reasondom”—to bestow sovereignty on reason as such (“reason alone”) for contemplating humans (“autonomous individuals”) and for assessing the “real” world (for there is no other). Attention to the deicidal diagnosis, I submit, is especially demanded within the academy by anthropology’s existential stakes in studying difference constituted as cultural rather than as designated in relation to the Absolute, First Principle, Being, Language, or Consciousness, as in diverse philosophical idioms, or to God, as in theology’s idiom. Attention to this diagnosis helps induce questions about anthropology’s complicated relation with a form of domination other than those already recognized—capitalist, colonial, Orientalist, and imperial—namely the domination of modern secular transcendence. Perhaps most significantly, it is useful for better understanding the particularity of secular reason that forms anthropology as an academic discipline, which, in turn, disciplines, and simultaneously inhibits, the study of the enduring subject of multiplicity. Multiplicity is thereby diminished (as only cultural) and isolated (within the realm of the anthropological), its fullness obscured and the integrative faculties required for its rational and wise investigation obstructed.53 By taking note of the divine’s death or displacement as an “enabling experience” (Said 1998: 122) for the emergence of anthropology as we know it, perhaps we can understand this modern academic discipline as an idolatrous instance of “showing in a cave.”54 Given the allure provided by anthropology’s sense of release attained especially via ethnographic immersion when and if its practitioners experience other ways of being in the world, we may ask in what ways might fieldwork practices and cultural concepts serve purposes 53 In his discussion of a variety of “anthropocentric theologies” or “atheistic theologies” Funkenstein (1986) evokes them as modern anthropology’s forbears, whose beginnings are traceable back to the seventeenth century with figures such as Leibniz, Vico, Newton, Galileo, and Descartes, prior to the anti-religious savants of the eighteenth century, who stressed the self-sufficiency of the world and the autonomy of humankind. 54 With “showing in a cave” I am alluding to Nietzsche’s statement in the Gay Science: “God is dead:—but as the human race is constituted there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow. And we—we have still to overcome his shadow!” (1882: section 108). I interpret this metaphor as signifying the contracted human condition in modernity.

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akin to sacred rites, masks, and idols mimicking redemption and divinity, even while occluding these roles.55 Perhaps the constitutive practice of fieldwork and the regnant, though contested, ideal-idol of culture stand as “holy games” among anthropologists in the modern secular world.56 Perhaps predictably, Nietzsche’s treatment of theology promoted a genealogical vision of academic disciplines (such as in Michel Foucault’s 1966 Les mots et les choses), but it can also—and this is the point that matters here—enhance a symptomatic vision of modernity, including understanding our object here, anthropology, as just such a symptom. By pursuing a genealogical vision, with theology as a mode of seeing, we can perhaps detect anthropology’s unstable, wanting, and discontinuous secular identity, formed in part by taking the theistic as its reason’s exteriority—at once negating, reconstructing, and preserving it. This approach could perhaps meet Foucault’s exhortation “to make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us, . . . [for genealogy’s] intention is to reveal the heterogeneous systems which, masked by the self, inhibit the formation of any form of identity” (1984: 95). Yet Nietzsche’s critical apparatus again avails something other than a genealogical vision. It also

55 Although my evocation of occluding sacred roles implicitly resonates with Nietzsche’s reference to “idols” and “masks,” it explicitly relates to Deitrich Bonhoeffer’s way of speaking in such terms: “We must really live in that godless world and not try to cover up or transfigure its godlessness somehow with religion . . . . If one wants to speak of God ‘non-religiously,’ then one must speak in such a way that the godlessness of the world is not covered up in any way, but rather precisely to uncover it and surprise the world by letting light shine on it” (2010: 480). See also Weil: “Every human being has probably had some lucid moments in his life when he has definitely acknowledged to himself that there is no final good here below. But as soon as we have seen this truth we cover it up with lies” (2009 [1951]: 139). Finally consider from a markedly different tradition, that of psychoanalysis, how according to Eric Santner, an “immunological” history of sovereignty has “the people . . . who are now blessed and plagued by a surplus immanence. The new bearers of the principle of sovereignty are in some sense stuck with an excess of flesh that their own bodies cannot fully close in upon and that must be ‘managed’ in new ways” (2011: xxi). 56 One may think here of anthropological works that contest the concept of culture and even declare it defunct (e.g., Abu Lughod 1991, Barth 2007) by offering alternatives such as “halvies” processes, critique of power, and human diversity. Yet such attempts seem to nevertheless perpetuate an ingrained romantic impulse in the discipline’s humanism, in so far as they amount to our ethical and political salvations or at least their melioration.

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furnishes a physiological vision of modernity, including the birth and evolution of modern anthropology within it. Nietzsche’s toolkit also contains a hallmark category, namely idolatry—clearly and not surprisingly appropriated from theology— useful in diagnosing anthropology as a symptom, not just of modernity, but of all those modern forms of domination that limit inquiry into our human vision and condition. Differently put, while a theological critique driven by Nietzsche’s genealogical method can possibly detect ways theology never fully extricated itself from anthropology,57 as one of Nietzsche’s techniques of criticism, “physiology” (in distinction from his other one, genealogy) also helps reveal the ways in which modern anthropology’s birth was a complicated and geographicallycivilizationally locatable symptom of divine death.58 In sum, keeping in mind modernity’s deicide as formative of the secular world anthropology has come to inhabit enables us to recognize this enterprise as a symptom of a theistic event. Nietzsche’s diagnosis induces doubts about common wisdom (assumptions) regarding theology’s relation to modern science, in general, and to anthropology, in particular, whereby we can question whether theology was simply and entirely left behind as sovereign reason marched on. More importantly, it permits questioning the givenness of givens, such as the one stating that anthropology is the discipline that studies the other. It further propels us to perhaps go beyond comfort zones and recognize defeat in that which has for so long been claimed by and large as accomplishment: the discovery of the other as cultural. Without developing an ability to better discern accomplishment from defeat, anthropology might be hard-pressed to uncover the conceits and self-deceits it adopted in being beholden to secular reason’s sovereignty. In an attempt to provoke such discernment, Chapters 1–3 explore anthropology’s relation with its exteriority, the theosphere, first to understand how it “forgets” theology, then 57 In his perceptive study of anthropologists of canonical standing in the discipline and their Christian faith, Timothy Larsen finds it striking “how much theology not only has been but continues to be a conversation partner for anthropology” (2014: 225) in that it never fully excluded theological voices. 58 My intimating a geographic location for this divine death derives from a powerful little poem by William Blake, “The Little Black Boy,” who relates about a woman under a tree: “She took me on her lap and Kissed me | And pointing to the east began to say: ‘Look on the rising sun: there God does live” (1960: 41).

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how it also preserves theology, and finally how it may benefit from further engagement with theology. I mean to hold up theology as a mirror that could possibly enable anthropologists to begin peering into their secular souls. Such “soul-searching” could perhaps in turn help anthropologists hone their discernment of difference, including of differences vital to their own reasoning. Such improved discernment may also serve anthropologists who are committed to finding ways of acknowledging how practicing their discipline opens to the soul’s ethical, no less than epistemic, quests.

METHOD Inviting anthropologists to inspect, with the help of a theological “mirror,” their ethical quests under the auspices of secular reason, my method in this book is largely introspective to the discipline. After all, as Roy Wagner pointed out: “The study of culture is culture” (1975: 16).59 I am supposing that mining certain personal introspections of lives lived in anthropology could be insightful in reassessing the kinds of questions we ask and how we ask them, chiefly those having to do with multiplicity—who the other is, has been, or might be. I examine materials “internal” to anthropology, but surprisingly with very little “digging.” There is little in my “raw data” that is outright new and almost none of it is “external” to the anthropological enterprise. My ethnographic site is anthropology itself, including the making of anthropological careers as experienced by anthropologists. While I largely examine personal reflections, whether in writing or in interviews conducted by me or others,60

Wagner continues this thought by noting, “an anthropology that wishes to be aware, and to develop its sense of relative objectivity, must come to terms with this fact” (1975: 16). 60 Among sources of interviews are Alan Macfarlane’s ancestors series from the University of Cambridge, attributed within the book by interviewee, date, and “Macfarlane Interview.” All are available at . All other interviews, referenced only by date, were conducted by the author. Some of these interviews were conducted in French. All translations of these and other foreign language materials in the book are the author’s unless otherwise noted. 59

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I have also made good use of biographies written by anthropologists’ close friends, colleagues, family members, and students. Although most of these materials have always been there, they have largely been misrecognized as irrelevant to understanding the discipline’s work, certainly in its theoretical moments. Fortunately, I have found them highly relevant for raising the curtain on the personal lives anthropologists lead while working as professionals. While publically marginalized from academic disclosure, these accounts are by no means unrelated to academic pursuits.61 My method thus becomes doubly introspective in that I aim to introspectively inspect anthropologists’ introspections.62 As this biographical material dissolves lines separating the professional from the personal, it helps to demonstrate the complex relations anthropologists have had and could yet have with theology. This method may appear unusual, but I have found it well suited to the task at hand. Perhaps it follows in part from Nietzsche’s genealogical proclivity whereby he views philosophy as an act of becoming, such that every philosophical line contains a trace of the biographical.63 This method also finds support in theological approaches, which refuse to separate the truth from the good, fact from value, or ethics from epistemology.64 Most importantly for this book’s subject, this method also finds justification in anthropology. The discipline already dissents from liberal dictates separating “pure” 61

Incidentally, to argue for the relevance, presumed in my method, of biographical narratives for comprehending the discipline does not mean imputing them with coherence. My resort to biography aims toward no such claims, about which Pierre Bourdieu (1986: 69–72) cautions. 62 Two years prior to the publication of the aforementioned ARA interview, Edmund Leach wrote in his textbook Social Anthropology: “I still hold that all the anthropologist’s most important insights stem from introspection” (1982: 127). Thus I take “introspection” to mean looking inside in order to examine not merely how anthropology renders the other as its object of study, but how it also pursues a disciplinary and disciplined study of self. 63 Recall the subtitle to Nietzsche’s autobiographical Ecce Homo: “How One Becomes What One Is” (1992 [1908]). Also recall his “confession” in Beyond Good and Evil: “It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography . . . . However far man may extend himself with his knowledge, however objective he may appear to himself—ultimately he reaps nothing but his own biography” (1886: chapter 1, section 6). 64 For views on theology as a discourse that integrates the faculties that had been separated by Immanuel Kant (such as those for recognizing truth, beauty, and goodness) see MacIntyre 2011 and Milbank 2006.

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from “political” knowledge and aesthetics and ethics from knowledge. It also already recognizes the relevance of the personal for understanding the professional and the apparent for unveiling the concealed. Leach noted some three decades ago: “Of one thing I am certain. Unless we pay much closer attention than has been customary to the personal background of authors of anthropological works, we shall miss out on most of what these texts are capable of telling us about the history of anthropology” (1984: 22). While his note directed me upon entering this particular ethnographic field, the senior anthropologists I met affirmed Leach’s guidance.65 Learning about others living in other cultures, these anthropologists regularly embarked on dissociable quests for learning about the kinds of people they are or strive to be. My choice of field has meant that the other is not only a subject anthropologists discover, represent, and write scholarly and professional tomes about, but one in relation to which they ethically fashion truths about who they are in the making. My aim to understand anthropologists in the making—their strivings through the discipline—has led me to collect and examine biographical materials of anthropologists in the three national traditions of American, British, and French anthropology. Together these three traditions arguably comprise the bulk of what counts as the canon of Western anthropology, although surely not the entirety of its Western nor global landscape. It must remain the task of other inquiries into other traditions of doing anthropology to investigate ways in which they may or may not conform with anthropodom as I here portray it. In speaking of traditions, I want to be careful to treat them gingerly and elastically so as not to mislead, for these national traditions do, of course, subdivide and unite into minor and major ways of doing anthropology. So while I employ “tradition” here to indicate continuity through, say, communities of conversation and debate, I do not 65 While in the field I stumbled across a reference to a discussion that took place in 1976 in which Sydel Silverman, former president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, apprehensive with a sense of separating anthropology from its “own human background,” contends that anthropological biographies are an integral part of anthropological theory, yet remain rarely taught (see Silverman 1981: x). Balandier also maintained during our interview at his home office that “family history has a great importance when it comes to determining what one does with one discipline or another” (May 2, 2015).

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take these traditions to be mutually exclusive nor immutable; rather they fuse and fissure in the broad scene that has been modern anthropology across time, states, and continents. To delve into these traditions from the personal experiences of those who have lived through and participated in them, I traveled across time (figuratively speaking, of course), states, and continents, accessing diaries, letters, biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. I also listened to published interviews and conducted some of my own interviews of leading American, French, and British anthropologists, during the autumnal, parrhesiastic stages of their lives and careers. To reach them, I traveled to diverse locations, including Washington, DC (for the 113th American Anthropological Association meeting in 2014), the Baltimore area, and New York City in the US, London and Cambridge in the UK, and Paris, France. With both my interview questions and my perusal of other materials, I sought to learn about why and how my subjects became anthropologists: what might have attracted them to the concept of “culture” or its cognates in the study of anthropology, what their fieldwork experiences meant to them, and what they have hoped to contribute to the discipline and the world. Their collective frankness and honesty about the ethical trajectories they followed have enabled me to construct an argument about both the excision and enduring presence of theology in anthropology and about how its continuing presence could offer the discipline promising avenues of critique.

ITINERARY The three “ethnographic” chapters following this introduction are meant to demonstrate, first, how anthropologists “forget” theology, second, how they preserve it, and third, how they could benefit from subjecting their discipline to its critique. Each of these chapters is named after an ancient or enduring sacral figure of sorts, respectively: Thoth, Eucharist, and Hubal. Each “figure” evokes divine powers, fitting for a theological critique. Yet beyond this evocation, I find each figure useful for furnishing a particular vision, paradigm, or ideal for characterizing anthropology’s relation, actual or putative, with theology. Each one offers a potent vantage from which anthropology might see itself in theology’s mirror. I am taking each of these figures

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as standing for a “proverbial master” anthropologists can be said to commonly serve. Before I further explain what these “powers” are employed to do in this book, I first wish to introduce another metaphor to help us comprehend anthropodom’s relation to the theosphere. I ask that you imagine a geodesic dome, which like those in science fiction preserves vitality inside while keeping dark powers of vitiation safely outside. The particular dome conjured for this book is the sovereign space housing the modern anthropological discipline. Built carefully over decades by its practitioners-inhabitants, according to particular edicts and precepts dictated by sovereign secular reason, it is the proverbial physical domain occupied by anthropodom. We can imagine that this dome was constructed gradually over time in order to safeguard its inhabitants and their industry from any and all forces banished by the same sovereign reason, which were consequently destined to roam untethered—at least to anything within anthropology—out there in the theosphere. Regarding the dome’s material construction, imagine it as a spherical edifice, forming a complete biosphere, built of joints of steel and panes of glass, each pane composed of many layers and coatings, which prevent particular forms of “dangerous radiation” and objectionable “light waves” from seeping through.66 The dome requires regular maintenance to protect and preserve the secular reasoning of its inhabitants, not only to make sure cracks do not form and panes do not break that could admit dangerous waves, but also to forestall even the tiniest gaps where noxious gasses could enter. Thus sealants, “theosealants” if you would, must be regularly applied so as to safely “theoseal” the dome from the theosphere. The panes anthropologists have laid for their dome consist of factoids, facts, sensibilities, dispositions, orientations, practices, concepts, paradigms, and even values structuring anthropology as a lawful citizen in the modern academy. To the extent that the dome remains architecturally sound—a viable and stable dwelling place for anthropological reason that keeps at bay all vanquished reason—secure anthropodom 66 Of course, this fortification does not at all mean that anthropology obliterates an interest in the religious, quite the contrary. Anthropology has arguably been living off it all along. Anthropodom does indeed welcome the study of religion, so long as religiosity exists solely among those studied and not in the life of its own reason. Any theology living in its reason constitutes an unwarranted breach, for it is appropriate to reason about it but not with it.

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can march forward like any “mature” and “normal” (read secular) enterprise of the modern intellect. Now please imagine that despite best efforts, some panes of glass paving the dome’s surface are accidentally, or deliberately, missing a layer or two, allowing certain light to seep through. Some of the joints are also weak or gaping or poorly sealed, again accidentally or deliberately so. These imperfect states of the dome may date from first construction, or perhaps later generations of dwellers selectively removed layers of glass or dissolved coatings and sealants. Regardless, these weaknesses, whether endemic, inevitable, or willful, all admit seepage from the theosphere. Indeed, perhaps anthropology remains unpeered in the modern research university as a discipline that seeks like no other to vindicate the rationality of the seemingly irrational, especially within religious traditions outside the West. Anthropology’s vindication of the other may reverberate in its unique “failure” to absolutely disconnect from the theosphere. This rather extensive metaphor of a protected anthropological biosphere helps with raising the questions: How dangerous are theospheric seepages to the anthropological enterprise? Could they lead to anthropodom’s inevitable doom? Is theology’s outright banishment outside the domain of “legitimate” truth-languages warranted and necessary for anthropology and the greater academy to survive as embodiments of “mature reason”? How might theospheric seepage already be affecting anthropodom? What might happen should it continue or even increase? Is there indeed something to fear? Or alternatively, to perhaps embrace? Fear, confidence, fearlessness, and anxiety may all be at work in the reflections of anthropologists to which I turn in the three core “ethnographic” chapters following this introduction. A word of caution about this book’s “ethnographic” evidence is necessary. In support of my argument, I muster the experiences and insights of some eighty anthropologists, which at times I present in quick succession with little “ethnographic detail.” I am concerned that the reader may find this presentation too speedy, flattening, and unduly fragmented. The evidence itself is likely to disappoint anyone expecting a developed account of the specific historical and biographical milieu of authors belonging to the discipline’s diverse times and places. However, while historically informed, this book is not intended as a history. Instead, this book aims to advance an argument about an ethico-epistemic evaluation of modern anthropology with

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historical materials marshaled in its support. I hope the reader interested in fuller and broader accounts of this book’s protagonists and their times will consult the copious sources cited. I call the book’s first “ethnographic” chapter “Thoth,” after an ancient Egyptian god of measurement and sciences, to evoke the ideal for building a science (or a humanities for that matter) called “anthropology,” safeguarded from theological intrusions. I choose Thoth to describe anthropologists’ multi-layered immurement of theology. Drawing heavily on the geodesic dome metaphor, Chapter 1 outlines the ways its protective “surface” is constructed of distinct layers and sublayers of “forgetting” what was banished to the outer theosphere, personally, professionally, rhetorically, and conceptually. It examines five major “panes,” three constructed from anthropologists’ personal dispositions and experiences and an additional two that, while personal confessions help us detect them, primarily lie in the realm of “official” anthropological concepts and rhetoric. I present the three markedly biographical panes in order of complexity, starting with a “pure and simple” rejection of “theospheric intrusions” by paragons of secularism, to culminate in a complex theological rejection couched in an interplay between personal and professional languages. The next two panes are constructed from the discipline’s official and professional language—its conceptual constitution and rhetorical tools—summoned for the task of severing anthropodom from the theosphere so that it could be a dutiful heir of the Enlightenment, a “science” with lawful citizenship and respectable membership in the modern academy. Chapter 2 explores the flipside of the dome’s relation to the theosphere, examining ways in which anthropologists also admit its waves and gasses into their dome, although not necessarily consciously. In effect, anthropologists undermine the science they attempt to hermetically construct. This chapter follows the proverbial, genealogical, and chiefly analogical means by which anthropologists preserve theology as part of their profession. While anthropologists employ thothic measures in constructing and preserving anthropodom and a dome to house it, that their knowledge may be justifiably locatable in the modern university, they also betray Thoth by going, analogically, to the “Eucharist” that names this chapter. Through their espousal of ethnographic immersion, a practice that demands dissolving boundaries between the knower and the known, anthropologists undermine—with a kind of practical theology of

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communion—tenets of secularization to which they adhere in building a science out of studying culture. Hence, we witness the complicated relationship anthropodom has with its Enlightenment inheritance. With thothic powers anthropologists follow the Enlightenment, while with Eucharistic energies they deviate from it. As an “age of criticism,” the Enlightenment insisted on the autonomy of reason, reasoners, and their world. While anthropology has conformed conceptually to this demand by famously adopting culture as the object of its sovereign reason, it has dissented practically by undertaking “ethnographic immersion” in the cultural other. In somewhat schematic words, anthropologists have vindicated the Enlightenment conceptually yet repudiated it methodologically, to the extent that “ethnographic immersion” is arguably a method. Taken together, these first two ethnographic chapters examine how anthropology both forgets and admits theology, showing ways in which the secular enterprise of anthropodom was born and housed in an edifice constructed at once of panes that both seal off the theosphere and let it seep in. The third ethnographic chapter, “Hubal,” named after a pre-Islamic Arabian god of the moon, whose name connotes confusion, takes a different approach. Invoking a particular ancient idol, it extracts a tool from theology’s repertoire, namely idolatry. Here, I explore how, as part of the theological mirror, this theistic concept can serve as a potent reflector permitting anthropodom to examine itself. Falling prey to a certain idolatry, anthropology abides by powerful premises of sovereignty regimes, notably the modern state, whereby the discipline’s version of what is “real” coincides with state sanction. Such fidelity means that anthropological reason implicitly follows state edicts to legitimate certain forms of reasoning: what it can “legitimately” ask, doubt, criticize, observe, and avoid observing. By recognizing its own idolatry, anthropology can observe ethical and epistemic costs of its bondage to sovereignty. This exercise points to a promise for diminished anthropological reason, such that it could profit from further questioning the costs of its severance from the theosphere. In addition to reviewing the book’s argument, the concluding chapter extends “Hubal” by arguing for the profitability of anthropology turning to the theosphere as a source of additional tools for revitalization. This attempt includes setting the grounds for a propaedeutic consideration of another fundamental category residing in

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the theosphere: revelation. Here I speculate about conceptual and institutional consequences should revelation be allowed to live not merely as a legitimate object of anthropological inquiry, but also as a recognized companion of anthropological reason per se. Once a trace within the exercise of reason, revelation approached as reason’s consort and not its concubine may be able to teach anthropological reason about reconnecting to its own fragility and to the fragility of all faculties under its command. I ask: if revitalized by the theosphere’s integrative powers, might anthropological reason recover a certain fuller ability to be itself and to wonder about multiplicity, long ago lost to the Leviathan’s sway over our perceptions and polities?67

67 In speaking of Leviathan’s sway, I mean the governance of souls and societies modeled on the paradigm of sovereignty (including self-sovereignty). Taking a cue from Leviathan as Thomas Hobbes’ metaphor for a politics whose “soul” is sovereignty, I invoke “Leviathan’s sway” to refer to the pandemic reign of the category of sovereignty, indeed, to the sovereignty of sovereignty as a figure of thought, which governs modern projects in politics, ethics, and epistemology (see Bartelson 1995, Kahn 2011, Santner 2011, Elshtain 2008).

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1 Thoth Immuring Anthropology from Theology

When our human sensorium began to transmute and shrink as modernity advanced, human faculties to splinter into autonomous domains, and realms of knowledge to fracture into disparate (not merely distinct) professions, theology was also immured away from the modern academic discipline of anthropology. Constructing itself as a particular secular enterprise, as an autonomous sovereign realm with its own rules, mores, and practices, as anthropodom, the discipline of anthropology cordoned off theology, and necessarily so. To attain freedom for its reason and to establish itself as an academic discipline in the modern university, anthropology had no choice but to sequester theology, just as any “mature citizen” of the Enlightenment must do, yet it did so in complex ways, which this chapter explores. Acknowledging this complex sequestering is indispensable to any attempt at generating an adequate account of what is at stake in pursuing multiplicity exclusively or primarily within the category of “the cultural” or its cognates, as anthropologists typically do. In embarking on this endeavor, I find it helpful to employ a metaphor whereby anthropodom is housed within, protected by, a theologyproof dome.

A DOME FOR ANTHROPODOM Imagine the secular discipline of anthropology—anthropodom—as inhabiting a physical space, embodied in a fortified structure

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resembling a geodesic dome whose surface is made of panes of glass. By erecting these panes, anthropology establishes its secularity, insulating itself from its theospheric exterior, wherein theistic reason finds a home. As any enterprise that wants to properly and appropriately satisfy the measures of modern science must do, anthropology has had to construct such a proverbial edifice to immure itself from, to forget, theology. The dome that anthropodom has built for itself is what has enabled it to secure viability for a certain intellect among its citizens, which has in turn permitted it citizenship within the modern academy for it has sustained its prized orders of truth. Forgetting theology in anthropology’s case has not meant that it disavows religion, at least not if practiced by the other cultures it studies. Indeed, modern anthropology would likely be unrecognizable without such forms of study. But studying religion anthropologically has proceeded according to the underlying premise that religion (including theistic forms of reason) is safe and even sound, but only for other people to have, certainly not anthropologists. A proper scientific anthropological mind cultivates secular sovereign reason, safely sequestered from theology, except as a source of ethnographic materials over which its reason rules from a measured distance. Constructing this dome—undertaking to craft anthropology as a proper science—gives this chapter its title and vision: Thoth. Thoth was “the scribe of the gods,” whom ancient Egyptians adored and ancient Greeks admired. He was worshiped for the many dominions he commanded: wisdom, writing and literary arts, sciences, crafts, reason, the moon, balance, law, measurement, and architecture. In this chapter, he serves as an eponym summarizing a primary relation at its center: anthropology as an aspirant science built, in part, on learning ways to reach and keep a measure of distance from theology, that is, on forgetting it. Independent of his mythical significance in Egypto-Greek antiquity, I choose to conjure Thoth, including in adjectival forms, to principally signal the skillfulness by which anthropologists have sealed away theology. Thus, anthropologists mobilizing thothic powers to build their disciplinary dome refers to the architectural efforts they have invested in their secular enterprise that aim to make it impervious to theology. In naming this chapter after Thoth, I seek to draw attention to those thothic—for the

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Greek-minded “hermetic”1—skills anthropologists have mustered to build, fortify, and insulate their dome, keeping secularity inside and theology safely outside, out there in the theosphere. The “panes” they put in place to perform this distinction consist of facts, sensibilities, dispositions, orientations, practices, concepts, paradigms, and ultimately values. Dome-dwellers have been variously maintaining their theology-impenetrable panes at all levels of their dome, from its underground catacombs to its very surface. To recognize dwellers’ relations with their dome, let us recall the “tremendous event” that cast its shadows on the West, which Friedrich Nietzsche famously characterized in 1887 as “the death of God” (1968: 447). Charles Taylor, Nietzsche’s trenchant—and Catholic— critic, referred to this event less heretically as a “closing off to God” (2005: 13). I see this event as having cosmically destabilized life dispositions, including the life of the mind.2 Out of this planetary tumult, new possibilities and limitations for modern thought emerged, anthropodom being one of them. Perhaps anthropology as an academic discipline amounts to a form of freedom enabled by this cosmic-shaking event, as well as a price paid for stability, including stable citizenship in the modern research university. Taylor (2005: 16) names the price of such stability a “spiritual lobotomy,” which exacts a compensation in secular modernity in the form of “freedom projects.” The particular project that is anthropology offers payment in a breathtaking diversity of ways, but pay it does, and necessarily so, in order to aspire to secular stability as an academic discipline, to reside in “pax saeculum.” This chapter initiates the task of unraveling this payment’s diversity, restitutive and otherwise. But first a warning. Anthropologists have not constructed the dome separating them from the theosphere in completely uniform ways, rather they are lyrical, prosaic, fluid,

1 The ancient Greeks associated Thoth with Hermes, naming him Hermes Trimegistus (Thoth the Thrice Great), designating the city of Hermopolis (al-Ashmonein) as his major worship site. By qualifying the skill with which anthropologists have constructed their dome as “thothic,” I evoke this ancient god’s name only selectively, not faithfully. I do so to conjure Thoth’s responsibility for science, laws, architecture, and calculations (and even only in the modern sense of these domains), while disregarding his affinity, as the husband of Ma’at, with balance, truth, justice, and wisdom (Budge 1904). 2 Ludwig Feuerbach attests to this evolution in himself with: “God was my first thought, reason my second, and man my third and last” (in MacIntyre 1968: 24).

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overlapping, fragmentary, idiosyncratic, and certainly imprecise. I have thus far identified five distinguishable ways, albeit discordant and contradictory, or perhaps kinds of panes, with which anthropologists have built their theosphere-immuring dome. The first kind of these panes comes across as “pure and simple,” with the remaining four exhibiting greater complexity. Most extensively described here, the first type of pane is laid by the “usual protagonists”—unremitting agents of secularism, anthropologists who reject theology in their private lives as vehemently as in their professional lives. They hail from many religious and non-religious backgrounds, seeking—slowly or suddenly—sometimes to escape, at others to embrace a theistic grounding in the world. The second type of pane is laid by anthropologists who too reject theology in their private lives yet professionally transmute that rejection into a form of theospheric admission, which nevertheless supports their dome’s sequestering architecture. These anthropologists do not forget theology altogether as those of the first pane-type do, rather they retain a residue of memory within forgetfulness. The third type of pane is laid by anthropologists who admit theology’s presence in their personal lives yet conceal it professionally, sometimes even thinly. The two subsequent panes take their texture from writings in the discipline’s agora rather than its byways. Thus the discipline as a whole lays the fourth type of pane, largely made up of a disciplinary amnesia and excision in which the body of anthropological knowledge is lodged discursively distant and disconnected in time and space from theology. The fifth type of pane is fashioned from anthropology’s commitment to an array of concepts that exclude theology as such to rest upon other concepts as a priori: “Man,” culture, human, to name a few of the most primary. The first three panes solidly consist of biographical materials, and although visible in the biographical as well, the final two panes ultimately comprise robustly rhetorical and conceptual registers deeply embedded in the discipline. There is also a sixth type of pane, which I refrain from discussing, largely due to the ample attention it has already received—especially by the anthropologies of secularism, of Islam, and of Christianity—whereby theology is sequestered from theoretical anthropological labor.3 That my interest

3

See note 27 in the Introduction for examples of this literature.

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lies more in what anthropologists have done with their own religious traditions (or lack thereof), rather than how they study those of others, furnishes another reason for my lack of attention to this pane. To begin understanding these panes’ constitution and function, I wish to note that, as though under the spell of Thoth’s architectural might, all are as principal as they are protean. While I here identify only five types of panes, they may fissure or contract upon subsequent inquiry into additional modes of sealing theology in anthropology. Oxford anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard was long ago clear and candid about the primacy of these panes’ function. In bringing the religions of the Sudanese Nuer and the Azande, among others, to the anthropological canon, he provided a general assessment of his discipline as a space devoid of theistic belief, for if one had faith—as an academic, as a scientist, as an anthropologist—one would jeopardize one’s relation to reality and rationality. In his 1959 Aquinas Lecture, he explains the stance of leading anthropologists’ prevailing secular discrediting of religion, both during and before his time: “Religious faith is total illusion . . . . Religion is a superstition to be explained by anthropologists, not something anthropologists, or indeed any rational person could himself believe in” (1960: 110).4 Anthropologists who believed in God could even face accusations of betraying their discipline, as did Victor and Edith Turner when they left Marxism to embrace Catholicism. They reported on their colleagues’ overwhelming reaction: “You have betrayed us. You have let us down” (Turner 2005: 89). They viewed the Turners as abandoning anthropology proper, a “discipline [that] walled off poetry, magic and religion” (Turner 2005: 5). If one believes in God and thereby strays from anthropodom, one arguably betrays the anthropological enterprise (of which the Turners were accused), but if one believes and stays in anthropodom then a sense of intellectual safety starts to matter. This much is implied in the wish of committed Catholic and anthropologist, Mary Douglas, who seems to have always dreamed about making the discipline

4

It seems that E. E. Evans-Pritchard repeats this observation three years after the Aquinas lecture in his Social Anthropology and Other Essays: “Religious belief was to these [influential] anthropologists absurd, and it is so to most anthropologists of today and yesterday” (1962: 162).

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safe for believing Catholics.5 However, making the dome safe from theistic belief—through various modes of disbelief—has been anthropologists’ ambition for securing anthropodom and its citizenship in the secular university.

PANE-TYPE ONE: THEOLOGY’S REJECTION, INSIDE JUST AS OUTSIDE Anthropologists’ rejection of theistic faith in their personal lives has ranged in its degree of dismissing God and religion, with one end of the continuum a blunt and plain rejection and the other end a subtle and equivocal repudiation. While Evans-Pritchard eventually found faith through Catholicism in 1949 in Benghazi, Libya, after a desert sojourn among Muslim Bedouins (Larsen 2014), his Polish-born teacher at the London School of Economics, Bronisław Malinowski, fully eschewed belief in God. Another student of this legendary scholar of the Trobriands of Papua New Guinea, Sir Raymond Firth, who traveled to the discipline from Auckland, New Zealand and from economics, remembers his teacher as follows: Malinowski was a humanist . . . . He had no belief in spiritual powers other than those of man himself, no faith in revealed religion. Though Catholic when young, he seemed to have lost all trace of this by the time I knew him in his forties . . . . Perhaps one of the legacies of his Catholicism was a certain preoccupation with the concept of death. (In Silverman, 2004: 83)

Malinowski’s (1989: 37) diaries corroborate Firth’s memory of his teacher as one who “has a faith in humanity, not a religious faith.” For someone who completely “forgets” about the Mailu Christian mission in the midst of his fieldwork site, it is not surprising to hear him confess on power (in Nietzschean tones): “I ascertain deep inside 5 In her “Feeling for Hierarchy,” Mary Douglas reports hearing from an anthropologist in a colonial office: “No anthropologist could be a sincere Catholic” (2005: 105). By explaining the “much misunderstood” ideas of Émile Durkheim, Douglas had hoped to make “anthropology safe for Catholics” (2005: 107). Yet only relatively late in her career, in the midst of preparing for a talk at the Presbyterian Seminary in Princeton, NJ while working on her book, In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers (2001) did Douglas’s “real homecoming” as a Catholic begin (2005: 118).

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myself a dormant, unbridled [desire] to fulfill a ‘will to power’” (in Young 2004: 111). With his eyes toward power, Malinowski seems to never have forgotten the advice of his teacher, Charles Gabriel Seligman, also from the London School of Economics, about the importance of the ethnographer prevailing over the evangelist rival among the natives: “You must intellectually have the upper hand [over] your missionary” (in Young 2004: 333). Malinowski kept fidelity to this advice as his reputation grew to surpass Seligman’s. Lauding an ordained missionary who came to study anthropology under him some thirty-five years after they had originally met in the Trobriand Islands, where Malinowski had despised him during fieldwork, he was ready to commend him “as a modern type of missionary who has been able to fashion himself into anthropology” (in Young 2004: 332). With this statement, Malinowski seems to regard the discipline of anthropology as a self-sufficient creator, giving form to the adepts it “creates” as in the Imago Dei from Genesis.6 The power Malinowski ascribes to anthropodom as a form-giver he extends to the construction of his anthropological mind. Thus it may seem ironic that in his effort to create his own systema philosophiae, Malinowski declares the following three “principles of belief”: “No God,” “Mind only in Man,” and “No Immortality” (in Young 2004: 89). These three attestations of “no” serve to ward off any possible oozings of theology back into the dome. With them, Malinowski “designed,” with thothic measures, three insulating layers of this first type of pane for the dome. Additionally, consider the following telling “confession” from Malinowski’s fieldwork diary. These lines reveal how ineradicable the God question remained for him, at least while he was still in the field, as well as the ways personal diaries accommodate the kinds of questions the profession precludes, and finally, how wanting, in vain, to flee from God may itself stand as a possible theistic performance.7 In a tenor again resonating with Nietzsche, who had been loyally tuned to life’s “instincts,” Malinowski contends that his “theory of religion” is completely purged of Christian ethics: “My whole ethics is 6 Genesis 1: 27: “So God created man in his own image.” Anointing Society as sovereign in The Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim holds a similar tenet: “Society fashions the child in its own image” (1982: 6). 7 See Book of Jonah, especially chapters 1 and 2 for the biblical narration of Jonah’s flight from the divine only to be ingested by a God-sent leviathan.

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based on the fundamental instinct of a unified personality . . . . There is no way of deducing Christian ethics from my theory . . . . The real problem is: why must you always behave as if God were watching you?” (1989: 297). We can observe the exercise of just such an instinct and just such a “flight” from God’s gaze in the answers and questions anthropologists have devised to screen away, time and again, the divine’s encroachment upon their intellect, as they aspire to full residence within their dome of secular and sovereign reason. The question put forth in Malinowski’s diary seems to have been resolved by its very dissolution, thanks to modern science. Since the seventeenth-century God has been merely “an ultimate causal hypothesis” (Milbank 2006: 127) in the prevailing mode of work for the intellect in the West. The mid-twentieth-century version of evolutionary thought seems to have been just such a site for dissolving the God question. In that anthropological century, God is simply not watching, not even in heaven. For example, leading anthropology theorist Leslie White, a founding member of his department at the University of Michigan, is remembered by his student, Marshall Sahlins, who hails from an ex-Hasidic family and joined the University of Chicago, as having “really believed that once people ascended to the heavens on rocket ships they would be able to see there was no God” (Sahlins 1999: xiii). Disbelief in or denial of God became evidently a matter for elucidation by interplanetary travel and an almost intuitive assumption for the disciplinary science known as anthropology. However, it still required vigilant enforcement in anthropologists’ personal lives. Settled in the vast landscape of anthropodom’s atheism, far away from the Samoans she studied, Margaret Mead gave birth to her daughter, Mary, on the day of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception at the then French Hospital in Manhattan, aided by the Sisters of the Holy Cross. In fear that Mead would be swayed by the nunnurses, Gregory Bateson—Mary’s father, Mead’s third husband (although she was the first of his three wives), and an anthropologist who maintained a lifelong interest in cybernetics—promptly sent a cable from London to New York City, imploring: “DO NOT CHRISTEN.” This seemingly impious act may have actually been expressing a Batesonean form of piety, if we recall that the Roman virtue pietas demands loyalty to one’s ancestors, for Bateson hailed from a British family who followed a creed of “studied atheism” (Bateson 1984: 23).

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Anthropologists carried their atheism with them as they committed their lives to a discipline practiced across continents. The anthropological life of Elsie Clew Parsons exemplifies this “traveling” atheism. Joining Robert Lowie as a student of Franz Boas to study the Zuni and Pueblo Nations, she wanted to contest biological determinism in anthropology and fideism in society writ large, “to kill what was not [yet] dead [from] the 19th century, which was so sure of evolution and prayers” (in Deacon 1997: 1). Also at the New School was their friend Pliny Goddard, who descends from a Quaker family, with whom Parsons shared a “stout faith in the virtues of ‘reasoned nonconformism’” and an enthusiasm “for the recent victory over God” (Deacon 1997: 108). Killing God and displaying enthusiasm for defeating “the supernatural” were some of the stances anthropologists brought into their rejection of revealed faith. Lowie, who worked among the Shoshone and Crow Nations in the Lemhi Valley in Idaho, confessed how anthropology liberated him from “illusions” and “traditions,” as if a kind of psychoanalysis, which also plausibly offered some liberation to his colleague down the hall at Berkeley, fellow Boas student Alfred Kroeber, who underwent psychoanalysis and led it for others. Lowie admitted to another Boas student, Paul Radin, that he was rescued by physicist Ernst Mach from pious “bondage,” helping him resolve to have “no more systems of faith, religious or non-religious” (in Deacon 1997: 128). Lowie’s atheism, however, did not thwart his articulating what sounds like a critique of reason within anthropodom. Consider his reference in the quote below to “ghosts of tradition” by which he repudiates the tradition of positivism, which would only proliferate among subsequent generations of cultural anthropologists, particularly after wars of national independence from colonial powers during the mid-twentieth century. Modern positivism upheld itself both as a powerful inheritor of the Enlightenment concept of criticism and as a rescuer from “tradition,” what Lowie calls the “Black Hole” (in Deacon 1997: 128). Lowie’s critique emanates from a markedly secularist pursuit, seeking to reinforce the dome’s membrane from any theological onslaught: Like the generation of thinkers that preceded ours, we are living in an age of revolt, but the object of our revolt is different from theirs. Our predecessors fought tradition as arrayed against reason. We have the

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task of exorcising the ghosts of tradition raised in the name of reason herself. (Lowie 1914: 68)8

Lowie and his cohort of early students of American anthropology doyen Boas at Columbia seem to have needed to fight “tradition” qua tradition, which their secular rhetoric pits against reason tout court.9 Joining an “apostasy” of doing away with God, fighting “tradition” in its various iterations (religious, familial, national, and so forth), was a means anthropologists pursued to safely seal their reason from the perils of theospheric exteriority. They worked to provide a home for their reason, where it would be safe from danger as it marched toward maturity, a home deep within secular, that is sovereign, reason’s belly, in which, like Jonah, they found refuge. While some anthropologists variably work to “kill,” “exorcize,” or “retreat” from the theosphere, other reactions have included apathy or disinterest, as expressed by David Schneider, the Chicago-based iconoclastic disciple of anthropology, who devastated its elevation of kinship as a research topic. By the time he reached kinship studies, having a long a time before, according to his parodic testimony, “converted” 129 Yaps of Micronesia—in one day, single-handedly, and without proselytizing—to Judaism, Schneider concluded, “nothing much was really very sacred to me” (1995: 114, 220). I do not believe Schneider was religiously wedded to his typically sardonic humor in professing little or no personal interest in or connection to the sacred, yet his typical (for anthropologists) divesting from the sacred demonstrates the dome’s panes functioning as intended: sealing away theology. While typical for anthropologists to personally dispel belief, it is important to note that as a discipline, anthropology has not necessarily precipitated disbelief. Disbelief, disinterest, and rejection of theistic faith, prevalent as these views may be, could arrive for disciples before joining the discipline. Anthropology may simply be a way station, a vindication, or a culmination of an adherent’s long

8 Cited in Deacon 1997: 103. Desley Deacon locates this important vision in Elsie Clews Parson’s life in a section tellingly titled, “Washing Metaphysics out of Anthropology” (103–7). 9 In his evaluation of the evolution of thinking about the “tradition” concept in the Enlightenment and its aftermath, Alasdaire MacIntyre notes, “Earlier liberal thinkers were avowed enemies of tradition . . . The earlier liberal theorizing was the expression of models of social, political, and economic practice” (in Knight 1998: 271).

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road to an atheist Damascus.10 Travelers often find initial footing within their own families of disbelief. Two of Boas’ students illustrate such natal disbelief leading them toward anthropodom. From Lowie, once president of the American Anthropological Association, we learn about his German-Jewish parents: “They had become quite alienated from their religious heritage . . . . They were also educated and rationalistic in the older sense of being ‘free thinkers,’ and their dedication to learning, political liberalism and professional attainment was their only devotion” (1959: 10). Not far from the spatial and moral universe that raised Lowie into secular “devotion” and “dedication” was Kroeber’s. His GermanAmerican upper-middle-class milieu in late nineteenth-century New York City included a father “whom religion bored,” a mother baptized as a Catholic, who belonged to an “ethical culture” society led by an agnostic rabbi where she “instigated [Kroeber] to sample Sunday service,” and two sisters left unbaptized “as befitted enlightenment.” Kroeber reminisces: None of the German families I knew were church members. None of the Jewish families went to synagogue, a few perhaps on the Day of Atonement, in satisfaction of their elders or the memory of them. But they took for granted that one did not believe in religion. (In Kroeber 1970: 26)

Do not take Kroeber’s self-possessing words to mean that self-evident disbelief inhibits intellectual curiosity in others’ belief. For again, not practicing a religion personally does not preclude one from studying it professionally. Some anthropologists even went on to declare, as did Kroeber, that the study of others—their religious lives included— was for them a form of religion. After entering the discipline, Kroeber went on to study the religions of the Arapaho, Mohave, and Yoruk Nations and even taught a course in anthropology of the Bible. Kroeber’s second wife, Theodora, calls him an “untheist . . . denying no man’s God,” and speaks of his lasting secular vision wherein he “never subscribed to any religion, to any creed of religious belief, public or private” (1970: 232, 234). Moreover, while Theodora never 10 “Road to Damascus” is a common metonym for any form of “conversion,” taken from the story of Paul/Saul of Tarsus whose conversion from Judaism to Christianity is narrated in Acts 9, among other places.

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recalled Kroeber calling himself an atheist or an agnostic, she quotes him as saying, “I began my life without belief in God . . . with nature as the sole basis of understanding life” (1970: 232). She goes on to observe: Kroeber had gone on from the ethical training he received and absorbed as a child, to build his own wholly secularized value system . . . . Kroeber’s thinking was in line with the scientific-rational attitude of the day, but it was his own [and] . . . changed relatively little throughout his life [because finally] . . . he did not much believe in ultimates . . . . [H]e accepted the rugged logic and limitation of his secularized-rationalist view of life, but without dogmatism. (1970: 232)

These limitations notwithstanding, Theodora speaks proverbially of Kroeber’s “hegira”11 in describing his “flight” from his Mecca—the museum he was directing and his residence on Washington Street in Berkeley—to a Medina for his life, a destiny he could not descry (1970: 86). “Anthropology is my religion” (in Kroeber 1970: 10) was what Kroeber recognized, and openly so.12 It was a kind of recognition that remains largely, if not solely, captured in the biographical contours of anthropodom’s history—the history of a discipline’s immurement from the theosphere. Even so, in struggles away from theistic faith, the modern discipline of anthropology does not necessarily provide immediate answers. At times it appears that anthropology serves as a way station on a road toward answers to questions of what to do, if anything, with religious faith. Consider the career of Anne-Christine Taylor, a present-day intellectual heiress of Claude Lévi-Strauss, former director of the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, dedicated to exhibiting indigenous cultures. She reminisced: I did go through a period of thinking about religion at about thirteen, fourteen. I remember trying very hard to establish some sort of relationship with God by praying, but nothing ever came of it. I have never felt any twinge of it. As Lévi-Strauss said, I have never been touched by the wing of transcendence, and have never felt the need for any religious practice or attitude. The multifarious world is enough to keep me 11 Strictly speaking, “hegira” means “migration” in Arabic, yet largely alludes to the prophet Muhammad’s 622 AD flight from his native town of Mecca to Yathreb, renamed Medina. 12 Eric Wolf (in Silverman 1981: 55) also attributes such a confession to Alfred Kroeber.

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happy. I am not a militant atheist but I guess an agnostic. I did not feel the need of a religion to understand the Achuar, but you could say that it is precisely the Jewishness of Durkheim, Mauss, or the Catholicism of Evans-Pritchard and others that was in a sense an expression of existential marginality, which is more important for feeding an anthropological vocation than having religion. (Macfarlane Interview, May 4, 2015)

Thus for the anthropological “vocation,” Taylor reflects on the need to go nowhere beyond humans to attain “happiness.” Religious identity can provide an advantageous experience of “existential marginality,” but serves no other real purpose in disciplinary pursuits. Taylor’s spouse, Philippe Descola, was another of Lévi-Strauss’s students, who likewise expressed a penchant for this vocational happiness, based on his explorations of the Achuar’s oneness with nature in the Amazon (Descola 2013). Refusing, as has Descola, to set nature apart from culture, this happiness also enables humans to experience anew the animals and other non-human life with which they coinhabit the earth. Thus anthropodom’s dome-dwellers may not reach out to God, out of concern for the safe-keeping of reason’s sovereignty, but can delve into the wonder of other lives, into finite nonhumans, or even things (Descola 2013, Leiris 1939). While genuine “happiness” may be ultimately unreachable, at the very least an ambition to “keep it together” led other seekers to join anthropology. This aim was conveyed to me by Alan Macfarlane when I met him in his chambers at King’s College, University of Cambridge. Descended from Wordsworth’s childhood Lake District valley and having ascended the Himalayas, Macfarlane conveyed that it was in striving but failing to remain Christian that he found anthropology instead: I moved out of the enchantment of childhood, the world of Kipling and children’s stories. The world began to become what I call modern: postCartesian, separated, individualistic, rational, etc. I was trying to be a Christian. I was trying to hold it together with a religious faith, which would bridge over the growing tensions between different parts of my life—sexual urges, economic desires, and Christianity. I thought I was intuiting a vision, which would hold things together and explain the meaning of life and so on . . . . I struggled to retain the kinds of vision I had as a child, but in my late teens and when I went to Oxford University, I became more and more aware that this Christian vision was not sufficient. It was threatened

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from all sorts of directions. My mother was a Buddhist and very much influenced me, and she was writing about Indians . . . . I was reading in history about random confusions of the past. In other words, I was growing up into an adult world and I found that Christianity and religion no longer hold it together and then just at that time, I came across several books earlier than I thought but one of them was called Institutions of Primitive Society . . . and I felt this is the thing for me. I felt this is a quasi-religion. (Interview, April 29, 2015)

Rather than an unequivocal denial of theology, anthropology as an elevated vocational pursuit, for Macfarlane, as with Kroeber, starts to feel like a religion. For some who are searching for ways to distance themselves from or replace their inherited faith, anthropology provides a haven, a path to a secular kind of redemption. That quest for distance from natal faith provides a ready pane for the dome’s membrane, brought prefabricated by anthropologists to merely lay in place, rather than construct in situ. Two examples from anthropology’s canon illustrate joining anthropodom as a haven safely distant from the theosphere. A student of Marcel Mauss and Maurice Leenhardt, and secretary for “religious inquiry” with a Dakar-Djibouti ethnological expedition directed by Marcel Griaule, who was impressed by the “formidable religiosity” of African peoples during his fieldwork (in Bréchon 2005: 36),13 Michel Leiris notes how his sojourns first through psychoanalysis and then to Gondar, Ethiopia were supposed to take him away from Catholicism, from his family, and even from his self: Through psychoanalysis I expected to disabuse myself from this illusory fear of punishment, a chimera that is reinforced by the imbecilic sway of Christian morality, freedom from which one can never flatter oneself for fully attaining. I have suffered this healing for a year with varying luck . . . . Leaving this limbo at the advice of my physician, and thinking to myself that I missed out on living a tough life, I seized the occasion, took a long voyage and left for almost two years into Africa . . . . In 1933, I returned having killed one myth at least: “that of voyage being a means of evasion.” (1939: 198–201)

13

See L’age d’homme (1939) by Michel Leiris. This expedition mostly to East Africa was directed by ethnologist Marcel Griaule, once chair of anthropology at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and a specialist in Dogon, Amharic, and Gueze traditions.

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Leiris’s memoir from this fieldwork, L’Afrique fantom (1981 [1934]),14 similarly exhibits an intimate traveling in search of a fatamorganic continent. The Africa Leiris sought with the aid of “primitivism” and surrealism provided fertile soil from which a different self could emerge, one sealed away from a Catholic and imperial France.15 Again, it is important not to hold anthropology as necessarily an understanding seeking a way out of faith.16 In Leiris’s case, as in countless others, theology’s immuring began in childhood, long before reaching anthropodom. He recalls: [With] the presence of a certain dose of mysticism in me, I had what one calls a “fervent” first communion, or just about. I expected a miracle, a fabulous revelation at the moment of the Eucharist’s melting in my mouth . . . . I was horribly dismayed in my attempt, as I was in fear . . . saying to myself: “there is nothing more to it.” No longer hoping for any miracle, I shortly after ceased to practice, and then to believe, and never picked it up again. (1981 [1934]: 84–5)

However, to view Leiris as simply escaping from Catholic rituals would amount to overlooking his concomitant escape from his family and his very own self. Introspectively writing and publishing, in keeping with a French practice of the fieldwork memoir,17 Leiris reports in the third person: He crossed this black Africa from west to east before the last war, while astonished for not being able to escape himself, when he should have noticed the very personal reasons that made him decide to cut himself away from his kin impeding him, all along, from being otherwise. (1981 [1934]: 14)

14 Griaule is said to have deemed the publication of l’Afrique fantome “inappropriate,” claiming it did disservice to both colonists and ethnographers, and apparently so did Marcel Mauss (Leiris 1981 [1934]: 12, 1992: 302). Moreover, Leiris reports that a minister of national education who refused to purchase this book was reported as saying: “Its apparent intelligence owes only to a great baseness of sentiments” (1992: 302). 15 For a very thoughtful review of Leiris’s work in the context of consolidating a French identity with the help of surrealism, see Taoua 2002. 16 After St. Anselm (1033–1109) coined it, this phrase became a motto for defining the practice of theology: “faith seeking understanding,” fides quaerens intellectum. 17 Vincent Debaene (2013: 649) calls this practice a “double-book phenomenon,” in which anthropologists in France often write a literary account of their experience in the field beyond the professional ethnographic account.

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Whatever aspects of Catholicism, the French state, and French society troubled Calvinist-born convert to Catholicism Jean-Jacques Rousseau—with whose lines from Confessions Leiris opens his contribution to French literary-confessional-ethnographic writing,18 and to whom the troubled “non-Jewish Jew” (Loyer 2015: 10) LéviStrauss had also wished to dedicate his own memoir (1973: 390)19— seem to have surfaced in Leiris’s writing. Leiris places his troubles with the powers of Catholicism and the work of hegemony in French society out in the open, expressing how the two powers made it difficult for him to be awakened to his self-alternatives, to “being otherwise” as he put it.20 Described as “zombie Catholicism” (Todd 2015: 54–7), this hegemony demands that laicitie (secular state doctrine), at work in the French republic, disguise its catholicity. Arriving at anthropology, entering its dome, may have served in some sense as Leiris’s attempt to overcome Catholicism’s haunting effects, lingering in distant or not so distant childhood memories. Hortense Powdermaker similarly provides an American instantiation of the dome as a plausibly safe space for sheltered disbelief.

18 The epigraph appearing in Leiris’s (1981 [1934]) memoir comes from Book I of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (1782) Confessions: “I alone. I comprehend my heart, and know mankind; I am not made like any one I have seen, I dare believe that I am made like no one in existence; if not better, I at least am an other, and whether Nature did well or poorly in breaking the mold within which she cast me, can only be ascertained after having read this work.” As though he were continuing a Catholic confessional tradition exemplified by Augustine, Rousseau further writes: “I will present myself, whenever the last trumpet shall sound, before the Sovereign Judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, ‘Thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory: I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood. Such as I was, I have declared myself; sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous, generous, and sublime; even as Thou hast read my inmost soul: Power Eternal! assemble round Thy throne an innumerable throng of my fellow-mortals, let them listen to my confessions, let them blush at my depravity, let them tremble at my sufferings; let each in his turn expose with equal sincerity the failings, the wanderings of his heart, and if he dare, aver, I was better than that man.” 19 See also Tanya Luhrmann’s (1990) analysis of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s relation to Rousseau. 20 Robert Bréchon (2005: 21–3) situates Leiris in a “tradition of confession” that likely includes figures like Augustine, Montaigne, Rousseau, Baudelaire, and LéviStrauss, attesting to the purification powers of Christian confessions, psychoanalysis, and auto-critique.

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Powdermaker did not arrive at anthropology by resuming a natal distance from religion as did her German-American colleagues Lowie and Kroeber, who, like her, inherited religion’s banishment from their families. Rather, in going to study diverse and distant peoples Powdermaker arguably distanced herself from natal religion and family. Commenting on this dual distancing from this dual inheritance as a prior condition leading her toward anthropodom, Powdermaker reflects: Often apartness is part of an intellectual’s personality and may take diverse forms, among which are the arts as well as the sciences. The form for me eventually was anthropology, and among the conditioning factors (some known and others unknown) was a rebellion against family. As a child, I did not accept the norms of my upper-middle and middle-class German Jewish background . . . . I never had a sense of much real religious feeling in the family, although there was a definite sense of being Jewish particularly for my mother. Her father had been a president of a reform synagogue . . . and I was confirmed in it. My family, other relatives and their friends completely accepted the then alleged social superiority of German Jews over more recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe . . . . My identity was polarized against this background. (1966: 21)

Coming from a family of “less than real” religiosity did not prevent Powdermaker from wanting to sail away. For other disciples, it was a really religious family that inspired exodus. Consider Sydel Silverman, who hailed from a pious Jewish family of Eastern European, specifically Litvak, genealogy. It seems her uncle, whom she recalled as being “a mystic doubleton with interest in Oriental religions,” planted the seeds for her anthropological being in the world. She retained her family’s love of learning while rejecting its religiosity: There always was an outsiderness. As a girl, growing up at a time when my family did not understand what I was doing, [I had] the feeling of you know that this is not your place, you are going somewhere else. I grew up in an Orthodox family, and I had an Orthodox education, but I never really accepted that. It was never really a part of me. Intellectually it did not speak to me. Also there is another prehistory here. I am a Litvak and a descendant of the Vilna Gaon, the great genius of Vilna in the eighteenth century who was challenged by the Hasidic movement. The Litvaks believed in study and in coming close to God through learning, and not by being emotional. My father was very much like that and my father was a rabbi, and I think what I got out of that is

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the secular part of that message. They all very much believed in education but that it was for the boys. So I grew up believing in the value of education as a secular enterprise. There was no religious conviction. I stepped out of it. I got tired of that message in fact. When my parents regretted that I never accepted religion, I would say you know but I got the message of our ancestors, I just did not get the religious part. (Interview, December 3, 2014)

All religious backgrounds have thus been welcomed inside anthropology’s dome so long as they remain there, in the background, as a thothic sequestering of theology demands of any modern academic enterprise. The “religious part” must invariably stay away from the foreground of secular reason’s work so that each anthropologist can contribute to eliding or sequestering “the religious” with her own particular theosealing efforts, thereby participating in making up the secular texture of the dome’s membrane. The anthropologists thus far appearing in this chapter have shown how their arrival at their discipline did not solely emanate from seeking understanding outside of theistic faith. At times they arrived via seeking a way toward redemption, as did Leiris, Macfarlane, and Anne-Christine Taylor. At times these anthropologists’ arrival was a gradual process and at others, a sudden epiphany. Such was “the gift” for Gender of the Gift (1988) author Dame Ann Marilyn Strathern, for whom rejection of transcendence in her personal life was sudden. It occurred while listening to BBC radio to what Strathern recalled as the annual Reith Lectures series presented that year by Fred Hoyle, an astronomer whose name remains indelible in her memory:21 I had not been baptized. My father was an atheist, my mother agnostic. I was in a bit of a quandary. I knew that I was going to have to make some conduct decision and then to my tremendous relief the decision was taken from me. I heard lectures or a lecture by an astronomer who was giving an account of the universe and the formation of the universe and I suddenly realized one could have an explanation of the world that did not require a deity . . . and that was like being on the road to Damascus, you know. That was the conversion. That suddenly opened up. I would be a bit skeptical these days, but that opened up the power of knowledge. (Interview, April 30, 2015)

21 It has been argued that the series which Fred Hoyle gave on the BBC on Saturday evenings at 8:00 p.m. was not part of the Reith Lecture Series even though some physicists today remember it as such (see Milton 2005: 139).

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Strathern elsewhere described this shedding of the need for a deity as “an incredible liberation and I have never looked back” (Macfarlane Interview, May 6, 2009). Yet she did look back in some sense as we can see in the words with which she retrospectively and candidly assessed her position toward her informants’ faith: “I was not neutral, but I had no problem perversely acquiring tolerance for ancestor worship and what the people did in Papua New Guinea. That was really very childish. It was a kind of a deliberate paganism if you like on my part” (Interview, April 30, 2015).22 In an act of self-criticism, judging an earlier part of her life as “childish,” when she simultaneously respected non-Western paganism and resented Christianity, Strathern thus admitted that she abjured religion (Christianity specifically) in her own life but accepted it, “perversely” so, among the natives. It should be clear by now that both Christianity and Judaism were rejected by anthropologists on the way to finding anthropology, but not always without replacement. Some anthropologists found among certain natives a religion of their “professional” choice, that is, a religion they could subject to anthropological inquiry, whereas others found the discipline itself to be that choice. Just what that may mean when anthropology is said to “behave like a religion” will be more fully explored in Chapter 2. For now, let us take a brief look at it in the work of some of anthropology’s founding figures. According to Boas’s biographer, this thothically driven premiere builder of the American region of anthropodom engaged with science “religiously”: “If Boas had any faith, if he deified anything, it was most certainly science” (Cole 1999: 285). That Boas credited his intellectual liberty and ability to oppose majority opinion to his being Jewish (Cole 1999: 283) did not preclude his dislike for the term Jew, for Boas thought it “assigns to the bearer an exceptional position” (in Cole 1999: 280), although, of course it ought not necessarily be assumed that “Jew” for Boas indexed a religious faith. Along with the reflections from Silverman above and Lévi-Strauss below, we can see how Boas was far from exceptional in transmuting his discontent with Judaism into dedication to anthropology as a form of service to humanity. Lévi-Strauss, whose friend Boas fatally collapsed into his arms at a Columbia faculty dining room on December 21, 1942, likewise 22 Similar repudiations of what can be arguably be called “deliberate paganism” were recently made by Marc Augé (1982).

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distanced himself from his ancestors’ Judaism. In a move akin to Strathern’s, Lévi-Strauss developed a tolerance for pagan religions. Indeed, through an ostensible act of erasure, Lévi-Strauss aligned his intellectual capacity with an era, religion, and people with whom he connected anthropologically, rather than with those from whom he descended. In his own words, he identified himself as possessing “neolithic intelligence” from societies wherein “myth” rather than “history” prevails over a sense of time: “Today I sometimes wonder if anthropology did not attract me, without my realizing this, because of a structural affinity between the civilizations it studies and my particular way of thinking . . . . I have a neolithic kind of intelligence” (1973: 53).23 The personal life and writing of Lévi-Strauss provide multiple ways to observe an anthropologist’s rejection of inherited, revealed religion, with startling effects on his life and work. Let us start by noting how Lévi-Strauss’s recent biographer speaks of his childhood Jewishness as oriented toward republican fidelity, characterized by a “laic and patriotic Judaism” (Loyer 2015: 10). We can attain a glimpse into Lévi-Strauss’s troubled relation to Judaism within his own “native setting” through his claim: “The value [the anthropologist] attaches to foreign societies . . . has no independent function; it is often a function of his disdain for and occasional hostility, towards, the customs prevailing in his native setting” (1973: 284). “Already a non-believer” in his childhood home, which he shared with his grandfather, a rabbi of Versailles, Lévi-Strauss speaks of traversing a passage from the house to the attached synagogue: “It was difficult to venture without a feeling of anguish” (1973: 231). Both Lévi-Strauss’s professed and adducible hostility toward his natal tradition (arguably extending beyond Judaism) did not preclude this “very French intellectual” from being saluted upon his death “like a national monument” (Loyer 2015: 11). Perhaps Lévi-Strauss’s natal Marshall Sahlins expressed a similar sense of affinity: “The other thing that I found amazing is what I wrote the other day in the London Review of Books about the nature of our human sciences as fundamentally organized by the fact that the way we work and what we are working on are the same thing, that is they are meaningfully constructed, and so the method and the truth are one . . . . So an anthropological explanation involves reproducing in your mind, as logic, the way that world is constructed. In human sciences there is a fundamental identity, as Vico saw it, between the made and the true, the interchangeability of the method and the object” (Macfarlane Interview, June 6, 2013). 23

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disdain even helped to fortify this stately regard for a social thinker highly concerned with the Fifth Republic’s health. In distancing himself from “original Judaism” (Loyer 2015: 10), Lévi-Strauss boasts, “I am probably more faithful than anyone else to the Durkheimian tradition” (1973: 59), a tradition, to recall, that opened a dominant pathway sanctifying the social. Indeed, on his way to anthropodom, Lévi-Strauss first dabbled in, but then fled, legal training at the École Normale Supérieure for, as he put it, “the teaching of law . . . is caught between theology, which at that time it resembled in spirit, and journalism” (1973: 53–4). Here then are but some landmarks of Lévi-Strauss’s dwelling far from faith, out of his “rupture with the synagogue” (Loyer 2015: 10). His experience echoes that of another scholar of French modernity, Berkeley anthropologist Paul Rabinow. Recollecting his own personal dépaysement, Rabinow skipped out on his bar-mitzvah and opposed Zionism, yet maintained an alertness to anti-Semitism, all of which made him “one of those cosmopolitan New York, 100% nonreligious, 100% Jews, cut off from my past but rooted in New York City” (Macfarlane Interview, April 12, 2011). We thus witness anthropologists settling within their discipline’s dome following a variegated personal search. It is alternatively a space of newly found atheism, an avenue for continuing a natal family’s secularism, a way station on a path in search of a certain kind of redemption, or a haven following rejection of a family’s religion and even general way of life. Recall that these trajectories in anthropological seeking all constitute merely the first of five thus far identified panes with which anthropologists have sought to immure their dome from the theosphere, to ensure that reason as they know it does not fall prey to its assault. This task of thothic immurement is clearly far from being complete or straightforward. Under Thoth’s spell, anthropologists have devised ever more intricate ways to ostensibly render their dome impermeable by the theosphere.

PANE-TYPE TWO: PERSONALLY REJECT YET PROFESSIONALLY INJECT THEOLOGY In forming this second kind of pane for their dome, a few anthropologists make a peculiar move. Their private eschewal of faith

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curiously transmutes into a professional admission of it. Strathern gives us a glimpse of this complex pane, which I can only gingerly touch upon a bit further here, for this dual maneuver—theology at once a woe and wooer of anthropologists—can only be slightly detected by scratching a very hard and generally impregnable surface, leaving any possible additional evidence buried and inaccessible. But here I wish to offer some initial observations of two anthropologists rejecting-yet-embracing theology, involving wholehearted declarations of rejection that disguise their paying a regretted price. LéviStrauss and Malinowski provide these instances of startling expressions of a tortured relation to their discipline’s secularity. Faced with the modern assault of “history,” wanting to safeguard a rightful place in the tribunal of human reason for “myth,” LéviStrauss defined his anthropological orientation as a “seeker of dreams and memories” (1973: 42). Moreover, in his vision for the world, Lévi-Strauss spoke of “les droits du vivant (the rights of the living),” and not of “human rights,” because a “decentering” should occur where “humanity” no longer stands at the center but gives way to integration with animals. France continues to recognize him as someone filled with “self-vindicated archaism” (Loyer 2015: 97), who bore witness to the “paradigms of lost ones” (Fabre in Loyer 2015: 16). Given “the occasional hostility” anthropologists may have toward their natal societies—or those societies toward them—it is not surprising that not all “ancients” were equally admissible into LéviStrauss’s orientation. For example, the professionally admissible Amazonians held far more merit than the biographically rejected Hebrews, whose exclusion was perhaps even a necessary prerequisite for Lévi-Strauss to attain his imaginary of “the ancients.” Serving the role of priest, if not martyr, bearing witness to the truth about those who had peopled humanity’s beginning (and may still remain) was a sort of office to which Lévi-Strauss was anointed, whether by himself or his colleagues. By his very “archaism” he astutely, even if unknowingly, fashioned this very curious type of pane. Making it appear as if the dome’s horizons remain open to multiple realities, this pane-type can assuage dome-dwellers’ possible restlessness for infinity, for seeing what may lie outside their carapace. It enables anthropodom to appear to contain all that could be. Upon discovering the kind of anthropology practiced in the US, Catholic-raised, British-trained Malinowski said about Boas, arguably

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the American homologue of Lévi-Strauss: “if only I’d known Boas was my spiritual father all the time” (in Mead 2005 [1974]: 28). Ruth Benedict captured Malinowski’s reaction upon receiving “the revelation” of anthropology from the Columbia-generated school of “acculturation” in a letter to Mead: “he’s discovered it as if it were a new religion” (in Mead 2005 [1974]: 27). Out of the sources of their discomfort toward and disinterest in their natal religions, Lévi-Strauss and Malinowski extracted feelings that fed their very excitement toward anthropology, redirecting their sense of faith toward their adopted disciplinary home in which “a new religion,” “a spiritual father,” or “a nostalgia for belief ” could dwell as they did for Malinowski. The very Malinowski who wanted no God in his official language—that is, in his philosophical system—is described by Firth as a lapsed Catholic who nevertheless “would have liked to believe . . . who had a nostalgia for belief ” (in Silverman 1981:109). Thus, these anthropologists’ rejection of theology lays the grounds for its very injection anew, making their own apostate brands of anthropology possible. It is as if they made out of anthropology a modern theological heresy, constructing anew a creed befitting devotion, serving lingering aspirations of faith. Malinowski also helps with identifying a third, distinct kind of pane, helping to form the dome’s membrane. Here, anthropologists can be seen to accept, even promote, a life of theistic faith, but only for a life lived privately. Faithful in private faithless in public has been their creed. Thus, theology’s acceptance remains concealed away from the discipline, whether through anthropologists’ self-discipline, the disciplining power of their field, or both. Malinowski helps to clarify the ways this strand of rejection is distinct and dissociable from others in that what he longed for in private (faith or something like it) he erased in public. His students’ reminiscences are helpful for unearthing what he had professionally buried. However, anthropologists have themselves also provided remembrances of journeys into and within the dome, naturally quarantined to biographical realms. Private admission adjoining professional omission thus characterizes the third type of pane sealing theology away from anthropodom. This next pane has anthropologists policing a religious life they lead and hide as private, away from anthropodom’s disciplinary and public recognition.

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This third kind of pane marks a transition from anthropologists who outright reject to those who admit the theosphere, but only in their private lives. The pane-type that they thereby erect demonstrates the policing strength of anthropodom’s secularity. To begin understanding this pane-type’s texture, let us observe Mead, who biographically reveals an abiding lifelong commitment to Christ found nowhere in her professional oeuvre. Mead’s memoir opens with her recalling an epithet hanging on the door of her childhood town’s physician, as if she wanted to disclose the principum (beginning) that also became her life’s principle: “All things work together for good to them that love God” (1972: 1). Mead later speaks of her paternal grandfather, a Methodist preacher, as having had “the most decisive influence on my life” (1972: 45). An icon of anthropodom as a secular academic enterprise, Mead received her lasting religious teachings from her grandmother, to whom she also credited her commitment to her ethnographic informants: When I went to Samoa it was for Grandma[’s sake] that I tried to make clear [to the islanders] what I was doing . . . . Even though she hardly ever went to church—she decided that she had gone to church enough—she taught me to treat all people as the children of God. But she had no way to include in her conception of human beings the unknown peoples of a distant South Sea Island. (1972: 54)

Mead recalls from her early life: “I enjoyed prayer. I enjoyed church. I worried over the small size of our congregation . . . . The other children I knew thought all of this was odd” (1972: 77). Mead’s upbringing was in a Methodist milieu, but she received a Quaker education at the Buckingham Friends School, following which as a young adult she launched a search to join a church that would provide her “some kind of religious anchorage” (1972: 76). Along the way to her eventual Episcopalian theistic home, Mead dreamed about becoming a nun, “a professional” woman, a minister’s wife— which she did when married (from 1923 to 1928) to seminarianturned-sociologist Luther Cressman—and even a lawyer (1972: 76).24 24 Before he left his first vocation to embark on sociological and later archeological pursuits, Mead’s first husband Luther Cressman (1897–1994) had been ordained as an Episcopalian minister in 1923 (Butler 2018).

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Mead terminated her studies at DePauw College when a sorority rejected her application due to her religious affiliation, a price she paid for her newly adopted creed (1972: 2), which was clearly recompensed by a greater reward: “Almost at once I felt that the rituals of the Episcopal church were the form of religious expression for which I have been seeking” (1972: 76). Having “shifted with enthusiasm to the little Episcopal church,” as distinct from her mother’s “overcognitive” religiosity, Mead recognized: “What I wanted was a form of religion that gave expression to an already existing faith” (1972: 77). For Mead, faith persevered from her days with her grandparents to her days as a parent. Although “church as a vocation was slipping away” from her life when her first husband left the ministry, Mead still expected life “to center around the church” (1972: 123). Her daughter, anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, reminisced how her mother “chose to pass on her deep commitment to Christianity” (1984: 87–8). Mead’s commitment was such that she herself regularly carried St. Christopher’s (the patron saint of travelers) medallion on her key ring and arranged for her daughter: (a) a place in a children’s choir telling the annual nativity narrative from the Gospel of Luke; (b) a children’s book of Psalms; (c) for Aunt Marie to take her to Sunday worship in Mead’s absence; and even (d) a set of postcard reproductions of gospel paintings for her to leaf through during moments of boredom in mass (Bateson 1984: 88). Despite Mead’s deep commitment to Christianity, only a faint redolence of her particular ecumenical proclivity can be sensed within her anthropological sensibility, which she articulates in describing her anthropological formation at Columbia—as if echoing in her position a modern day Bartolomé de las Casas:25 “Our training equipped us with a sense of respect for the people we would study. They were full human beings with a way of life that could be compared with our own and with the culture of any other people” (1972: 141). And to make manifest the humanity she shared with peoples she found fully capable of it—be they Itamul, Samoan, Manu, Tchambuli, or Arapesh—Mead fervently dedicated her anthropological profession to exhibiting and defending it. However, while doing so she safely hid away the tenets of faith feeding her dedication.

25 Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) was a Dominican friar and bishop who in his Apologia reaffirmed indigenous peoples’ humanity, a reaffirmation which Mead seemed to parallel for a secular anthropology.

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We would be mistaken to think that Mead was unique in professionally concealing a religious persuasion, implicitly or explicitly policed by anthropodom. Her third (and last) spouse, anthropologist and scholar of Itamul and Balinese cultures Gregory Bateson, charged the discipline’s dome with the task of sealing away his own theistic persuasion, Zen Buddhism. The daughter he did not want christened notes: His rejection [of contemporary cultural forms] was an appreciation of form and a demand for mental discipline . . . . [It] was this, I think, that underlay Gregory’s attraction to Zen Buddhism and made him hospitable to its extreme attention to formal detail . . . . There was also a congruity between his developing view of the scared as immanent in the mental structure of the natural world and the immanent Buddhist sense of the sacred . . . . Finally he found, I think, in the San Francisco Zen community a community whose epistemology united their ideas and actions, a kind of coherence he missed. (Bateson 1984: 97)

This sense of insufficiency if not disillusionment with prevailing epistemologies within or outside the discipline—and even with the academy writ large—which led one anthropologist to Zen Buddhism, led another to eventually return to natal religion. The attraction to “formal detail” that drew Bateson to Buddhism sent Edward Sapir looking for beauty and spirit, ultimately in once-rejected Judaism. Throughout an anthropological career that had him work at the Vancouver Genealogical Survey of Canada, University of Chicago, and Yale University, Sapir is especially known for his work on language, his seminal work aptly titled, Language (1921). Sapir’s biographer, Regna Darnell, notes that at the end of a life immersed in “adult secularism,” this son of a Jewish cantor developed “a renewed interest in Judaism” (1990: 398). Remaining without affinity to “organized religion,” in old age Sapir began reading the Hebrew Bible and Talmud. While he refrained from formally participating in religious worship such as celebrating Jewish holidays, he kept non-kosher foods such as pork and shellfish away from his home (Darnell 1990: 402–3). Although Darnell describes him, similarly to how James Clifford describes Leenhardt,26 as a man who “did not compartmentalize,” Sapir did not want advertised his “clandestine 26 James Clifford notes that “ethnographic science provided a breathing space for Leenhardt” who “cannot be divided into compartments” (1982: 147).

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ambitions” and “disillusionments with anthropology” (Darnell 1990: 152), which he viewed as no one’s fault but his own: I have no theoretical quarrels with anthropology. The fault lies with me. Being as I am, for better or for worse, the life of an American does not satisfy my inmost cravings . . . . I find that what I most care for is beauty of form, whether in substance or, perhaps even more keenly, in spirit . . . . [T]hese are some of the things, in the sphere of the immaterial, [which] have most deeply stirred me. (In Darnell 1990: 152)

Arguably absent from Sapir’s official anthropological reason, theology appears quite notably in his poetry. Sapir reportedly envied his friend Benedict’s rootedness in English devotional poetry, especially her having seventeenth-century metaphysical poet and Anglican Church cleric John Donne and medieval monk Thomas à Kempis as exemplars for her poetry (Modell 1984: 138). A hint at the cleft separating Sapir’s poetry from his anthropology comes from Kroeber, a co-orbiter in Boas’s circle, who exhorted Sapir to find another way for his poetry: “[P]lease, please leave out God. I know that is the way it’s done, but it is not your way” (in Darnell 1990: 163). Such criticism aimed at keeping art, as it were, “God-free” seemed to weary Sapir. Convinced that “aesthetics was essential to both art and science” (in Darnell 1990: 162), Sapir questioned the implication of error in publicly displaying personal striving, including those of the aesthetic variety about God. He wrote to Lowie, another fellow Boas-orbiter: “Isn’t it high time we all recognized clearly that art, criticism, and to some extent even science are but expressions of the self? I have no patience with the conventional dodging of the personal” (in Darnell 1990: 161). Perhaps it was Sapir’s depleted patience with “compartmentalizing” logic that prompted him to implore his close friend and confidant, the poet Ann Singleton, to reveal her true identity as anthropologist Ruth Benedict. No citizen of the anthropological republic arguably held as close to a visceral understanding of him as did Benedict. In seeking ultimates, she too was thinking of God, albeit likely “scandalously” to the devout. Commenting on the beauty of a Cochiti Pueblo landscape at the sacred mesa in the early morning, Benedict wrote in her field notes: “When I am God I am going to build my city here” (in Modell 1984: 173). Some of Benedict’s most earthly entrapments lasting throughout her life were Sapir’s as well. Both Benedict and Sapir experienced the

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insufficiency of the discipline to which they dedicated a lifelong career. Reflecting on her professional life containing studies among Japanese, Serrano, Cochiti Pueblo, and Zuni peoples, Benedict wrote: “My jobs have never been an end in themselves, always just a means, and a rather subordinate means. They have never been the essential. That, I think, has never much wavered” (in Mead 1959: 138). Like Sapir, Benedict sought solace in the benedictory power of poetry, immersing herself therein aesthetically and theistically (Modell 1984: 92). Her poetic persona, Thomas à Kempis was the subject of an unpublished poem, “Monk of Ariège,” composed by Benedict at a time when her poems were, as Sapir put it, “getting more, rather than less difficult” (in Mead 1959: 193). It was in her challenging poetry, rather than her professional work, where Benedict expressed her complicated relation to truth, even if only faintly, as in her poem titled, “Eucharist:” “Light the more given is the more denied | . . . . You are not like to find her, being fed | Always with that she shines on | Only those storm-driven down the dark, see light arise” (in Mead 2005 [1974]: 75). Benedict appears to evoke “truth” with the feminine pronoun, an interpretation finding reinforcement in her understanding of the industry of remarkable human talent: The highest endowments do not create, they only discover. All transcendent genius has the power to make us know this as utter truth. Shakespeare, Beethoven—it is inconceivable that they have fashioned works of their lives; they only saw and heard the universe that is opaque and dumb to us. (In Mead 2005 [1974]: 19)

From her childhood reminiscences, we learn that Benedict grew up in the pious Baptist home of her maternal grandparents on a farm near Norwich, New York. There she and her sister said the Lord’s Prayer every night with their mother, who knelt with Bible and candle on a cold floor to cure a young Benedict’s writhing tantrums, thereby patterning her life with lasting theistic reverberations (Mead 1959: 85, 108). A biographer notes this enduring embodiment rooted in Benedict’s Baptist upbringing: Ruth drew on the language of religious awe to express and embody an overwhelming sensation . . . . [S]he returned to a mode of expression in which intense passion took color from religious doctrine—the habit of her years in Norwich . . . [where she had experienced a] Baptist upbringing she never quite rejected. (Modell 1984: 174, 249)

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As Benedict journeyed from her youth, Boas entered her anthropological life, thanks to Parsons who had taught Benedict at the New School. Benedict called Boas “a godsend” in her search for her own life-patterns. She came to admire him as she did her devout Baptist grandfather (Modell 1984: 121–2), from whom she seemed to have inherited a lasting love of reading the Bible (King James Version), even if she read it quite differently than he did (Mead 1959: 87). Indeed, Mead speaks of Benedict’s Bible reading as adding to the rifts that grew between Benedict’s life and worldview and those of her family: “The Bible, rigidly adhered to by her family’s fundamentalist relatives, became the background of her daydreams, but her feeling about it was so different from that of her family that her delight in the Bible was still another source of alienation” (2005: 6). Benedict’s retained Christianity buttressed her critique of Puritanism as a force at work in American consciousness and society. On her dropping the line “Father forgive us our sins” from the Lord’s Prayer by the age of six, and omitting the prayer entirely from her bedtime by the age of twelve, Benedict reflects: “[I have] no Puritan load on my conscience about my unforgiven sins . . . [in a] dirty-minded Puritan bred [society that] discounts in any private conversation: monogamy” (in Mead 1959: 139–40). Repelled by conceits of sanctity that Puritan patterns confer on monogamous marriages, Benedict sought to challenge them in American society with the help of Christ and others, attempting to construct her own pattern in her life as a woman and an anthropologist: The trouble with life isn’t that there is no answer, it’s that there are so many answers. There is the answer of Christ and of Buddha, of Thomas à Kempis and of Elbert Hubbard, of Browning, Keats and of Spinoza, of Thoreau and of Walt Whitman, of Kant and of Theodore Roosevelt. By turns their answers fit my need. And yet, because I am I and not any of them, they can none of them be completely mine . . . . [W]e must build up our own answer, that not even a Kant or a Christ can answer it for us. (In Mead 1959: 126)

While Christ did not build a full answer for Benedict’s life, questions raised by the Bible continually molded it, albeit like for Mead, in a fully sequestered personal domain. Benedict is known for writing the anthropodom classic, Patterns of Culture (1959 [1934]), but not for seeking patterns in Christ, her “favorite company,” for conducting her life as she describes below. Benedict was especially reflective and

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articulate in expressing the ways Christ provided answers, however incomplete, which other anthropologists may have sequestered at deeper, less accessible depths. Describing the “background of her daydreams,” Benedict’s reflections on the Bible’s constant presence usefully display the interplay of professional self-censorship, a religiosity inhabiting a secular performance, and an enduring personal piety. As for professional self-censorship, Benedict speaks of the Bible’s lasting influence only on her “emotions,” since clearly mind, intellect, reason, intelligence, and rationality as faculties for thinking are all inappropriate hosts of biblical influence, despite its vividness and consequence in this Benedictine life: Ever since I had stopped playing with my little playmate who lived over the hill, “my” world had been one I made up mostly out of my Bible. I was brought up in the midst of the church: my grandfather whom I loved was a Baptist deacon and a pillar of the religious community; we went to church and Sunday school as a matter of course. Nevertheless my religious life had nothing to do with institutional Christianity nor with the church creeds. I loved the story of Christ, and I knew it better than the ministers before I was ten. I had thought the picture of Christ on the wall was my father, and I think I never stopped believing it as far as my emotions went. The story of Jesus was “my” world. I liked that part of the Bible better than any other book I had . . . I never identified my “religion” with the authority of the family, any more than I identified with dogmas, so that I never had to throw off a yoke of any religious submission. Theological doubts never raised their head against me. For me the gospels described a way of life, and Christ, who had lived that life. Besides, the church taught me to pray, and I took it at its word . . . . Christ was a real person to me, and my favorite company. I learned most of what I know about life from the Bible. (In Mead 1959: 107)

Thus leading a “religious life” with Christ as a “real person,” faith and heavenly kingdom held genuine living meaning for Benedict. As she grew up, these two realms—faith and celestial kingdom—gave her means for mitigating a sense of futility, for combating slothfulness in the pursuit of knowledge, and for attaining friendships and selfexpression. While perhaps counter-intuitive, Benedict’s instincts for life, for living life in gratitude, led her to Nietzsche, author of The Antichrist, whom she read passionately,27 but turned on his head when she wrote affirmatively of Christ in her personal journal: 27 See Alfred Smith (1964) on the centrality of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Apollonian– Dionysian distinction for Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture.

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Little by little, in the long run aspirations can realize themselves. Work for that. We must count it our wealth. Why must we rebel as passionately against the blindness, the futility, the loneliness? It is nobler to be thankful, even for the vision of what might be, and pray—try to pray— that we may keep the dreams . . . . I am sure it is what Christ meant when he said, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” (In Mead 1959: 122–3)

Four months after this entry in what reads like a sermon on the virtue of faith—expressing how Benedict desperately wanted to know “how other women saved their souls alive,”28 Benedict wrote further in her journal: “Faith is the sturdiest, the most manly of virtues. It lies behind our pluckiest, blindest, most heartbreaking strivings . . . . God gives us the faith that looks unflinchingly at the day before us and accepts it, even lovingly, as an opportunity to faithfully, squarely, live up to God, that is the faith we need” (in Mead 1959: 125). There is little reason to doubt that Benedict’s “most manly of virtues” was fully the domain of women as well. She seems to have been thinking of both genders when forging a relation with God and also when forging a rewarding academic placement for anthropology. In her 1947 address as the retiring president of the American Anthropological Association, Benedict revealed her relationship with the discipline (in Mead 2005 [1974]: 167–71). With a tragic, very Ruth Benedictine sensibility, she wondered if her advocacy of humanities as a home for anthropology would secure a path to the faith she professed yet needed to seal off, along with her poetic ventures, from disciplinary reason, a path the sciences had clearly failed to open. Two milestones in Benedict’s trajectory help us see the ways her advocacy of the humanities, including anthropology’s bond with this domain, defended faith as a potentiality for her life. An open confrontation of dualities—reason with revelation, science with religion—would have been ill advised at a time when science “came to dominate the field of intellectual inquiry” (in Mead 2005 [1974]: 168). Speaking of faith per se would have been too brazen a move within anthropodom. Benedict was thus only able to hint at it, by transmuting it as “humanities.” Referring to the “excitement of phrasing the study of man in terms of scientific generalizations” (in Mead 2005 [1974]: 167), Benedict

28

In 1917, upon seeing a picture of Mary Wollstonecraft at the National Portrait Gallery, Benedict wrote, “I wanted to know how other women saved their souls alive” (in Mead 2005 [1974]: 2).

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also sighted loss in the balance: “There were great gains in the new phrasing . . . . But, looking back at it now there were also losses” (in Mead 2005 [1974]: 168). Benedict appeared apprehensive about her discipline, with its new (that is, “scientific”) apparatus, losing contact with the “human spirit” and “symbolism,” which had been relegated to outside the dome. She had sought an anthropology concerned with what she called the “mind of man,” her general attribution to the male gender in keeping with condoned referents in the scientific idioms of her day for the finite pivots of modern humanism: “man’s emotions, his rationalizations, his symbolic structures” (in Mead 2005 [1974]: 169). In arguing for the value of an anthropological mooring in the humanities, Benedict harnessed the authority of philosopher and cultural critic George Santayana. For her he was one of the “great humanists” with whom anthropology should “find common ground.” Yet in his The Life of Reason: Reason in Religion, Santayana (1905) speaks of man’s “spirit,” not “mind” as evoked by Benedict, perhaps deliberately so. This “slip” might betray that the “soul” or “spirit” in Benedict’s poetry may be the same as her “mind” in anthropological parlance and activity. Indeed, from solidly within anthropodom, she brazenly anoints the spirit in her presidential address’s concluding lines in quoting Santayana as saying: “Any world, any society, any language . . . satisfies and encourages the spirit which it creates . . . . Imperfect and shifting as this . . . must be, it is sufficient to support the spirit of man” (in Mead 2005 [1974]: 171). What we witness with these few lines as theology’s seepage into the dome in Benedict’s later years had surely been averted upon her entrance to anthropodom, which began with her first course in anthropology at the New School in 1919. Benedict personally admitted the disruption this rupture with faith wrought her, such as in a journal entry wistfully entered fifteen years later: What is this need I have so strongly and which comes over me only the more overwhelmingly after I’ve been faithful for a while to my jobs and duties? It is nothing that I can recognize in other people . . . . [W]ork even when I am satisfied with it is never my child I love nor my servant I’ve brought to heal. It is always busy work I do with my left hand, and part of me watches grudging the waste of time. It is always a distraction—and from what? It is hard to say. From contemplation and detachment, from impersonal candor that knows work and people in their proper proportion—that sees existence under the form of

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eternity, maybe. I wish I had lived in a generation that cultivated the spiritual life; perhaps then I would not have felt so frustrated. (In Mead 1959: 154)

She continued in a resoundingly prophetic vein: Perhaps one day the right environment will be hit upon and a culture will arise that by its very nature fosters spiritual life that is nevertheless detached and adventurous—something of the sort Spinoza or Christ achieved in certain flashes. It’s nothing that has appeared on earth yet. What might it be like? Chiefly a great sureness, experience out of which belief and existing had passed with all the other traits of temporality . . . . Work could not be alien to it . . . . [T]o work or to live, would not be distractions, but largess of its prodigal security. It would be so simply foundational upon verities that are not the sport of time . . . and those to whom the life of the spirit was a reality could pass in and out of the temple at will, the smallest act lit with the radiance of their knowledge. It is a dream. (In Mead 1959: 155)

It is curious how Benedict so effectively sealed away from her profession such fervent aspirations of faith. Just as her presidential address manifests “faith” or “spirituality,” yet largely transmuted into coded and condoned words such as “humanities,” Benedict hid her sentiments for a spiritual intelligence, as it were—simultaneously with her undisciplined identity—in her journal and her poetry. Evans-Pritchard arguably did the same, but to a lesser effect, and perhaps subsequently, he less effectively, likely because less desirously, sealed theology away from his disciplinary practice. Although he retained a private and strong connection to religious life, he did not seem to bother much with veiling it, although veil it he did. In this sense his trajectory provides a variation to the general patterns of this pane-type. It even raises the possibility that the thin sealing of theology within secular parlance, in which Evans-Pritchard was so expert, might merit identifying him and other anthropologists like him as providing a distinct type of pane for constructing the dome’s membrane. In allowing a bit of “ventilation,” they helped safeguard the entire edifice. Like Mead and Benedict, Evans-Pritchard led a subterranean religious life.29 Yet unlike them, he only thinly veiled a life so lived from 29 Upon delivering a public lecture titled “Some Reflections of Mysticism” at the end of his Oxford career, E. E. Evans-Pritchard confessed to Meyer Fortes about its

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view without fully and hermetically excising it from his professional life. His thinly clad theology seemed to require from him neither apologia nor repentance. One year after his death in 1973 this posthumous introspection was first published: “I have no regrets. Bad Catholic though I be. I would rather be a bad one than not one at all” (in Larsen 2014: 92). No book seems to better demonstrate Evans-Pritchard’s theistic ventilating tendency than his landmark Nuer Religion (1956). While Benedict opens her Patterns of Culture with a proverb from her fieldwork,30 which she learned from Ramon, a Digger Indian, Evans-Pritchard opens Nuer Religion with a quotation from his own native setting, specifically Isaiah 18: 1–2.31 Allusions to theology’s sway on this work continue through to its final page, visible to anyone willing to see them. Evans-Pritchard’s colleague at Oxford, Godfrey Lienhardt, maintains that he wrote Nuer Religion “from an explicitly theistic viewpoint” (in Larsen 2014: 110). Historian and theologian Timothy Larsen (2014) goes even further to hold that theological phrases and references prevail—revealing a pietistic engagement far more extensive than found in the work of fellow, secularly disciplined anthropologists—in what arguably remains among the most classical of anthropological monographs. EvansPritchard concludes his anthropological account of the Nuer’s notion of Spirit (Kwoth) and its place in governing social life with a striking transfer of the scepter in this work’s closing line, betraying his, and indeed anthropology’s, inadequacy to faithfully depict a faith system: “At this point the theologian takes over from the anthropologist” (1956: 321). Within his Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, EvansPritchard (1937) admits that at home he personally follows this tribe’s

content: “It must have been apparent to you, if not to them that this is my inner life” (in Larsen 2014: xx). 30 The Digger Indian proverb Benedict (1959 [1934]) quotes as an epigraph to her book is as follows: “In the beginning, God gave to every people a cup of clay, and from this cup they drank their life.” 31 The full epigraph from Nuer Religion (1956) reads: “Ah, the land of the rustling of wings, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia: that sendeth ambassadors by the sea, even in vessels of papyrus upon the waters, (saying) Go ye swift messengers, to a nation tall and smooth, to a people terrible from their beginning onward; a nation that meteth out and treadeth down, whose land the rivers divide.”

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oracles “to the letter” (in Douglas 1981: 39), which, like for the Azande, became his adopted “natural philosophy” for comprehending and coping with misfortune in life. Following his public delivery of a lecture sharing “Some Reflections on Mysticism” at the end of his Oxford career, Evans-Pritchard confided to his co-editor of the anthology African Political Systems (1940), South African-born anthropologist of Ghanaian Tallensi cultures Meyer Fortes: “It must have been apparent to you, if not to them, that this is my inner life” (Fortes in Larsen 2014: 101). Rather than abandon transcendence to the state or to the intellectualizations of state-minded sociologists (Durkheim, first and foremost), Evans-Pritchard seems to not have only theorized transcendence, but to have lived it, in the field and out, just as if he were a believing native. Such “living transcendence” was for Evans-Pritchard a practice simultaneously engaging both his inner and professional worlds, emulated by others of his colleagues at Oxford—Catholics Mary Douglas and the Lienhardt Brothers (Peter and Godfrey), Jewish Franz Steiner, and Hindu M. N. Srinivas—who also did not find it necessary to abjure their religious traditions in order to practice anthropology. Evans-Pritchard rejected his discipline’s axiom requiring that he remain within its secular confines, by which he rejected a diminished, merely anthropological, understanding of religious experience: “What this [spiritual] experience is the anthropologist cannot for certain say . . . We feel like spectators at a shadow show watching insubstantial shadows on the screen” (1965: 322, 321). In thus allowing the theosphere to make claims on the working of his reason, a reason that did not necessarily fear the infinite or unknowable, Evans-Pritchard refused to adopt for himself or for his anthropology anthropodom’s vision of reality, which generally appeared to its denizens as the ultimate reality. Investigating thus far the first three kinds of panes forming anthropology’s dome home, I have drawn heavily on biographical materials. The remaining two kinds of panes I next explore largely derive from non-biographical materials. They consist of a body of anthropological knowledge extricated safely away from theology in time and space. These panes reflect “the insubstantial shadows” separating disciplinary life within the dome from the theosphere chiefly made up of “the screen” of professional writing. More precisely, writings by anthropologists have worked to markedly distinguish the disciplinary corpus from the theosphere outside it.

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Redeeming Anthropology PANE-TYPE FOUR: ANTHROPOLOGY’S CORPOREAL CONFINEMENT

We have seen how the first three panes are primarily evident in anthropologists’ personal biographies, revealed by themselves or others. In addition to the personal register, anthropologists have commented on their discipline’s theosealing practices in their professional writings. The texture of this fourth pane is thus composed of ways in which anthropologists comment on the body of their professional knowledge. It is what may typically count as the recognizable “corpus” of the discipline, its official and disciplinary (in distinction from biographical) writings. Differently put, the texts fashioning this pane are largely those of the discipline “in performance.” It is thus first to “onstage” commentaries from the anthropological corpus, cut off and sealed away from the theosphere in time and space, that this chapter now turns. Up until the final decades of the twentieth century, when certain doubts began cracking the seams of anthropology’s dome having to do with questioning “the purity” of its driving fuel, namely science, anthropodom went on operating confidently, albeit “sometimes concealing from itself its strong romanticist tendencies” (Lambeck 2012). Yet perhaps it was neither “sometimes” nor “romanticism,” but always and theology that anthropology concealed from itself. The panes on which such “insubstantial shadows,” as Evans-Pritchard might call them, might appear developed such sophistication as to even conceal their very concealment of theology. Insofar as this concealing consisted of anthropology’s self-policing in order to anchor itself in the modern academy, whether confidently among the sciences or less confidently, and perhaps inversely, within the humanities, on the whole anthropologists—especially those attaining an acute understanding of their discipline’s ironic scholarly position—were well disciplined not to drop any reference, God forbid, to theology. Indeed, as a body of knowledge aspiring to legitimacy in the modern university, anthropology has succeeded in articulating its work at a safe distance from theology. Two anthropological luminaries allow a glimpse into this policing, Clifford Geertz and David Schneider. Geertz reflected on anthropology’s self-definition as “the study of man” to find it “broad, general, and wildly aspiring,” making for “impossibly diverse” kinds and topics of study. And yet Geertz complained about its ambiguity: “There is indeed a lack of firm

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edge and defined target to what we do, however hard some may work to disguise the fact” (1995: 96–7). Neither logically nor practically does the indeterminacy Geertz identifies necessarily amount to selfcensorship. However, his articulation may amount to theology’s outright omission. In holding that anthropologists “lack in fact the language to articulate what takes place when we are in fact at work” (1995: 120), Geertz may have in fact been participating in an unrecognized, yet very solid guarding against theology. An inability to articulate does not preclude an ability to censor. Just as King of Prussia Fredrick II reportedly responded to Immanuel Kant’s answer to what is the Enlightenment with “argue as much as you want and about what you want, but obey” (Kant 1996 [1784]: 59), we can almost hear Geertz commanding: doubt as much as you want about anthropology, but forget any relation with theology, forget even that you forgot it. Like Geertz, Schneider notes, “Anthropology has always had a problem defining itself” (1995: 203), yet defining anthropology as not theology has presented little problem. Anthropologists have only associated their discipline with, let alone likened it to, theology at their own risk. Far more common has it been to think of anthropology as some kind of psychoanalysis, odyssey, or “othering.” Perhaps recalling Evans-Pritchard’s “point” in the very final line of Nuer Religion (1956)—where the theologian must reclaim the scepter from the anthropologist—can help us recognize that policing theology’s forbidden admission to the anthropological corpus has endemically happened across time and space. Due to theology’s very absenting, I find that I am only able to illustrate it with a slight few examples, this omission itself revealing a sort of disciplinary “amnesia.” It is a non-occurrence for the discipline’s introductory textbooks to let its initiates know of leading anthropologists leading religions, even if as trivia. For example, Mead was a prominent drafter of the American Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (Episcopal Church 1979) and Dell Hymes belonged to the Guild of Scholars of the Episcopal Church. Going even further than concealing confessional layers of anthropologists’ personal lives are certain omissions of even professional work, details never disclosed in textbooks. Reviews of Lévi-Strauss’s work, such as that by a recent biographer, typically identify him as “the author of humanist thought” or “anthropologist, across the centuries (anthropologue, par-delà les siècles)” and imagine

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him conversing with similarly grand figures, les philosophes and les ethnologues, such as Rousseau, Montesquieu, Chateaubriand, and Enlightenment ethnologists (Loyer 2015: 17), notably omitting leaders of Christian missions, with whom he actually did converse and without whom Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology would not have been conceivable. Let us also consider how, through his historical scholarship on anthropology and literature, Clifford remembers the work of French pastor and ethnographer Leenhardt in ways that submit to the dome’s thothic power for sealing away theology. Loyal to the academy’s secular principles, Clifford notes how although Leenhardt “continued to believe in the mission—that they constituted the most open, living element of the church,” his ethnographic work “steered clear of theology. His ultimate goal was to discover, through comparative analysis, the essential forms of the religious experience, whenever and wherever they occurred” (1982: 219–20). We can see Clifford as employing a bold rhetorical move to steer readers clear of Leenhardt’s clear theology, his practical theology of “discovering God” in the ethnographic field. Such ways seem to be how anthropologists manage to conceal from themselves theological aspects that their own or others’ work may entail in order to establish an identifiable corpus sanctum for secular anthropology. Clifford’s implied claim that “comparative analysis” precludes theology deserves scrutiny. When viewed from a theological position, comparative analysis may in fact comprise a sort of anthropological theology. Differently put, seeking religious experience’s essential forms whenever and wherever they occur is not exclusively an anthropological undertaking, but one fully belonging to theological inquiry as well.32 Looking more closely at Clifford’s secular homage to Leenhardt with its traces of theistic erasure, we can consider the ways theological labor may have actually been at work in Leenhardt’s ethnographic research. It is especially notable to find such erasure in Clifford’s account, for three reasons. First of all, it is from Clifford that we learn about Leenhardt being a “spiritual explorer” (1982: 20), who belonged to a tradition in which “facts are [the] word of God” (1982: 134), who did not keep “the religious and scientific enterprises separate” (1982: 3), 32 For recent examples of theologians conducting comparative analyses of religious experiences see Lemons 2018 and Farris and Taliaferro 2015.

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and who could not “be divided into compartments” (1982: 147). Indeed, Clifford tells us forthwith that Leenhardt embarked on fieldwork in order to “discover his God concretely in Melanesian religious experience” (1982: 5), yet for Clifford that fieldwork remained recognizable only as ethnographic, in distinction from another kind of work which he does not name: theological. Second, this seeming denial of theology’s possible presence in some ethnographic work is particularly striking in the keenly observant Clifford, who exhorts us to remain cognizant that “a discipline most actively defines itself at its edges, in relation to what it says it is not” (2005: 25). Since anthropology says that it is not theology, then by Clifford’s axiom, here is exactly the edge we need to scrutinize under blazing lights. And we need to do so precisely when reviewing anthropology’s history, when gazing retrospectively at the endeavors and lives of our forebears, as Clifford does with Leenhardt, going all the way back to the armchair anthropology—concerned with affirming Western evolutionary thought, not with conducting ethnographic fieldwork—pursued by founding figures like E. B. Tylor and James Frazer. Third, with an ecumenical eye toward anthropology, Clifford sees it “articulated” as a “comparative science of human diversity” (2003: 25). He names a slew of fields to which anthropology connects, none of which are theology, denoting them as “extra anthropological stuff: literature, history, feminism, cultural studies [all taking part in] dramatic interdisciplinary work” (2003: 23). He also lists fields with which anthropology has assembled and disassembled: “history, sociology, cultural studies, literature, biology, linguistics, psychology, and geography” (2005: 25), excising theology yet again. This excision brings me to the third reason I find Clifford’s account of Leenhardt striking. By purging theology outside this disciplinary memory constructed within anthropodom, Clifford’s reconstruction of Leenhardt conforms to established anthropological lore, since the time when anthropodom was immaculately conceived—and indeed populated— at a safe distance from native subjects and their points of view. At Oxford, E. B. Tylor, the British father of modern anthropology, exhorts in his 1871 Primitive Culture: We may hasten to escape from regions of transcendental philosophy and theology, to start on a more hopeful journey over more practicable grounds . . . . It is with a sense of attempting an investigation which bears

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very closely on the current theology of our day, that I have set myself to examine systemically, among the lower races, the development of Animism . . . . In these investigations, however, made rather from an ethnographic than a theological point of view, there has seemed little need of entering direct controversial argument, which indeed I have taken pains to avoid as far as possible. (in Bohannan and Glazer 1988: 65; 76)

The principle of separation (“ethnographic rather than theological”) that Tylor thus establishes has remained within our anthropology to the present day, serving to exclude theology from professional memory. Yet not only out of time, out of the memories of our forebears that variably make up the anthropological corpus is theology erased, but also out of space. This effacement happens in the way, for example, natives and non-natives to the discipline relate it to other fields of inquiry, to theology’s invariable exclusion. This omission tellingly occurs in the words of Eric Wolf, who trained in anthropology at Columbia and taught it at the University of Michigan, Lehman College, and finally at City University of New York’s Graduate Center, whose anthropology program he helped to found, and who bequeathed enduring lessons about the ways Europe has written other peoples outside it out of history. Here, he writes theology out of an anthropology depicted as an ever-encompassing, ever-connecting domain: Anthropology is . . . less subject matter than a bond between subject matters. It is in part history, part literature, in part natural science, part social science. In an age of increased specialization, it strives to be above specialties, to connect and to articulate them . . . anthropology thrives at the very heterogeneity of its subject matter. (1974: 88)

Thus, anthropology ever expands to welcome other fields into its dome, although theology remains secured outside. Yet, when looking at the discipline’s past, for the health of the discipline’s memory, let us recall that anthropologists have not always “forgotten” their natal relation to theology. Some have even taken theology as the discipline’s “prehistory.” Similar to Tylor’s perspicacity about his discipline’s very germination in contrast to, and therefore to some extent out of, theology, in 1904 Boas candidly reminisces on the discipline’s initial points of departure: [Observations of strange customs] were and remained curiosities. It was only when their relation to our own civilization became the subject of

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inquiry that the foundations of anthropology were laid. Its germs may be discovered in the early considerations of theologists [sic] regarding the relation between Pagan religions and the revelations of Christianity. (In Stocking 1989: 24)

While Boas exhibits clarity regarding anthropology’s theological seeds, succeeding generations’ reminiscences blur them. Kroeber, who led a private psychoanalytical practice from 1920 to 1923, comments on the “personality of anthropology” that feels disquiet within the social sciences, for its true paternity lies with secularly revered science and its true maternity lies, perhaps to Benedict’s approval, with romantic humanities: Since personalities are initially determined by their ancestry, it is a relevant fact, if I am right, that anthropology was originally not a social science at all. Its father was natural science; its mother, esthetically tinged humanities . . . . The vision was wide, charged, and stirring. It may perhaps fairly be called romantic . . . . The pursuit of anthropology must often have seemed strange and useless to many people, but no one has ever called it an arid or a toneless or a dismal science . . . . If at times some of you, like myself, feel somewhat ill at ease in the house of social science, do not wonder: we are changelings therein; our true paternity lies elsewhere. (Kroeber 1959: 404)

In juxtaposing anthropology with nearly the whole of the academy, Kroeber copiously blurs theology’s relation with anthropology, and not simply by omission. In referring to its mother as “esthetically tinged humanities,” Kroeber ignores the fact that theology could have very reasonably been swimming in that same aesthetic-literary-historical womb. Noting anthropology’s pedigree lying outside of social science, perhaps out of “un-ease,” perhaps out of timidity or denial, Kroeber presciently concludes his discussion by announcing that anthropology’s “true paternity” lies ambiguously “elsewhere.” We may also question the prudence of divulging a “true paternity” of anthropology at least partially in theology if aspiring to citizenship in science’s homeland. As entrenched or attenuated his unease may have been, Kroeber showed no inhibition in clearly taking natural science—post-Newtonian to be sure—as anthropology’s exemplar. Thothically driven toward modern natural science as a model, Kroeber specifically anoints biology as a paragon for a maturing anthropology, wishing it could learn from this of its father’s incarnations: “Anthropologists . . . do not yet clearly recognize the fundamental

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value of the humble but indispensable task of classifying—that is, structuring—our body of knowledge as biologists did begin to recognize it two hundred years ago” (cited by Wolf in Silverman 1981: 50). If Boas exhibited clarity and Kroeber haziness regarding theology’s early role in anthropology, keeping it within our vistas, however blurred, this awareness progressively dissipated over time. Within a few decades after Kroeber, the total obliteration of any lingering relation with theology had become a necessary condition for anthropology’s self-recognition. Fully reflecting theology away from the dome’s surface began to mean that anthropologists are what natives of the theosphere are not, conveying the sense of “We are here and they are there. What we do they do not do and what we see they cannot see.” Sydel Silverman revealed to me how she sought a very corporeal excision to insulate anthropodom from its theospheric exteriority. Listening to her comment on the New York City Orthodox Jewish upbringing she fled, precipitating her arrival in anthropodom, we may find that her attraction to the discipline derives from its very severance (even if incomplete) from theology. However, in some sense we can even see Silverman, like Boas, nevertheless descrying anthropology’s theological seeds. While Boas located these seeds in the discipline’s germination, Silverman located them in her own germination as a budding anthropologist. Her passion for her learning arose out of a theological world, but one with no vitality to offer her destiny. This vitality is something anthropology possesses, with its ability to teach Silverman so many truths in so many ways, bequeathed by a founding generation that revered the “plasticity” of humans and their cultures as a deep-seated conviction. This multiplicity appealed to Silverman, whereas “religious people” did not: It is always study. My father spent his whole life sitting at a dining table with his nose in a book . . . . So as I grew up . . . it was always study, questioning, arguing but you know the way the Talmudic argument goes it always ends up validating the Talmud, and it is not really stepping out . . . . In anthropology we step out. We don’t argue within an enclosed world . . . . [But] I think the commitment to study is relevant. Everything will come from study. The idea that there are different ways of interpreting and arguing about . . . . All that stuff except for the God part. That does not work for me . . . once you are exposed to 500 different notions of the supernatural, you can’t really see the truth in one realm . . . . People of

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religious commitments usually don’t come to anthropology . . . . It is a different way of looking at the world. (Interview, December 3, 2014)

While keeping the “God part” outside the dome, anthropology nonetheless seems to involve, as Silverman notes, a “stepping out” of bounds and perhaps even of self, akin to the experience of believers. For Silverman, her anthropological mind is committed, like the religious mind, to studying and questioning. Silverman even grants the art of arguing to the religious mind she left behind. However, anthropologists have no stable “final vocabulary,”33 in their viewing truth as multiply locatable and justifiably so, rendering their discipline as “a different way of looking at the world” from “the religious way.” So while Silverman did not seem to deny that her formation as an anthropologist may have begun in a theologically imbued personal milieu, that milieu is best “forgotten,” put behind her, for sustaining her dwelling in anthropology’s secular dome. Furthermore, with “500 different notions of the supernatural,” doubt seems alive in anthropology to a far greater degree than the theosphere could perhaps admit. It should be clear by now that impugning theology’s dismissal of doubt and diversity may help fuel anthropology’s disciplinary construction but not forgetfulness. Theology so negated can never be completely forgotten. Differently put, theology is remembered every time it is called upon to serve anthropodom in recognizing itself as theology’s negation, in taking note of this other to fortify its sense of a distinct, secular self. On the other hand, total oblivion of theology also occurs, whenever its very contrast with anthropology becomes superfluous, redundant, or even unthinkable. This ultimate forgetting can be found in some reflections on anthropology’s positioning, not for what they say but rather for what they do not say. Recent French thinkers on anthropology’s relation to literature either regard the two as having the same object of study—the other—or beseech the former to take on the latter’s identity. This is to say anthropology would behave like literature (see Debaene 2008). I find it notable the ease with which they align these two fields without even hinting at what they might jointly share with theology. Anthropologist Marc Augé notes that literature and ethnographic observations grow in the same soil (terreau) and contain the same 33

I take the term “final vocabulary” from Richard Rorty (1989).

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primary material, in so far as they both communicate with and about an other (2011: 214). Viewing anthropology as an “exiting of the self” (sortie de soi) (2011: 50), Augé does not simply echo Lévi-Strauss, but also contemporary receptions of him in France as the doyen of the discipline, a “Zen monk” of French intellectuals (Loyer 2015: 12). One recent appraisal of Lévi-Strauss’s work even conveys as reasonable, legitimate, and viable to understand his anthropology as literary practice: “By its title alone [Tristes Tropiques], one could say that the work of Lévi-Strauss is literature in the sense that it allows for a reading that is not simply an acquisition of knowledge or comprehension of a reality through representation, but an experience of the self and an experience on the self” (Deabene 2008: xxi). In this type of pane, the body of anthropological knowledge becomes identifiable with the cognate secular enterprise that is modern literature, not with theology of course. And yet as literature, anthropology takes on a function that is not necessarily foreign to the theosphere. I am referring to “experience of . . . and . . . on the self” (Deabene 2008: xxi) as ethical exercises that various religious traditions may promote. Yet in this mode of French writing, such traditions are not allowed to make any claim on self-experience or experiments. This pane-type’s work to corporeally confine anthropology by allowing it to self-identify with literature to theology’s exclusion would likely not be realizable without the complementary work of an additional type of pane. It is time my surveying the membrane of anthropology’s dome reached this theosealing type, whose aim is not the discipline’s body, as it were, but its “heart,” that is, its core concepts, notably culture among them.

PANE-TYPE FIVE: THE CULTURE CONCEPT UNDER THOTH’S BLADE Anthropologists’ thothic measuring of time and space in order to ensure anthropodom’s impermeability from theospheric infiltration has taken place within a particular climate of constitutive concepts. A policing has worked by excising the theological from the very paradigms and concepts that have nourished anthropologists, sustained their hopes, guarded their aspirations, and quelled their anxieties.

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Examining a final pane-type here (but by no means ultimately final), I want to locate the theological and its absenting in the ways anthropologists passionately reflect on personal meanings they attribute to one of their discipline’s elemental concepts and paradigms: culture. Thus, the fifth type of pane for anthropology’s immurement contains the discipline’s conceptual pivot. To grapple with it, I review how anthropologists speak of Culture, here capitalized to mark it as a name of a valorized—even if contested—paradigm containing related concepts that illuminate certain forms of otherness in the human condition, yet simultaneously truncate other forms. Culture and its conceptual relatives—difference, alterity, diversity, human, “man,” society, and nature—behave as if they were a thothic blade paring the fullness of otherness, thereby obstructing the possibility of radical openings to its infinity outside anthropodom. If we assume that indeed a divine, supra-human, unknowable Other exists outside what anthropodom can accommodate, then speaking of otherness as only cultural or within the human domain closes us off to even considering that Other’s possibility. We can thus understand a concept like Culture as cutting, plastering, binding, and sealing anthropology’s dome, leading practitioners to see the cultural other as their discipline’s a priori, as the only other that matters. If, as Anglican theologian John Milbank (2006) argues, sociologists studying religion have policed and shrunken the sublime, then anthropologists studying alterity have similarly narrowed its scope. Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s statement on the all-encompassing Enlightenment, “Nothing at all may remain outside, because the mere idea of outside is the very source of fear” (1997 [1944]: 16) helps us understand anthropology, Enlightenment’s progeny, as inheriting its fear, thereby making it deaf to any form of otherness external to its dome’s clear confines, demarcated by sovereign secular reason whose auditory capacity reaches only to the pitch of Culture’s call. Before moving to the words of anthropologists relevant to this discussion, let us first recall the work of two significantly divergent thinkers assaying the price modernity exacts. Walter Benjamin conveys a sense, already voiced in this book’s introduction, that an openness, a certain relation to the infinite, a kind of modus vivendi, has been closed off in the modern condition, substituted by humanity’s relation to itself. Recall his final lines of Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: “Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an

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object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself” (1968: 242). No longer concerned with contemplating God, human reality is thereby reduced, the infinite eclipsed by the finite. A humanity self-absorbed with itself shutters epistemic windows to the ultimate Other. Theistic reason’s subject is thereby available to the anthropological imagination only insofar as the others it interrogates imagine it. Under the auspices of “unaided” secular reason, only cultural others can furnish anthropologists with a space for thinking about an ultimate Other, say, God. It is tempting to say: anthropologists cannot think about God by themselves, God must be thought about for them. In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor (2007) provides two related concepts that speak to this contraction of vision, “exclusive humanism” and “beyond life,” both useful for understanding how idolized Culture performs conceptual excisions for anthropologists. Taylor employs them in describing a condition of shrinkage attendant to modernity, whereby living the condition of “exclusive humanism” precludes recognition of any kind of flourishing beyond the human, “beyond life.” As “transcendence” resides “beyond life,” acknowledging its existence, even its possibility, involves recognizing “that the point of things is not exhausted by life, the fullness of life, even the goodness of life” (Taylor 2007: 20). Taylor goes even further to ask that “life” be redefined so as to incorporate “beyond life” (2005: 20–1). Recognizing such features of a shrinking reality within the particular site of anthropology, as one of modernity’s manifestations, means demonstrating that within their disciplinary edifice, anthropologists actively pursue this endemic hemming in. Of course, an underlying premise of such recognition, and in fact to this investigation entire, proposes that the reality of alterity is not and cannot be exhausted by culture, humanity, or even animality, let alone thing-ality. In repudiating both biology and theology as the foci of inquiry into human diversity, I see Wolf exhibiting Taylor’s “exclusive humanism” and what I here describe as the thothic sealing, excising, immuring, and hemming in executed through the adored disciplinary concept of Culture. Following his ancestor Benedict’s position on the “human mind,” Wolf articulates a charter for anthropology’s ideas and ideals and—with some help from romanticism—regulates what anthropologists can and cannot properly study: “The Unity of Man is due neither to an ultimate biological homunculus inherent in each man, nor to a unitary process located in the mind of God. It is a

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process of the involvement of man with man, through the medium of human culture” (1974: 95). Extirpating first biology and then God from anthropological consideration enabled Wolf to craft a unity making his science possible. Anthropology’s unity or wholeness is tantamount to nothing less or more than “the human mind,” the supposed seat of human culture. The search for conceptual coherence—for which what ultimately matters is “man’s involvement with man”—finds its methodological translation in ethnographic inquiry. Wolf presents a view of this conceptual extension in his notion of ethnographic practice: Both humanist and anthropologist have shared a wish to escape from the reality that surrounds them, both have attempted transcendence . . . [T]he anthropologist . . . has escaped from the humdrum world of his civilization to walk among headhunters, cannibals, and peyote-worshipers to concern himself with talking drums, magic, and divine kings. Anthropology has thus shared in the wider characteristics of a romanticism . . . that in Hoxie Fairchild’s words “arises from a desire to find the supernatural within the natural,” or in other words, to achieve an emotionally satisfying fusion of the real and the unreal, the obvious and the mysterious. (1974: 11)

For Wolf, escaping civilization and participating in a form of transcendence induces the quest that is anthropology. Wolf likens the anthropologist to a romantic, who desires the relocation of the “supernatural” into “the natural.” Abrogating the native territory of the “supernatural” means that it operates on terms supplied by “the natural.” This newly acquired and redefined territory enforces a “fusion,” or rather a simile of fusion, between the two realms.34 Seeing beyond the precision (or its lack) and idiosyncrasy of Wolf ’s depiction, what matters is that he too demonstrates the demotion anthropologists have affected in bringing experiences once ascribed to the “supernatural” fully within the realm of the “natural.” Wolf helps us detect the thothic membrane anthropologists have crafted in seeking

34 I say a “simile of fusion” because I take seriously Hannah Arendt’s, and before her Nietzsche’s, observation of the death of a distinction for which Wolf ’s “relocation” is symptomatic. This is the distinction between “the super sensual” and “the sensual.” She draws upon Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols where according to Arendt the “true world” stands as his reference to God: “We have abolished the true world. What has remained? The apparent one perhaps? Oh no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one” (Arendt 2003: 162).

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to demote the infinite and subsume it within the finite, including manufacturing simulations of the former within the latter. Augé likewise reveals that he is aware of the multiple orders of reality comprising otherness, even confessing that he went to work among the Alladians of the Ivory Coast precisely to witness this multiple multiplicity. Indeed, he learned: “Without perhaps knowing it but not without sensing it, they deal with all types of otherness” (1998: 26). Thus, Augé entered a world he could not observe in France but found in “non-modern” Africa. Regardless of the sincerity of his search, Augé entered it from the confines of anthropology, a discipline that typically allows him to only speak of difference as cultural among humans. He had to shut his eyes to extra-cultural (or extra-biological) difference in order to scrutinize its cultural forms. I met Strathern, now retired Mistress of Girton College, University of Cambridge, at her home in Cambridge, where she explained how such a fusion of realms is superfluous, finding it necessary to not see everything in order to see something or some things, to selectively exclude in order to attain focus at a sufficient resolution. During our conversation about anthropology as cosmology, after having learned about the astronomy lecture instigating Strathern’s “conversion” on her “road to Damascus,” I asked whether anthropology was her resultant “confirmation.” She responded, “Very nice, anthropology was the confirmation, I take that, very good, you could have that. Well of course, one could be an anthropologist and one could practice a variety of religions . . . . For me each cosmology confirms the fact that there is no single cosmological position.” I then asked her, “Is anthropology a-cosmological?” With her answer, Strathern vindicated her strategy of applying an epistemic aperture that she opens or closes depending on the demands of “the picture” that she wants to take with her anthropological “camera”: Of course, of course but there are some things that one should not see, you know or one could not do it. Had I fully articulated that point, that actually this discipline is as good as another cosmology, had I rounded it off like that, which of course as you know later, one was able to, I think that would have inhibited the energy, the drive, to use the discipline to reach this preliminary point that there are multiple cosmologies. You need to have something stable in order to destabilize other things. You can’t do it all at once, otherwise you will fall into a hole. (Interview, April 30, 2015)

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To be sure, there is a dose, maybe even an overdose, of ephemerality in Strathern’s description, yet it should not preclude us from witnessing the measure of precision she has nevertheless attained. Strathern has managed to map an imagination so elemental to her discipline, hence her testimony’s usefulness for uncovering a certain process producing, to paraphrase Taylor, “the anthropologists’ lobotomy.” What reverberates in Strathern’s retrospection is the possibility that anthropologists have needed to not see a certain kind of transcendence in their field experiences in order to develop their disciplinary reason. It has been this not-seeing that enables them to see the cultural, only the cultural, and to see it everywhere, even if such seeing rests upon seeing almost nothing else, beside or beyond it. As in the excerpt above, Strathern has granted this disciplinary fiat the status of a cosmology. And a cosmology requires coherence: its adherents must hold on to something that remains steadfast while they question everything else. A key conceptual hallmark by which this cosmology established an academic career is arguably Culture, which Michael Lambeck (2012) credits with “the relocating of humans now no less as a production of either God or nature than of themselves.” Now that we have heard anthropologists describe how they have moved from one order of reality to another (specific to universal, theoretical to practical, immanent to transcendent), let us hear them describe how they dwell within a unified one. It is an order of reality directing their attention, not toward watching God, but rather toward observing themselves as they labor with their finite anthropological minds. Taylor’s “exclusive humanism” and Benjamin’s words on selfcontemplation help us recognize the ways anthropologists narrow their focus on humanity, such that they also empower it to contest particular strictures of its own making. As if antecedently verifying Sir Edmund Leach’s, her junior British colleague’s, precise identification that “[t]he essential subject matter of all kinds of anthropology is the diversity of mankind, both biological and cultural” (1982: 123), Mead divulges her reason for doing anthropology: I went to Samoa, as later, I went to other societies on which I have worked to find out more about human beings, human beings like ourselves in everything except their culture. Through the accidents of history, these cultures had developed so differently from ours that knowledge of them could shed a light upon us, upon our potentialities and our limitations, that was unique. (1972: 293)

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Leach’s pronouncement about anthropology thus finds vindication in Mead’s description of what she actually did. She went to an other to find out who she could possibly become. But in anthropodom, the furthest this other can be is human. Leach and Mead thus illustrate how the blades of human and culture pare down existence, leaving essentially only finite difference to observe. Malleable as they may be, these concepts nonetheless neither hide nor negate the fact of anthropology policing a boundary it helped to erect between the finite and the infinite. Man, culture, nature, and humanity, inspiring anthropologists’ ultimate devotion, developed as concepts containing built-in exclusions. For example, in witnessing the hemming in hammered out by Geertz, who abandoned philosophy for the sake of anthropology because he was “interested in the world’s variety” (2000: x), let us remain alert to the fact that none of the claims he established regarding culture’s conceptual nebulousness contradict its policing ability: Everyone knows what cultural anthropology is about: it’s about culture. The trouble is that no one is quite sure what culture is. Not only is it an essentially contested concept, like democracy, religion, simplicity, or social justice; it is a multiply defined one, multiply employed, ineradicably imprecise. It is fugitive, unsteady, and encyclopedic, and normatively charged. (2000: 11)

Given Geertz’s conviction, surely shared, I maintain that it is possible, logically, if not practically as well, that culture is multiply defined, multiply employed, and ineradicably imprecise, even while steadily policing theistic—and safeguarding the sovereignty of anthropological, that is secular—reason. In the mouths of its detractors or defenders, culture whips up around itself a proverbial dust cloud, which succeeds in occluding the stealth of its policing. To detect it humans have only themselves to observe, or just about. The possibility that culture polices diversity for anthropologists, and does so as a protean, agile, even contested concept, suffers from no aporia. This position is not accepted as given across all generations of anthropologists. Some highly sensitive anthropologists have felt culture’s hemming in of their minds, even resisting it to construct new visions—dissenting here and dominating there—of what anthropologists could do to counteract the lobotomy afflicting their imaginations. It is possible that Lévi-Strauss can be counted among these resisters. He did not resist the all-encompassing dome as such, but

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rather how this dome should feel for those who dwell within, for those who should take it as their reality, at whose edge he masterfully stood. Consider a palliative wish he made shortly before dying as a way to redress the diminished imaginary he experienced in anthropodom: I would have liked for once in my lifetime to fully communicate with an animal. This is an unattainable goal. It almost pains me to know that I will never be able to find out of what the structure and the material of this universe are composed. It would have signified to me: being capable of speaking with a bird. But there is the frontier that one is unable to cross. Crossing this frontier would be a great happiness for me. If you can give me a good fairy who could realize one of my wishes, I would have chosen this wish. (In Loyer 2015: 7)

While desiring to break out from the limitations of his human mind, clearly for Lévi-Strauss the ultimate difference reaches no higher than where aviary life forms soar. Curiously, the synagogue, and more broadly monotheism, from which he separated himself in childhood, seemed to hover in Lévi-Strauss’s autumnal wish for a Solomonic inheritance.35 If King Solomon dreamed about and ultimately attained an ability to comprehend the logos of birds, Lévi-Strauss desired even more: human and animal life cosmically intertwining, as it did in the lives of the Bororo, Guana, Nambikwara, and Caduveo peoples he lived with in the Amazons.36 The lessons they taught LéviStrauss about being a human, who remains in contact with the freshness of beginning one’s humanity, were ones he found neither in his religious inheritance nor in philosophy, which he, like Geertz, had forsaken for anthropology: It is true that in my personal history the reasons that have pushed me away from philosophy and lead me towards ethnology have been precisely that if one wants to understand the human, by necessity then one had to avoid imprisoning one’s self in introspection, where one attains self-contentment with considering only one society—ours— or surveying a few centuries of history of the Western world. I wanted

35 This inheritance refers to the Qur’anic evocation of Suleiman (Solomon) as inheriting from Daoud (David) the ability to comprehend the “logos of birds” (manttiq al-ttayr) (Surah 27:16). Also see, Song of Songs, Rabbah 1:1, No. 9; Midrash Tanhuma B., Introduction 157. 36 Lévi-Strauss ends Tristes Tropiques by proposing that human learning also occurs “in the brief glance . . . one can sometimes exchange with a cat” (1973: 415).

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one to bend to cultural experiences that are most different from ours and most distanced from them. (In Eribon 1988: 106)

Lévi-Strauss’s search for the human thus required him to take an optimal distance from human experiences, both as he knew them and categorically, to go to the outer limits of humanity and even past them. This pursuit perhaps also took him beyond the edges of anthropological imagination, where he aimed to decenter humans and humanity. In Lévi-Strauss’s penchant to travel so far from the West, he demoted humans altogether, hoping to live in concert with this world’s non-human lives. Leaving this world in 2009, over one hundred years after he entered it, Lévi-Strauss never saw his hope fulfilled. He expressed sadness toward the ways his inherited tradition thwarted his vision of neolithic intelligence. While the West disparaged “myth,” Lévi-Strauss found much to value in the Amerindian peoples’ way of comprehending the world: [Their] definition [of how the human and animal world conjoined] seems to me very profound. Because despite the seas of ink that were spilled by the Judeo-Christian tradition to mask it, no situation appears more tragic and more offensive to the heart and mind than that of a humanity that co-exists with others living on earth, whose joy it shares but with which it cannot communicate. (In Eribon 1988: 193)

Lévi-Strauss thus sought a transcendence in which “Man” is decentered, one stretching beyond the typical kind of transcendence anthropologists pursue, for he felt what they generally do not. He felt imprisoned by the very humanism that fires their anthropological odysseys. But thinking mythically or acquiring the ability to speak with birds indeed demonstrates more, not less, immurement within anthropodom, more, not less, imperviousness to a consideration of otherness beyond the finite. For like a typical anthropologist, LéviStrauss nevertheless retained the transient’s sovereignty over his imagination. Perhaps Lévi-Strauss’s antipode, say, the militant atheist, laid opaque panes for insulating anthropology from the heavens, whereas he came along and painted them the blue of the sky, making them appear endless, open to infinity, but kept them intact regardless. He named this contribution “structuralism” and conferred on it the status of theory. It ignited imaginations in its heyday and lives on in narratives of allurement by and “conversion” to the discipline. Think of Douglas and Leach as but two examples of prominent

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anthropologists who heeded “the calling” of structuralism, finding it a fountain of meaning when meaning was wanting (Erickson and Murphy 2008: 116). But devotion to structuralism is the not the place in anthropodom where this book turns in order to illustrate how anthropology not only forgets but also preserves theology, the focus of the next chapter. Before exploring how the complexity of anthropology’s relation with theology that informs its dome’s structure—the five types of pane here explored through which anthropologists have sought to seal away the theosphere—also undermines its thothic design, I wish again to note that I leave it to another inquiry to either subdivide or augment the types thus far identified. Furthermore, at no point do I assume that anthropodom’s thothic powers are exhausted by the number or fashion of pane-types making up this chapter. However, I have assumed that anthropologists have needed thothic powers, or something like them, to be able to immure theology, to forget it, indeed to found a dome whose absence would have precluded their citizenship in the modern research university. Yet the powers anthropologists have harnessed to forget theology lead them to remember it in the very acts of forgetting. Thus no walls they—nor anyone—could have built can be fully hermetic, can have no “holes.” It is the task of Chapter 2, “Eucharist,” to identify these “holes,” the lapses of anthropologists’ thothic immurement of theology. Chapter 2 aims to investigate how, despite all efforts exerted in its construction, anthropology’s dome is compromised through a betrayal of its thothic architecture. Even with the five pane-types discussed here, as well as the identified sixth and likely others as well, this structure has not fully succeeded in insulating anthropodom from the theosphere. Indeed, this edifice suffers at the hands of its own builders from various breaches and compromises that allow the theosphere to seep in, whether deliberately or surreptitiously. If thothic powers have enabled anthropologists to remain largely loyal to Enlightenment principles, their simultaneous abandonment of these powers for the sake of Eucharistic proclivities renders this loyalty all the more complex.

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2 Eucharist Theology Seeping into Anthropology

If Chapter 1 demonstrates how anthropologists have constructed a “sealed-off dome” to hermetically establish a “science of culture,” this chapter counters that argument. It claims that anthropologists have also worked to undermine the thothic architecture they have created, subverting their discipline’s secularity by orienting themselves toward a pivotal practice whose logic is native to various theistic, among them philosophical, traditions. Indeed, within the Christian or postChristian societies from which many anthropologists emerged in the West, this theistic logic is found, catholically speaking, in a sacrament commonly called the Eucharist, here invoked analogically to examine the practice of ethnographic immersion. The Eucharist, or something very like it, imbues anthropology’s central practice of ethnographic immersion, or so I will argue in this chapter. To the extent that anthropologists have proverbially followed Thoth in taking “science” and “culture” as means for immurement from theological reason, they have analogically assumed the Eucharist in uniting the seeker and the sought-after. Schematically put, the secular reason anthropologists obey conceptually they simultaneously disavow in their consummate constituting practice of immersion in ethnographic fieldwork. Through immersion, but not only, anthropologists compromise their dome’s theosealing function. Before expounding on the analogy of the sacrament of the Eucharist as a means for understanding ways in which ethnographic immersion inevitably enfolds a certain theistic reason, as though it were a

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kind of theosis, which I do later in this chapter,1 I must first attend to other ways anthropologists have compromised their dome, to the more visible forms of “light” refracting through its theosealing panes. In admitting such “light,” anthropologists essentially craft a space in anthropodom for preserving theology. The following sections discuss proverbial, genealogical, and finally, but centrally, analogical “waves of light,” successively marked by decreasing visibility yet increasing sagacity.

THEOLOGY AS A PROVERBIAL SOURCE FOR ANTHROPOLOGICAL PROVERBS The most “visible” light refracted inside the dome, but not necessarily the most potent, may be “readily seen by the naked eye.” We can understand it as “proverbial,” consisting of common terms anthropologists habitually use—idiomatically, and with marked figurativeness— which are originally native to the theosphere rather than to the parlance of secular reason. Uttered by secular or even atheist anthropologists, these words may come across as theological, but only vestigially so. They could almost count as “survivals,” to borrow a phrase from the evolutionary language of an early dome-builder like E. B. Tylor. Having become embedded in an appropriating secular vernacular, these words convey a theological aura, but not necessarily substance. Inheriting them from theology has not rendered these words dry, dead, or petrified, quite often the opposite, for these “loan-words” commonly pepper the secular parlance to which anthropologists, as expected of all denizens of this modern age, commit their speech. Indeed, it appears as though not a single facet of any anthropological undertaking omits this penetrating light. From the moment students first join the discipline, learn from its teachers, enter the ethnographic field, write monographs, and even dissent from the mainstream, their anthropological parlance readily includes words both theological and theologically resonant. These words largely serve 1 I evoke theosis in an Eastern Orthodox Christian sense indicating striving toward union with or likeness to the divine.

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as fabulous means with which anthropologists can tell fables about themselves. While a cautionary note is in order against impugning any inherent theological intent to anthropologists’ usage of such words, consider this account from her biographer of Ruth Benedict joining the discipline, which relates her urban teacher, Franz Boas, to her rural grandfather, Baptist minister John Samuel Shattuck: In both men, too, the energy Ruth Benedict admired went along with a stern devotion . . . in Shattuck’s case to his church and in Boas’s case to his discipline. Increasingly she interpreted Boasnian anthropology to suit principles she had learned in a Norwich farmhouse . . . . Ruth Benedict responded to the person, poet, preacher or scientist, whose subject was ultimately the desire to comprehend existence . . . . She did not do Boas injustice; he too believed anthropology provided a basis for faith in mankind. (Modell 1984: 122)

Benedict following Boas, joining his devoted faith in mankind, was part of her hope to find in anthropology a “conviction” for her “soul” (Modell 1984: 126). Similarly, Benedict’s student Margaret Mead joined the discipline out of a “conviction” that developed into a “devotion” to anthropology as a discipline that could excel in “serving mankind” (Modell 1984: 144). Thus, faith, soul, devotion, service, and conviction illustrate the kinds of words from theology’s lexicon that find a place within anthropologists’ figurative parlance. Benedict’s confidant, Edward Sapir, similarly joined anthropology after he “was converted from Germanic philology to anthropology when Boas confronted him” such that the meeting between the two men was “apocryphal” (Darnell 1990: 9). Of course, Sapir is not alone in having “converted” to anthropology. His contemporary, Bronisław Malinowski, was fascinated by Benedict’s kind of anthropology, as if it were his “new religion” (Mead 2005 [1974]: 27–8). Malinowski records his conversion-resonant reaction to reading an ancestral anthropological work, James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and how it induced his decision to study anthropology: “I became immersed in it and enslaved by it. I realized that anthropology, as presented by Sir James Frazer, is a great science, worthy of as much devotion” (in Young 2004: 4). One of Marcel Mauss’s students used the theological notion of “vocation” in describing how his powerful oration “awakened them to their [anthropological] vocations” (in Fournier 1994: 600). Claude Lévi-Strauss (1973: 249) recalled receiving “blessings” from Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Mauss, and Paul Rivet for turning into a fully fledged

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anthropologist. Whatever “gifts” Mauss extended to Lévi-Strauss seem to have traveled down the generations of devotees. In my interview with University of Cambridge anthropologist Alan Macfarlane, he described his belonging to the discipline in votary terms: I felt this is a quasi-religion. I often explain to my students [that] anthropology is not a discipline and I often quote to them, and it is very appropriate in this room in Kings College, which is very old and very special and divided now into three rooms. I live in the outside room as an anthropologist. [Next to me] is a musician who teaches music here and on the other side is a mathematician. And Lévi-Strauss once said there are three true vocations: mathematics, music, and anthropology. And what he meant and I always take from him is that [anthropology] is a calling. (Interview, April 29, 2015)

Beyond initially answering this calling, some of its most elemental acts as a scholarly quest—here reading and researching—are also commonly vocalized to theological tunes. To start with a mundane and typical example, Hortense Powdermaker, a student of Malinowski, recalls a classic book by another one of her teachers, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown’s The Andaman Islanders, serving as a “bible” for a fellow London School of Economics student (1966: 40). A visit to Lévi-Strauss’s library, which he called his private “heavens” and his “wonderment,” and which his biographer Emmanuelle Loyer (2015: 7–8) structurally likens to a “temple of paper” graced with a statue of the Nepalese idol, Tara, exuded a sense of being “inside a sanctuary.” It contained samples from all the world’s maps, minerals, religions, languages, and arts, with 12,000 books to its name. Here is where Lévi-Strauss dreamed about human life not severed from animal life, rather the two soldered together (Loyer 2015: 8–9). It is also where he perhaps spent days and years envisioning “structuralism,” which Marcel Fournier (1994: 765) invoked as his “promised land,” echoing Lévi-Strauss’s evocation of Mauss leading sociological and ethnological tribes to the edges of social thought. In his 1950 preface to the complete works of Mauss, Lévi-Strauss wonders, “Why did Mauss stop on the border of these immense possibilities, like Moses, leading his people until the Promised Land, whose splendors he never saw” (in Fournier 1994: 765). When Lévi-Strauss saw a Moses in an anthropological ancestor like Mauss, he was hardly being apostate. Rather, he was expressing a kind of apotheosis shared by many others in the discipline when beholding

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their teachers. While Mauss, this “incontestable master of French ethnology” (Fournier 1994: 760), awakened his followers to their vocations, Fournier (1994: 36) describes Mauss’s maternal uncle, Émile Durkheim, as a “secular priest” and a “prophet of some religion to be born,” whose foundational energy would reach anthropology’s evolution, rather than remain only within sociology’s. A Durkheim–Mauss theoretical devotee in London, Malinowski ran a seminar promoting anthropological ways of knowing that became “the recognized central shrine of the movement” (Gellner 1998: 121). As the revolutionary partisan of fieldwork-driven knowledge, Malinowski invariably emerged as a “priest-king”—“the new King of the Sacred Grove of Anthropology” (Gellner 1988: 171, 192)—while over in the United States, Benedict saw Boas as “a godsend” who “welcomed converts to the discipline” (Modell 1984:121). There too, with likely irreverence, David Schneider bemoaned the “abuse” of his powerful teachers, Alfred Kroeber, Clyde Kluckhohn, and George Murdock at Berkeley and Harvard: “The horrible irony [is] the way these gods, who are very human, are pushing you around and your career” (1995: 38). Theological idioms secularly employed exceed descriptions of entry points to the discipline. They also appear in accounts by anthropologists about consummating their membership in the anthropological tribe, namely, through fieldwork. Indeed, when anthropology’s “gods” transport their votaries out to the field, theological tunes only grow louder. Once an assistant to Benedict, Sydney Mintz, whose ethnographic inquiries took him extensively to Puerto Rico, recalled for me how a transition occurred in his life when he went to the field, undergirding the notion of fieldwork as “an initiation rite” or a “rite of passage.” He even invited his mother to witness, for “I did not feel I grew up until I did my fieldwork, my first fieldwork” (Interview, December 5, 2014). Once in the field, even the act of composing notes could attain a status of sanctity, as with Marc Augé, whose fieldwork moved from West Africa to sites of globalization (including airports); writing in his field diaries felt like “a daily prayer” (un priere quotidienne) (2011: 210). For Robert Lowie, an immigrant from Vienna to the United States, field experiences were “pilgrimages to the Indians” that gave him “more than mere emotional satisfaction” (1959: 87). That fieldwork has the feeling, if not the weight, of an initiation ritual or pilgrimage culminating in a communitas with native subjects

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should make a fear of personal rejection, here expressed in theistic parlance by Powdermaker, rather legible: “Anthropology fascinated me. I wanted to continue studying and to be part of the LSE group. I would be excommunicated if I did not work towards a degree” (1966: 45). Sydel Silverman, who conducted her initiatory fieldwork in the Umbrian hills of Italy and whom I met during the 113th American Anthropological Association meeting in Washington, DC, described a similar feeling present at meetings among anthropologists, at least before she sensed careerism and professionalism setting in: You do feel, or at least you used to feel, when you knew people going on to the business meeting here [at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting], you would feel that communion of likeminded people coming from all over because they have a common view of themselves or the world . . . . I don’t know if it is true anymore. It is like Durkheim’s description of the sacred as community, as commonality and the effervescence of being in a group that all shares that commonality. (Interview, December 3, 2014)

At times when excommunication or something like it did happen, not even someone of Eric Wolf ’s standing could escape from its force as applied by his community, bent on generating solidarity and a hallowed cohesion among its members. Indeed, the sense of banishment Wolf experienced following his political dissent appeared mutual for both disciple and discipline. In the words of Silverman, his widow: Anthropology gave me a kind of a home . . . . My kids used to complain that Eric and I always talk about anthropology . . . [that] everything becomes anthropology . . . . It is all relevant. It is all part of the way we look at the world, a way of life. Eric used to talk about anthropology as his church. When he had this whole crisis over the Thailand case,2 he was devastated. He said it was like my church failed me, like I was kicked out of the church. I don’t want that church anymore. And he was totally secular . . . . But he said he found [faith in] anthropology. (Interview, December 3, 2014)

And finding “faith” seems ever a last resort for the discipline when facing a crisis of identity. The most scientific of humanities and 2 The “Thailand case” refers to the 1970 exposure by the Student Mobilization Committee of anthropologists involved in American counter-insurgency research in Thailand. It was brought to the attention of the American Anthropological Association by Eric Wolf, chair, and Joseph G. Jorgensen, member, the American Anthropological Association Ethics Committee (Hinten et al. 1971).

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the most humanist of the sciences appears destined to experience recurring bouts of angst. An early reassurance that anthropology would always find itself after being “lost” comes from Kroeber, who professed “culture” was his religion (Kroeber 1970: 235). While it is not entirely clear in his prediction as to whether anthropology as such was his faith or that he had faith in anthropology’s continuity or both, Kroeber confidently maintained that “anthropology will continue and will be expressed in new ways. This is a faith” (Kroeber 1970: 231). We are able to observe how a theospheric lexicon provides at least some idioms with which secular anthropologists have been able to articulate their profound dedication to anthropodom. My attention here has been to those theological words anthropologists use to describe this or that facet of their discipline, which again has served not merely as their academic profession but also as their personal becoming, their “soulwork,” yet it only scratches the surface of the ways theology is preserved within anthropodom. To sense this endeavor more deeply, we must move from anthropologists essentially calling their discipline a faith, to observing the ways their discipline has functioned like a faith. To do so, we now descend beneath proverbial phraseology to the level of genealogy.

IN ANTHROPOLOGY’S BLOOD THEOLOGY REMAINS Anthropologists have not needed to consciously shave off layers of their insulating dome in order to remain in contact with the theosphere hovering outside it. In fact, some of the dome’s theosealing components inherently refract theospheric light rather than reflect it away. In order to detect these compromised coatings and their ongoing flaking we need to move from the words anthropologists have used to the lives they have lived. Here we witness theological preservation enabled by anthropologists’ lives, notably in ways they live out their genealogies with aspects inherited from their disciplinary and familial forebears. Detecting genealogical imprints in intellectual formations requires locating theology, albeit scantily, in biographical fragments. Unlike their counterparts in “Thoth” aimed at demonstrating divisions anthropologists draw or maintain between the theological and the anthropological, this chapter’s biographical

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shards aim at showing how in the groundwater beneath these lines of separation, the two realms also swim together. Here my excavation primarily attempts to recognize, rather than scrutinize, theology’s biographical and conceptual existence. In looking at anthropologists’ lives, I do not exclusively focus on perhaps the most obvious ones—Catholic anthropologists who had been leading active religious lives while simultaneously spearheading, and at times challenging, their discipline’s secular performance— namely E. E. Evans-Pritchard, the Turners (Victor and Edith), and Mary Douglas. Their lives of belief and its relation to their anthropology has been well explored by historian Timothy Larsen (2014). As I draw on his work, I additionally endeavor to identify biographic marks of theology emanating from diverse religious traditions that make their way into the discipline’s heritage. This attention to the theological in segments of the lineage that makes up the anthropological tribe enables us to recognize how vastly true for a host of anthropologists has been a dialogic that Douglas found active in herself: “The interaction between religion as I was taught it and anthropology as I discovered it has been too continuous and intimate to be distinguished. All I can say is that for me there was always going to be an internal dialogue between religion and anthropology” (2005: 120). Not a Baptist, Episcopalian, Jewish, Hindu, Mennonite, Methodist, Mormon, Muslim, Presbyterian, Quaker, nor Zen tradition can be claimed as irrelevant to anthropologists inhabiting anthropodom. Persons whose religiosity did not end upon entering the discipline— and who paradoxically became paragons of its secularity—but rather lived on within them in one way or another, were present from the earliest founding generations. Henry Lewis Morgan was brought to canonical stature by his evolutionary research, most notably among Iroquois and Ojibwas. He dedicated his 1877 Ancient Society, a seed for Marxist materialism, to his vehemently Presbyterian minister. This clergyman, Rev. Joshua H. McIlvaine eulogized Morgan at his funeral in December 1881, thus revealing how as a founder of the Anthropology Branch of the American Association for the Advancement of Science whose president he once was, Morgan never ceased to conform to Christian tenets in his work within a secular discipline: There is nothing in the most advanced results of our friend’s investigation opposed to the Christian religion, or to our faith in the Holy

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Scriptures. Not a line or a word he has written, which in its bearings upon the Christian religion if he were here today, I could ask him to blot. In this sense he presents a striking contrast to the skeptical scientist. (In Stern 1967: 23)

It is not clear whether this philologist and Orientalist, who had spent a decade on Princeton’s faculty, counted among Morgan’s “scientific results” his founding of a secret society culled mostly from his work with the Iroquois and Seneca. Morgan concluded his initiation ceremony for “The Gordian Knot” with: “Do you also pledge yourself in the presence of the Great Spirit whose eye beholdth us on this occasion . . . . Yea with the Red man’s faith” (in Stern 1967: 11). Embracing Indian patrimony in the US was a way Morgan aimed to “preserve” native worldviews well on their way to oblivion. Indeed, anthropologists, as if votaries, typically preserve native theology and even promote its revival. In Morgan’s words again: “We need somewhere in our republic an Indian Order which should aim to become the vast repository of all that remains to us of the Indians” (in Stern 1967: 12). Devotion to Indian religion might explain Morgan’s selfassessment following his hearing of a Sunday sermon on “The Influences of a Christian Man.” He lamented to a friend: “How I wish I were just such a Christian . . . . I am afraid I am not. I am far from being one” (in Stern 1967: 27). Morgan’s belief, persisting within his anthropological intellect, seemed insufficient to be “just such a Christian,” despite his concluding Ancient Society with: “Civilization might have naturally been delayed for several thousand years in the future so as to have occurred when it did in the good providence of God” (in Stern 1967: 26). Yet just this despair about his deficient Christianity makes it possible for us to understand why Morgan’s biographer notes how he “never emancipated himself from his theological background” and from “conservative religiosity” (Stern 1967: 22, 7). Yet as Morgan’s lines above demonstrate, the notion of “background” does not always capture the ways in which anthropologists genealogically preserve theology in the lives they lead, even as professionals of a professed secular discipline. For “background” may implicitly at least consign “theology” to regions of passivity or inconsequentiality within anthropological lives. We must instead look at the ways in which anthropologists actually live theologically, including the ways they may actually craft their works that become canonical for the discipline, as with Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877).

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This living of theology may be especially apparent in a particular intellectual lineage within the French tradition of the discipline. Evidence exists of the ways in which a teacher’s active valuation of his personal religious upbringing was transmitted and continued to live on in his student’s fieldwork despite their abiding by different religious traditions. I am referring to Mauss and Maurice Leenhardt. Mauss confided in a 1902 letter to his friend from Année Sociologique Henri Hubert, “I am at my best with him,” referring to the grand rabbi of his hometown, Epinal, France (in Fournier 1994: 40). Mauss also apparently enjoyed discussing his own family’s rabbinical lineage, expressing how he “valued his spiritual antecedents” (Clifford 1982: 152). The lived appreciation a Jewish ethnologist had for his ancestors did not escape his student, Protestant missionary Leenhardt. Like the perhaps more well-known examples of Douglas and Evans-Pritchard in the UK, both in the way he conducted his life and in his fieldwork encounters, Leenhardt did not live his religion severed from his intellect. If we recognize that he was perhaps less concerned with the secular health (such as “maintaining the solidarity”) of La Troisième République than was Mauss (Fournier 1994: 348), while clearly more concerned with the church in France and abroad, then historian of anthropology James Clifford can help us comprehend him: To understand Leenhardt’s work more than superficially one cannot separate its scientific from its religious aspects . . . . Leenhardt should not be thought of as a missionary-turned-anthropologist . . . . His peculiar combination of careers . . . also contributed to [his] originality in a secular university milieu . . . . The word “religious” needs to be kept, implicitly, in quotation marks, for Leenhardt at least did not see it as a separate, clearly definable category of experience. (1982: 3)

Taking his theology with him to the field, Leenhardt encountered anew not only the “the cultural other” but also what he likely considered the Absolute Other, thus providing a distinct example of how an exhausted European intellect could find revival in receptiveness to another truth outside its continental ken: “Leenhardt came to believe that the Christian God spoke in these accents. Not only could God speak this vernacular but in so doing, he revealed himself, to the European able to listen, as a source of life as well as of power” (Clifford 1982: 8). We would be amiss to infer from Leenhardt’s life that in order to attain porous borders between anthropology and theology, one must

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take on a missionary purpose. Indeed, Mead and Benedict illustrate that this porousness can occur irrespective of definitions of mission. Consider Mead as an example of this perforation: “All her life her faith was implicit and part of the privacy she cherished and guarded.” It was in the Episcopal Church where “she began her deeply religious life” and then “worked devotedly” for the World Council of Churches (Metraux 1980: 264). Mead’s reflections on lessons she learned from her college teachers help us perceive her inability to separate intellect from ethics, as well as demonstrate a preservation of her Episcopalian theology in her anthropology: I was introduced to discussions of the Old Testament prophets and the Social Gospel, and this firmly established association between the Old and the New Testament and the demands of social justice provided me with an ethical background up to the time of the development of ecumenicism and Vatican II. (1972: 98)

More than mere “background,” theological positions have provided anthropologists with a purpose for which to live, a telos. Mead’s teacher at Barnard, Benedict, who arrived at the discipline from a childhood deeply anchored in the Baptist church, expressed the following purpose: “The issue really and truly is fine free living in the spirit world of socialized spiritual values” (in Modell 1984: 116). And those “values” mattered to Benedict in the quick of her anthropological quest more than any prevailing national preoccupations with politics and economics in the governance of American aspirations. Thus, the author of Jesus Was an Anarchist (1939) and a leader in the Arts and Crafts movement, anti-industrialist writer and publisher Elbert Hubbard indelibly influenced Benedict in ways that passed through her to a good many other anthropologists. With his typical irony, Schneider names Hubbard alongside Benedict as vastly influential figures for his work, noting that Hubbard was “committed, you know, to the higher and more spiritual aspects of commerce but he was a profound materialist in that he felt very strongly that spirituality grew out of and rested upon the material . . . . He was, therefore, an inspiration to us all in the social sciences” (1995: 2–3). Even when dancing to a “spiritual” tune, humor in anthropology was not Schneider’s provenance alone. Theology in its Hasidic variance has seemed to flow into the way anthropologists—Schneider among them—tell stories, especially when they are humorous, and especially if their tellers come from the University of Chicago.

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Trained in anthropology with both Schneider and Marshall Sahlins to go on and study the Daribi cultures of Papua New Guinea, Roy Wagner (1975) investigated how anthropologists “invent” culture as a figure for their thinking. He tells us of his teachers: Marshall [Sahlins] is a direct descendent of the Baal Shem Tov [literally, Master of the Good Name]3 . . . . You have David Schneider you have Marshall Sahlins . . . . These guys use these humorous techniques of storytelling as if they were almost Hasidim themselves. It gives a very distinctive flavor to American anthropologists . . . . They have educated a lot of us and they are very important people. (Macfarlane Interview, June 9, 2008)

Theology thus appears conserved within anthropology by both “good names” and “bad names,” as it were, with the world-renowned Tübingen theological seminary—the object of Friedrich Nietzsche’s attempt at giving a “bad name” to German philosophy4—leaving a trace on anthropology, notably in the family genealogy of Terence Turner from Cornell University, who worked among the Kayapos of Brazil. A founding member of the American Anthropological Association Ethics and Human Rights committee, Turner claims that his eldest maternal uncle—reportedly the first American Mennonite to hold an advanced degree from this German seminary and who preserved the Anabaptist bibles containing his family’s genealogical knowledge—was very influential, particularly on his interest in internationalism (Macfarlane Interview, September 2, 2004). Beyond mere biographical interest, theology’s genealogical presence generates intriguing nooks and crannies in the discipline’s architecture, worthy of investigation for detecting theology’s robustly enduring presence in anthropodom. Douglas’s remarks at this section’s opening on the inseparability of her profession from her religion should help us perceive the intimacy between biographical and conceptual theological tunes wafting through anthropology as a secular quest. A devout churchgoer who recommended her Natural

3 Baal Shem Tov is the sobriquet for Rabbi Yisroel ben Eliezer (c.1700–60), considered a mystical founder of Hasidic Judaism. 4 In “The Anti-Christ,” Friedrich Nietzsche writes: “One need merely say ‘Tübingen Seminary’ to understand what Germany philosophy is at bottom: an insidious theology” (1968: 576).

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Symbols to “anyone interested in theology” (1996: xi), Douglas can help us do even more.5 In her reflections below on the career of her mentor and colleague, Evans-Pritchard, Douglas demonstrates how, while a paradigmatic anthropologist, he retained a porousness in his personal life, especially in the life of his mind. Her insights help us recognize the ways theology geologically resides in anthropologists’ intellectual labor, and with remarkable plasticity. Going from the Azande to the Nuer, [Evans-Pritchard] had to reformulate the careful boundaries he had earlier drawn between mystic and rational, everyday reason and scientific thinking . . . . After The Nuer [(1940)], he was ready to encounter Islam. In 1944, he entered the Roman Catholic Church . . . . [H]e insisted it was no sudden break with his past but the latest step in the steady development of one who had always been a Catholic at heart. (Douglas 1981: 42–3)

Douglas goes on to say more about religion’s value to this anthropological sirdar from Oxford, who worked in the Sudan and taught at Fuad University, renamed Cairo University after the British Crown rescinded its power over Egypt in 1952: “Before writing the next outstanding book on The Nuer [Evans-Pritchard] paid a debt to Islam. Better than anything else he wrote, his history of the Sanusi Order in Cyrenaica explains his recurrent shafts of criticism against reductionist theorizing” (Douglas 1981: 44). It is fairly safe to surmise that “reductionist” here refers to thinking about religion within anthropological reason alone. Evans-Pritchard challenged these strictures by “treat[ing] alien theology as theology” in southern Sudan and thus “tak[ing] theological scholarship seriously. He refreshed his knowledge of Greek philosophy” (Douglas 1981: 94). Although we cannot ascertain whether the “philosophy” Douglas specifically evokes here includes Greek religion as well, it takes a refresher to know one. For refreshing her knowledge of medieval Christianity, Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, Joan of Arc, and the Old Testament, most notably Leviticus, is precisely what Douglas did to write her Purity and Danger (1966) (Larsen 2014), with its focus on sanctity and profanity as markers of social

5 Douglas’s Natural Symbols (1996) originated with a 1968 Thomas Aquinas Lecture for the Dominicans at Blackfriars.

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boundaries, giving secular anthropology one if its—and the descriptor is rather apt—canonical works. Three other Catholics help enlarge our vistas to the diversity of anthropological concepts’ theological ancestry. Timothy Larsen points out that the Turners formulated an anthropologically useful concept from the Catholic caritas in their Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978), an ethnography for anthropodom that he finds nevertheless “deeply engaged with Christian theology . . . [it is] one long confession of faith” (2014: 196). The notion of the Third World also grew from theological roots, a term Georges Balandier introduced to the French anthropology landscape. He told me: It was L’abbé Sieyès who had written a pamphlet at the time . . . at the moment of the 1789 revolution. What is the Third Bloc (Le tiers état)?6 Nothing. What do they want? All. Hence the reference was that model, the model of Sieyès. It was that model from the French Revolution and not the third bloc of states that appeared from the non-alliance countries of that era in 1955 at Bandung under the influence of Nehru and Tito . . . . You see, there is aristocracy, nobility. There is the clergy [of the Catholic Church] and then there is the Third State . . . the people. (Interview, May 2, 2015)

Anthropology’s theological genealogy also extends to institutions and sensibilities for anthropologists’ intellectual labor. The Royal Anthropological Institute resulted from a merger of several societies, one of which was the Ethnological Society of London, founded by the “deeply devout Quaker” physician Thomas Hodgkin, a long-time friend of Tylor whose “reformer’s science” with its notion of animism could be read as a Quaker critique of Catholicism (Larsen 2014). Indirectly, the Quaker tradition has also given anthropology ways to sense and understand the struggles of the weak in their daily resistance against the powerful. Indirectly, it feeds anthropologists’ interest in studying the subaltern. I emphasize indirectly, because a particular Quaker I have in mind was not trained as an anthropologist and yet

6 Georges Balandier was here referring to a 1789 pamphlet by Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836), a Roman Catholic abbé who was among the political theorists of the French Revolution. “Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? (What is the Third Estate?)” refers to a “bloc” within social and political classification that includes neither clergy nor aristocrats, but “commoners.” In reference to “le tiers état” anthropologist and demographer Alfred Sauvey coined the term, “third world (tiers monde)” in 1952 (Copans 2006: 29).

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has been anthropologically central. Political scientist and ethnographer James Scott reflected on the profit he reaped from attending a Quaker School, including its form of worship known as “meetings”: This school did things that a public school couldn’t have done . . . . They put in front of me everyday people who had the capacity to stand up in a crowd of a hundred and be a minority of one. That kind of Quaker courage was infectious. I can stand up against a crowd, but if you show me the instruments of torture I would betray anyone . . . . [My] interest in subaltern studies comes from this experience. [I] became a Quaker for a while but now [am] lapsed. The Quaker doctrine of the light of God in every man and the history of Quaker social action I admire. [I] wrote a book, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, which I dedicated to the school, the Friends School in Moorestown, and dedicated my royalties to them as well, as a mark of my gratitude. (Macfarlane Interview, March 26, 2009)

Traces of theology’s genealogical presence in anthropology’s intellectual labor, and to be more precise, within sensibilities on which such labor rests, also appear prior to and outside of formal education, such as with a mother, as in the case of my teacher, Talal Asad. Asad spent decades clarifying anthropological thinking about the nature and place of “religion” in the modern condition, and more specifically in Protestantism’s wake. While Anne-Christine Taylor holds that “Protestantism is something that seeps well beyond devotional practice” (Macfarlane Interview, May 4, 2015), and Geertz’s notion of religion derives from that seepage,7 it was inferably Asad’s mother, specifically her non-literate, non-academic practical theology, which seems to have helped him pinpoint Protestantism in anthropological thought: I have also discovered, much later, perhaps too late, that my mother was more of an influence than I thought. My mother was not an educated woman. In those days, girls did not even go to school. It was a primitive society at that time, Saudi Arabia. [I am] talking about the beginning of the twentieth century. So it is only slowly, after she died, really to be honest, that I began to realize [that I had become] dissatisfied more explicitly with what was meant: not being concerned with belief. All my critique, for example of Geertz, this was all written after my mother died and having spent the last year [of her life] with her . . . . I recognized that 7 See Geertz’s (in 1973) essay, “Religion as a Cultural System” and Asad’s 1993 critique of it, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category.”

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for her—unlike for my father who was an intellectual who thought things out and had philosophical interest—for her it was not so. It was what I called embodied. She knew she was a Muslim. She did not have to justify herself. She occasionally might be a little uncertain about what was the right thing, what to do as a Muslim, but by and large, her own living was her Islam. And interestingly enough I began to think much more about that, not just as something my mother could not do, but as something in its own right, as an attitude. I began to understand something that even al-Ghazali8 had said, you remember, “Oh to have the faith of the old women of Nishapur.” And also something similar though not quite in that way is Ibn Taymiyyah,9 where he says that really the faith and the activity of ordinary Muslims is more important for the tradition of Islam than that of philosophers and theologians.10 (Interview, December 7, 2015)

Thus, if theological refraction indirectly occurred in Scott’s sensibilities via his formal education, with Asad that refraction happened directly in the informal and embodied formation of his sensibilities. Asad’s mother living out—rather than giving instructions about or justifications of—Islam enabled the theosphere to seep into Asad’s work, and hence into anthropodom. Yet theological formations in the discipline’s genealogy do not end with the personal lives anthropologists bring to their discipline, with the books they write, the concepts they generate, the institutions they found, nor the sensibilities that underlie their work. Theology also extends to what anthropologists practically do in their fieldwork. If we recall that at its roots, the Arabic word um means not only “mother” but also “beginning,” among other things, then we have available for consideration two anthropologists with two radically different beginnings. While Asad found in his biological um a way to uncover sources of his disquiet with Protestant thinking about belief, Lévi-Strauss went to a civilizational um (the Greeks and their not-always-admitted antecedents)

8

Talal Asad was here referring to Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad alGhazali (1058–1111), author of Deliverance from Error and Resuscitation of Religious Sciences. 9 Taqiyy ad-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328), author of Book of Faith and Refutations of the Logicians. 10 Belief as lived and embodied is emphasized in a comment made by Pope Francis (2013a) on his return from Brazil’s World Youth Day: “Our Lady, Mary, was more important than the Apostles, than bishops and deacons and priests . . . . Women, in the Church, are more important than bishops and priests.”

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in order to excavate his deep discomfort with monotheistic beliefs about humanity. Lévi-Strauss’s reflections on his fieldwork in India and Pakistan declare his animosity toward monotheism, a disposition to which he alludes by noting his “disdain and occasional hostility towards customs prevailing in native settings” even before setting forth (1973: 382). It remains for other inquiries to uncover just how Islam may have served for Lévi-Strauss as a souffre douleur (punching bag) in lieu of his inherited Judaism that he did not tolerate, but somehow could not criticize, perhaps not even privately. Lévi-Strauss wrote his famed fieldwork confessions, otherwise called Tristes Tropiques, in 1954–5 after what he scantly evoked as “recent events” in Europe that, according to him, only hypocrites could call “temporary” (1973: 150). My point is not that after the Nazi genocide in Europe it was probably politically safer for Lévi-Strauss to unleash his anger on Islam rather than on Judaism as the risks of opprobrium likely ran higher for the latter. Rather, Lévi-Strauss’s relation to Judaism in particular, and monotheism more generally, contains highly instructive materials for understanding core features of his anthropological enterprise and its rippling effects to this day. By delving into some depth here, I essentially want to emphasize a point pertinent, and now rather recognizable, to any non-assuming approach to understanding secularism. No adequate understanding of secular intellectual labor can afford to ignore the theological undercurrents feeding it, even if, and especially when that feeding is denied. Lévi-Strauss provides a clear and specific example of this necessity in the ways his estrangement from monotheistic theology drove his durable search for a “neolithic” one (1973: 52), which could also be named Bororo, Guana, Nambikwara, or Caduveo theology, in reference to the Amazonians among whom Lévi-Strauss worked and whose creed he coveted. Of course, Lévi-Strauss does not qualify neolithic as a kind of theology. He recognizes it only as an “intelligence.” Yet within this “intelligence” there is a resoundingly theological wish: to regain immediate access to the mysteries of the natural world and become one with its non-human inhabitants, especially birds. Thus, Lévi-Strauss’s secular epistemic quest ran on theological fuel, largely composed of a disdain for monotheism, which endures in his enduring oeuvre. Even decades ago, John Murray Cuddihy argued for Jewry’s relevance to Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism: “It was relatively late in his

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intellectual life that Lévi-Strauss was able to settle on an intellectual tool, structuralism, that would put an end to the trauma of status-loss inherent in Jewry’s entry into the modernized West” (1974: 155).11 In eulogizing Lévi-Strauss, anthropologist André Mary denies that his work embodied any sort of “religious disquiet” or “angst about the transcendental,” yet also insists that he was moved “only by the mystery of the universe” (2009: 10). Mary also holds that Lévi-Strauss was “bothered” by Islam’s “exclusive universalism,” considering it an offshoot of Western civilization in the Orient that opposes the “model of cultures’ co-habitation.” Mary concludes by estimating that an “imaginary” of “relations of relations” (referring to structuralism) is better off than the “secondary articulations of totalitarian monotheisms,” because monotheism, like the Enlightenment, is an axial movement that regards humans as superior to other species (2009: 15).12 Loyer (2015: 16) garners testimony from anthropologist Daniel Fabre stating that in seeking to run away from the Enlightenment and from two millennia of monotheism having its sway over Europe, Lévi-Strauss encountered surviving natives and turned to “a paradigm of the last ones.” In arguing that he was driven toward “another project of understanding,” Loyer holds, “The warmth of the sacred among the Bororo contrasts with the dryness and coldness of Judaism, but in fact according to Lévi-Strauss, to all of monotheism: ‘That which serene religions tolerate, proselytizing universalism renders exclusionary’” (2015: 54). The religions of “neolithic intelligence” are thus able to tolerate what the exclusionary practices of universalist monotheisms cannot, or so posited Lévi-Strauss. It was thus as an apostate of monotheism, concerned with “contradictory conceptions of the transitions from the human to the divine” (Lévi-Strauss 1973: 379), that Lévi-Strauss composed during his fieldwork, by his account his largely failed play Apotheosis of Augustus. In a sense, Lévi-Strauss attempted a literary-ethnographic foray into inquiring about the nature of the divine, about the relation between 11 John Murray Cuddihy furthermore places Claude Lévi-Strauss (along with Freud and Marx) in “a struggle to redefine the post-Emancipation situation in terms of the Jewish pariah, the Ostjud” (1974: 161). 12 Similarly, Jean-Jacques Rousseau whom Lévi-Strauss (1973: 445) called “our master and our brother” expressed regret for not being able to find belonging among the dryads: “I often regret that there are no dryads, it is most certainly among them that I would have liked to become attached” (in Leiris 1992: 229).

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the divine and the human, including a failed attempt at becoming one with or like divinity (theosis), made manifest by a reference in his play to a police force serving a “divinized Head of State” (1973: 378). It is not entirely clear if, to what extent, or in what ways LéviStrauss was exposed to the Sumerian epic from Middle Eastern antiquity, Gilgamesh (Anonymous 1960), with which his play resonates. In response to the death of his friend, Enkidu, who had lived in peace with the beasts of nature before joining human society, King Gilgamesh of Uruk embarks on a quest for immortality and ultimately learns that immortality can only coincide with divinity. Similarly, in Cinna, a seventeenth-century play by Pierre Corneille set in Roman antiquity, an eagle teaches the protagonist Augustus that divinity consists precisely of no longer feeling the revulsions that overwhelm men. This figure names Lévi-Strauss’s play. His Augustus learns “that he had become a god, not by some radiant sensation or the power to work miracles, but by his ability to tolerate the proximity of a wild beast without the sensation of disgust . . . carrion, decay, and organic secretions would appear familiar to him” (Lévi-Strauss 1973: 379). Provided that “the beautiful” speaks to “the truthful” in LéviStrauss’s play, Augustus performs a theology of preservation as well as of restoration. It may be that Augustus stands as a tragic figure embodying Lévi-Strauss’s entire anthropological endeavor: a theological exercise seeking to recover access to the divine. Indeed, LéviStrauss has all the play’s characters perform an anthropological rendition of the Genesis notion of Imago Dei (God’s image) when each one of them must “even at the cost of death, preserve the meaning of his past . . . [because] the forces which inspired our distant ancestors are still present in us . . . . In the poorest tribe [there exists] a confirmation of our own image and experience, the lessons of which we can assimilate” (1973: 378, 393). In his ethnographic confessional, Lévi-Strauss reveals how pursuing a rendition of Corneille’s Cinna in literary form helped him recognize that anthropological travels were about “an exploration of the deserts of my mind rather than those surrounding me” (1973: 379). His ethnographic-literary “mind” was on a quest to rediscover and restore a rightful place for the human at divinity’s table, even if it amounted to a return to humanity’s beginnings, and even if it meant both humanity and divinity starting afresh. Let us remember that for Lévi-Strauss artwork was “sacredness” restored to modern society

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(Mary 2009: 10). Perhaps similar to Augé’s (1982) vindication of paganism as surmounting dualities, Lévi-Strauss’s play sought to restore the kind of animism Western society had lost upon its entry to modernity (Mary 2009: 10), which remained absent from Durkheim’s “social fact” construct that was supposed to restore an integrative totality to modern French society (Hollier 1972: 56–7). Thus, as his reflections on his play reveal, for Lévi-Strauss doing fieldwork not only entailed rediscovering his self, but somehow, somewhere, divinity too. Yet as his “master and brother” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, his paragon of what return is about would have it, divinity lies in humanity’s principum as it were, in its “imperceptible beginnings” (Lévi-Strauss 1973: 390, 316), in a relation with Nature, which Montaigne (1968: 39) declares “can’t fail to be just, being equal and common to all.” Tragedy has not been the only mode of pursuing theological ends in the anthropological field, so has the comic. An American, a Brooklynite to be precise, with Jewish Hasidic ancestry, provides an illustration of a secular fieldworker’s ethnographic conduct whose form and content can be read as theological, or at least as a parody of the theological field of Christology. Recalling his inquiry into who Christ was for a Yap woman in Micronesia, Schneider facetiously and pruriently narrates a moment from their conversation: So she spreads her skirt and sits down on the ground, and I start in with her, and it was great! “Tell me, who was this Jesus Christ? What lineage did he belong to? What was his authority? What did he do?”—the whole thing. We spent that day. I learned not only what [Jesus] did, but how he operated and what kinds of prayers to use, and so on. (1995: 110)

Perhaps inquiry into Jesus in the ethnographic field was a way for Schneider to learn about who he, Schneider, was not. Yet an anthropologist may want to learn about who Jesus is, or about people’s belief in Jesus or beliefs more broadly, in order to learn who he or she is or might become. Reminiscent of Augustine’s Confessions,13 a work of scrutinizing and “remembering” oneself, Michel Leiris admitted that

In Confessions, Augustine identifies memory as his vehicle for self-exploration: “I entered into my own depths, with You as guide . . . . I entered with the eye of my soul, such as it was, I saw Your unchangeable Light . . . . And I heard Thee” and later on reveals, “And in my memory too, I find myself—I recall myself ” (1993: 117–18, 179). 13

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ethnography had been a way to help him bear witness to himself, to observe himself, and not simply the other (in Bréchon 2005: 41). Bearing witness to the truth about oneself as part of ethnographic practice does not happen in isolation. The observed brings out the best potentiality of the attentive observer, at least that hope drove the work of some of the discipline’s founding titans. Kroeber here wonders about the ends of bearing witness in anthropology: “I have long pondered to whom we owe the saving of human religious and aesthetic achievements as are recorded here. It is probably not to the group that produced them . . . . It is the future of our own world culture that can be enriched by the preservation of these values” (in Mead 2005 [1974]: 48). Thus under the umbrella act of “observing,” anthropologists appear capable of engaging in other theistically resonant self-edificatory acts: witnessing, preserving, discovering, and restoring. The Delphic invocation inscribed in the forecourt of Apollo’s Temple, gnothi seauton (know thyself), was reiterated by the new “priest of Nemi”14 and doyen of ethnographers, Malinowski, who frequently exhorted his students to practice this theologically laden gnome in preparation for ethnographic work (Powdermaker 1966: 39). If the worshipers in Apollo’s sanctuary beheld the gods in order to observe themselves and to find out who they could still become, modern-day anthropologists rode all seas and trekked all continents to encounter other humans for that purpose. In the words of Germaine Tillion, an anthropologist who studied both French colonialism in Algiers and Nazi concentration camps, “if one does not know oneself, one will never know any one” (2009: 49). Benedict shared with Malinowski a passion for Nietzsche (Modell 1984: 192) and an even greater passion for how personalities are culturally generated. She taught her students, Mead among them, about the “virtue of comparison as a way of understanding one’s own society” (in Modell 1984: 144). Leiris was likewise committed to 14 While describing Bronisław Malinowski’s path to anthropology as a “road to Damascus,” Ernest Gellner also refers to him as “the new priest of Nemi,” following the death of James Frazer (1988: 16, 171), for Malinowski declared that he had “became bound to the services of Frazarian anthropology” (in Gellner 1988: 169). Michael Young calls this narrative about Malinowski’s loyalty to Frazer as prompting him to become an anthropologist an “unreliable history,” passing as a “compelling myth” strategically deployed by Polish-born Malinowski while seeking to install himself in the British academic establishment (2004: 4).

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ethnographically generated knowledge of oneself. In an interview, Leiris wondered: “Isn’t the habit, besides the influence of psychoanalytic healing, of taking a position when facing human phenomena of an observer that permits him to be a witness, an outsider in some way to himself, of that which unfolds within?” (in Bréchon 2005: 41). That which unfolded within Leiris, fatigued by the Catholic Church in France, contrasts with his teacher Leenhardt’s experience, who was revived by the Protestant church in Melanesia and wanted to bear witness to what apparently was unfolding outside himself as well. Thus, more than knowing himself in Melanesia, Leenhardt sought to revive himself, and particularly his faith. With his ethnographic research, he endeavored to “rediscover his God concretely in Melanesian religious experience” (Clifford 1982: 5). For his own ordination ceremony in Montpellier days before his travels he wrote, “And perhaps, God only knows, it is the young churches in pagan lands who will provide us with the fresh blood needed for the vitalization of our tired milieu” (in Clifford 1982: 28–9). Whether to inject “fresh blood” or preserve “old blood,” anthropologists have turned and returned to theological roots in various guises: intellectual, personal, and civilizational. And these roots have nourished the anthropological corpus and yielded concepts, sensibilities, institutions, and ways of pursuing ethnographic fieldwork. Thus far, we have seen fieldwork bearing theistic genealogies in explicitly searching for God (Leenhardt), irreverently researching beliefs (Schneider), pursuing the other for purposes of self-improvement (Kroeber, Mead, Benedict), and bearing witness to oneself containing an Other (Leiris). An attentive reader may have noticed additional ways. Now our attention turns to a highly subtle way of preserving theology, one deep within the very heart of anthropology, yet paradoxically blatantly obvious, the defining practice of ethnographic fieldwork, immersion.

ETHNOGRAPHIC IMMERSION AS A EUCHARIST It should be clear by now that anthropologists have not left fully intact the dome they built for their secular discipline. We have borne witness to how the dome’s surface has been compromised in two major ways, enabling the refraction of both proverbial and

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genealogical “theospheric light.” We now turn to yet a third means of compromise, one that allows refraction into the dome of the least— yet perhaps also the most—readily visible kind of theospheric light, the analogical. I am referring to ethnographic immersion as analogous to the theistic practice of communion (paradigmatically here captured in the example of the Eucharist) whereby a consonant logic infuses both fieldwork and this type of sacral rite: a vision of uniting the seeker with the sought-after. For dome-dwellers to recuperate from theology’s banishment, some have painted parts of the edifice to resemble and even feel like endlessly expansive heavens, as Lévi-Strauss did with structuralism (which allows one to decipher “relations of relations” ad infinitum). Others have elegantly sloughed obscuring layers straight off the dome, as Douglas and Evans-Pritchard did throughout their anthropologically driven, theologically restorative careers. Still others may have found ways to burrow tunnels beneath the dome to reconnect with the external theosphere. However, I think it is safe to say that all who consider themselves anthropologists have undertaken a quintessential exercise that connects them rather directly back to obfuscated theology: ethnographic immersion. The dome anthropologists attempt to hermetically seal with thothic powers they unseal with the power of a certain koinonia (communion), when undertaking a practice of understanding in a form of immersion, which they commonly recognize through Malinowski’s adage: “from the native point of view.” Shifting from sealing to peeling, Eucharist takes over from Thoth as it were, as anthropologists pursue their “unstable” research method called fieldwork.15 Perhaps more than traditionally studying peoples outside the West, and more than taking their point of view seriously, it is this very quintessential practice that can best guide us toward witnessing the amazing extents to which anthropology preserves theology (by means of a secularized theosis) and subsequently stands as the Enlightenment’s scintillating scandal. I call it scintillating because it has been, as we will see, an extremely powerful attraction for scholars on an emancipatory quest via anthropology. I call it a scandal because it attracts secular disciples, even while brazenly violating

15 James Clifford calls ethnography an “unstable but productive fusion of objective and subjective methods” (2005: 38).

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some Enlightenment tenets, notably separation of the knower from the known as upheld by Immanuel Kant’s autonomy of reason. Even from a patently Marxist tradition, anthropologist Alpa Shah (2017: 49) expresses ethnography’s continued valuation, identifying its immersive grammar as a “potentially revolutionary praxis.” Holding that participant observation is not only an anthropological method but also a form of knowledge production, whose revolutionary potential lies in a dialectical mode of learning based on “an intimate long-term engagement with, and participation in, the lives of strangers” (2017: 49), Shah also identifies the embodiment of a potentially Eucharistic praxis. In order to acquire a sense of the extent to which the practice of ethnographic immersion violates modern reason, let us return to religious texts where such a practice also has a “home.” To speak of an analogous religious “home” is to refer to an epistemic consonance between modern “ethnographic immersion” and diverse religious or philosophical practices embodying the same form of reason. As such, “ethnographic immersion” can be said to have “a home” in any of the various philosophical and religious traditions that promote some form of unio mystica (mystical union), whether they be Greek, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Jewish, or Christian. However, since the concern here is with a historically Western intellectual tradition that has sought, attained, and largely maintained its secular identity by setting itself against Christian theology writ large (its primary other), then it might only be apt for us to return to some of Christian theology’s sources. By looking at such sources, we may be able to gauge just how far “astray” anthropologists have ventured from secular reason, as well as to conversely gauge the degree to which modern anthropology has retained a theistic mindset. Our focus here is thus on the ways immersion in the field continues a theistic practice as exemplified by the logic of communion, known as the Eucharist in the Christian tradition.16 One epistemic home of the Eucharist, although hardly the only one, is the gospel of John where among Jesus’s reported words count the following: “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in

16 I assume that Catholic and Protestant traditions have arrived at different appellations and interpretations for the sacrament they call Eucharist and communion respectively.

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me, and I in him.”17 Thus instituting a sacrament in Christian life, the Eucharist stands for a life lived in Holy Communion, in intimate communion with Christ, hence the centrality of the Eucharist as “the source and summit of the Christian life” (Catholic Church 1994: §334), the “sacrament of sacraments” (Catholic Church 1994: §336). Furthermore, through collective reception the Eucharist establishes a community: incorporates a unified body. And it makes the group into the body of Christ. For St. Thomas Aquinas, the Eucharist stands for “perfection of the spiritual life and the end to which all the sacraments tend” (Catholic Church 1994: §346). However, it is not merely the Eucharist’s centrality as a ritual in a Christian life that renders it analogous to “the rite” of ethnographic immersion that is arguably central to any anthropological life. The Eucharist stands as analogous to ethnographic immersion for the kind of relation to truth it avails. Below, I discuss how Augustine illustrates the ways the rationality of the Eucharist resembles ethnographic immersion’s rationality and hence how both stand as an aberration to Enlightenment-sanctioned reason. In this rationality, the truth of the other presupposes a relational subject (also qualified as “heteronomous” or “porous”) demanding immersion in truth and participation with it (as distinct from attaining truth through means founded on models of correspondence or representation). Incidentally, Augustine’s Confessions (1993) provide ample reasons for perceiving their author as a kind of “ethnographer,” as one who immerses into an Other in order to also, even if implicitly, learn about oneself, only that the Other is not restricted to another cultural being or beings, but is God.18 Confessions is an inquiry, apparent from its entreaties and questions: “Grant me, O Lord, to know which is the soul’s first movement towards Thee”; “What art Thou to me? Have mercy, that I may tell. What rather am I to Thee?”; “Was the time I spent in my mother’s womb such another age? . . . Was I anywhere? Was I anyone?” (1993: 3, 5, 7). Finally, in a radical turn, unearthing 17 The institution of the Eucharist as a sacrament in also inscribed in: Matthew 26:17–30, Mark 14:12–26, Luke 22:7–39, and John 13:1–17:26. 18 See Augustine 1993: 6, 9, 13, 117–18, 186. Having written her doctoral thesis on Augustine’s concept of caritas, Hannah Arendt attests to Augustine’s “credentials” of knowing himself through a relation with the Other: “But Augustine does not look back on his life to glorify himself, but for the glory of God. One’s own life has meaning not only because it is earthly but also because in it we decide to be near or far from God” (2005: 25).

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the roots of knowing (both God and self) through his sensorium, Augustine declares: “I said to all the things that throng about the gateways of the senses ‘Tell me of my God, since you are not He. Tell me something of Him’ . . . . And I turned to myself and said ‘And you, who are you?’” (1993: 176–7). Referring to himself in the third person (“who are you?”), Augustine not only asks questions like an anthropologist (turning the familiar into the odd), he also answers them like one, in that he “turns to himself” through immersion in the Other. Two excerpts illustrate how Augustine immerses in truth in order to know truth, including truths about himself: For calling into Him, I am calling Him to me, and what room is there in me for my God . . . . Is there anything in me, O God, that can contain You? . . . You must in some way be in all that is: [Therefore also in me since I am]. And if You are already in me, since otherwise I should not be, why do I cry to You to enter me? . . . Thus, O God, I should be nothing, utterly nothing unless You were in me or rather unless I were in You. (1993: 3–4)

And God “who is the Truth itself” (1993: 191)19 has Augustine not only represent truth but live it, live with it and in it, or rather it in him: When once I shall be united to Thee with all my being, there shall be no more grief and toil, and my life will be alive, filled wholly with Thee . . . . Thou does raise up him whom Thou dost fill, whereas being not filled with Thee, I am a burden to myself. (1993: 192–3)

Wanting to be “filled with” God, and to attain communion with God as a means for knowing the Truth of God and of oneself, constitutes more than a rite and its rationality. For Augustine, it is a rationality that gives form to a certain life. Thus, the Eucharist’s logic embedded in Augustine’s life becomes an apt way to locate the dissonance arising in anthropological professional life due to engaging in “ethnographic immersion.” The rupture that immersion causes to anthropology’s dome follows prior fault lines. Even before Malinowski promoted seeking the truth (about others if not about his own self) from “the native point of view,” one of his teachers at the London School of Economics, W. H. R. Rivers, issued words that help us see how anthropology 19

Augustine (1993: 192) also refers to God as “You who are the Truth.”

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defied the Enlightenment perhaps from its very beginning. If in heralding secular reason’s triumph, the Enlightenment project is about arriving at abstractions, then not abstracting is exactly what ethnography has always been about. Already in 1900, the year of Nietzsche’s death, eighteen years after he diagnosed the death of God in Europe, Rivers announced the end of a certain relation with the Enlightenment. He proclaimed that for the fledgling science of anthropology, fieldwork enables the observer “to study abstract problems on which the savage ideas are vague by means of concrete facts, of which he is a master . . . . The abstract should always be approached through the concrete” (in Stocking 1983: 88, 90). This exalting of the concrete as facilitating the study of multiplicity continues to reverberate in the discipline’s lasting embrace of the local and the particular. Fifteen years after Rivers’ observation, Malinowski milled the same point: “The nearer one lives in the village and the more he sees actually of the natives the better” (in Stocking 1983: 97). And then, approaching the century’s close, Sahlins, a leading theorist of the culture concept who launched his ethnographic fieldwork in Fiji and Hawaii, reiterated this view, stating that to put things anthropologically is: “to perceive great things in little ones” (1999: ix). Just because things or persons are nearer, more enfleshed and less abstract, does not mean they are any clearer or more comprehensible to the observer than things far away. A single grain of sand in the palm of a hand could be just as—if not more—mysterious than one at the bottom of the deep. Augé more recently voiced the fact that things near can be just as evasive as things far in contrasting the labor of the anthropologist to that of the philosopher. Unlike the Absolute or Abstract Other that philosophers may typically study, the others that anthropologists study “revolve, repeatedly, and in revolving they get lost, somewhere between memory, imagination and writing, in this non-place where they can join in only to be continuously searched for or anticipated” (2011: 233). Thus, proximity to “truth” does not necessarily abolish perplexity nor wonderment, but may even enhance them. Two contingent features about this logic of ethnographic immersion seem useful to acknowledge in order to comprehend it: its location and its valuation. As for this logic’s “location,” I specifically mean relative to the Enlightenment: what it entails for the loyalty and disloyalty anthropologists have shown toward their dome. Provided

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that the Enlightenment endows the dome’s theosealers with their sealing powers, then it is exactly immersion that tints anthropology’s relation to the Enlightenment with both fidelity and infidelity. Anthropology conforms to the Enlightenment in choosing worldly “Man” as its subject, but dissents from it in undertaking immersion as a technique for seeking truths about this subject. Differently put, the Enlightenment that anthropology adores through its founding concepts (Man, humanity, culture, etc.) it betrays through the grammar of its constituting practice. While, in consonance with Kant, anthropology has by and large piously taken “Man” as an ultimate concept and “a final end”20 (now more inclusively called “humanity” and even more expansively stretched to include “animality”), it has adopted heretic techniques to know it. To recognize anthropology as preserving theology inside its very epistemic sanctum sanctorum demands that we trace the main features of this perfidy. I aim here to show how a theological grammar is fundamentally at work in pursuits anthropologists have undertaken in order to know others, and inevitably themselves, pursuits that place them intimately among others, spawn new intimacies, including with themselves, and finally allow them to transcend the day-to-day particulars of others to ultimately transcend themselves. In addition to its location, the logic of immersion at the center of ethnographic practice demands for its adequate comprehension that we recognize its valuation by anthropologists across generations and geographies. It might be helpful to begin by asking a fairly simple question: what status has fieldwork enjoyed in the discipline? After becoming, first of all among Boas’s disciples in the United States, “the basic norm of the discipline” (Mead 1973: 8), fieldwork has continued to be repeatedsly described by subsequent generations of anthropologists as its “hallmark” (e.g., Leach 1984: 21, Stocking 1983: 70, Spradley and McCurdy 2003: 8). For Kroeber (Kroeber 1970: 228), fieldwork is what made anthropology substantially different from any other science. British anthropologist Edmund Leach (1961: 1), known for his work among the Katchin of Burma (today Myanmar), even called it anthropology’s “essential core.” When we met at la Maison Suger in Paris, French anthropologist Emmanuel Terray, whose research took him to the 20 Immanuel Kant states in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View that in the modern period “man is his own final end” (1974 [1785]: 3).

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Dida and Abron cultures of Ivory Coast, told me that ethnography is the keystone of anthropology (clé de voûte de l’anthropologie) (Interview, September 22, 2014). For his homologue at College de France, Philippe Descola (in Dhoquois 2008: 60), it stands as the very clay or soil (le terreau) from which the discipline is formed. Using less earthly metaphors, Paul Rabinow at Berkeley calls fieldwork an “alchemy” and a “metaphysical marker that separated anthropologists from the rest” (1977: 4). Bernard Cohn from the University of Chicago considers fieldwork to be a “sacred” practice in which anthropologists go “out there” into the land of “anthropological ‘dreaming,’ the field,” adding, “In the good old days fieldwork was truly a sacred rite. It was a mystery” (1980: 200). So revered has fieldwork been among anthropologists that Schneider (1995: 216) expresses disquiet with “the fetishized place” it has attained. Whether anthropologists have adored, ignored, or frowned upon the value of fieldwork, it has clearly been more than simply or only a research method. To say the least, it has been “an experience.” For Kroeber (Kroeber 1970: 228), when anthropologists embark upon fieldwork they seek direct “contact and experience.” Fieldwork’s paragon, Malinowski, who led it to emerge as “a methodological revolution” (Stocking 1983: 111), calls it a “certain type of experience” (in Stocking 1983: 112), while his student Leach goes further to call it “an extremely personal and traumatic kind of experience” (1961: 1). Clifford calls it simply a “research methodology,” yet one still “peculiarly intensive and interactive” (2005: 38). So what kind of experience is this “hallmark” and what does its “peculiarity” do to those engaged in it? One way to start answering these questions is to hear fieldwork’s practitioners describe it. Needless to say, there are likely just as many descriptions of fieldwork as there are anthropologists. But to help sight the breach in the dome, I wish to highlight two kinds of descriptions. The first kind notes particular features of fieldwork experiences. The second kind describes the ways fieldwork affects fieldworkers.

FIELDWORK FERVOR Prior to embarking upon fieldwork, anthropologists tend to speak of something formidable about to happen in their lives. They do not

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expect to remain the same. Surviving fieldwork’s waters and fires would lead them to emerge anew. Kroeber recalls undergoing “a baptism of fire” even prior to the “ultimate initiation ritual of going to ‘the field’” (in Darnell 1990:10). Geertz extends this metaphor in noting that for anthropologists, “unlike the others, mere academicians, we had a testing ahead, a place we had to go to and a rite we had to go through” (1995: 101). So anthropologists over the decades have regarded fieldwork as an experience that set them apart from “mere academicians” and have perhaps nurtured a fear that it could even tear them apart. Such a fear of the field does not seem to have skipped over even Malinowski, who despite occupying for generations the place of “a paradigmatic anthropologist” (Gellner 1998: 113) and even the “archetypal fieldworker” (Gluckman in Stocking, 1983: 111) left traces of this fear dwelling in him. A biographer describes Malinowski’s life in the field as akin to “a monk in his own body’s cell,” who in search of asceticism befitting his life “may have found spiritual encouragement in Nietzsche’s works” (Young 2004: 110, 111). Describing himself as belonging to the agnostics (in Gellner 1998: 152), Malinowski “frequently embraced the ascetic ideal” (Young 2004: 111) and gave the following advice to those engaged in ethnographic work: “I used to maintain . . . that a man ought to have regularities of seclusion, a few weeks yearly or half-yearly, say. During that time, one would have an absolute taboo on outward life and live only in the world of reflexion” (in Young 2004: 125). These testimonies by and about Malinowski are important, not just because they reflect a sanctity anchored in his notion of tapu or vita contemplative, nor because they imbue a monastic aura. Rather, they are important because they express the ways Malinowski became daunted by what he arguably invented. Encumbered by the weight of an imminent ethnographic mission and the kind of departing from the ordinary patterns of life it promised to entail, Malinowski discloses his fear as though he were Moses in Horeb on the eve of confronting Pharaoh:21 “I was taking a leave of civilization. I was fairly depressed, afraid I might not feel equal to the task before me” (1989: 5). If Malinowski feared going to the field, others seem to have feared what would happen if they did not embark on fieldwork. For example,

21

See Exodus 3–11.

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Boas feared that Mead would “break down” if prevented, due to her young age, from going to the field (in Metraux 1980: 265). So badly needed has this “rite” been that the prospect of losing it has felt like losing air to breathe, such that when Leenhardt came upon “fieldwork science” he found a much-needed “breathing space” (in Clifford 1982: 147). Beyond mere breathing, fieldwork has also offered a sense of life. Having studied peoples in the American Deep South, Zambia, Papua New Guinea, and even Hollywood, Powdermaker describes feeling alive in the field: “I quickly understood a basic fact about actors: that acting is a way of life for them . . . . Acting was essential to [their] being alive. This I could understand. Fieldwork, writing, teaching are among the ways in which I feel alive” (1966: 227). Lévi-Strauss would not have been at all surprised that fieldwork helped Leenhardt breathe and Powdermaker feel alive. His extensive years in the ethnographic field notwithstanding, he claimed that he was never fit for the task of ethnographic immersion, believing also that men inevitably face greater difficulty than do women when immersing themselves for truth. Asked by an interviewer about his noted deficiency as a fieldworker, Lévi-Strauss offered: “To say it without any intention to degrade, quite to the contrary, fieldwork is somewhat of a ‘ladies’ handicraft’ (which is probably the reason for which women are so good at it). I personally lack the care and patience” (in Eribon 1988: 66). For our purposes here, Lévi-Strauss’s claims about women’s purported superiority in fieldwork bear little relevance. However, his words do helpfully point out that the truth-path of fieldwork requires patience and care, qualities surely required of other truth-paths as well to a greater or lesser degree. One such truth-path often likened to and linked with fieldwork is psychoanalysis. If one Frenchman claimed his maleness impeded his mastering a “ladies’ handicraft” entailing knowing through immersion in what one seeks to know, another Frenchman, Jean-Loup Amselle, thought it was his Jewishness in a country like France that made more expedient the kind of knowing attained via ethnographic immersion. I excerpt our interview at length because of the links Amselle establishes between psychoanalysis and fieldwork, revealing the latter as work toward understanding the self no less than work toward understanding the other:

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The colonial situation was a way to define or redefine my Jewish identity because at the time I did not feel completely French. I used to say I had only a French passport, but was not really French. Because even if Jewish people were not ill-treated at the time, of course there was anti-Semitism and so forth and [although] we were not oppressed, we felt different from the mainstream, the Christian or Catholic mainstream. So in a way African identity as it was, as it has been redefined by the colonial situation offered me a way of identifying and redefining myself toward my Jewish identity through the lenses of African people. I was attracted by American Negros, jazz, black Muslims, Malcolm X, and then I was interested in the continent of origin and then the negritude of [Leopold] Senghor . . . . I was reading a lot of travel narratives about Africa . . . . These traders at the village would come back after having completed their professional life, where they would stay and die, and for me this was a kind of Israel, in the metaphoric sense. So while insisting on the flexible character of identity, it was a way for me to wonder what my own identity was as a French Jew or a Jew living in France. My own identity, as I consider it now, was very problematic and is still very problematic, but what does it mean to be Jewish when you don’t believe in God, when you are pro-Palestinian, when you are atheist? What does that mean? Anthropology yes probably helped me deepen my understanding of my personal identity or the reverse, that my own identity, my search for this understanding led me to do fieldwork or to a career in anthropology. It was more a matter of status, status within French encompassing society, which is still dominantly Catholic, even as it pretends to be secular. Yes, absolutely. I mean French society is very hypocritical. So now I can say it, I will fulfill my condition, projecting a status on Africans and African-Americans. I was projecting in the psychoanalytic sense. I have been involved in psychoanalysis. I have been influenced by psychoanalysis and I did psychoanalysis for years . . . . But before doing psychoanalysis, I was always interested in it, in . . . Deleuze as a critic of psychoanalysis . . . . Fieldworker and psychoanalyst are both mirrors of your own personality, in that way. It is possible to compare . . . . You are projecting your psychological problems on the field, on people you are studying. It is not an objective science. (Interview, September 18, 2014)

As we can see, ethnography as “an experience” is variably described as definitive, terrifying, demanding skills of patience and care, and requiring a boldness for facing oneself. All these features may lead us to wonder not only about this experience’s objectivity, but also about the

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sorts of claims that anthropology (or psychoanalysis for that matter) make as to conducting “science” in its post-Newtonian formulation. These testimonies also invite consideration of the grammar of knowledge, games of truth, and tradition of reasoning fieldwork typically endorses. If anthropology is indeed science—as for example in the French sense of connaisance and the Arabic ‘ilm, which still mean both knowledge and science—then what kind of knowledge experience does anthropology enable and in what ways does the knowledge it produces fail to reside in the safe secular dome anthropologists have erected? Two responses further illuminate the perforation that ethnographic immersion has affected upon anthropodom. After she retired from teaching anthropology, Marilyn Strathern— an atheist with a greater tolerance of Christianity than she had had in times past—told me about her fieldwork experience within Hagen communities in Papua New Guinea: “I had a dimension in my life that was simply non-sharable. I could not convey the quality and the tenor of the relationship I have had with the people” (Interview, April 30, 2015). In some sense, Strathern corroborates Geertz’s (2000: 11) evocation of “mysteries” of the field in which he got himself thoroughly “lost.” But for all their non-sharability, it is the “tenor” and “quality” of relationships as conduits of knowing others if not oneself, to which we must give our steadfast attention. Impervious as “tenor” and “quality” may be to inquiry, they can nevertheless help us recognize breaches in anthropology’s dome. They or something like them may manage to guide us through a way of knowing that presumably happens in the field and takes the knower, who may know it or not, to kinds of relations with truth that are less than licit according to those Enlightenment principles set to secure the sovereignty of both reason and reasoner. These intangibles forfeit the principle of a sovereign self to move toward a self that solders with a non-self designated as truth or truth-source, thereby admitting truths “from the native point of view.”

FIELDWORK ON THE SELF We thus arrive at examining the ways fieldwork does not only entail learning about others, but also about—even to the point of transforming—oneself. According to an old Arabic idiom, entering

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a bathhouse is not the same as exiting it. Fieldwork also does not leave those who enter unaltered, here attested to by Terray: “I personally believe that fieldwork is definitely an experience in which one learns things not only about people one faces but about transforming oneself as well. Normally, one should not leave the field as one has entered it” (Interview, September 22, 2014). Terray reminds us that in traveling to the field, ethnographers are likely also traveling within. Their destination, inner as outer, is arguably a place of learning from within the unfamiliar, certainly from outside the habitual. Fieldwork means going “somewhere” where one’s habits—not just of thinking, even of sensing—become “exposed to the elements” as it were, to roast in the sun, thrash in the wind, or shiver in the snow. Audrey Smedley excitedly describes this coveted ventilation of one’s habits, of stepping “into the field” and living the habits of others. Upon leaving Ann Arbor and later Manchester to embark on fieldwork in Nigeria during the late 1950s and early 1960s, she reflects: “I was intrigued by the intricate ways around which human begins sort out their lives and garner meaning from the process. I was eager to get into the field, somewhere in Africa” (Smedley 2001: xxiv). For Smedley, going “somewhere” in Africa may have been her way of getting somewhere in herself as well.22 She traveled not only across oceans but also into an ocean within. Theologians call that ocean “the soul.” Anthropologists not timid about sounding theological, and ancient, do so too, like Geertz (2000: 19). Macfarlane spoke to me about the soul in relating what fieldwork had generally been for him and for Descola, whom he had interviewed: So when you worry about your Christian faith and becoming rational early in your life you don’t see it but now I see it . . . fieldwork is soul work. I mean for Descola it was soul work for him among the Achuar in the Brazilian jungle. You can see that very often when an anthropologist comes back because they feel very, very alienated. [When] he came back, he could not tolerate things back in Parisian society, so he went to 22 Audrey Smedley’s (2001: xxiv) wish to be “somewhere in Africa” appears similar to Michel Leiris’s wish to “be in the other’s skin.” Jean Jamin describes the general mode of Leiris’s writing: “To be but without being completely, that was a frequent attitude in the works of Leiris. In his diary he does not conceive of the ethnographer as someone precious: wanting (or having) to be in the skin of the natives while knowing fully that one can never simply glide into it or that one will see oneself being refused their endorsement” (1996: 22).

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a remote wood in France. Many, many anthropologists feel quite alienated from society when they come back into [it] . . . the difficulty you face of losing the integration you gained in fieldwork. (Interview, April 29, 2015)

So returning from fieldwork may be even more daunting than entering it. Your soul “gaining integration” in the field comes with a price. It is the price of first dissolving it through the “initiation rite” that is fieldwork immersion. It may even entail the additional price of losing it a second time after returning to home’s alienation. Geertz offers a particularly outstanding thick description of what fieldwork did to his soul: I saw the concept of culture looming large, both as a way into the mysteries of the field and as a means for getting oneself thoroughly lost in them . . . . I enjoyed fieldwork immensely (yes, I know, not all the time) and the experience of it did more to nourish my soul, and indeed to create it, than the academy ever did. (2000: 11–12, 19)

Precisely the words of this world-renowned anthropologist, whose Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz 1973) opened new frontiers across various fields of inquiry, express not only certain advantages of anthropology over other disciplines in the modern academy—in Geertz’s case, it was Harvard, Chicago, and finally the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton—but also how fieldwork is also soul work. It has the capacity to nourish a soul, even create one, that is, if one sufficiently loses oneself in the field—merges with it as in communion. Four French anthropologists, each in his own way (yes, all are men, surprisingly so if we are to believe Lévi-Strauss), help me illustrate how one actually “gets lost” in the field. When not taken literally, “getting lost” in the field is best understood as, in a word, immersion, whereby one loses, sheds, dissolves boundaries between oneself as knower and the other that one desires to know. In other words, to get lost in the field is to dismantle walls separating observer from observed. As Augé puts it, fieldwork entails “stepping out of the self” (2011: 50). To know ethnographically means to suspend, at least initially, what one takes to be one’s normal self. Let us now explore just what this suspension entails. When ethnology teachers give advice on how to be good ethnographers, they invariably call for working toward permeability, for suspending, unloading, and emptying one’s self. For example, Descola

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exhorts his students: “The ethnographic experience becomes fruitful starting from the moment when you cease to interrogate. Clearly in the early steps of the inquiry one has to pose some basic questions. But the ideal is to listen” (2005: 69). Ethnographic suspension of self and its boundaries received an evocative description in my interview with Marc Abélès, who studies the Ochollos in Ethiopia: “I have the quality of a sponge. I believe that one cannot be an ethnologue without having a sponge-like quality. This is to say one who can immerse oneself and be completely permeable” (Interview, September 16, 2014). Perhaps the most radical listening that a field may demand was probed by Leiris. Describing himself as bearing the “subjectivism of a dreamer” (1981 [1934]: 12), he offers us his honest confessions. They do not bear importance because in them Leiris advocates fieldwork. If anything, it disillusioned him. But it is precisely Leiris’s vision, disabused of adoring fieldwork, that extends us perhaps our best chance at glimpsing the radicality of ethnography’s breach of the dome that secular reason built, which to Leiris’s apparent chagrin nevertheless failed to collapse it. Leiris makes use of two theistically tinged words to help us track the rupture: effusion and communion. Having experienced voyages in Africa as “un poesie vecue et un dépaysement (lived poetry and de-dwelling),” Leiris writes: I meant to break away from the intellectual habits that were mine until then, and by contact with men of cultures and races other than mine I meant to tear down the walls of partition in which I was suffocating, and to enlarge my horizon by a truly human measure. Thus conceived, ethnography could only disappoint me, a human science remains a science, and a detached observation could not by itself bring the contact about. Perhaps by definition it may imply the opposite: the very attitude of the observer, being impartial to objectivity, is an enemy of all effusion . . . . [I]t is an enlargement and a forgetfulness of self in the community of action, a purely formal communion. (1981 [1934]: 13–14)

Leiris despaired of incomplete “purely formal” communion, yet a field experience thwarted—due to science, objectivity, or any other impediment—does not intrinsically repudiate its driving vision, for whose expression we turn to yet another set of anthropologists. But before going forward, allow me to caution the reader not to let the following profusion of words and tongues distract from attending to

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immersion as a paradigm for the art of doing fieldwork. In its very conduct, anthropologists forsake what Kant demanded they adopt through citizenship in reasondom and for undertaking the task of forging a mature and enlightened—read secular—science: autonomy. There may be no better way to gaze at this breach in the dome than by invoking Kant’s antipode—Nietzsche’s sobriquet for the last German he respected—namely Goethe. The seditious contact anthropologists have had with Goethe came to them via their German-born and -trained ancestor, Boas. Do not be distracted by his arcane, perhaps bemusing language, for here in plain sight are heretic seeds planted in anthropology’s hallmark practice. In 1887, Boas described the endeavors of “the cosmographer,” precursor to the ethnographer, here quoted and paraphrased by George Stocking: Cosmography . . . arose out of the “affective” impulse, the “personal falling of man towards the world” around him. The cosmographer was interested in the phenomenon itself “without regard to its place in the system”; like Goethe, he tried “lovingly . . . to penetrate into its secrets until every feature is plain and clear.” (1989: 10)

To personally fall toward, to lovingly penetrate, secrets of the world is not the way anthropologists tend to describe to neophytes what they do in the field. For neophytes, as well as for outsiders, and even among themselves, anthropologists typically resort to the less evocative term of “immersion.” Locution aside, the act at stake is one of demolishing walls between the knower and the known in the ethnographic field. “Communion” was Leiris’s choice (yet hardly his alone) for evoking the epistemic grammar belying fieldwork’s secular syntax. Mastering this grammar’s rules has proven a great accomplishment and source of personal pride. One of Boas’s students, Lowie, considered this communion his life’s crowning achievement. His ability to “enter into the Indians’ own attitudes” was his “chief asset as a practicing ethnologist” (Lowie 1959: 171). Having lived among the Shoshone and Crow Nations, Lowie relates: Probably the greatest compliment of my life was given [to] me in a little restaurant just off [the] Crow reservation, where I heard one Indian tell another (in Crow) “you see that white man over there? He looks like any white man, but when he comes to the campfire, you’d never know him from an Indian.” (1959: 171)

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To penetrate, to immerse, to enter a communion, to let go when it comes to knowing the other all comprise a grammar of immersion into which teachers inculcate their students when preparing them to embark on fieldwork. For example, Mauss exhorted his students to adopt a Zen-like attitude, to deny one’s self its emotions, desires, and attachments: “Don’t believe, don’t be astonished and don’t get carried away” (in Fournier 1994: 600). Perhaps this exhortation helps clarify why Pierre Métais said of Mauss, who would take his students on visits to Musée Saint Germain and Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, that he “spiritually nourished an entire generation” (in Fournier 1994: 602). In introducing The Gift, Mauss’s perennial offering to the discipline, Evans-Pritchard emphasizes Mauss’s paramount lesson: one does not ultimately belong to oneself. For Mauss, as with Durkheim, his uncle, it is to society that one ultimately belongs. Clearly EvansPritchard also identifies and condones this breach, highlighting the fusion a seeker desires to attain with the sought-after, as if to imminently experience a communion: [An] anthropological fieldworker who studies social life from both outside and inside, from the outside as an anthropologist, and from the inside by identifying himself with the members of the society he is studying . . . bring[s] a trained mind to bear on the social life of the primitive people which he both observes and experiences. (1966: viii)

Perhaps the anthropologist giving us the most explicit analogy between ethnographic immersion and the ascetic grammar among minds seeking to know God is an apostate of ethnography, namely Leiris, who sought to unload his Catholic inheritance. In appreciation of one of his teachers, Leiris attests that Leenhardt tried to think aloud “like a Canaque” whom he studied in Melanesia and wished to “speak the language and the culture from within” (in Clifford 1982: 155–6). Clifford tells us that fieldwork demonstrated for Leenhardt how a person can emerge as “a relation, a communion with a human-divine Christ, immanent and transcendent” (1982: 217). After Leiris became thoroughly inculcated in the immersion principle of ethnographic research, he was able to capture the analogy of communion, albeit not in regard to the physical field, but for the state of writing. In reading his words, keep in mind what contributors to Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) note: writing occurs

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before, during, and after one’s presence in the ethnographic field. Leiris observes: It is a feeling of intense solitude that I experience at moments of writing. I feel all alone facing the world, not because all is exteriority, but because nothing exists other than as a function of mine . . . . And all without any arrogance or megalomania. It is hardly a kind of pride, a joy of seeing myself so sensitive, or being full of sensitivity that for a while forces the world to respond to my calls. I believe that this state is sufficiently analogous to those that know the mystical when they “submerge in God.” Nevertheless, I am certain that there is nothing religious to it, because what dominates and I am fully conscious of it is the pleasure. I have no sense of being “pure” or “detached” but only of being alone, being alone in the venture of being . . . . It is to do not with suppressing the world but with incorporating it within me, my becoming really a microcosm. (1992: 150–1)

As Leiris describes, submersion, incorporation, integration, and becoming a microcosm all point to the possibility that upon dedicating oneself to the ethnographic field, in some sense, yourself is no longer your self.23 It becomes permeated in ways previously unrecognized. It turns porous and ceases to be buffered, despite the regimes of sovereignty that govern so many segments of modern life, not to speak of the modern academy since the Enlightenment. This very academy is what Geertz found insufficient in the soulquest he undertook through his initiation rite of ethnographic fieldwork, where he learned that to meaningfully interpret the other, he need only have average “capacities for ego-effacement” (1983: 70). Whether to experience or even comprehend the other, the non-self, it is necessary to “efface the ego,” to let go of one’s regular sense of autonomy. Retaining a sovereign sense of self, as Kant exhorts, while aiming to experience life as or of an other would be a futile exercise. Geertz seems to have sensed this impasse brought by the secular– theological divide while pondering a central notion raised in Malinowski’s diaries: how impossible anthropological knowledge would have been if not for immersion in the other (1983: 56). Anthropologists may be able to evade a sense of futility when celebrating as accomplishment communion with—if not submersion 23 Phyllis Taoua holds: “Leiris’s quest was not only to discover the Other but to find himself as Other” contending that his sojourn to Africa was “a quest to leave himself and his culture—to become Other” (2002: 481, 486).

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within—the native. They succeed thanks to a couplage forte (powerful coupling) between observer and observed, which helps those seeking to know in the ethnographic mode avoid objectivism and detachment (Stengers in Jeanpierre 2013: 127). Meyer Fortes, a University of Cambridge anthropologist originally from South Africa’s Jewish community, provides examples of knowing through “identifying,” such that neither the known nor the knower remain sealed off from one another. The gates cordoning off the self are lifted, if not outright abolished, even if only for the duration of the fieldwork. His wife having joined him in the field, Fortes worked among the Tallensi and Ashanti peoples of West Africa, observing: “Thus open to and receptive of us, they made it easy for us to discover that we could identify with them sufficiently to have some appreciation of their ways of life, their values, and their troubles” (1978: 7). I do not mean to imply that this mode of knowing and search for truth somehow arrives at complete knowing. Identifying with someone hardly amounts to knowing that someone, rather it may only mark the beginning of a journey into “mysteries” that reside in the seeker no less than in what is sought. Silverman directed her seeking toward what she did not know about radically different realities: Maybe it has to do with the sense of leaving that world, the world where I grew up. I am not going to stay here forever. There is another world that has different possibilities. Anthropology allows you that in some sense. It does that for you intellectually: the experience of immersion in the unfamiliar . . . . That is where you get the best training of thinking about encountering something utterly unfamiliar. (Interview, December 3, 2014)

Discussing with me his relationship with the Nepalese communities he studies, in his idiosyncratic inflection to be sure, Macfarlane adhered to the anthropological intellect’s theological grammar underlying immersion in reflecting on the suspension of the self that occurs. Silverman spoke to me of “different possibilities” and Macfarlane illustrated one of them, that particular possibility of living his “home community” anew. You find the other in you, as the discipline’s iconic scholar of the Azande, Evans-Pritchard, already knew: We became one as in gemeinschaft, community. It is part of a community and your relationships and obligations . . . . It is a suspension, all play. There is the whole view. What I tell students is that the first thing you have to do is the suspending of all of your categories . . . . You think like the Azande. (Alan Macfarlane, Interview, April 29, 2015)

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If one anthropologist at Cambridge tells his students to think like an Azande, and if another follows their beliefs to the letter at home in Oxford, as Douglas said of Evans-Pritchard in Chapter 1, it behooves us to ask: just what is this particular cosmology—in which one learns through immersion in the Other—that lodges itself in the discipline of anthropology? While an ethnographer’s adaptability to Azande thoughts may be typical of the intellectual discipline of anthropology to which its scholars have dedicated their lives, such adaptability is hardly found elsewhere in the modern university. There comes a point where the rationality anthropologists refuse to dismiss is the one that the institutions (usually universities) employing them work to crush. The compatibility that anthropologists have with their studied others, but lack with the institutions that hire them to study them, may also indicate the breach anthropology causes to the dome it built in order to belong to the modern secular academy. Properly following the incongruence between modern anthropology and the modern university—its limits at functioning as a disciplined discipline—must remain a task for another time. After tracing the breach induced by the technique of immersion, I now wish to identify where it lives, the kind of cosmology it inhabits. Comprehending immersion requires comprehending its habitat, or at least that habitat’s major features. Now that we have witnessed the locus of the breach— ethnographic immersion—let us examine how it appears to travel in two distinct directions. This breach affects fault lines within both anthropodom as a whole and within its individual citizens, anthropologists. The cleaving power that causes both kinds of fissures lies in memory, specifically in the place and work of memory in anthropologists’ perceptions. The next section thus focuses on the ways in which the breaches of anthropodom, affected by ethnographic immersion, reside in a typical practice of—or are at least associated with— fieldwork, namely, remembrance, both professional and private.

W HERE REMEMBRANCE IS DAILY BREAD Just as for Augustine in his Confessions, where a return to God meant a return to oneself,24 analogously and similarly ethnographic immersion 24 Augustine further articulates this theistic alterity: “And even if I would not confess to You, what could be hidden in me O Lord, from You . . . . I should only be hiding You from myself, not myself from you . . . . And in my memory too I meet

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has been invoked as a certain return, often a return to “childhood,” whether to that of the anthropologist in question or to humanity’s as a whole. While Malinowski found in fieldwork a return to his childhood (1989: 295), for Ernest Gellner it provided a collective modern story he titled, “Anthropology Became the Remembrance of Things Collectively Past” (1998: 115). For some anthropologists, to know anthropologically means to remember. Remembrance is thus bound to anthropology, but also to theology, by means both analogical and genealogical. Analogically, theology may be conceived as a rationality-driven remembrance of God.25 Genealogically, remembrance may be understood as an inheritance, an inherited practice that religious traditions—and secular ones, for that matter—have deposited in us. As Augé puts it, “Two millennia of monotheism and a century of psychoanalysis have trained us to believe that meaning comes from the past . . . to search there for the clues to our unresolved enigma[s]” (2011: 9). And because this remembrance does not only relate to humanity’s “childhood,” but mingles with one’s own as well, we have figures like Lévi-Strauss, who carried “an obsessive desire to find the past behind the present” (Loyer 2015: 19), and who, upon distancing himself from the study of law and veering instead toward the “arts and sciences” that anthropology purportedly straddles, told us: “The student choosing them does not bid farewell to the world of childhood: on the contrary, he is trying rather to remain within . . . . An almost monk-like tendency inspires him to withdraw . . . to devote himself to the preservation and transmission of a heritage independent of the passing moment” (1973: 54). But Lévi-Strauss forgot the God of “beginnings,” remembered in the theosphere, as he resided fully within the discipline’s sealed-off dome. He could only descry beginnings’ nebulousness: “For knowing that for millennia man has only succeeded in repeating himself, we shall subscribe to this nobility of thought, which consists, beyond all repetition, of giving as a starting point for our reflections, the indefinable greatness of beginning” (1973: 393). myself—I recall myself . . . . What then am I, O my God? What nature am I? . . . I shall mount beyond [the power of memory], to come to you, O Lovely Light . . . I shall pass beyond memory to find you . . . And how shall I find You if I am without memory of You?” (1993:173, 179, 186). 25 Offering a modern articulation of the affinity between knowledge and remembrance, Arendt writes: “For thinking, then . . . withdrawal from the world of appearances is the only essential precondition . . . thinking always implies remembrance; every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought” (1978: 78).

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In his autumnal writing, in The Laws, Plato tells us: “For the beginning, because it contains its own principle, is also a god, who as long as he dwells among men, as long as he inspires their deeds, saves everything” (in Arendt 2006: 205). By way of analogy, anthropologists have always been going to what Plato would call a “god of beginnings,” with each generation finding a new name for that god to whom they devote their lives. But for this analogy to appear in fuller relief we must try to discern those moments when anthropologists actually decide to embark on journeys to “beginnings.” Such decisions typically mean exiting an old world, moving to a new world, finding a new dwelling, even if remaining ever restless. Such moments and movements involve anthropologists confronting, in a word, their dépaysement (de-dwelling). Balandier captured this sense in explaining how being “out of place” at home meant he had to find a place in “another world” away from Europe’s wars fought globally: “Anthropology has been for me the worlds of elsewhere. The western world no longer felt agreeable to me because there was this terrifying war” (Interview, May 2, 2015). To learn about the “elsewhere” that anthropologists seek outside of their unsettling life conditions, it may help to return to moments of the discipline’s inception as anthropologists remember it. It is perhaps in memory where we can discern that if there is one world that anthropologists have been collectively seeking, it would be the world of beginnings. Gellner provides us a starting example in holding that anthropology “was born of an attempt to use the present as an evidence of our past” (1988: 172). Anthropologists have turned this “return to the past” into a quest, a life quest at that, not merely a professional one. Anthropology has thus become the vehicle of a quest already assumed by its adherents into their human and thereby their own past, who then continue to search for what their discipline can bring to their lives. Three examples from anthropodom’s American tradition illustrate anthropology as the object of a personal quest, an arduous return “home,” to beginnings, “a consciousness” in the form of a truth gradually disclosing itself. First consider Powdermaker, who presents anthropology as a kind of homecoming, as enabling an understanding of her own human existence: “Anthropology was what I had been looking for without knowing it . . . . I had found a discipline which, more than any other I knew, provided an understanding of man” (1966: 33). Whether uncovering an understanding of “man,”

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humanity, or oneself, anthropology constitutes a search, a soul-search for daily subsistence, without its wanderers necessarily recognizing it. Next, Silverman allows us to see how Leenhardt’s effusive, that is, non-compartmentalized, religiosity surfaces in the kind of anthropology she, Wolf, and a host of generations have experienced: I [have] noticed a world move to careerism, [but] when I was in grad school, everybody was doing it for love, for the love of the discipline . . . . Anthropology is something one lives on a daily basis: I live it every day . . . [in] my family principles, which happen to coincide with anthropology. (Interview, December 3, 2014)

That people have “lived anthropology daily,” something that could also be said about religion, ethics, politics, or aesthetics, would hardly surprise anyone who knows the discipline’s history sufficiently, at least its biographical register. Finally, Geertz supplies insight as to why anthropology can provide nourishment like an epiousios (daily bread): “Of all the human sciences anthropology is perhaps the most given to questioning itself as to what it is and coming up with answers that sound more like worldviews and declarations of faith” (1995: 97) than like supposedly detached disciplinary arguments. If anthropology thus sustains its seekers with worldviews and faith declarations to live with and by, then the concept of beginnings seems to count as a vital nutritive source. For Lévi-Strauss, finding contact with, or at least steadily searching for, beginnings seems to render the anthropological mission salvific: “The anthropologist is the less able to ignore his own civilization and to dissociate himself from its faults in that his very existence is incomprehensible except as an attempt at redemption: he is the symbol of atonement” (1973: 389). In the context of his prelapsarian yearnings, Lévi-Strauss affirmed Plato’s aforementioned affirmation of beginnings in The Laws, holding that those who go to beginnings, who eat and commune with beginnings’ daily bread, namely anthropologists, are the ones who forge a path to redemption! Of course, one need not be supremely loyal, as Lévi-Strauss surmised he was, to a grandfather of French ethnology, Durkheim,26 to denote anthropology as a salvific repetition or return to “childhood,” 26 Lévi-Strauss writes: “I am probably more faithful than anyone else to the Durkheimian tradition” (1973: 59).

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a metonym for beginnings, whether one’s own, humanity’s, or the world’s entire. Even anthropologists dissenting from Durkheim’s lineage as to how to understand and where to locate “the social” have come to similar conclusions. For Augé, fieldwork is about recovering certain rhythms from childhood, where he, like Smedley, dreamed in Africa “to go somewhere far:” There was Africa that was some kind of a dream. I had this appetite to go and see somewhere . . . . I heard a lot of talk about distant countries when I was a child. This taste for “exoticism” existed in me. The desire to travel always had sway over me and I could not hide the desire for exoticism being very present within me, sustained by childhood readings . . . . I am certain that when my friend presented me with the possibility of leaving France to go abroad, it had awakened a childhood drive. (in Dhoquois 2008: 19)

Malinowski similarly spoke about anthropology as an epistemic space of return to and communion with beginnings, and fieldwork as an empyreal site where return and communion occur. In a biographical fragment, referring to himself in the third person, Malinowski identifies what led him to anthropology: “[It was] an enthusiasm for the exotic that led him at this time to desert the sober sciences . . . for the humanistic study of anthropology. It was not altogether a new interest; in his childhood, spent in the Carpathian Mountains, he had lived among the rude mountaineers and shepherds” (in Firth 2004: 43). If anthropology provided a space wherein Malinowski could return to his childhood, fieldwork served as the means of that return. To recover childhood does not necessarily mean to restore enchantment or repel pain, but rather to revisit pain, even if it takes one to one’s own Golgotha: suffering and even self-sacrifice. Early in his field diaries, Malinowski relays his torments: “I wake up feeling as if just taken down from a cross” (1989: 53). In those same diaries, he later takes us with him down into his dreams, deep into his thoughts about them day and night: Then I went for a walk and again wept. At night sad, plaintive, dreams, like childhood feelings. I dreamed about Warsaw . . . [e]verything permeated with Mother . . . [b]y morning drowned in sadness. Went out on the road and wept . . . sudden flashes of understanding, visions of the past. Life pierced with the arrow of grief, guilt, feelings, irretrievable things. Tiny details recollected: The linen Mother gave me when I left, continual memories and associations . . . . Many things I can’t

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look at—return to Poland, memories of last days . . . . Every small detail reminds me of Mother. My suits and my linen which she marked. Again, frightening thoughts . . . . My own death is becoming something infinitely more real to me. Strong feeling to go to mother, to join her in nothingness . . . . [M]y ambitions and appetites have a strong hold on me and tie me to life. I shall experience joy and happiness(?) and success and satisfaction in my work, but all this has become meaningless. The world has lost color. All the tender feelings of my childhood come back. (1989: 295–8)

When death marks its presence, when its reality becomes an actuality, when “nothingness” calls urgently, it becomes sensible to propose that the fieldwork experience and its attendant discipline emerge as sites for vindicating realities of invisibility in human existence. The very act of thinking, certainly as remembering things past or absent, rises to demand restoration of “the invisible” and not necessarily from religious motives.27 Thus not only missionaries, but anyone following Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss’s paradigmatic anthropologist, or even just plainly critical in their anthropological quest, dare to affirm their thinking’s involvement with the invisible. To start with perhaps a missionary, the almost obvious choice for illustrating the attention anthropological thought may give to the “invisible,” recall Leenhardt, who, according to Clifford, was primarily concerned with “what happened within the soul” of natives (1982: 133). This concern came first, prior to those concerns with exterior and visible changes (as with modest dress), even if he did not separate, we are told, attention to the “soul” from attention to vestments (Clifford 1982). Of course, it is not necessary to assume that the “invisible” as a category of thought is conducive only to those who seek faith, to those who want to trust in something or someone. It can also serve those who are learning to doubt and even mistrust. In an interview with California magazine, Laura Nader noted how students can even experience the “invisible” in class, before going to the field, as occurred in her “Controlling Processes” class at Berkeley, which interrogates how domination works: “That’s why they saw the course has changed their lives. Not because they have a dogma they’ve picked up from class, but because they have learned to see the invisible. They have learned to make the invisible visible” (in Hebdon 2013: 44). 27

See Hannah Arendt’s discussion on this point (2003: especially 165–80).

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Even if not questioning and criticizing domination in a deliberate way, but merely recovering lost beginnings, the “invisible” finds a legitimate place in ethnographic quests. Having learned from Marx, Freud, and the field of geology about the persistent elusiveness of truth and that true reality is never obvious, Lévi-Strauss (1973: 57–8) traced his method to Rousseau’s Confessions, without referring to Augustine’s antecedent and paradigmatic standing among French solitary walkers: “As for myself, I had gone to the ends of the earth to look for what Rousseau calls ‘the almost imperceptible stages of man’s beginning’” (1973: 316). So the immanent respect Rousseau retains for the concept of “beginnings,” albeit no longer a god as in its conceptual career in antiquity,28 and despite its illusiveness, spreads throughout anthropodom, whether within or outside the field. I learned from Nader about how for her fieldwork was a place for recovering beginnings through dreams. Because I encountered numerous anthropological trajectories into fieldwork out of relation to “couchwork” (psychoanalysis), I allowed myself to ask Nader about a likeness between these two domains. She responded: “In a way [fieldwork is like psychoanalysis] . . . if you are at all attentive while in the field . . . . I dreamt a lot in the field about when I was a kid. I mean you have dreams . . . . It was very interesting because what does that have to do with being in the Zapotec hills?” (Interview, December 5, 2014). For Nader it was attentiveness in the field, for her in Mexican mountains, that generated dreams, while for Lévi-Strauss attentiveness to anthropological knowledge generated visions. In reflecting on his own journey, he illustrates the ways both fieldwork and anthropology writ large embody a return to beginnings: Above all, [the anthropologist] asks himself questions: why he came here? . . . [W]hat exactly is the nature of anthropological research? . . . [D]oes it result from a more radical choice, which implies that the anthropologist is calling into question the system in which he was born and brought up? It was now five years since I had left France . . . . And here was I, trekking across desert wastes in the pursuit of a few pathetic remnants . . . . Did my decision express a deep-seated incompatibility with my social setting so that, whatever happened, I would inevitably live in a state of ever greater estrangement from it? 28 Janus, who gave his name to January, was the Roman god generally associated with beginnings, gates, transitions, endings, dualities, and time.

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Through a remarkable paradox, my life of adventure, instead of opening up a new world to me, had the effect rather of bringing me back to the old one . . . . [T]he men and the landscapes I had set out to conquer lost the significance I had hoped they would have for me . . . . [O]ther images were substituted which had been held in reserve by my past . . . . [W]hat came to me were fleeting visions of the French countryside I had cut myself off from, or snatches of music and poetry which were the most conventional expressions of a culture which I must convince myself I had renounced . . . . On the plateau of the Western Mato Grosso, I had been haunted for weeks, not by the things that lay all around me and that I would never see again, but by a hackneyed melody, weakened still further, by the deficiencies of my memory, the melody of Chopin’s Etude number 3, opus 10. (1973: 376–7)

Not only does the anthropologist live in the field haunted by personal dreams, visions, memories, and repetitions, but the labor of immersion ultimately yields knowledge that ignites memory in others. Like the anthropologist who finds in fieldwork a return to childhood, a community that an anthropologist studies may recover its own “childhood” with the aid of the resultant anthropological knowledge. Anthropological truth to the native self too is alethea (absence of lethe or “oblivion”), that is, truth in the sense of disclosure and remembrance. As with any truth aimed at disclosure, it unveils who the native had been or is becoming and along the way protects that native from lethe’s pestle, from oblivion. In the following example, alethea’s grace appears to reach beyond the observer to the observed. In 1978, Grand Chief Mus of New Caledonia told mourners in eulogizing Leenhardt: From what I know, the old pastor worked for [us] natives, especially in religion, customs and all. So much so that nowadays, for example, if we old ones know pretty well what customs, as they call it, is all about, it is because he sought out customs and inquired from old people, who were knowledgeable; he searched deep, deep down. Me, I’ve read his work and that’s how I know. And so I rediscover what our elders used to say, the ones who didn’t tell, and the ones who forgot to tell . . . . I’d hear about all this; but I forgot; but when I look again at his book, there I remember. (In Clifford 1982: 225)

Just because certain anthropologists have served as custodians of memory, Leenhardt among them, does not mean that anthropologists might not themselves forget. That anthropologists admit certain light waves from the theosphere into their thothically constructed dome

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does not nullify the fact that it was initially structured to block out those same rays, to seal away and fully forget the theosphere outside. While allowing—and seemingly not fully knowingly—some theospheric light to seep through, the dome still succeeds in obstructing any goings and comings that could perilously assault the reason that ultimately gives it its raison d’être. Sealing secular reason from the threats of the theosphere constitutes anthropology’s forgetfulness. It has forgotten that there is no inherently good reason for reason to be alienated from the theistic realm. Now that we have examined what else anthropology has done with theology, other than surpass it, how it has indeed preserved it, in Chapter 3 we look at what theology could further offer anthropology. “Hubal” unveils some ways in which theology could, as it were, “speak back” to anthropology, including identify anthropology’s idolatry.

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3 Hubal Idolatry in Anthropology

Upon visiting Lahore and the Taj Mahal, Claude Lévi-Strauss witnessed the destruction of “images.”1 He attributed this occurrence to Muslim “official attitudes” and to antagonisms arising out of “recent political and national implications” between the two nascent national populations making up the fledgling states of India and Pakistan (1973: 399). In appraising iconoclasm in the subcontinent, finding that idolatry “is still very much alive,” Lévi-Strauss provides its “exact meaning.” Along Augustinian lines he defines idolatry as: “the personal presence of the god in his image” (1973: 399). My concern lies neither with his definition’s accuracy nor its neutrality, rather I find his concern with it helpful for thinking about what counts as idolatry and about the ways we can employ it for a critique of anthropology’s entrapments.2 Indeed, idolatry might be “very much alive” in LéviStrauss’s own work. Consider an example of how idolatry may be “living” in the solutions Lévi-Strauss elaborates to a puzzling contradiction he locates at the quick of the anthropological vocation. As he formulates 1 Sounding distinctly hostile to Islam, Claude Lévi-Strauss observes that the Taj Mahal “remains a marble imitation of a draped scaffolding” within the “Moslem culture” that wants “to conceal rustic customs and the bigotry permeating Islamic moral and religious thought” (1973: 399, 401). 2 Roy Wagner points in a general way to anthropology’s entrapments in writing, “Culture is what you make it, though it poses the same kind of trap for those who would consider it as ‘real’ as any other concept” (1975: 156). My attention to the secular entrapments of anthropological concepts is not beyond Wagner’s ken; he states: “Definitions restore ‘clarity’ and security of commonplace secular reality” (1975: 157).

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it, this puzzle has anthropologists occupying a position of critic at home and conformist abroad, devaluing their natal society while valuing foreign ones. Noting this “fundamental inconsistency” (1973: 385), to resolve it Lévi-Strauss returns to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who taught him about “the principles which will allow us to construct a new form” (1973: 390).3 Although Lévi-Strauss introduces these principles without indexing their kind, he identifies what they do: enable a “rediscovering” of the “natural man” as a basis for “a theoretical model of human society” (1973: 392). Here is where we can witness Lévi-Strauss’s idolatrous anthropologic performance, in that he deifies “the social.” By presenting a model for “human conduct” conceivable outside of all time and all space, universal and eternal, as an a priori and sovereign category, Lévi-Strauss (1973: 392) regards “the social” as the locus of human multiplicity and redemption.4 It is through approaching the most remote and foreign forms of “the social” that we find out how we might dwell anew in the world. Among the tasks that “principles” of life in human society demand of the anthropologist is the rediscovery of the human form in its “immanent social state,” for mankind is “inconceivable outside society.” These principles implore anthropologists to “[use] all societies . . . to elucidate the principles of social life that we can apply in reforming our own customs” (1973: 392). By going to no less than “all societies,” including the most remote and most foreign, anthropologists may recognize even “in the poorest tribe, a confirmation of our own image and an experience, the lessons of which we can assimilate” (1973: 393). If in

3 It is perhaps surprising that Lévi-Strauss (1973: 390) locates this lesson specifically in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (1986 [1762]) to the extent that it arguably offers a variation on Thomas Hobbes’s earlier espousal and reconstruction of sovereignty as a paradigm for secular order in Leviathan (1985 [1651]). 4 Lévi-Strauss learned from Rousseau to search for societies from a “mythic age,” those lacking control over nature and eluding civilizational slavery only by “a cushioning of dreams” (1973: 391). Such societies bear the capacity to turn anthropologists into “agents of a silent world,” in a universe whose “deterministic laws” should have stayed “remote and awe-inspiring” rather than colonize thought (1973: 391). While these Rousseauian lessons seem to have entangled Lévi-Strauss with charges of mysticism leveled against his work, I suggest that idolatry, rather than mysticism, makes for a more relevant charge, all the more so since it remains unclear how to best account for his “conservatism sauvage” (Keck 2016: 917). Working with Lévi-Strauss’s own definition of idolatry, I attempt to locate in his imagination the domineering presence, via Rousseau, of sovereignty’s images.

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the theosphere, the foreign and remote Other is divinity, for the Rousseau-inspired Lévi-Strauss in anthropodom, “the poorest tribe” is in a sense the divinized Other. More fundamentally, in idolizing “the social,” this finite category becomes sovereign, singly and supremely capable of teaching us who we are and what we can still hope to be. Here is the crux of anthropology’s idolatry. Chapters 1 and 2 show anthropologists, first in their thothic efforts to seal theology away from their scientific, that is secular and sovereign, reason, then nevertheless preserving it in their discipline’s lexicon, its conceptual labor, and chiefly in its Eucharistic practice of ethnographic immersion. While both these chapters in some sense speak about theology, or more precisely about anthropology’s relation to it, the current chapter attempts to let theology speak to and about anthropology.5 If the discussions in “Thoth” and “Eucharist” serve to unveil anthropodom from within the dome of secular reason, this chapter proceeds with the work of unveiling from a place markedly outside it. The space for this unveiling lies somewhere exterior to the dome, out there in the theosphere, in order to make a certain critique possible, one drawing on theological language wherein idolatry stands as a preeminently useful category.6 This chapter’s purpose is thus to argue the case of idolatry in anthropology. From a particular theological eye, specifically one 5 It would be rash to conflate “letting theology speak,” as I do here, with the exercise of “political theology” as recently and commonly associated with Carl Schmitt (1986 [1922]). While I presume, as inquiry in the form of “political theology” commonly does, a conceptual insufficiency of the secular and therefore a certain complex relation it has with the theological, I am not directing my inquiry toward concerns for establishing and disputing legitimacy or historic authenticity of that relation’s products (such as concepts of modern state sovereignty). For helpful critical assessment of Schmittian performances of this exercise see Blumenberg 1985, especially chapter 8, and Agamben 2005, especially chapter 4. 6 It is rash to impugn to this critique an aggressive or condemnatory tone as commonly inherent to “idolatry” as a category of theistic critique. To do so would be to mirror the self-understanding of the modern age as a negation of theology. For example, see Hans Blumenberg, who holds: “The occasion of the talk of the legitimacy of the modern age does not lie in the fact that this age conceived of itself as conforming to reason and as realizing this conformity in the Enlightenment but rather in the syndrome of assertions that this epochal conformity to reason is nothing but an aggression (which it fails to understand itself as such) against theology, from which in fact it has in a hidden manner derived everything that belongs to it” (1985: 97). Rather idolatry—paradoxically approached from an immunological logic—may be the form of critique demanded for the vehement and vigilant protection of human frailty against encroachments of sovereignty.

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that emanates from the “knight of infinite resignation” (Kierkegaard (1983) [1843]: 27–53), namely Abraham—a paradigmatic figure in the history of monotheism who refused to adore (take as worthy of worship) anything other than God, not the moon, the sun, nor any sublunary idol—I am recognizing idolatry constituted as an epistemic confusion and a gratuitous ethical compromise as to who the other might be in a discipline committed to studying multiplicity. Hubal, an ancient Arabian god, stands here as a paradigm for the confusion and compromise about what counts as ends worthy of life’s devotion. Before explaining how this chapter forges a way to some of the contents and consequences of modern idolatry in anthropology, it is important to note that this exercise follows a logic anthropologists regularly apply: critically examining oneself from the standpoint of an other.7 If such a form of critical self-examination has enabled anthropologists to educate themselves (and their societies) about, for example, their self-alienation, then this chapter seeks to offer anthropology a dose of its own medicine. By anthropology examining itself through the other that its secular reason fears, invalidates, or simply ignores, perhaps it can also learn of its alienation from that other and concomitantly from itself. A primary critical tool employed by this other—heretofore banished theistic reason (and incidentally critique need not be anthropology’s only use of this reason)—for discerning due from undue allegiances has been idolatry. I essentially employ this category for examining the endeavor that is anthropology with the aim of revitalizing its stunted capacities of discernment. In other words, my argument ultimately aims to stimulate, not dismiss, the discipline, and specifically to enlarge its capacities for critique.

7 One could argue that this anthropological logic has been at work since the discipline’s inception with E. B. Tylor’s (1958 [1871]: 539) establishing of a “reformer’s science” for improving British society. Margaret Mead epitomizes it in framing her Coming of Age (1928) as a critique of patterns in white American families. This logic lives on in this statement issued by the European Association of Social Anthropologists (2015): “Anthropology can teach important lessons about the world and the global whirl of cultural mixing, contact and contestation—but it can also teach us about ourselves. Goethe once said that ‘he who speaks no foreign language knows nothing about his own.’ And although anthropology is about ‘the other,’ it is ultimately also about ‘the self.’ ”

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A WORKING SENSE OF IDOLATRY FOR A CRITIQUE OF ANTHROPOLOGY Idolatry can be a rather sweeping, and even blunt and polemical, instrument of critique, with all its features, faces, edges, and apparitions not necessarily suited to the task at hand. Used indiscriminately, idolatry’s capacities for conducting critique may be drained and its utility deformed into sheer condemnation. We must thus employ this instrument patently, carefully, and incisively. While idolatry has a history, an etymology, and epistemic and political usages as old as monotheism, I here work with a sense of idolatry as a confusion about ends worthy of life’s devotion, and more specifically where “man [is] his own final end” (Kant 1996 [1784]: 3). In order to position the particular sense of idolatry guiding my argument, I first review general, diverse, and historic formulations of idolatry by Western thinkers across centuries. Identifying the ancient Egyptians as practicing idolatry, Augustine holds that idolatry is about “changing the truth of God into a lie and worshipping and serving a creature rather than the Creator” (1993: 117). Some fourteen centuries later in waiting for God, refusing the lies and compromises that veil the truth of human finitude, Simone Weil defines as idolatrous any act that “labels something else with the name of God” (2009 [1951]: 139). One need not come from a Catholic or even a religious tradition to hold this understanding of idolatry. As a rhetorical tool of criticism, idolatry famously serves in Francis Bacon’s 1620 Novum Organum: “Idols and false notions . . . will again meet and trouble us in [developing a science of nature], unless mankind when forewarned guard themselves with all possible care against them.” Perhaps even more famously, irreligious Marx puts the category of “idolatry” to work in criticizing money as the jealous God of Israel, calling it an alien god worshiped as a fetish (Halbertal and Margalit 1992: 243). Also within the Marxist critical tradition, specifically the Frankfurt School, Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1997 [1944]) articulate idolatry as finite values posing as though they were infinite. And quite radically, as an anti-Christian wanting to promote through his anti-philosophy a “life-affirming” paganism, Friedrich Nietzsche uses “idolatry” in his critique of modern morality and by

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extension Christianity.8 Moreover, Nietzsche equates scientific ideas with idols he wants to shatter in resonance with the Abrahamic act at monotheism’s foundation: “No new idols are created by me . . . overthrowing idols (my word for ideals)—that comes closer to being part of my craft” (1989: 217–18).9 Finally, as though calls resounded from nearby Germany, where Nietzsche was on his way to take on Zarathustra’s speech, or from ancient Ur where Abraham hammered down his clan’s idols,10 Ludwig Wittgenstein articulates idolatry in postulating his own discipline’s promise: “All that philosophy can do is to destroy idols. And that means not making any new ones, say out of the ‘absence of idols’ ” (1922: 244). Amos Funkenstein (1986) holds that ideas constitute science while ideals chart its goals. In other words, ideals operate like Immanuel Kant’s “regulative principles.” Moreover, ideals of science “express the ultimate criteria of rationality of their time” (Funkenstein 1986: 18). In unveiling idolatry, we can recognize where “ideas” have become not only “ideals” but also idols—even if contested—inspiring lifelong devotions and abiding commitments. These diverse formulations of idolatry seem to share an enduring common denominator across theistic and philosophical traditions: dedication to an image of truth rather than to truth itself. For the purpose of the current argument, idolatry stands as a “category of criticism” (Halbertal and Margalit 1992: 250), useful for identifying a number of forms of “false worship” or misplaced fidelity. In my employment of idolatry, I largely, but not piously, draw upon Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit’s definition of idolatry as turning a “non-absolute” into “a god-like being,” granting it an “ultimate value” (believing in it, worshiping it), rendering it “absolute” (overriding, final, demanding), and upholding it as the ends of a life of devotion (1992: 245). I use idolatry to recognize: conflating things finite with the infinite; ignoring or demeaning anything that might defy sovereign human reason; and viewing as given things

8 I say “radically” in comparing Friedrich Nietzsche to less damning critics of Christianity (such as Machiavelli and Rousseau) who too exhibit a preference for revived paganism as part of their critiques (see Halbertal and Margalit 1992, Beiner 1993). 9 Nietzsche moreover holds: “There are more idols than realities in the world” (1968: 465). 10 See narrations of idol smashing by Ibrahim/Abraham, for example, in the Prophets chapter in the Qur’an 21:50–70 and Genesis Rabbah chapter 38.

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fleeting and transient, thereby bestowing sovereignty where none applies. Conversely, to repudiate idolatry is to refuse compromised, shrunken, conceited forms of “worship” or life devotion. Set to the tunes of Plato’s allegory, idolatry amounts to contentment with images, shadows, and reflections rather than seeking “the sun” (i.e., truth) outside the cave. What I wish to recoup from this tour of idolatry’s formulations, modern and pre-modern, philosophical and anti-philosophical, theistic and even atheistic, is a particular sense of idolatry active in this chapter: conflating in thought and in action finite ends with infinite ones, whereupon the former pretends to the latter. My particular interest in idolatry here is epistemic (inquiring into forms of reasoning) and rests upon what it does to ethical faculties: confuses, obfuscates, obscures, and occludes the recognition of a greater order of reality, whether by substituting shrunken versions or altogether untruths or by luring attention away with distracting vistas. In undertaking this exercise, I wish to suggest ways that theology could be more than a “dialogue-partner” with anthropology to help anthropologists better appreciate other people’s religions, by furnishing tools for critiquing the anthropological enterprise constituted as anthropodom. To recognize idolatry in anthropodom, constituted as a particular disciplinary application of secular sovereign reason,11 means in part to recognize ways in which modern anthropology builds itself upon false worship, misplaced trust, and categorical conflation when taking the Cultural (or its categorical cognates) to be all that there is to multiplicity in and of the world. In invoking idolatry for a critique of anthropology, I aim at honing a discernment within, not a pruning of, the discipline. Notwithstanding the diversity of forms for practicing anthropology and the salutary solutions these forms may offer to diverse ailments in modern society, idolatry helps us see that they all invariably rest upon a finite category confused as infinite, encountering the other as ultimately and singularly Cultural. Cultural thus becomes at once

11 In calling for enhancing an experience of truth as alethia, “unconcealedness of beings,” as opposed to “agreement with what is” or as “correctness in representation,” Martin Heidegger depicts the ways reason operates as sovereign: “Reason established a special system for its saying, for the logos as declarative prediction, the logic of reason is itself the organization of the domination of purposeful self-assertion” (1975: 36, 52, 33).

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the grounding (locus) and the form of infinity for humanity, anthropologically conceived, turning this other into all that there is to observe. Anthropodom thus confers on human finitude, culturally comprehended, an autonomy and self-sufficiency—and thus sovereignty—with deleterious consequences. A vigilant anthropology should recognize “the costs” of a thus absented discernment, of the confusion sovereignty effects on reigning ideas and ideals in the discipline as an ethico-epistemic enterprise. In an attempt to name this confusion and the compromises it affects, this chapter invokes a particular false god, Hubal, a preIslamic idol housed in the Kaaba until the seventh-century advent of Islam. His name’s supple etymology offers particularly apt descriptors for the form of idolatry employed in this critique. In the misty beginnings of ancient Semitic languages, the root h.b.l. gives a name to a god of the moon, rain, war, and the unknown. From the same root in today’s Arabic is the verb habala or ahbala, which refers to losing one’s mind and discernment, becoming “dumbstruck,” whether by grief over the loss of a mother or child or by falling in love. In adjectival form, ahbal can describe someone who, out of disturbed states, seeks out and stays near the god of divination, Hubal, to reach a state of clarity and tranquility. In demotic Arabic today, it also conveys an insult akin to “dufus” in English slang. As a noun, hubbaal refers to the vapor and steam clouds that can obstruct clear vision. In the opening of Ecclesiastics (1:2) in the Hebrew Bible, hebel habalim (generally translated as “vanity of vanities”) refers to things fleeting, nonsensical, and transient.12 Claiming neither lines of causality nor succession among the derivatives of h.b.l., my brief foray into its enduring plasticity aims at accentuating Hubal’s powerful semantic possibilities for connoting a deficient discernment. As a god, Hubal, performatively and implicitly, sums up this chapter’s working definition of idolatry as a critical pronouncement on the human mind’s confusion as to the aims of a life of devotion. Hubal in this chapter thus refers to a paradigmatic form of idolatry. More specifically, it connotes its effects as a ruinous confusion in 12

Across the Mediterranean, related terms appear in Greek, wherein haplos (απλος) can connote simpleton, and its derivative haploikos (απλοικος) simplistic and naive. In contemporary French maboul, imported through North African immigrants, is a way to say “looney.”

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which the finite stands for the infinite. When Hubal proverbially hubals, he confuses into performing this conflation. In falling prey to a certain idolatry, anthropology has thus been huballed, that is confused, as a result of its dedication to (and hence deification of) idols of sovereignty (Reason, Culture, and State, to name a few). Furthermore, the deified concept of Culture in anthropodom, immuring multiplicity within “the cultural” (or extended to “the natural”) manifests a disciplinary dedication that is inseparable from serving idols of modern sovereignty in various guises. As reviewed earlier, arguments about modern secular idolatries have been made by thinkers from Bacon to Wittgenstein, yet here I am looking at its particular presence, its huballing presence, in anthropodom: the discipline of anthropology caught in the pandemic grip of secular sovereign reason. I aim to first show how anthropodom has fallen prey to the huballing idol of Culture, which takes its place among the pantheon of idols of the State, quintessentially ruled by the paradigm of secular sovereignty modeled after the divine as sovereign.13 Of course, other idols may also hold sway over anthropodom, and certainly over the modern university and modernity writ large, but they must be the subject of other inquiries. This chapter’s focus must remain on those idols to which anthropodom is devoted as a sovereignty-promoting enterprise. Before proceeding any further, it is important to stress that my point in identifying idolatry in anthropology does not aim at a restitution of the secular mind’s capacities for having faith in God; I am not using the term idolatry ultimately for theological purposes. Idolatry, whose specific iteration I convey through the notion of huballing, is strategically useful here for arriving at a “philosophical” comprehension of this discipline, for recognizing epistemic conflations and ethical entrapments in anthropodom.

13

On the genesis of the leviathan as a symbol for the very soul of the political body (D’Entrèves 1967: 105–6) as a paradigm for governance Hobbes writes: “As if every man should say to everyman, I Authorize and give up Right of Governing my selfe to this Man, or to this Assembly of Men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorize all his Actions, in like manner. This done, the Multitude so united in one Person, is called COMMON-WEALTH, in latine CIVITAS. This is the Generation of that great Leviathan, or rather to speak more reverently of that Mortall God, to which wee owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defense” (1985 [1651]: 227).

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My argument assumes, as already noted in the Introduction, a basic validity to Nietzsche’s diagnosis of modernity as a “reduction of the divine” (1968: 584) and its utility for understanding the genesis and operation of modern anthropology. Likewise, articulating entrapments of the Enlightenment as a critique of religion in the service of reason’s sovereignty, of which modern anthropology is but an instance, recall how Adorno and Horkheimer draw attention to the reduction accompanying its hermetic yet voracious reason seeking a sovereignty of its own where: “Nothing at all may remain outside, because the mere idea of outsideness is the very source of fear” (1997 [1944]: 16). I believe it is yet to be sufficiently examined to what extent Franz Steiner’s anatomical understanding of voracious reason’s fear, manifest in his ethnographic concerns with concepts of danger and taboo, remain part of an enduring anthropological response to this modern shrinkage.14 Even trenchant critics of Nietzsche lend support to his diagnosis of the reduction of, immurement to, and inaccessibility of the divine attending the regnant exercise of secular reason. For example, its limitations notwithstanding, Charles Taylor’s reading of the background of our secular age contains many useful points for understanding what modern anthropology has been attempting to accomplish within today’s condition of modern contraction. He holds that this age belongs to an “exclusive humanism” bearing “great dangers, which remain very unexplored in modern thought” (2005: 16). In some sense, this chapter responds to Taylor’s disquiet by examining a particular facet of exclusive humanism’s dangers. However, my task is not simply to join the amply accomplished one, nearly a century old, of repudiating humanism (see Geroulanos 2010). Nor is it to follow the charge typically associated with “political theology” bent on excavating cordoned-off recesses of secular reason (see Blumenberg 1985, Schmitt 1986 [1922], Agamben 2005, Kahn 2011). Rather, I wish to demonstrate ways in which anthropology, a specific inflection of humanism, constitutes idolatry. I also wish to draw attention to ways this idolatry’s performance poses a danger of 14 Horrified by a civilizing process that wants to control nature and erases along the way distance from danger, Franz Steiner writes: “Whoever realizes [that civilization is the march of danger into the heart of creation] lives in a night of despair. It is only lightened up by one guiding star, the star of dual teaching: of man who is created in His image [and] of society whose boundaries are immutably set within the community” (in Mack 2001: 147).

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epistemic complicity with what I call “sovereignscape”: the landscape of the human condition wherein the paradigm of sovereignty stands sovereign (as it does in ethics, epistemology, and politics, for example). I argue that dedication to sovereignscape poses a most notable danger for anthropology’s injunction to undertake unfettered inquiry into multiplicity. It is in remaining oblivious to the intellect’s fettering by the sovereignty paradigm that poses a danger, huballing anthropology into registering multiplicity within only a finite realm, as quintessentially cultural. In other words, the widest range of difference that anthropology identifies falls fully within the realm of “culture,” or within an equally finite consonant category. Moreover, the most that anthropodom’s secular language can possibly pronounce about reason is that it is always cultural, culturally specific to be exact. So long as anthropology persists in only identifying reason’s cultural particularities, it is invariably hobbled when it comes to breaking free of reason’s claims to sovereignty and thus fails to lift the veil shielding its inherent fragility, irrespective of this or that culture. To recognize not simply the cultural specificity, but also the fragility of reason, we must first contend with the fact that “the cultural” cannot possibly exhaust all forms of alterity, which we next explore with the aid of theistic reason’s category of idolatry.

THE HUBALLING OF ANTHROPODOM At last delving into this particular critique of anthropology, let us again turn to the keen philosophical observer of anthropological observations who opened this chapter, Lévi-Strauss. He provides useful starting points for unveiling dangers to anthropological knowledge when huballed by the culture concept, polyvalent and persistent critiques of it notwithstanding, for certain critiques of an idol may count among its very powers to mollify critique. Pointing out how anthropological knowledge remains perilously ensnared in the driving premises of its enabling modern condition, Lévi-Strauss warns of the “harmful collaboration” between anthropology and travelers’ exhibitions (1973: 41). It is Western society’s “self-delusions” that drive their interest in native lives and artifacts, self-delusions that carry a host of modern symptoms.

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A proliferating and overexcited civilization has broken the silences of the seas once and for all. The perfumes of the tropics and the pristine freshness of human beings have been corrupted by a busyness with dubious implications, which mortifies our desires . . . . Our great Western civilization, which has created the marvels we now enjoy, has only succeeded in providing them at the cost of corresponding ills. The first thing we see as we travel around the world is our own filth thrown into the face of mankind . . . . Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization. (Lévi-Strauss 1973: 37–8)

Lévi-Strauss’s observations furnish my argument with two sets of assumptions: (a) his charges of “corruptions” and “ills” leveled at Western interest in non-Western life remain relevant today; and (b) anthropodom has yet to sufficiently excise itself from them. Perhaps the famous antinomy Lévi-Strauss’s “neolithic intelligence” establishes between “mythical” and “historical” societies can provide one entry point for beginning to understand the huballing of anthropodom: for seeing how idolatry lives in his work and in anthropology writ large. Central and fundamental to all work within anthropodom, and hence an apt place for embarking on this examination, is the concept of culture. I here examine the ways in which the concept of culture arrives, not merely as an ideal, but also as an idol and a huballing one at that. To recognize the huballing engendered by the culture concept, insofar as it stands as an ideal-idol, is to attend to anthropology’s triumph in shrinking the unlimited Other to human variability— nowadays, after the ontological turn, enlarged to animals and even “things” like trees—invariably within the realm of the finite. For all the amazing capacities to doubt that anthropology inhabits and instigates, there is hardly any room left for a healthy skepticism toward the accomplishment that is Culture and its conceptual surrogates. An anthropologist committed to serving Culture as the ceiling of multiplicity—even when reconciled with nature—is arguably huballed by that concept so articulated. Two keen disciplinary observers guide us into the “godly” status of the Culture concept, duly charged with transcendental tasks: to regulate the discipline’s rationality; ensure that it conforms to its secular age’s mandate even through critique; keep it coherent; ward off its fragmentation; and fashion a unity for it in its image (see Eggan 1974: 2–5). Already in 1932, Edward Sapir sensed and faulted as misleading just this godly status, speaking about the “metaphysical locus to

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which culture is generally assigned” (in Eggan 1974: 4). Some sixty years later, Marshall Sahlins (1999) reaffirmed this metaphysical standing. Even though anthropologists had not long before been exhorted to “write against culture,”15 Sahlins identifies how adored Culture has persisted even as its careers have undergone changes over generations: “So nowadays all culture is power. It used to be everything that maintained the social solidarity. Then for a while everything was economic or adaptively advantageous. We seem to be on a great spiritual quest for the purpose of cultural things” (1999: vi). Keeping this “spiritual quest” in mind, we can understand why any endeavor to dismantle the unity bestowed on the discipline by this “god” can be called “unwrapping the sacred bundle,” as it is by a wellknown text proposing to do just that (Segal and Yanagisako 2005). So with sacredness, spirituality, and metaphysical powers attributed to Culture, how have anthropologists served this idol? First, it may behoove us to verify the fact that Culture has been served. As a god, even if contested, Culture and its huballing apparitions (man, humankind, human diversity, and diversity of any kind) have made the discipline of anthropology an object of devotion, service, and the offering of entire lives. For many in anthropodom, speaking of devotion to the Culture concept, anthropology’s premise and promise of emancipation, is to engage in a truism, albeit a somewhat anachronistic one, which may require only a few reminders to be recognized as such. Theodora Kroeber notes about her husband, Alfred, “culture was his religion, [in] that in culture he found the commitment and faith which another person finds in religion” (1970: 234). When Hortense Powdermaker (1966: 297) criticized positivism in ethnographic methods she saw it as amounting to “naive worship of methodology.” Finally, recall how Margaret Mead’s “devotion” to anthropology was inspired by that of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, in whom she saw a model for a discipline’s capabilities for excellence in “serving mankind” (in Modell 1984: 144). Anthropologists’ devotion to their discipline has not come unrequited. Their love for it and for its pivotal concepts returns to embrace and inspire them. About Culture’s enduring effect

15 I here allude to Lila Abu Lughod’s (1991) essay “Writing Against Culture” and other works that go further to declare the very concept of culture defunct (e.g., Barth 2007).

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Eric Wolf writes: “The concept of unlimited human variability . . . gave many people the feeling that their own lives could be recut upon other patterns, that new different possibilities were in the air” (1974: 23). Alexander Lesser notes about his teacher Boas that he had an “intense interest in nature” with “an open mind, without religious preconceptions or inhibitions” and designated as “real happiness” having membership in humanity as an indivisible whole, being absorbed in humanity’s oneness (1981: 12). If for a theistic mind, true happiness lies in a world beyond this one, in the unseen or in a life to come, for Boas there seems to have been no beyond, no life to live other than one devoted to humanity. Hence for him and for others in anthropodom, redemption lies in the here and now, with humans. And if one has faith then it is faith in humanity. Raymond Firth attests that Bronisław Malinowski, “had faith in humanity, not a religious faith, but a faith in the value of human knowledge, intelligence, honesty, friendship, qualities which no judgment of history or of anthropology has yet shown to be irrelevant to the meaning of life” (1988: 37). Thus we see how, in consonance with modern reason, out of respect for the sovereignty paradigm, neither Boas nor Malinowski nor Wolf admitted a reality or a validity to any truth superseding humanity’s adjudication, thus restricting the sensorium of their intelligence to only that which it could perceive as reasonable, esteeming only humanity with the highest aspiration. While between two globally fought European wars, Malinowski expressed faith in humanity, Sidney Mintz’s agitation against the US war in Vietnam followed from it being “the highest good.” And anthropology was charged with helping the world recognize that good: I continue to think that people have difficulty understanding the fundamental nature of humanity, what it is to be human . . . . I think we do have to help people understand what does make us one species, and people don’t want to look at that . . . . You have to keep telling people that, naked savages are as human as they are . . . . I don’t think that people even to this day have grasped the significance of thirteen generations of slavery and that ended so badly, so badly without any real concession at all to their humanity . . . . Well there is not a higher good than humanity in the sense that I don’t think we come to the world good or bad. I don’t believe in the supernatural at all myself, I am an atheist . . . .

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Because the world [is] the way it is this is a very radical lesson . . . . What you are teaching [students] is that it does not matter what color they have, what religion they are. It is humanity that we have to identify with. We are the only species that are like that . . . . I have a creed, everyone is entitled to a philosophy, and it does for me a place for religion. (Sidney Mintz, Interview, December 5, 2014)

An atheist, disbelieving in “the supernatural” as a devoted citizen of the Enlightenment, Mintz banned it from the sensorium of his intelligence, so that he could see the world “the way it is.” Such was his philosophy, founding his worldview, taking a place in his life that he speculated for others is occupied by religious tradition. He posited, as does anthropodom generally, that humans have a quintessential self-referential attribute: they recognize their own humanity. In other words, humans’ ultimate striving must aspire to knowing who they are within a sovereign realm referring back to themselves: humanity. As a god, Humanity (or Humankind, or “Man”) regulates both life and knowledge. It sets ideals for the ends of living and knowing and adjudicates as to which among them best deserve anthropologists’ allegiance. Humanity further exhibits divine attributes given by monotheism of oneness and indivisibility. For example, Paul Rivet, who admired and worked with Boas out of shared concerns over vanishing Indian history, rising state racism, and the importance of safeguarding ethnic pluralism among scientists, claims: “Humanity is an indivisible whole, not only in space, but in time as well” (in Gourarier 2008: 6).16 Even in moments of apparent humility, the greatest distance a secular anthropologist sees—taking anthropological knowledge to its furthest edges—permits the view that it is Nature, and Nature alone, that possibly exceeds our comprehension. Again, we hear from Lévi-Strauss: “I am increasingly imbued with the feeling that the cosmos, and the place of man in the universe, surpasses and will always surpass our understanding” (in Eribon 1988: 14). Thus, while there may be limits as to what human intelligence can grasp, they lie only within Nature—the cosmos in which “man” has a place. The unified cosmos, and more importantly unified “man,” is a precept crucial to anthropodom. In his seminal textbook, Anthropology, Wolf (1974: 95) articulates how “man” is anthropology’s subject 16

See Laurière 2008 for a discussion of Paul Rivet and Franz Boas’s friendship.

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matter and “organizing principle.” This subject matter has become so elevated in anthropodom that it is expected to perform a task deeply associated with theology insofar as it is a science of God: integrate inquiries and connect their diverse domains.17 Recall how in reasondom, Kant bestowed such powers of connectivity upon artists, outside of science’s purview, since only their modern secular endeavors are capable of linking aesthetics with ethics, and, ever so dimly, with knowledge as well (Milbank 2006: 124). For some of anthropology’s dome-dwellers, a turn to the aesthetic has enabled a connectivity secularly denied, but again in ways that serve Man’s and Culture’s status as gods. Mead attests that Benedict developed some kind of ganze approach to culture, understood and lived as a whole and as a holistic source of flourishing for mind and soul. Culture for Benedict did what a work of art, according to Martin Heidegger (1975), is supposed to do: enable truth’s revelation.18 Thus, for the attentive seeker, Culture reveals truth through its power as one integrated whole: “Now as [Benedict] learned what a culture is, she came to feel that it was possible to view a primitive culture holistically, much as works of art are viewed in our culture, as something to be ‘discovered’ . . . that came to be an integrated whole” (Mead 2005 [1974]: 19). So even when anthropologists contest and express concern about Culture’s conceptual ascendancy in the discipline, and offer instead what sounds to them like a different idol, say Humankind or even Nature, their adoration remains steadfast, as does their attribution of unity to the adored. For example, in taking note of attributions made to Humanity—considered a moral improvement over the object initially identified for anthropology as “Man”—as indivisibly comprehensive, singular, even impenetrable, French anthropologist Germain Tillion (2009: 7) denotes it her file rouge de fidelite, that is, as the organizing principle guiding her fidelity in life, both inside and outside her profession. While Humanity appears to be one of the Culture idol’s apparitions, there are others, a major one being Diversity. Like the apparitions of Hubal as Culture and Humanity, anthropologists have faithfully

17 Recall how Eric Wolf regards anthropology as “less subject matter than a bond between subject matters” (1974: 88). For their understanding of theology as an “integrative” form of inquiry, see Newman 1968: 46–50 and MacIntyre 2011: 17. 18 In Poetry, Language, Thought, Heidegger contends: “Beauty is one way in which truth occurs as unconcealedness” (1975: 56).

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adored Diversity, served it, and upheld it as the ultimate object of devotion. In return, Diversity seems to have united them and dispensed a certain kind of happiness. As with any idol, it has drawn devotees into a huballed, that is misplaced, trust and devotion, for after all, Diversity remains in and of this world. The words anthropologists devote to Diversity help reveal their allegiance’s idolatry. Explaining the origin of French anthropology, anthropologist and scientific director of the Museum for European and Mediterranean Civilizations in Marseille, Zeev Gourarier, notes: “Ethnology is, par excellence, a school of reasoning at the service of diversity in knowledges and cultures” (2008: 8). Serving Diversity not only offers anthropologists unity in their quest, but also the very foundation of their own unity, the condition of possibility for their community. In adoring this idol, anthropologists define their creed, setting themselves apart from the rest of the world. In turn, its votaries receive distinction, helping to constitute their sense of self and other, and that other is inevitably “cultural.” By masking other registers of reality, Diversity becomes a supreme divinity and redeemer. As Nietzsche presciently sees, Diversity is a modern mask to be donned and adored based on faith in its redeeming power.19 Joining him in scrutinizing undetected enslavements and entrapments of modern forms of freedom, Walter Benjamin (1968: 254) reminds us that people’s image of redemption is “indissolubly bound up” with their image of happiness. For its devotees in anthropodom, Diversity liberates the world and enables its preservation. By valuing Diversity, anthropology even saves the world and all of humanity from infernal aloneness, as Emmanuel Terray explained: I believe that what anthropology could give the world is an awareness (la conscience) of its diversity and the limitless richness of that diversity in a certain way. But it can also remind the world at some point that this diversity is precious and justifies that one devotes much effort to preserving it . . . . Lévi-Strauss concluded with a nice formula consisting of the statement that the only misfortune that could really strike a society is that of being alone. Yet one is alone if everyone is like you. I wish to say, if everyone is alike, then they [all] are alone. (Interview, September 22, 2014)

19 Nietzsche holds: “We will choose the mask as supreme divinity and as redeemer” (in Haar 1998: 167).

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Some anthropologists have gone beyond the diversity of humanity to find salvation in a greater Diversity encompassing the animal world. For examples, we need only to recall Rousseau’s (in Leiris 1992: 229)20 wish to be tied to a dryad’s tree and Lévi-Strauss’s (Loyer 2015: 7) to speak with birds, which have taken scholarly form in their disciple’s, Anne-Christine Taylor’s, dedication to animals, the destination of her quest toward radical alterity: I loved animals and always have, and was an avid animal collector. My mother, having been brought up on Rousseauist [sic] principles, firmly adhered to the idea that one should not teach children to be afraid of animals. So I would pick up snakes, for example, and keep them in my room . . . . I have never been touched by the wing of transcendence, and have never felt the need for any religious practice or attitude. The multifarious [natural] world is enough to keep me happy. (Macfarlane Interview, May 4, 2015)

As the dispenser of ultimate anthropological happiness, Diversity and other conceptual apparitions of Culture thus serve as sole redeemer, outside of which devotees will not find contentment. Upholding them as ultimate amounts to a huballed anthropology: confusing bounded for unbounded and finite for infinite, being blinded to inherent fragility and precariousness, and holding as supreme the very reason that brought this discipline into being. To venture beyond Diversity’s finitude in cultures of all and any sort (including the cultures of nature) is to betray this idol, to trespass into dangerous zones beyond reason’s purview. In regions where reason is not sovereign, one sojourns at one’s own risk of defilement and insanity. When, for example, an anthropologist studies natives who believe, then demonstrating reasons behind their beliefs’ apparent “unreasonableness” falls within anthropological reason’s adjudication, whereas an anthropologist herself believing risks transgressing that very reason. Apparent irrationality is out there to be explained by the “rational” anthropological mind, yet how just that mind itself might be tethered to certain irrationalities eludes consideration. Sydel Silverman told me: 20 Rousseau expresses this wish in his Confessions: “J’ai souvent regrett qu’il n’existât pas de dryades, c’eut infailliblement ete parmi ells que j’aurais fixe mon attachement” (in Leiris 1992: 229).

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The whole understanding that we have [is] being part of nature, in an evolutionary sense, of understanding diversity, the fact that we understand that there are all these different ways of thinking, when in fact the rest of the world is indifferent to, or in denial of this diversity, of the legitimacy of diversity . . . . Most people you tell them about New Guinea and [they say] “Oh, they are interesting savages, or dangerous savages, or they are irrelevant as savages.” But what anthropology does is to understand and enter into other worlds and understand diversity as different ways of being human and that they are all of interest and that they are legitimate. You know the anthropological view that we try to teach students in the first course they ever take . . . but that is definitely something that anthropologists share among themselves and becomes the glue of the community. And I think that part is still true even with the times when so many young people are studying their own society, not doing fieldwork, not getting direct experience of encountering others. (Interview, December 3, 2014)

With its unifying and all-encompassing power, Diversity succeeds in banishing other kinds of others, those who may surpass the human and “the natural.” Diversity’s apparitions can serve as wellsprings of both happiness and misery. For many an anthropological fate, happiness and misfortune derive from the abundance or scarcity of diversity, whether human, animal, or natural. Recalling his experiences outside France, first at a public school in Gloucestershire called Leckhampton Court and later on in the Middle East, Philippe Descola noted: This first experience of another system was informative, not yet to become an anthropologist, but to enjoy the diversity of the world . . . . I was fortunate enough to have early editions of Jules Verne illustrated by the same person, so there was a porosity for me between novels and the accounts of travel in faraway places. When I started travelling in the Near East it was as though some of these illustrations had come alive. I remember waking in a bus in central Anatolia and seeing the minarets in a village and a caravan of camels, and I really had the impression that I had entered into one of those etchings. So very early on I had enjoyed the spectacle of the world and its diversity. (Macfarlane Interview, February 3, 2015)

As an idol for anthropodom, Diversity turns a deaf ear to the infinite, thus silencing ways of knowing wherein human reason does not

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stand sovereign, despite anthropology’s recognition and appreciation of such diverse ways of knowing among peoples it studies. Even defending reason’s diversity rationally, unsettling claims to secular reason’s universality is not equal to probing its oddity. Questioning the extent of its jurisdiction does not equal questioning its antecedent claims to legitimacy. Furthermore, adored as an idol, Diversity shrinks anthropologists’ radar to its existence in only finite forms and registers of reality. Thus all the diversity that is left for anthropologists to recognize (race, class, gender, ethnicity, or even animality) lies within a radius that reason, sovereign and secular, can recognize. And out of the diverse kinds of reason that can and do exist, the particular one of secular reason appears most at home within the political form that has become the modern embodiment of sovereignty: the state. Anthropologists have settled for their particular exercise of reason within state-condoned bounds to the extent that they constitute their object of inquiry as an ultimately cultural other even when mobilizing this exercise to study and vindicate other kinds of reason, such as those remaining less indebted to the state than theirs. And of course Culture—celebrated and contested, heralded and rivaled all the same—has functioned as a modern academic idol. It hubals anthropologists’ rational ways of inquiring into God (wherein reason is unnecessarily alienated from revelation) and in so doing also hinders their endeavors to know themselves. This discussion of anthropology’s idolatry thus far attends to its adoring of idols in three among multiple apparitions: Culture, Humanity, and Diversity. As ideals and idols (not merely ideas) these concepts have huballed the discipline. While furnishing anthropologists with a sense of happiness and redemption, bestowing wholeness to their lives and a certain integrity and integration to their inquiry, even a sense of chosen-ness as a professional community, these idols have huballed their sense of other and their sense of reason, for both the cultural other and reason must conform to the superseding idol of sovereignty. All that anthropodom can legitimately “see” (that is, study) is all that the concept of culture allows it to see, for there is nothing beyond, above, nor deeper than culture and its cognates. And finally, all that there is with which to legitimately see multiplicity is a singular form of reason, sovereign over all reason and beholden to the sovereign state.

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FIDELITY TO THE IDOL OF THE STATE Taking seriously Nietzsche’s pronouncements on the state—that it is a powerful modern formation born out of deicide, a “new idol,” and a place “where the slow suicide of all is called ‘life’” (1997: 46)—may help us assess anthropology’s service to this idol, notably the extent to which service to Culture, Man, and Diversity subsumes submission to it. Perhaps then we can bear witness to anthropodom’s commitment to living and knowing within the state, to its adherence to boundaries that permit only a shrunken study of the Other, and to the ways it participates in the “slow suicide” masquerading as life among others. Though not known as a scholar of the modern state, Lévi-Strauss once again comes to our aid by pointing to just this deleterious transcendence through his dramatic—not his academic—tome, presciently referring to a divinized state police who “can see and hear everything without raising suspicion” (1973: 378). Talal Asad (2015) also assists us in perceiving state idolatry, in calling for a recognition and critical examination of the ways certain secular formations have become transcendent, rather than merely negate transcendence, including “the state,” “free speech,” and “the market.” Indeed, the transcendence anthropology has cut for its rationality and its object of study in order to operate within the modern secular university also abides by the omnipresent modern state, a complex whose epistemic residence in the discipline’s basic assumptions and ideals warrants probing, not mere acceptance, and inviting, dare I say, “anthropological curiosity,” rather than reflexive conformity. Made in the state’s image, even when taking a demonstrable role of adversary, anthropological reason follows that of the state in that both claim sovereignty for their ideals-idols. This then is epistemic idolatry. Perceiving it does not simply involve focusing on how anthropologists practically serve the state with varying degrees of publicity in this or that particular project.21 Just as with “the secular” in 21 Commenting on anthropological involvement in World War II, Anne-Christine Taylor attests: “American anthropologists had also been recruited: Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Ruth Benedict, etc. Their job was to devise techniques of psychological warfare. Apparently, Gregory Bateson was endlessly inventive but highly impractical” (Macfarlane Interview, May 4, 2015). Her testimony serves as a reminder that such a mode of idol-serving exists as recently as anthropologists’ involvement in developing the Human Terrain System to assist with US destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq toward generating a “New Middle East” out of “creative chaos,” whose “birth

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modernity and “whiteness” in American society, deeply ingrained and invariably assumed, so too is “reason” invisible in the state. Efforts to recognize state reason might begin by asking about the ways in which it has come to permeate anthropodom’s norm, forming its “world-picture” as Wittgenstein might say. We can perhaps detect anthropology’s idolatrous relation to the state upon recalling its historical division of labor with sociology, which traditionally, although not currently, was allotted to reign over the study of “immigrants” residing within the borders of the nation state, while anthropology was allotted to reign over the study of colonized “natives” dwelling outside them. In some sense, this traditional division can hardly be recognizable today with anthropologists studying practically everything everywhere, from stock markets to sandals, from orangutan feces to operas. But to the extent that this division lingers, we can wonder about the ways in which anthropology, by accepting its place to study the rest and leave the West to sociology, has served the State idol. Its service perhaps began with its very advent, upon it recognizing itself as a “queer science” (Segal and Yanagisako, 2005) that investigates the seeming abnormalities of human rationality and permits the relegation of normative or normalizing subjects to the arguably “normal” and stately science of sociology. This division still largely remains in France, at the very least in the perceptions some anthropologists have of their profession. Terray reports how in the Fifth Republic sociologists are still more likely to research populations residing within it while anthropologists research those outside it: “There are many more sociologists who work with migration today than there are anthropologists” (Interview, September 22, 2014). That this disciplinary discrepancy is actively reproduced, rather than simply survives residually, is also evident in Marc Abélès’s words describing enduring reverberations of this division: There is a relation, in my opinion, quite a powerful one between what Said calls Orientalism and French anthropology . . . . We don’t truly question the construction of this [kind of radical] alterity and the fact that there are subjects that are considered good ones [or] themes that

pangs” were proclaimed by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in an announcement from Tel-Aviv during the Israeli war on Lebanon (in LeVine 2006).

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are considered as legitimate themes in the discipline, while others are still considered [to be at the] marginal limits . . . which would be better off with sociology. We’ll say, yes, that’s what he does, but it’s sociology. (Interview, September 16, 2014)

An originator of sociology in France, Émile Durkheim, who stands for many French anthropologists as a founding figure for their discipline, provides a thread as to how it serves the State idol in formulating specific concepts. Known also as “the totemic principle,” “mana” is but one of them. Such concepts are a form of epistemic fidelity to the State by adhering to its organizing paradigm— sovereignty—charged with maintaining the health of “the general will,” Rousseau’s (1986 [1762]) iteration of Thomas Hobbes’s (1985 [1651]) paradigm of sovereignty in Leviathan. And in fact, rather than anthropology per se, it would be more accurate to say it is Durkheim’s sociology that is serving this idol while also serving as a wellspring for “ethnologie” in France. Here is how Durkheim, who declares that “the object of science is a thing” and thus contributes to the shrinking of comprehending the Other in the West—in proportions appropriate to the republic and its task of generating and maintaining a secular society—describes the value of the totemic principle: “This notion of mana is of primordial importance, due not only to a role it plays in the development of religious ideas. It has also a secular aspect where it is of interest to the history of scientific thought. It is the first form of the notion of force” (in Fournier 1994: 342).22 Durkheim finds “mana” valuable not only because it recalls a religious inheritance from humanity’s primordial past, but also because of its “secular aspect” as a force for keeping society in the French republic scientifically together and laic. As his nephew, Marcel Mauss, attests (in Fournier 1994) in a polemical position, further described below, to protect “the social” for the good of the republic something like the mana concept would seem necessary. We then see that what anthropology is in fact allowed to ask about the other and how it ought to instigate inquiry into its own assumptions are state-condoned, for reasoner and reasoned about are essentially made in “society’s own image,” just as the child is made through the process of social integration in Durkheim’s sociological imagination

22 This quote can also be found in its French original in Durkheim 1968: 290 or in its English translation in Durkheim 1995: 205.

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(1982: 6). The reasoning subject—and indeed reason itself—are fashioned in the State’s image and, like the State, in the image of Sovereignty. Thus, anthropological reason inhabiting anthropodom is cut off from the theosphere, as is every “normal” academic discipline, making the kind of other that anthropology is allowed to know fall safely within the bounds of the State, locatable within the finite registers of difference the State variably manages, tolerates, polices, and surveils: racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and so forth. We might be able to witness the vast shrinkage in which anthropologists participate when weighing the deafening silence of the category “cultural” for studying life, say within prisons or geriatric centers. What might happen if they ask: what makes the daily life of certain segments of society, presumably made other to the social and political norm by state law, remain outside the anthropological imaginary and its concern with alterity as those in prisons, schools, or hospices have been? If anthropologists are committed to uncovering and preserving diversity in all its guises, to finding out how other people think, then why does the thinking of these quarantined populations not benefit from the vitality of emergent anthropological thinking readily extended to the people of Samoa, Bali, or the Internet? Regardless, such instances of excision may matter little to an argument about the ways the anthropological imaginary has been made to fit the state. To understand this excision of who the other is or might be for an imaginary consonant with (even if critical of) the state, consider how Mauss responded to challenges to Durkheim. When Gabriel Tarde and Henri Massis questioned Durkheim’s sociology and complained about his “intellectual despotism,” Mauss charged back in his defense and in support of the French state and society as secular edifices: Read [Tarde and Massis] but don’t buy them. No need to enrich our Agathons. They will end elsewhere, like their Greek ancestor. As courtesans they will die at the court of some Macedonian king. For we are here to guard the Republic in creating “the social” among us, in France. (In Fournier 1994: 342)23

That “the social” is not antithetical but complementary to what elsewhere is called “cultural” in Mauss’s terminology is evident from his urging the collecting of knowledge about the fragmentary human 23 By invoking “Agathon,” Mauss is referring to the tragic Athenian poet, who lived in the court of Archelaus, King of Macedon.

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condition, about how peoples around the world have created “the social,” so that “humanity will gain knowledge of itself” (in Fournier 1994: 358). But humanity is not alone at stake here. According to Mauss, the task of compiling such knowledge “becomes all the more urgent in France who is responsible for souls and it is responsible for human groups that it wants to administer without knowing them” (in Fournier 1994: 358). Therefore, in claiming that “sociology,” in which we can reasonably hear a historical synonym to ethnology and modern anthropology, is “French by origin and even by succession” (in Fournier 1994: 357), Mauss establishes an affiliation among the republic, its society, and the kinds of knowledge they ensue. Mauss–Durkheimian sociology, or for the purpose of my argument, anthropology, is at once identifiable with the French republic and serves it, helping to “administer” human souls and groups for which the state is responsible yet ignorant. Hence, we witness the moral urgency of anthropodom as assembled by Durkheim and Mauss, in its sociological, anthropological, and ethnological iterations. This chapter’s promise to unveil idolatry in anthropology has had us fully enter the territory of adoration of the sovereignty paradigm in the form of an object of inquiry within anthropodom (multiplicity paired down to the cultural) sanctified by a political form also constituted by sovereignty (the modern state). To conclude this discussion, we turn directly toward the sovereignty of the sovereignty paradigm itself. More specifically, a fundamentally huballing apparition of sovereignty dominates over modern reason, which we next examine within anthropological quarters.

SOVEREIGNTY HUBALLING MODERN REASON IN ANTHROPODOM The modern state is arguably but an instance, even if paradigmatically, of sovereignty regimes’ ascendancy. These regimes hang together in what I designate here as the modern sovereignscape, epitomized by Hobbes’s (1985 [1651]) Leviathan, in vindicating the paradigm of sovereignty.24 As a protean idea-ideal, modern sovereignty not only 24 Paul Kahn (2011: 16) recently describes sovereignty as “the soul of the polity,” an apt way to capture the centrality of sovereignty for Hobbes. For Hobbes

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regulates politics, but also epistemology and ethics. Sovereignty as ideal and idol reigns sovereign over all other ideals. To paraphrase Hobbes’s metaphor, the sovereignty ideal has become the belly for digesting (understanding) instances of states and their knowledge fields, including knowledge on the history of anthropology as sovereigntypromoter. This is why the anthropological study of other people has been consonant not simply with the modern state, but also with its underlying paradigm of sovereignty as well. A trace of historical alertness to this consonance appears in Asad’s sense of the discipline: “I think the whole business of looking at other peoples’ societies has been a part of development of empire” (Interview, December 7, 2015). Asad thus reminds us to lodge the story of anthropology within a broader one about Europe’s imperial expansion out in the world, an expansion illegible outside the historic ascendancy of sovereignty, as, for example, in the conception of a sovereign individual conscience, presumed within and powered by protests against established authority that Martin Luther’s thesis first advanced 500 years ago.25 Yet Asad’s sense goes further—like Mauss’s defense of Durkheimian sociology and like Michel Leiris’s pronouncement below—to alert us to sovereignty lodged in anthropology, be it of state, empire, or even liberalism. The sympathies and good intentions of anthropodom’s individuals or collective toward the natives notwithstanding, ethnography is the object of Leiris’s opprobrium due to a certain complicity with an unspecified “regime:” “A[n anti-ethnographic] tendency means that vis-à-vis the Africans, the ethnologists are in a posture analogous to that of the liberal American vis-à-vis the blacks of current Black Panthers: hypocrites related in fact to the regime, seen as agents of the regime” (1992: 633). While decades have passed since Leiris raised this concern, we must and do still ask, in what ways does anthropology remain in an inescapably ruinous

sovereignty comprises the soul of the Leviathan, which he enduringly reformulates after a divine paradigm to serve modern forms of ruling: no legitimate rule without sovereignty. Rousseau subsequently notes with consequences up to the present day: “The principle of political life dwells in the sovereign authority” (1986 [1762]: 135). 25 Recall Martin Luther’s hold on modern political images, deriving from when he divinized his conscience in rebellion against papal authority, so that he became “utterly free in conscience . . . in innermost being” (in Elshtain 2008: 82). Applying this disposition to civil governance, Hobbes concurs: “Men shall Judge of what is lawfull and unlawfull, not by the Law it selfe, but by their own Consciences; that is to say, by their own private Judgements” (1985 [1651]: 383).

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relation, if not necessarily with “the natives,” then essentially with itself? In what ways might this ruinous relation emanate from anthropodom’s epistemic complicity with regimes of sovereignty in their various iterations? Critiques of state power within anthropology may appear to address these questions, yet their attention to anthropological conscription for practical state projects may end up thwarting investigations of fundamental confluence between anthropology and the modern state. What ultimately matters for my argument in this chapter is epistemic complicity, in a word, idolatry. The gaze of anthropologists toward the state coincides with the gaze of this quintessential apparition of Hubal, Sovereignty. Sovereignty determines the kind of multiplicity allowed and disallowed into the dome of anthropologists’ secular reason. And the kind allowed into secular optics is confused and conflated as amounting to all the multiplicity there is. As an epistemic confusion, this performance of excision by Sovereignty engenders a huballed sense of reality experienced as an acquisition, and a celebrated one at that. A visit to the triumphalism embedded in language celebrating anthropology illustrates Sovereignty’s huballing, including its uplifting of the anthropologist’s self-sovereignty. Berkeley anthropologist Elisabeth Colson reflects on what made anthropology attractive to her generation and to undoubted others as well: It is difficult to remember, however, what it was that made us love anthropology other than the fact that it seemed to provide a powerful critique of the world as we knew it—particularly of the social rules that confined us. But we could also believe that anthropology had an important role in encouraging difference and in combating racial and ethnic differences. (1989: 5–6)

Adoring, even loving, anthropology for Colson meant adoring a form of sovereignty infecting the knower and the known. This reign of sovereignty affects the knower who takes as a particular target of critique “confining social rules” inhibiting freedom understood as autonomy, and helps with “encouraging difference” by paradoxically “combating differences.” For despite a desire to challenge given norms, the only differences appearing on Colson’s radar are those relevant to the state, in a regnant political embodiment of the modern sovereignty paradigm. This paradigm has made it possible for anthropologists to love their discipline as the study of human plasticity and

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multiplicity writ large, yet valuing these ideals should not squash skepticism toward their cherished means of arriving at them. Natives’ experiences with anthropology have paved a road for embarking on this skepticism. Linguist Jaime de Angulo responded to Benedict’s questions about Zuni mythology with a blistering letter. His chastisement illustrates: (a) ever so faintly the epistemic proximity between sovereignty and anthropological knowledge; (b) ever so bluntly the damage such proximity does to natives; and (c) how an observer’s construction can lead to an observed’s destruction, and even mask a consonant destruction within the observer. Having worked among northern California Indians and never secured permanent academic work, de Angulo quit ethnological and ethnomusicological study to write novels, famously Indian Tales (1953). He wrote to Benedict: But do you realize that it is just that sort of thing that kills the Indians? I mean it seriously. It kills them spiritually first . . . they soon die of it physically. They just lie down and die. That’s what you anthropologists with your infernal curiosity and your thirst for scientific data bring about. Don’t you understand the psychological value of secrecy at a certain level of culture? You surely must . . . you know enough of analytical psychology to know that there are things that must not be brought to the light of day, otherwise they wither and die like uprooted plants. Have you ever lived with Indians, Ruth? . . . Is your own interest in primitive religion the result of a deep but unacknowledged mysticism? . . . Why do you want to know these things? . . . It is all right to talk about them in a general way, with certain reservations, the necessary care that must be always used in handling all esoteric knowledge . . . . It is as powerful and dangerous as lightning. Look at all the harm that psychoanalysts do to their patients . . . . But the actual details of ceremonies, that must never be told. (In Mead 2005 [1974]: 31)

The value of de Angulo’s chiding of Benedict lies neither in its possible accuracy nor in the damning verdict it proclaims on anthropological knowledge, which may be vindicated as an exercise in humility. Rather, its value lies in the way it exudes a sense of crisis about—rather than of crisis impelling—the enterprise that is the pursuit of anthropological knowledge. In asking Benedict to turn the gaze around, to probe her motives—“Is your own interest in primitive religion the result of a deep but unacknowledged mysticism?”—de Angulo helps us recognize how idolatry is inscribed in the

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anthropological pursuit: measurements for one’s becoming are scaled down to the finite experiences of a finite other. As he suggests, perhaps even a thwarted mysticism, an incapacity to uphold a certain faith—or rather uphold it in a certain way for oneself since it must remain concealed within the balkanized soul of the researcher—leads one to seek it “scientifically” in others. Thus the Other that anthropologists seek as a source of a self ’s potential is ultimately reduced to the “cultural.” And this epistemic reduction reaffirms sovereignty where none truly exists. Differently put, none but human attempts at sovereignty may be truly recognized until and unless human life is recognized as existing in fragility and as essentially finite. The known or knowable other now deemed “cultural” takes its place as part of a sovereign sphere of immanence known as “humankind” or “nature,” and the other’s knower knows it by way of a reason that stands sovereign. If anthropologists suffering malaise today no longer share Benedict’s “thirst for scientific data” or “infernal curiosity,” they probably still have at least this in common with her: they ultimately take that finite other, whether cultural, natural, or virtual, as the ends of a quest for finding out who they are, who they have been, and what they might still become. Quenching the arid land of their knowledgefor-becoming with a fire of reduction, they experience it as satiation when it might further their privation. The result is not simply an innocuous, huballed illusion, it is a dangerous one. The solid sense of self-sufficiency—bequeathed by the sovereign secular reason that it upholds—blocks anthropologists (and not only, no doubt) due access to their fragility as bearers of human reason and as members of a fragile humanity and world. While the historical record does not seem to provide Benedict’s possible answer to de Angulo, recall how Stanley Diamond, a student of Paul Radin (Diamond 1960), who was in turn a colleague of Benedict, offers an approximate one: “We study men . . . because we must, because man in civilization is the problem. Primitive people do not study man, it is not necessary” (1972: 408). Thus admitting that anthropologists’ study of the other is generated by a sense of alienation from self—a disconnect from one’s self, society, and civilization—Diamond recalls for us Leiris, who broke away from the “intellectual habits that surround” him (1981 [1984]: 13) by traveling to ethnographic fieldwork in East Africa, and Lévi-Strauss, whose “ill-adapted” anthropological experiences led him to “disdain”

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and express “hostility towards prevailing customs in his [own] native setting” (1973: 382). Even Augustine notes: “Men are a race curious to know of other men’s lives, but slothful to correct their own . . . . [W]oe to them that speak not of Thee at all, since those who say most are but dumb” (1993: 174, 5). With their condemnatory tone, Augustine’s words take as their predicate a multiplicity that is neither equivalent to, nor exhausted by, humanity. A compromised, contracted, and compartmentalized faculty of knowing, arrived at by a self crowned as sovereign, is even huballed into celebrating self-alienation as self-fulfillment. Recall from this book’s introduction, Benjamin’s diagnosis of the modernity in which anthropologists have built anthropodom, which is confirmed by the very knowledge they generate: “Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (1968: 242). Sovereignscape, that is, vast regimes of cosmic, ethical, political, and epistemic sovereignty, where anthropological reason lives, is what permits anthropology to adore and adopt Hubal’s apparition as the culture concept (and its cognates) for constituting its activities and charting its goals. I want to suggest that the sovereignty anthropologists have implicitly adored and explicitly pursued in understanding multiplicity as essentially cultural or something very like it has been their aesthetic, ethical, and epistemic experience of, and participation in, an idolatrous destruction. In serving Culture, anthropologists have been able to do so many things, for so many purposes, including audibly contest the big “new idol” of the State, so long as they quietly (and perhaps unknowingly) cede to its sovereignty premises, including to attributes defining the reasoner in the very act of reasoning. To cede to Sovereignty entails becoming huballed by it, for idols invariably thwart, elude, and obfuscate any questions as to their legitimacy. Sovereignty thus hubals anthropology as to the ways in which secular sovereign reason should not eclipse all traditions of reason, such as those whereby reason does more than master. So long as anthropologists conflate sovereign reason with all kinds of reason they will also conflate their defeat with an accomplishment. Anthropology’s epistemic circumambulation around Sovereignty has unduly hobbled a discipline in fear of a plethora of concepts it has

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well learned to quash, in its quest to command and to fundamentally ignore an Other, thinking it safe and mature for its reason to do so. Notable among these feared and discarded concepts is revelation. Yet perhaps through its relation to revelation, reason could learn to go beyond commanding to participate, receive, and even immerse, and thus perhaps flourish. To conclude, subjects of anthropodom can choose to recognize the idol of Sovereignty and its various huballing apparitions for what they are, “smash” them so to speak through their very recognition, and then awaken to the fullness of the Other that these idols obstruct. Perhaps then anthropology could live up to its latent “antheistic” potential—its intelligence drawing on both theos and anthropos— begin seeing with the help of theology what sovereign reason has taught it not to see, despite it always and already being there within. Anthropology could attempt to redeem what a fearful and masterydriven secular reason has occluded and dismembered, not merely segregated. In mining its antheistic potential, attentive to theological seeds hidden deep within secular burrows, anthropology could perhaps be curious about the relation between humanity and divinity, or between critical and prophetic intelligence, not simply among native others, but within its own reasoning. Upon learning about itself, including learning about its critical potentialities from the critique of theology, and specifically from revelation, anthropology might even do more than revitalize itself. Once sobered from huballing Sovereignty, anthropology might be in a position to teach modern reason to behave akin to an ethnographer in the field. This is to say anthropology living up to its antheistic potential might teach sovereign reason the art of letting go, forgetting about itself, relinquishing its fear of not commanding, and immersing in and participating with its ostensible other. Modern and secular reason so educated might then learn from ethnographic wisdom that paths to truth may benefit far more from immersion in and submission to truth than from efforts at commanding it. We thus move into speculating as to how anthropological reason, disabused of huballing Sovereignty, might find revitalization in rethinking its relation to discarded concepts, such as that of revelation, which I take up in the next and concluding chapter after first summarizing this book’s argument.

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Conclusions Theology Revitalizing Anthropology

Recall that in this book’s opening, I ask you to join me in an experiment. Now, approaching its close, I cannot be sure as to its success or failure. At least, perhaps it identifies pathways toward unfearful thinking about multiplicity in the modern secular university. This book attends to a set of relations that the sovereign, secular, specialized, and fragmentary academic discipline of anthropology has had with its disreputable homologue, vastly banished from the modern research university: theology. It argues that by its pursuit of citizenship in the Enlightenment project, of which it is critical but to which it also conforms, anthropology has been constituted as anthropodom—a domain wherein secular reason is exercised as sovereign over anthropological thought—while notably obtaining a complex and potentially vital relation with theology. In three “ethnographic” chapters, each one focusing on a “master,” as it were, that anthropodom has been serving, I explore anthropology’s past, present, and possible future relation to theology. I heuristically invoke these three “masters”—Thoth, Eucharist, and Hubal—as paradigms for signaling and examining particular powers governing various relations anthropology has or could have with theology. We now arrive at these conclusions, where I speculate in the most preliminary of ways on what a revitalization of anthropology through engaging with the theosphere might be able to do. As expected of all “mature” (secular and autonomous) pursuers of a legitimate place in the Enlightenment project, anthropology has constructed a proverbial “dome” insulating its “rational” knowledge from theology. The ways in which anthropologists have built this

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protective edifice form the focus of the first “ethnographic” chapter, “Thoth.” An ancient Egyptian god charged with science, writing, crafts, and measurement, among other domains, here he paradigmatically evokes the powers culled by anthropology in constructing anthropodom and a proverbial “dome” for hermetically sealing away theology. It is thus with “thothic” architectural powers that anthropologists have laid various kinds of “panes” in constructing their dome’s surface, made of layers of “optical coatings” to render it impervious to the “theosphere,” an exteriority banished from and by their forms of reasoning. This chapter examines five “theosealing” panes. As a complex structure regulating reasoning, anthropology’s dome does not simply keep the theosphere at bay, as typically desired by any secular enterprise. It also variously simulates, dissimulates, and even allows the theosphere to seep back inside. Thus, what anthropologists have built with their thothic powers, in a drive to hermetically sever their secular discipline from theology, they simultaneously undermine in preserving some form of contact with the theosphere. The second ethnographic chapter, “Eucharist,” explores the forms this preservation takes, whereby anthropologists breach the dome they erected. Naming a chief logic underlying a particular truth formation, Eucharist offers a paradigm for arranging a subject’s relation to truth predicated on immersion of the knower in the knowable in contrast to Kant-demanded separation. While succeeding in reflecting away some theospheric wavelengths, anthropology’s dome refracts others. Through three admitting types of breaches—proverbial, genealogical, and chiefly, analogical—theospheric light manages to arrive at the dome’s interior. More than through the theistic metaphors they proverbially invoke, beyond the theologically and genealogically rooted intellectual formations they assume or explicitly employ, anthropologists analogically preserve contact with the theosphere when committing themselves to ethnographic immersion. I evoke the sacrament of the Eucharist as analogous to this immersion because it indicates a coveted communion between the knower— who in this logic of truth formation becomes a “receiver” rather than merely an “acquirer” of knowledge—and the known, the sought object of knowledge. Thus, if anthropologists retain a certain fidelity to the Enlightenment in its founding concepts as objects of scientific inquiry, they nonetheless betray it via their incarnate practice of

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ethnographic immersion, which, counter to Enlightenment postulates, defies the requirement that they separate themselves as knowers from that which they seek to know. This betrayal by anthropology provides a welcome example of how truth-seeking can be untethered from the sovereignty paradigm.1 While the first two ethnographic chapters focus on anthropology’s relation to theology with a view from within anthropology’s dome, the third approaches this relation from outside it, from a position in the theospheric exteriority. If the first two chapters examine the dome’s reflection and refraction of theology, the final one draws direct sustenance from theistic reason. Critical faculties belonging to the theosphere here furnish tools for undertaking an initial critique of anthropology. Regarding anthropology as a particular performance in idolatry, I identify it with an ancient illocutionary name, that of the god Hubal. Summoned from Arabian, pre-Islamic antiquity, Hubal here stands for acts of idolatry constituted as ethico-epistemic confusions arising out of misplaced trust in sovereignty as an idol. Focusing primarily on anthropology’s idolatrous relation with the concept of culture, I argue that an anthropology confused about its other and its own sense of wonder cedes epistemic authority to powerful assumptions espoused by sovereignty regimes—which take on a multitude of forms in a vast sovereignscape—and entangles itself within the epistemic intestines of the modern state. Authority so ceded allows for excisions, contractions, and compartmentalizations in constituting anthropologists’ prevailing sense of the other (at times “cultural” at others “social”). This sense proceeds with an enduring language of triumph about the discipline’s discovery of that other. All the wonder that remains then in a secular world is one emanating from a finite other legitimated by and legible to optics of sovereignty pursuits. In other words, the bar for the discipline’s sense of wonder (thaumazein) remains fixed by dictates of its sovereignty quests. But my disquiet lies not in enchantment’s absence nor its attempted reenactment, but in discernment about what counts as accomplishment, defeat, or both. As the critical Within his concern for the “consistence of truth” and his understanding of truth as “death of intention,” Walter Benjamin holds that truth presents itself as “revelation . . . which must be heard, that is, which lies in the metaphysically acoustical sphere” (in Arendt 1968: 49). 1

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category of idolatry assists in clarifying such discernment, it can further revitalize anthropology by helping to clarify other confusions within its inquiry into multiplicity. Assuming that revitalizing anthropology by theological means can take many forms, in these conclusions I propose one example of an effort at such critical clarification. In the vastly incomplete propaedeutic reflections that follow, I ponder the estrangement of anthropological reason from its theistic other, namely, from revelation, and the prospect that such reconciliation might untether the scope and content of anthropological reason so that it could face puzzles, confusions, and wonder to extents greater than sovereignty pursuits permit.

MODERN REASON RECONCILING WITH REVELATION TOWARD ANTHROPOLOGICAL REVITALIZATION In Chapter 3, I state an intent that bears repeating here: I employ idolatry in this book as a critical, not a condemnatory, tool. Its purpose as critique is, therefore, to revitalize and not denounce anthropology. This aim leads me to here continue speculating about what a theistically driven revitalization for and in anthropology might do. By speculating on theology as a reviving rival of modern anthropology’s critical capacities, I am assuming that this domain can furnish far more than mere items in a catalogue of researchable phenomenon, as instances of native forms of thought to interrogate, or as conversation partners on certain topics, such as religious beliefs.2 Rather, theology offers a promise of transforming anthropology, much the same way as an ethnographer is transformed through immersion in the field. Perhaps one way to realize this promise is for anthropology to become hospitable to revelation as viable to its reasoning, not simply about others, but about reason itself and about the stakes of rethinking its relation to forms, for example, of community and fragility.3 2

See Robbins 2006, 2013, Meneses et al. 2014, and Coakley and Robbins 2018 for examples of engaging theology in conversation with anthropology. 3 For my purposes here, I use the terms reasoning, thinking, intelligence, and rationality interchangeably, considering them members of one conceptual ecology.

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Of course, suggesting that theology can offer tools for revitalizing anthropology presupposes that anthropology is in need of revitalization. I am not alone in assuming that it does. Hardly a year has passed without an anthropologist somewhere, somehow decrying the discipline’s fragmentation or disorientation.4 In each generation, the response comes invariably in the form of apprehension about, indifference to, or endorsement of a perennial disciplinary incoherence. However, the perpetual anthropological concern over what kind of other to study and how has not yet aroused attention to the condition wrought by theology’s “mutilation” within anthropodom.5 This mutilated condition permits anthropological reason to dance only to its own tune, vastly deaf to any sort of difference outside “the cultural” and deaf, of course, to variations of reason itself. Because as instances of sovereign secular reasoning, anthropological forms of thought want nothing to do with revelation, except in instances when revelation belongs to a cultural other subject to anthropological interrogation. Yet revelation is “a gift” that theology can offer to anthropology, not simply to vindicate the reasoning of investigated others, but to awaken a critical curiosity about possibilities within its own. Those who accept my argument that theistic reason has been severed from its secular counterpart may still question this reason’s utility for revitalizing anthropology. Given theology’s diminished conditions in modernity and its own disciplinary entrapments irrespective of modernity, what grounds remain for maintaining that it possesses a potential capacity to deliver vitality to anthropological, or for that matter to any intellectual, labor?6 I maintain that even in its 4 A non-exhaustive sample of works commenting on anthropology’s fragmentation or disorientation includes Balandier 2001 [1951]; Wolf 1974; Hymes 1972; Asad 1998 [1973]; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Abu Lughod 1991; and Segal and Yanagisako 2005. 5 With “mutilation” I mean to evoke a question raised by Cardinal John Henry Newman: “Can we drop [theology] out of the circle of knowledge, without allowing, either that the circle is already mutilated, or on the other hand, that Theology is really no science?” (1968: 50). 6 I hope that these reflections make it sufficiently clear that while I join recent work in anthropology (e.g., Lemons 2018) exploring the vitality theology can bring to anthropological research, I do not here share what appears a prominent concern within this emerging literature to produce better anthropological studies of religion. Indeed, the supposition of my intervention is that theology helping anthropology become curious about the cultural oddity of secular triumphal versions of reason ought to help it probe its very grammar of integrated inquiry into the human condition.

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enfeebled state, theology still embodies two essential traits useful to this undertaking. First, theology has been in the business of studying difference for far longer than has anthropology and—when in good standing—has managed to avail to itself truth belonging to orders of reality far wider and more radical than that mere segment bounded by the “cultural.” Second, theology generally lives as an other to the whole of anthropology, not merely to an individual anthropologist or society here or there. Their own disciplinary predispositions should thus lead anthropologists to appreciate the revitalizing potential of an encounter with theology. It is indeed through anthropology encountering theology as a self may encounter an other that gives this relation potency for teaching anthropology about its actualities and potentialities. Should anthropology aspire to one of these potentialities, the antheistic for example, it could learn to be curious about reconciling reason and revelation, not just among peoples it studies, but significantly in the house of its own academic form of reasoning. Theology further offers potency for revitalizing anthropology to the extent that it retains power to both integrate and disintegrate. So long as theistic intelligence remains capable of accessing a divine time and builds a discipline for the endeavor of understanding the divine, theology integrates, or at least is traditionally expected to integrate, knowledge, politics, and ethics. Given theology’s insistence on the inherent unity of ultimate truths, it pursues an integrative vision in ways that have been nearly impossible for anthropology as an academic discipline compartmentalized, like any other, inside the modern research university. I do not intend to claim that anthropology lacks or has lacked integrative powers as a modern kind of inquiry, rather its powers for integrating inquiry have been limited due to their profound subservience to the paradigm of sovereignty. These powers have been made to conform to sovereignty’s grammar, even when conducting criticism of it (such as with anthropology’s long-standing critique of state power). Just as theology is particularly apt for uncovering the falsehood of sovereignty applied to any earthly being or ideal, it may also be particularly apt for revitalizing an integrative grammar for anthropology. Anthropology may be able to learn from theology’s capacity to integrate human faculties for the truthful, the good, and the beautiful, mustered for the study, experience, and encounter with an Other unlike all others, God for monotheists, gods for polytheists, and the divine for all.

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For the very reasons that theology integrates the truthful, the good, and the beautiful in the pursuit of knowledge about God, it also disintegrates. For an intellect moved to know God, theology disintegrates ramparts, borders, fences, walls, and any form of fortification that balkanizes knowing, the very forms of fortification to which reason clings in advancing its claims to sovereignty. Indeed, theology provides a groundwork for gainsaying these claims, for none of them can be endured by a theology prepared to consider the Infinite. Theology could further offer orders of truth it both presupposes and excogitates. Revelation is one such order of truth, which I here evoke temperately as a class of events delivering, slowly or suddenly, signs from divine time into reason’s regular exercise. Theology offers revelation as a chief means for averting confusion as to where sovereignty justifiably belongs, for precluding it from realms where all is finite and transient, where none can ultimately be self-sufficient. I see revelation as a possible resource in revitalizing anthropology’s forms of reasoning, by helping it first to recognize and then retrace its steps, this time away from sovereignty’s stalemates and degrading entrapments, where all that is asked is only what—in sovereignscape—can safely be answered. Another potential theology-based anti-corrosive tool for undermining sovereignty claims is the concept of tradition so famously denigrated in Enlightenment thought. While affinities between revelation and tradition run deep, in modern thought tradition has been largely consigned to desuetude (although signs exist toward its rehabilitation),7 whereas revelation remains more decidedly recognizable as theological and thus also more menacing to reason’s independence aspirations. To the extent that Antigone’s encounter with Creon may here be instructive,8 revelation appears to threaten 7

For a discussion on rehabilitating tradition, see for example MacIntyre’s two books, After Virtue (1984, especially chapter 15) and Whose Justice? Which Rationality (1988, especially chapters 10, 17, 18, 19), and specifically in anthropology, Asad 1986. 8 Here I refer to the moment when Antigone defies state law by claiming adherence to higher laws, those emanating from Zeus. “Yea, for these laws were not ordained of Zeus | And she who sits enthroned with gods below | Justice, enacted not these human laws. Nor did I deem that thou, a mortal man | Could’st by a breath annul and override | The immutable unwritten laws of Heaven | They were not born today nor yesterday | They die not; and none knoweth whence they sprang” (in Bradford 2017). From Christian tradition, when Peter and John were commanded in Jerusalem not to speak or teach in Jesus’s name, their response was: “Which is right in God’s eyes: to

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reason’s sovereignty and challenge its tyranny in ways the tradition concept does not. The category of revelation can thus remind anthropology to apply to the largely self-evident secular reason it shares with other disciplines within the modern research university what it already applies in studying multiplicity: see oddity in the familiar and familiarity in the odd. Differently put, anthropology has sought to comprehend the ways the self (personal or collective) inhabits an other and an other inhabits the self, how a self can also become its alternatives.9 Estrangement between self and other is not a necessary given, but rather an assumption. As for reason and revelation, theology can help remind anthropology that these domains need not inherently be estranged from one another. Revelation might then help reason recognize its own self-alienation. Thus, theology could provoke and enable anthropology to interrogate the boundary-making reason conducts in order to dwell safely inside its sovereign realms, modern anthropology among them. To risk redundancy, for its revitalization anthropology must turn beyond taking revelation as a serious subject for analysis to regard it as a serious and useful mirror and companion to its very own reason. Anthropology would do well to extend its commitment to fairly adjudicating the contents of revelation to learning to live well with it, not merely off it, parasitically as it were.10 More than adding revelation to anthropology’s catalogue of thought items, revelation betokens the catalogue itself to becoming a relentlessly revisable question. Anthropology could perhaps thereby activate its antheistic potential and allow itself to be provoked, as fearlessly as possible, by

listen to you, or to him? You be the judges! As for us, we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:18–20). 9 My invocation of “alternative” selves derives from a line in poet Mahmoud Darwish’s Mural announcing: “I knew I was tossing myself to the side before I flew. I would become what I want in the final orbit” (2000: 9). His various self-refashionings include becoming an idea, a bird, a poet, and a vineyard (2000: 12–14). 10 For a vastly assuming example of how anthropology can entertain a parasitic relation to the concept of revelation, see Eric Gans (1990: 28). He observes, “the anthropological utility of the notion of revelation” appears necessary for a due recognition of the place of “an event” as a site of human origins and therefore human ethics, community, and truth. In other words, for Gans, revelation is useful to the extent that it can elevate the epistemic status of “event” in anthropology, rather than for asking about how a discipline attuned to reason’s multiplicity need not necessarily remain estranged from it.

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revelation as an order of reality, rather than subsume it within the dominion of the insensate, omnivorous, behemoth of secular reason. This aim ought to belong to an anthropology truly bent on interrogating reason’s multiplicity to its furthest edges, far beyond those mandated by the modern powers we allow to lord over our finitude. Anthropology revitalized as proposed here means its reason awakened to revelatory thinking, wherein neither reason nor reasoner are easily seduced nor sedated into regarding themselves as selfsufficient, independent, autonomous, in a word, sovereign. Recognizing the fragility of both reason and reasoner would permit anthropology to not conflate secular reason with all reason and even to become curious about reason’s fear of its ostensible other (revelation) and essentially of fragility, including its own. Such an anthropology could take up the vital question of estrangement between reason and revelation, recognizing the enmity between them as humanly contingent rather than trans-humanly constant. When anthropological reason no longer fears disrobing before revelation—husking its panoply of sovereignty—and becomes equipped with the bare power that facing its own fragility can bestow, then we know it has begun caressing its way toward a new vitality. Because a courtship with revelation potentially entails sovereign reason’s transvaluation, transforming it into revelatory thinking, that is, participating in (not just representing) an Other’s self-disclosure and the un-concealment of its truths, an anthropological rapprochement with theology may raise the question as to where revelatory thinking can viably dwell. Clearly, this question is about a home, even an institution. For the question about what forms of thought deserve our allegiance inevitably relates to the question about what institutions can best serve them, can enable their flourishing. Here then lies another value in anthropology not sufficing with adding revelation to its catalogue of subjects, nor in sufficing with simply “rearranging its furniture” so as to more fully accommodate religious forms of thought, say by treating sacred texts as conversation partners. Rather, to be revitalized by theology, to tap the discipline’s antheistic potential, anthropology must also re-evaluate the architecture in whose cultural patterns we predominantly practice our discipline. In other words, with theology truly by its side, anthropology should be able to ask: how might the modern research university justifiably and effectively be entrusted with knowledge unfearful of revelation, especially at the current stage of mammon’s evolution?

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For example, in what ways does the modern university as we know it, from Humboldt to audit crescendos, from the Romantic to the neo-liberal era, compound reason’s troubles with its own set of “home-grown” dangers, insofar as the university provides it a home? Just exactly how endangerment to thinking may arise “at home”—and not simply or solely in the provinces of diverse publics external to it (such as may occur with professional politicians)—could be yet another crucial task for revelatory thinking, by inducing further probing of the reasons for anthropological reason’s estrangement from revelation, and in the process, allow us to recollect reason’s fragility, to see through the deceits of disciplines existing in fraudulently ascetic conditions as compartmentalized professions. Perhaps anthropology attuned to its antheistic potential may also become equipped at recognizing the ways the pursuit of truth, abandoned to professional speakers (academics, as distinct from, say, artists), and the pursuit of politics, abandoned to professional practitioners (politicians, as distinct from, say, “ordinary citizens”), follows from an impoverished comprehension of and alienation from both truth and politics. In learning from the sphere of intelligence that can integrate knowledges in a more awakened way that is theology, which both predates and predicates the modern university, perhaps even the whole of the academy could begin to recover from the desiccation of knowledges that has occurred under the guises of specialization, professionalization, and expertise. Anthropology so attuned might also become equipped to avow the insufficiency of all questions, and hence uphold their inherent connectivity and relatedness, therewith imploring its fellow disciplines to end their acting as gods lording over truth-fiefdoms. Among theology’s enduring lessons as a professional discipline (and, of course, one is not to suppose that all its lessons merit heeding) is that nothing and no one in this world, not even this world itself, exists as self-sufficient, impervious to all fragility. That this finite and fragile condition has been increasingly difficult to acknowledge since the singular ascendancy of the West with Columbus’s ships and the singular ascendancy of the sovereign individual conscience with Martin Luther’s hammer does not mean that it has become decreasingly real. An anthropology revitalized by theology, by revelatory thinking guiding knowledges’ reintegration, dismantling interstitial ramparts among the faculties, awake to all fragility, and awakened finally, to its antheistic potential, could further aid reason’s empowerment in

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any endeavor. Fragility—inevitably inscribed in our human efforts to be and in our human efforts to know—can empower through its ability to ensure that anthropology’s questions and even aporias never coincide with sovereignty quests dedicated to founding reason’s autonomy. This is to say that anthropology could perhaps cease allowing its questions and the ways it asks them to dwindle down to the measures of leviathans no matter their guises: epistemic or political, modern or ancient, spatial or temporal. Perhaps then anthropology could regain an essentially ethical capacity to wonder, even if terrified, not only about what is different, but more fundamentally, about what is. Perhaps vigilant wonder about existence could preempt lassitude in wondering about difference, since both kinds of wondering are intimately bound to one another. Perhaps then trusts, doubts, puzzlements, fears, confusions, and wonderments may summon integrated faculties to venture beyond apparent rivalries between “Athens” (reason) and “Jerusalem” (revelation) to consider vaster multiplicity within seas and deserts, bodily flesh and fluids, the glistening dew drop11 and the stars twinkling in galaxies above them all, especially in today’s world whose darkness, as usual, intends for us, despite the planet’s bleeding precariousness, to go on sleeping.

I mean to here evoke Rabindranath Tagore’s poem in which he admits: “Journeying through many countries, | I went to see high mountains, | I went to see oceans. | Only I had not seen, | At my very doorstep, | The dew drop glistening | On the ear of the corn” (1976: 128). 11

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Index Abélès, Marc 3n.3, 128–9, 164–5 Abraham 25–6, 145–8 Abron 121–2 Achuar 52–3, 127–8 aesthetics 6, 11–12, 33–4, 66–8, 81, 112, 137, 157–8, 172, 179–80 Africa 5, 54–5, 88, 125, 127, 129, 132n.23, 137–8 agnosticism 52–3, 58 alienation 9–12, 127–8, 146, 172 Alladians 88 Amazonians 62, 110 American Anthropological Association 35, 51, 71, 98–9, 99n.2, 105 Amharic 54n.13 Amselle, Jean-Loup 124–5 Anglican Church 67, 85 Angulo, Jaime de 170–2 Indian Tales 170 animism 112–13 Annual Review of Anthropology (ARA) 2–5 Anselm, St. 21, 55n.16 anthropodom 34–6, 38–9, 41, 43, 45–7, 49, 54–5, 59, 62–4, 69–72, 75–6, 79, 82–3, 85, 90–3, 100–1, 105–6, 109–10, 125–6, 134, 136–7, 144–5, 149–51, 153–4, 157–9, 163–9, 172–174, 178 definition of 22 geodesic dome, inhabiting a 36–8, 94–5, 100–1, 115–16, 119–22, 125–6, 129, 134–5, 141–2, 145, 158, 161–2, 169, 174–6 anthropology antheistic potential of 173, 178–9, 181–4 armchair 79 as a calling 52–3, 96–8, 136, 154–5 and colonial encounter 9–10, 9n.12, 15–16, 29, 167–8 conversion to, see conversion as cosmology 13, 88–9, 134 as crisis 9, 170–1 as critique 1–2, 8–9

definition of 1, 4–6, 76–7, 79–80, 89 as event 7, 10, 14–15, 17, 24–5 and evolutionary thought 12, 79, 101 and existential marginality 52–3 as a faith 59, 96, 99–100, 137, 155–6 as a homecoming 136–7 among the humanities 71–3, 76, 81 as idolatry 143–73, 176 as interdisciplinary 79–80 as literature 79–80, 83–4 ontological turn in 10, 12–13, 53, 154 and power 8–9, 12, 28, 154–5, 169, 179 as psychoanalysis 49, 77 as redemption 4, 6–7, 11–12, 29–30, 54, 61, 137, 144–5, 160, 169, 176–7 as religion 51–4, 59, 62–3, 96–9 revitalizing 1–2, 8, 146, 173–4, 176–84 as a science 38–9, 41–2, 71–2, 76, 81–2, 86–7, 94, 125–6, 129 secular formation of 4, 8–10, 14, 23–5, 30–1, 41–3, 64 as secular theology 14, 19, 23n.43, 36–7, 78 as soul work, see also fieldwork as soul work 2–32–4, 33n.62, 34, 100, 136–7 as symptom 9, 9n.11, 10–11, 24–5 and transcendence 87–8, 92 as a way of life 99, 137 Aquinas, St. Thomas 106–7, 106n.5, 117–18 Arapaho 51–2 Arapesh 65 Arendt, Hannah 118n.18, 135n.25, 139n.27 Asad, Talal 15–17, 15n.26, 108–10, 163, 167–9 Ashanti 133 atheism 49–53, 58, 61, 92–3, 95, 125–6, 156–7 Augé, Marc 5, 8, 83–4, 88, 98, 112–13, 120, 128, 134–5, 137–8

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200

Index

Augustine, St. 14, 14n.22, 56n.18, 118–19, 134–5, 140, 147, 171–2 Confessions 21, 113–14, 118–19, 134–5 as ethnographer 118–19 Azande 45, 74–5, 106, 133–4 Bacon, Francis 147 Balandier, Georges 6, 6n.6, 34n.65, 107, 136 Balinese 66 Baptist faith 68–70, 95–6, 104 Barnard College 104 Bateson, Gregory 48, 66, 163n.21 Bateson, Mary Catherine 48, 65–6 Benedict, Ruth 4–5, 8–9, 11–12, 62–3, 67–74, 86–7, 95–6, 98, 103–4, 114–15, 155, 158, 163n.21, 170–2 Patterns of Culture 69–70, 74 Benjamin, Walter 11–12, 85–6, 89, 159, 172, 176n.1 Berkeley, University of California at 49, 52, 61, 98, 121–2, 139, 169 Bible, references from the 47, 47n.7, 51n.10, 74, 117–18, 123n.21, 148n.10, 150, 180n.8 Blake, William 31n.58 Boas, Franz 8, 11, 49–51, 59–60, 62–3, 67, 69, 80–2, 95–6, 98, 121, 123–4, 130, 155–7 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 27, 30n.55 Bororo 91, 110–11 Bourdieu, Pierre 33n.61 Buddha 69 Buddhism see also Zen Buddhism 53–4 Caduveo 91, 110 Cambridge, University of 88, 96–7, 133–4 Canaque 131 caritas 107, 118n.18 Catholicism 19n.34, 45–6, 48, 51–6, 62–3, 73–5, 101, 106–8, 115, 117n.16, 125, 131, 147 Chicago, University of 7, 48, 50, 66, 104–5, 121–2, 128 Christianity 31n.57, 47–8, 53–4, 59, 65, 69–70, 80–1, 94, 101–2, 107, 117–18, 126–8, 147–8 City University of New York 80 Clifford, James 15n.25, 18n.31, 66–7, 78–9, 103, 116n.15, 122, 139

Cochiti Pueblo 67–8 Cohn, Bernard 121–2 College de France 121–2 colonialism see also anthropology and colonial encounter 9–10, 9n.12, 125 Colson, Elizabeth 169–70 Columbia, University of 50, 59–60, 62–3, 65, 80 communion, see Eucharist conversion 50–1, 58, 88, 98, 114n.14 Corneille, Pierre 112 Cornell University 105 crisis of representation 9n.12 Crow nation 49, 130 Cuddihy, John Murray 110–11 culture concept 12–14, 19, 28–31, 35, 41, 44, 84, 94, 120–1, 128, 143n.2, 149–50, 153, 159, 166–7, 171, 178–9 as an idol or religion 99–100, 150–1, 153–6, 158–60, 162–3, 172, 176 cybernetics 48 Dakar-Djibouti mission 54 Daribi 104–5 Darwish, Mahmoud 181n.9 death of God 10, 24–5, 25n.47, 27–8, 31, 43, 49, 119–20 Debaene, Vincent 6n.7, 55n.17 Deleuze, Gilles 25n.45 Descartes, René 14, 29n.53 Descola, Philippe 10–11, 11n.14, 53, 121–2, 127–9, 161 Diamond, Stanley 11, 171–2 Digger 74 diary, personal or fieldwork 46–8, 55–6, 70–2, 127n.22, 132–3, 138 Dida 121–2 diversity as an idol 158–63 Dogon 54n.13 Donne, John 67 Douglas, Mary 19n.34, 45–6, 75, 92–3, 101, 103, 105–7, 116, 134 Natural Symbols 105–6 Purity and Danger 106–7 du Bois, Cora 4–5 Durkheim, Émile, see also Lévi-Strauss, Claude and Durkheim, Émile 27–8, 46n.5, 47n.6, 52–3, 74–5, 97–9, 112–13, 131, 137–8, 165–9 mana 165

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Index

201

Eggan, Fred 8 Engelke, Matthew 15n.24, 18n.30 Enlightenment, the 12–13, 18–20, 38–9, 41, 49, 76–8, 85, 93, 110–11, 116–21, 126, 132, 145n.6, 152, 157, 174–6, 180–1 Episcopal Church 64–5, 77–8, 103–4 ethics 4, 31–2, 35, 47–8, 52, 84, 103–4, 137, 149–51, 156, 167–8, 172, 176, 179–80 ethnographic immersion, see also fieldwork; Augustine, St. as ethnographer 13, 38–9, 94–5, 115–117, 119–20, 129–30, 134, 145, 175 logic of 117–18, 120–1, 131–3, 175–6 as remembrance 134 as a return to childhood 134–5, 137–8, 141 Ethnological Society of London 107–8 Eucharist 22, 35–6, 38–9, 93–5, 116, 128, 145, 174 Christian practice of 55, 117–18 as a model of knowing 115–19, 129–34, 138, 175–6 European Association of Social Anthropologists 16–17, 146n.7 Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 6n.6, 45–6, 52–3, 73–7, 101, 103, 106–7, 116, 131, 133–4 Nuer Religion 74, 77 Sanusi Order in Cyrenaica 106 Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande 74–5

as union between knower and known 98–9, 115–16, 128, 132–3, 175–6 finitude 11–12, 12n.18, 148–51, 154, 160–2, 170–1, 181–3 Firth, Raymond 46–7, 62–3, 156 Fortes, Meyer 2–3, 73n.29, 74–5, 133 Foucault, Michel 6n.8, 12n.17, 13n.19, 30–1 fragility 160, 177, 183–4 of humanity 171 of reason 153, 171, 182–3 France, state or society 55–6, 60–1, 103, 112–13, 125, 164–6 Francis, Pope 21, 109n.10 Frazer, James 79, 96, 114n.14 Golden Bough, The 96 Friedl, Ernestine 2–3 functionalism 9–10 Funkenstein, Amos 14n.23, 21n.39, 26n.49, 29n.53, 148

Fabre, Daniel 111 faith, see also humanity, faith in 61 Feuerbach, Ludwig 19n.35 fieldwork, see also ethnographic immersion 6, 35, 54, 78–9, 109–10, 116, 121–2, 126, 161 dreaming in 121–2, 138–41 fear of 122–6 memoir, see diary practice of 86–7, 119–20, 134 as prayer 98 and psychoanalysis 124–5, 140 as a sacred rite 29–30, 98–9, 121–4, 128, 132 as soul work, see also anthropology as soul work 113–15, 127–8, 132

Hagen 126 Harvard University 98, 128 Heidegger, Martin 22n.40, 27–8, 149n.11, 158 Hindu 75 Hobbes, Thomas 26, 151n.13 Leviathan 40n.67, 144n.3, 165, 167–8 Hodgkin, Thomas 107–8 Hoyle, Fred 58 Hubal 35–6, 39–40, 141–2, 150–1, 174 etymology of 150 as a paradigm of idolatry 145–6, 150–1, 153–4, 158–60, 162, 167, 169, 172–3, 176 Hubbard, Elbert 69, 104

Geertz, Clifford 5–6, 13, 76–7, 90, 108–9, 108n.7, 122–3, 126–8, 132–3, 137 Gellner, Ernest 114n.14, 134–6 al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid 109 Gilgamesh 112 Goddard, Pliny 49 Goethe 129–30, 146n.7 Gourarier, Zeev 159 Greek philosophy 106–7, 109–10 Griaule, Marcel 54 Guana 91, 110 Gueze 54n.13

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202

Index

humanism 10–11, 12n.17, 22n.40, 27, 30n.55, 71–2, 77–8, 86–7, 89, 138, 152–3 humanity 11–12, 12n.17, 28–9, 29n.53, 44, 62, 65, 85–6, 89–93, 112–13, 120–1, 136–8, 149–50, 155, 157, 166–7, 171–3 faith in 96, 155–7 as an idol 157–9, 162–3 humor 50, 104–5, 113 Hymes, Dell 77–8 Ibn Taymiyyah, Taqiyy ad-Din 109 ideal-idol 29–30, 86–7, 148, 154, 162–4, 167–8 idolatry, see also anthropology as idolatry; culture concept as an idol or religion; diversity as an idol; Hubal as a paradigm of idolatry; humanity as an idol; ideal-idol; sovereignty, idol(s) of; state, the, idol(s) of 39, 141–73 in critique 31, 143, 145–7, 176–7 definition of 143, 145–51 Institute for Advanced Study 128 invisible, the 139–40 Iroquois 101 Islam 46, 106, 109–11, 143, 150 Itamul 65–6 Jamin, Jean 6n.7, 127n.22 Japanese 67–8 Jesus 64, 69–71, 73, 113–14, 117–18, 131 Judaism 50–3, 56–62, 66–7, 75, 91, 103, 110–11, 124–5, 133, 147 Hasidic 48, 57–8, 104–5, 113 Orthodox 57, 82–3 Kant, Immanuel, see also reason, Kantian 2, 33n.64, 69, 76–7, 121n.20, 132–3, 148, 157–8 Kapferer, Bruce 17 Katchin 121–2 Kayapos 105 Kempis, Thomas à 67–9 Kluckhohn, Clyde 98 Kroeber, Alfred 51–2, 54, 56–7, 67, 81–2, 98–100, 114–15, 121–3, 155 and psychoanalysis 49, 81 Kroeber, Theodora 51–2, 155

Lambeck, Michael 89 Larsen, Timothy 31n.57, 74, 101, 107 Leach, Edmund 2–3, 33n.62, 34, 89–90, 92–3, 121–2 Leenhardt, Maurice 54, 66–7, 78–9, 103–4, 115, 123–4, 131, 137, 139, 141–2 Leiris, Michel 6n.7, 9n.11, 54–6, 58, 113–15, 127n.22, 129–32, 168–9, 171–2 L’Afrique Fantom 9n.11, 55 Lesser, Alexander 155–6 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 3n.3, 6n.7, 7–9, 9n.10, 10–11, 27–8, 52–3, 56, 59–63, 77–8, 83–4, 90–3, 96–8, 109–13, 124, 128, 135, 137–8, 140–1, 143–5, 153–4, 157, 159–60, 163, 171–2 Apotheosis of Augustus 111–13 and Durkheim, Émile 27–8, 61 neolithic intelligence 59–60, 92, 110–11, 154 and Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 10–11, 56, 77–8, 111n.12, 113, 139–40, 143–5 and structuralism 92–3, 97, 110–11, 116 Tristes Tropiques 3n.3, 7, 83–4, 91n.36, 110, 112–13 Levy-Bruhl, Lucien 96–7 Lienhardt, Godfrey 74–5 Lienhardt, Peter 75 London School of Economics 46–7, 97–9, 119–20 Lowie, Robert 49–51, 56–7, 67, 98, 130 Luther, Martin 167–8, 183 Macfarlane, Alan 32n.60, 53–4, 58, 96–7, 127–8, 133 Mach, Ernst 49 MacIntyre, Alasdaire 50n.9 Mailu Christian mission 46–7 Maison Suger, la 121–2 Malinowski, Bronisław 2–3, 46–8, 61–3, 96–8, 114–16, 119–20, 122–4, 132–5, 138–9, 156 Manu 65 Marx, Karl 19–20, 111n.11, 140, 147 Marxism 11, 45–6, 101, 117, 147–8 Mary, Andre 110–11 Massis, Henri 166 Mauss, Marcel 6n.6, 52–4, 96–8, 103, 131, 165–9 The Gift 6n.6, 131

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Index Mead, Margaret 48, 62–6, 69–70, 73–4, 89–90, 96, 103–4, 114–15, 123–4, 155, 158, 163n.21 Coming of Age 146n.7 Mennonite Church 105 Métais, Pierre 131 Methodism 64–5 Michigan, University of 48, 80 Milbank, John 12nn.18–19, 14n.23, 19n.33, 19n.35, 23n.43, 26n.49, 85 Mintz, Sydney 98, 156–7 mission(aries) 46–7, 77–8, 103–4, 139 Mohave 51–2 Montaigne 113 Morgan, Henry Lewis 101–2 The Gordian Knot secret society 102 Moses 97–8, 123 mother 53–4, 57–8, 68, 98, 108–10, 118–19, 138–9 multiplicity 1, 11–12, 29, 32, 41, 82, 119–20, 144–5, 149–51, 153–4, 169, 171–2, 174, 176–7, 181 Murdock, George 98 Mus, Grand Chief of New Caledonia 141 Musée d’Ethographie du Trocadero 131 Musée du quai Branly 52 Musée Saint Germain 131 Museum for European and Mediterranean Civilizations 159 Nader, Laura 3n.2, 139–40 Nambikwara 91, 110 New School, the 11, 49, 69, 72 Newman, John Henry 178n.5 Nietzsche, Friedrich 24–5, 33–4, 43, 46–8, 70, 105, 114–15, 119–20, 129–30, 147–8, 152, 163 Nuer 45, 74, 106 Ochollos 128–9 Ojibwas 101 Orientalism 9–10, 28–9, 102, 164–5 Other, the divinized 19 Oxford, University of 45, 53–4, 73n.29, 74–5, 79, 106, 134 paganism 59–60, 80–1, 112–13, 147–8 Papua New Guinea 104–5 parrhesia, definition of 6n.8 Parsons, Elsie Clew 49, 50n.8, 69

203

Plato 21n.38, 136, 148–9 poetry 67–8, 71–2 political theology 145n.5, 152–3 positivism 49 Powdermaker, Hortense 6n.6, 56–7, 97–9, 124, 136–7, 155 Presbyterianism 101 Protestantism 103, 108–10, 115, 117n.16 psychoanalysis, see also fieldwork and psychoanalysis; Kroeber and psychoanalysis 2–3, 30n.55, 54, 125–6, 134–5, 170 Pueblo 49 Puritanism 69 Quakerism 49, 64–5, 107–8 Rabinow, Paul 61, 121–2 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred 97 Andaman Islanders, The 97 radical orthodoxy 20 Radin, Paul 11, 49, 171–2 reason 14–16, 39–41, 75, 125–6, 141–2, 156, 159–60, 162–7, 172–3, 175, 177–84 autonomous 11–12, 116–17, 129–30, 180–4 critique of 13n.21 fragility of, see fragility of reason Kantian 2, 26, 116–17, 120–1, 129–30, 175 secular sovereign 1–2, 8, 12–15, 18–20, 22, 24–5, 28–9, 31–2, 36–9, 42, 47–8, 50, 58, 85–6, 90, 94–5, 129, 141–2, 145–6, 148–9, 151–3, 161–2, 169, 171–4, 178, 180–2 theistic 14, 19–20, 36n, 66, 37, 41–2, 90, 94–5, 146, 153, 176, 178–9, 183–4 redemption, see also anthropology as redemption 58, 156, 159, 162 revelation, see also reason, theistic 22, 39–40, 162, 172–3, 176n.1, 177–84 definition of 180 Rivers, W. H. R. 119–20 Rivet, Paul 96–7, 157 Robbins, Joel 18n.30, 20–3 romanticism 14–15, 18n. 32, 76, 81, 86–8, 183

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204

Index

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, see also LéviStrauss and Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 26, 56, 111n.12, 140, 148n.8, 160, 165, 167n.24 Royal Anthropological Institute 107–8 Sahlins, Marshall 48, 60n.23, 104–5, 120, 154–5 Said, Edward 28–9, 164–5 Samoans 48, 64–5, 89 Santayana, George 72 Sapir, Edward 66–8, 96, 154–5 Schneider, David 50, 76–7, 98, 104–5, 113–15, 121–2 Scott, James 107–8 secular, the, see also anthropology, secular formation of; reason, secular sovereign 13n.19, 15–16, 15n.25, 20, 29, 143n.2, 152, 163–4 definition of 15–16, 15n.26 secular theology, see also anthropology as secular theology 14, 23n.43 definition of 14n.23 Seligman, Charles Gabriel 46–7 Seneca 102 Serrano 67–8 Shah, Alpa 117 Shoshone 49, 130 Silverman, Sydel 34n.65, 57–9, 82–3, 98–9, 133, 137, 160–1 Smedley, Audrey 2–3, 127, 137–8 “social, the” 143–5, 165–7 Society for the Study of Man 5 sociology 12n.18, 74–5, 97–8, 164–7 Sorbonne, University of Paris 54n.13 sovereignscape 153, 167–8, 172, 180 definition of 152–3 sovereignty, see also reason, secular sovereign 39–40, 126, 132, 148–50, 162, 176–7, 180–4 idol(s) of 150–1, 162, 165–7, 176 paradigm of 30n.55, 40n.67, 152–3, 156, 165, 167, 175–6, 179 of the self 13, 13n.20, 126, 132–3, 172 Srinivas, M. N. 75 state, the 12–13, 13n.19, 28, 39, 74–5, 145n.5, 162, 167–9, 176, 179 idol(s) of 151, 163 Steiner, Franz 75, 152 Stocking, George 130

Strathern, Marilyn 13n.20, 58–62, 88–9, 126 Gender of the Gift 58 structuralism 13n.20, 92–3 subaltern 107–8 surrealism 55 Tagore, Rabindranath 184n.11 Tallensi 74–5, 133 Tarde, Gabriel 166 Taylor, Anne Christine 52–3, 58, 108, 160, 163n.21 Taylor, Charles 15n.26, 27, 43, 86–7, 89, 152 Tchambuli 65 Terray, Emmanuel 6n.7, 121–2, 126–7, 159, 164 theology about 12–13, 25, 33–4, 61, 67, 70, 74, 78–80, 112, 117, 134–5, 157–8, 178–81, 183 as anthropology’s other 18 in critique 18, 31–2, 35–6, 39, 173 definition of 21, 21n.39, 55n.16 theosealing 36–7, 50, 58, 76, 78, 84–7, 94–5, 100–1, 120–1, 141–2, 145, 174–5 theosis 94–5, 116–17 theosphere 22, 25, 31–2, 35–44, 50, 52, 61, 64, 75–6, 82–3, 93, 95, 100–1, 109–10, 115–16, 135, 141–2, 145, 165–6, 174–6 third world 107 Thoth 35–6, 38–9, 42–5, 58–9, 61, 78, 81–2, 85–8, 93–4, 100–1, 116, 141–2, 145, 174–5 Tillion, Germaine 114, 158 tradition, concept of 19–20, 49–50, 180–1 Trobriands 46 truth 3, 27–8, 33–4, 37, 41–2, 60n.23, 62, 68, 82–3, 103, 112, 114, 117–21, 124–6, 133, 136–7, 140–1, 147–9, 149n.11, 156, 158, 173, 175–6, 178–80, 182–3 Tübingen theological seminary 105 Turner, Edith and Victor 19n.34, 45–6, 101, 107 Turner, Terence 105 Tylor, E. B. 18n.29, 79–80, 95, 107–8, 146n.7 Primitive Culture 79–80

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Index

205

university, the modern 13, 18, 24, 36–8, 41–3, 45–6, 81, 92–3, 132, 134, 151, 163, 174, 179, 181–3 US society 7, 69

Wolf, Eric 52n.12, 80, 86–8, 99, 137, 155–8 World Council of Churches 103–4 Writing Culture 131–2

Wagner, Roy 7n.9, 32, 104–5, 143n.2 Weil, Simone 21, 30n.55, 147 Wenner-Gren Foundation 34n.65 White, Leslie 48 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 12n.15, 18–19, 18n.32, 147–8, 151, 163–4

Yale University 66 Yap 50, 113 Yoruk 51–2 Zen Buddhism 66 Zuni 49, 67–8, 170