 

The Anthropology
of Christianity per se *

. Prologue

S     -                     is now a well estab-

lished discipline in most parts of the world. Although its deepest
underlying impulses are universal and for most practitioners its com-
parative framework is global, the institutional consolidation of this dis-
cipline is very much a product of post-Enlightenment Europe (includ-
ing of course colonial offshoots, notably in North America). The subject
originated as the scholarly investigation of others and this is what it
remained for a long time. Gradually, however, the remit of the discipline
has been extended and nowadays, at least in most Anglophone university
departments, many anthropologists carry out research in their own
countries ().
The question of anthropology’s origins and its capacity to grasp and
translate concepts worldwide arises in peculiar ways when it comes to
religion. Christianity was the dominant religion of the countries in
which socio-cultural anthropology was first established and it continues
to provide the dominant religious idiom in the countries in which most
practitioners live and work. What consequences does this have for
anthropological work? In the first place, according to Joel Robbins
(a) and Fenella Cannell (, a), it has led to neglect of
Christianity in the anthropological literature. Long after anthropologists
began to pay attention to the other world religions, Christians remained
* I am grateful to Mathijs Pelkmans for nes which have remained the more common
helpful comments on an earlier draft and for variant of anthropology in many parts of
allowing me to quote from his forthcoming Europe; however, for reasons too complex to
volume on conversion in the former Soviet pursue here, in some countries the differences
Union. between the Völkerkunde and Volkskunde
() In this respect there has been some traditions remain significant.
convergence with the nation-centred discipli-


Chris H, Max-Planck-Institut für ethnologische Forschung [hann@eth.mpg.de].
Arch.europ.sociol., XLVIII,  (), pp. -—-//-$.per art + $. per page©
A.E.S.
  

‘‘invisible’’, ‘‘occluded’’, and ‘‘repressed’’ (Canell a). Robbins

writes of an ‘‘overdetermined history of neglect’’ (, p. ). He has
suggested that Christians are ‘‘anomalous’’ in the classic sense of Mary
Douglas, ‘‘too similar to anthropologists to be worthy of study and too
meaningfully different to be easily made sense of by the use of standard
anthropological tools’’ (a, p. ). The latter difficulty arises
because Christianity draws on that part of Western cultural traditions
which is ‘‘in critical dialogue with the modernist ideas on which
anthropology is founded’’ (ibid). Hence, where Christianity does figure
in anthropological work it has usually been peripheral, e. g. because it is
viewed as an alien intrusion that undermines a local cosmology. Both
Cannell (a) and Robbins () refer to the influential work of Jean
and John Comaroff (), in which the Christian ideas and influence
per se remain secondary, addressed only where relevant to their main
themes of colonization and resistance; Cannell and Robbins suggest that
this subordination results in an inadequate representation of Christia-
nity in this part of Africa.
According to Fenella Cannell, Christianity began to gain recognition
within the discipline with the gradual extension of the anthropological
field to include (closer to home) rural southern Europe. However, the
regional bias of three recent attempts to promote ‘‘the anthropology of
Christianity’’ is still highly traditional (Robbins a, Engelke and
Tomlinson , Cannell b). Most of the contributors to these
collections deal with Christian communities that result from missionary
encounters in locations remote from the religion’s home territory. We
still do not have much by way of ethnographic studies of mainstream
Christianity in countries such as Britain and the United States, where
the contributors to these volumes are based. These Christians, so it
would seem, or at any rate the more common varieties, are not suffi-
ciently exotic to warrant attention. Most of the studies undertaken so far
in Northern Europe and North America tend to focus on groups viewed
with suspicion by the dominant institutionalized Christian denomina-
tions. In these collections Simon Coleman writes about evangelical
Protestants in Sweden (in Cannell b and in Engelke and Tomlinson
; see also Coleman , ), and James Faubion (in Engelke and
Tomlinson ) interprets the faith of a single member of the Branch
Davidians of Texas (best known in connection with the tragedy at Waco
in ). The work of Susan Friend Harding is widely discussed in these
collections (Harding ; ). Harding is self-consciously aware that
she is studying the ‘‘other’’: conservative ‘‘fundamentalists’’ who form
the ‘‘repugnant cultural other’’ of secular modernity; like Robbins, she

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believes the latter to be the bedrock of modern social science, including

anthropology.
But how solid is this scientific bedrock? The editors of these three
recent collections all draw attention to the ways in which the discipline
which emerged as part of a post-Enlightenment emancipation from
religion, and which continues to shy away from the study of mainstream
religion at home, has remained suffused with the concepts and world
view of that tradition (see also Cannell ). These problems were first
prominently raised by Evans-Pritchard (), long before terms such
as reflexivity and deconstruction came into fashion. Nowadays every
undergraduate student is made aware that ‘‘religion’’ itself is a highly
problematic term, which in other places and other epochs cannot be
applied to denote a separate domain of activity in the way that it does for
most of ‘‘us’’ moderns. It has also become commonplace to recognize
that ‘‘belief’’ in the interiorized sense that Christians usually use the
term may not be applicable to other religious traditions (Needham ;
Ruel ; see also Robbins ). A similar point can be made with
regard to the concept of meaning, which provides the unifying theme for
Engelke and Tomlinson (). This concept is absolutely central to the
work of Clifford Geertz (). However, to generalize a definition of
religion which privileges symbols and meaning is arguably to introduce
a Christian bias; after all hermeneutics, the interpretive exegesis of
culture as text, was invented not by anthropologists or sociologists but
by Christian theologians. But how adequate is the Geertzian approach
even to Christianity itself? Is a concern with meaning really so pervasive
and distinctive in this religion? The contributors to the collection of
Engelke and Tomlinson all explore ‘‘the limits of meaning’’ through
cases in which meaning somehow ‘‘fails’; but the focus on failure or
absence does not displace meaning as the central focus of concern.
Fenella Cannell (a) speculates that our preoccupation with
‘‘modernity’’ itself, which is common to all the classical sociologists and
a theme that is also taken up in Webb Keane’s ‘‘Epilogue’’ to her volume,
derives ultimately from a Christian temporality that emphasizes dis-
continuity. Joel Robbins too argues that Christians are uniquely
concerned with rupture, as exemplified by the distinction they draw
between the Old and New Testaments. In his case this emphasis seems
to follow naturally from his own fieldwork among recent converts to
Pentecostalism in Melanesia, whose world is nowadays structured by a
sharp sense of ‘‘before’’ and ‘‘after’’. Of course, Christians by definition
believe that they are special and in possession of the one true faith. What
is interesting is that the scholars promoting the anthropology of

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Christianity seem to endorse this ‘‘Christian exceptionalism’’: for

example, Keane concludes that Christianity offers ‘‘privileged insight’’
into the condition of the ‘‘troubled’’ modern subject (). I find such
arguments stimulating but ultimately unconvincing because they end up
reproducing the Western biases from which they seek to escape. I shall
argue instead for an alternative approach which would anthropologize
Christianity by investigating it systematically in wider frameworks than
those employed in any of these recent volumes. Although I cannot do
justice to the richness of all the case studies they contain, I shall outline
the contents of these collections in more detail in section III, paying
particular attention to the synthetic articles which open and close each
one of them. First, however, I shall sketch the intellectual context by
highlighting some of the more influential contributions and trends in
this field over the last two decades.

. The incubation of a sub-field

It is hardly surprising that anthropological investigations of Chris-

tianity should reflect wider trends in the anthropology of religion and in
the discipline in general. In the absence of any obvious annus mirabilis,
the time frame is necessarily arbitrary. I shall begin this review in the late
s, but I stress at the start that the end of the Cold War, the major
world-historical event of these years, did not have any decisive impact on
anthropological research in this field. There have been shifts of
emphasis over the last two decades, but no revelatory moment; I shall
suggest that continuity has dominated overall, in both regional and
theoretical predilections.
In terms of theory, the most influential paradigm in the anthropology
of religion in recent decades has been the interpretive approach develo-
ped in the s by Clifford Geertz, with its emphasis upon the central
role of religion in establishing the specific ‘‘webs of meaning’’ of a
culture (Geertz ). With regard to Christianity, the collection edited
by Wendy James and Douglas Johnston can be classified in this broad
genre (b). The emphasis is upon ‘‘native’’ appropriations of
Christianity in everyday practice rather than on doctrinal nuances. The
editors trace the tensions inherent in ‘‘vernacular Christianity’’ back to
cultural conflicts between Jews and Gentiles even before consolidation
of the Church (a, p. ). They point out that in fact ‘‘there never was
a Church’’, but always a plurality. Christendom was not generally iden-

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tified with Europe until after the sixteenth century and the construction
of Christianity as ‘‘a religion’’, to be compared with others on an
evolutionary scale, is a product of nineteenth century scholarship. James
and Johnson aim ‘‘to disengage the notion of Christianity from that of
‘‘the modern West’’ with which it has too often been unthinkingly
linked’’ (p. ). Since their volume was a kind of Festschrift for Godfrey
Lienhardt, who himself had written about the spread of Catholicism
among the Dinka, many of the case materials concern the spread of
Christianity in Africa. The editors note that ‘‘The native has in places
appropriated Christianity in such a way as to become more Christian
than the former imperial master’’ (p. ). They point out that conversion
can seldom, if ever, be approached in terms of a total transformation.
Rather, the anthropologist needs to analyze the particular elements of
the new faith that are taken up as Africans make their own religious
history. Finally, James and Johnson caution against reductionist expla-
nations in terms of political and economic factors. They argue instead
that religion is ultimately a matter of personal experience, and the job of
the anthropologist is to explore how local people themselves explore
intimate questions of spirituality in their specific cultural contexts:
Christian identity, as a confession of faith, does not bring with it or produce cul-
tural and social uniformity; but because, as personal experience, it inevitably goes
with a characteristic sense of particular place or time, the theme of personal reli-
gious identity cannot be separated from that vernacular context. In that sense,
every Christian is a native. (James and Johnson, a, p. )

In the opening case study of this collection Roger Just shows how the
Greeks of the island of Meganisi have virtually no knowledge of
Orthodox Christian doctrines but merge their religious identity with
their national identity as Greeks. He proceeds to explain how this has
come about, with reference to the foundation of the Greek state in the
early nineteenth century. Anticlericalism appears paradoxical in this
context, since the villagers delegate spiritual and doctrinal concerns
to an institution for which they harbor little respect. But in fact it is
paradoxical only from a Protestant perspective that would privilege
unmediated individual communication with the divine. In the Greek
case (similar analyses could be made for many Roman Catholic societies)
popular anticlericalism focuses on the practical conduct of the clergy
and has its basic motivation in the contrast between the competitive,
egalitarian ethic of the villagers and the privileged status of the Church
as a wealthy and powerful institution.
Orthodox Christianity in Greece is also the subject of an impressive
monograph by Charles Stewart (). In this work Stewart follows a

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Geertzian approach to religion as a cultural system while simultaneously

pursuing an original analysis with respect to earlier debates about world
religions and the postulated contrast between the ‘‘great’’ and ‘‘little’’
traditions. While theologians and folklorists in Greece have contrasted
the exotiká demons of local religious practice with the Devil of Christian
doctrine, Stewart shows that the two complement and reinforce each
other to form an integrated whole. In practice, at the level of the village,
the folk demons even come to resemble Christian saints as mediators
with the divine. Above all they function to express the abiding moral
concerns of local society. Greece, argues Stewart, presents a special case
of the dialectic between doctrinal and local, practical religion, since both
the great (text-based) and the little (orally transmitted) traditions draw
on the same pre-Christian cultural categories. Exotiká can be strategi-
cally deployed within the framework of Orthodoxy, and for villagers in
the past there was in effect only a single tradition, a unified cosmology.
However, Stewart also documents the changes that have taken place
in recent decades as a result of education and movement to the cities.
Villagers have become reluctant and embarrassed even to talk about
their traditional beliefs and practices, accepting the classification of the
Church and of the secular intelligentsia that these are mere ‘‘supersti-
tions’’. Meanwhile sections of the urban population have developed
interests in new forms of mysticism and the occult, in this way
maintaining their superior symbolic capital (see also Stewart ).
Until the s most Orthodox Christians lived under socialist
regimes, but opportunities for the anthropological study of religion in
these countries were limited. The major exception was the work of Gail
Kligman, who demonstrated the continuing vitality of practical religion
and ritual activities in Ceauşescu’s Romania (, ). While the
regime sought to reify ‘‘Tradition’’ for its own legitimation purposes,
Kligman showed that ritual and folk poetry were still very much a part
of lived daily reality for the inhabitants of the isolated region of Mara-
mureş. As in the Greek case documented by Stewart, Kligman noted the
persistence of numerous pre-Christian beliefs and practices. The ‘‘fit’’
between practices and Christian doctrine was often imperfect, but while
some aspects of ritual were inherently conservative, others were sus-
ceptible to change. The religious system as a whole helped the Moroşeni
to cope not only with the massive disruptions of socialist modernization
but also with the deepest universal contradictions of human experience
().
Similar points emerge from the significantly larger literature on
popular Catholicism in Europe, which has continued to grow in recent

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decades (Badone ; Christian ; Pina-Cabral ). Other

anthropologists have explored more complex patterns of syncretism
outside Europe, where local people have adopted Catholicism in the
wake of colonialism. In one of the outstanding studies of this kind
Fenella Cannell () has shown how the ritual behaviour of eco-
nomically marginalized villagers in Bicol (Philippines) towards a statue
of the ‘‘dead Christ’’ (Ama) is modeled on their native funerary prac-
tices. This Christ is not a mediator to the transcendent deity in the way
that saints mediate divine contact for European peasants. Ama is rather
to be seen as ‘‘the best shaman’’ (p. ), who helps the villagers to
manage relations between the worlds of the living and the dead. Long
after their conversion these Bicolano remain uninterested in the Catholic
‘‘economy of salvation’’, indifferent to concepts of sin and repentance,
or heaven and hell, and almost altogether ignorant of the idea of Pur-
gatory.
The ghost of Clifford Geertz continues to haunt all this work:
whether they cite him or not, most of the above-mentioned studies are in
one way or another concerned to explore religion as a local cultural sys-
tem. However, during the s a number of anthropologists began to
feel that a focus upon the ideas and beliefs which held cultures together
deflected attention away other aspects of religion that were no less
important, including sociological and political factors. This criticism of
Geertz was elaborated by Raymond Firth (). Talal Asad ()
argued that anthropologists needed to pay closer attention to the power
relations shaping the construction and ‘‘authorization’’ of religion in the
context of other representations and discourses. In his view, the focus on
meaning was a clear example of the Christian bias of the discipline, since
other religions did not attach the same importance to the internalization
of ideas (see also Asad ). Eric Wolf collaborated with a distin-
guished group of Europeanist anthropologists to explore complex links
between religion and state formation (, ). The most detailed
response to the Geertzian paradigm was Mart Bax’s elaboration of the
concept of ‘‘religious regime’’ (). He subsequently demonstrated its
empirical utility in numerous studies of the ecclesiastical and secular
politics which shaped the emergence and consolidation of the Marian
shrine at Medjugorje, Bosnia (e.g. Bax ).
Wendy James and Douglas Johnston argued that from its origins as a
Jewish sect, ‘‘culturally [...] Christianity could not help but be syncretic’’
(a, p. ), especially at the expanding margins. In the work discussed
above, Charles Stewart distinguished Greek Orthodoxy as a synthetic
religion from unstable situations of syncretism in which no coherent

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system had yet emerged. He developed these ideas in a later volume

(Stewart and Shaw ). Attention has also been paid to the political
implications of religious mixing, for example where the same holy place
is shared by different Christian denominations or by Christians and
Muslims. Whereas Bowman () found that communal relations
between Muslims and Christian Arabs at the shrines he studied in
Palestine implied a positive recognition of the other, Hayden () took
the case of former Yugoslavia to advance the thesis that such interaction
was better seen as ‘‘negative tolerance’’. In Hayden’s view, apparently
peaceful syncretic practices almost always concealed deeper antagonisms
with the potential for violence (but see also Bowman’s response in the
debate accompanying Hayden’s article and Bowman, forthcoming).
Syncretism has also been a very prominent theme in work on Chris-
tianity outside the tradition’s homelands in the Middle East and Europe.
(e. g. Green ; Meyer ). Indeed socio-cultural anthropologists’
investigations of missiology and conversion in colonial and postcolonial
settings have far exceeded the attention they have paid to Christianity
‘‘at home’’ (for a few examples see Barker ; Buckser and Glazier
; Hefner ; Luig ; Peel ; van der Veer ). Many
missionaries were sensitive observers of the customs of the natives they
aimed to convert. Protestant Pietists recognized in the th century that
certain elements in native cosmologies might be consistent with and
therefore adaptable by the new religion. Roman Catholics too have
found many ways to reconcile indigenous beliefs and practices with
those of Christianity, a practice which was increasingly sanctioned by
the Church after Vatican II and given the name ‘‘inculturation’’. In
many places, however, the earlier implantations of the larger churches
have been upstaged and supplanted in recent years by the impact of
more ‘‘fundamentalist’’ groups such as the Seventh day Adventists,
complicating syncretic practices still further (Jebens ).
The continuing thrust of the anthropological work on conversion has
been to reject the assumption of Pauline sudden rupture. In practice
conversion is more commonly a long-drawn out process, with ramifica-
tions in virtually all dimensions of life for both individuals and their
communities. In certain circumstances the new religion can serve to
express a people’s resistance to colonial domination (Comaroff and
Comaroff ). However, in his recent survey of this field, Mathijs
Pelkmans (forthcoming) is critical of a continuing individualist bias and
implicit reliance on models of a religious marketplace model in some
studies of conversion. He argues that such approaches are especially
likely to mislead wherever religion is politicized and tightly linked to

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ethnicity, as for example in much of the former socialist world. Pelk-

mans’ conclusion is that anthropologists should not attempt to define
conversion as an analytic concept but rather use the term as a ‘‘sensi-
tizing concept’’ in comparative analysis of the complex social dynamics
of both individual and collective boundary-crossing.
These themes have fed into larger multidisciplinary debates con-
cerning topics such as modernity, globalization and fundamentalism.
Anthropologists have been among the leading critics of standard
secularization theory, not least in European societies where many
sociological indicators point to a decline in traditional practices, yet
beliefs persist, religion continues to play a major role in the formation of
collective identity, and new forms of spirituality emerge (see van der
Veer and Lehmann ; Stewart  makes this point for Greece; cf.
Lindquist  on the subject of magic in postsocialist Russia). Peter
Van der Veer (building upon the earlier work of Robin Horton and
others) edited a volume which explicitly relates religious conversion to
‘‘modern notions of personhood’’ (). This volume anticipates
recent sociological debates about ‘‘multiple modernities’’ (Eisenstadt
). One notices, however, that the traditional Weberian model,
according to which to be modern is to embrace Protestant notions of
asceticism and direct communication with the deity, retains a lot of its
force. Van der Veer is prepared to allow that Catholics too can become
‘‘modern Christians’’ by these criteria, but his volume makes no men-
tion of Orthodox Christianity. Similarly, for Webb Keane, who has
written extensively about Protestant converts in Indonesia (a,
), the ‘‘moral narrative of modernity’’ is primarily a Protestant one,
in which local people are expected to take their doctrines seriously.
However, Keane proceeds to argue, since anthropologists have no access
to the interior states of the people they study, they are obliged to fall back
on exterior mediating factors such as the language used in communi-
cating with the deity and the material objects which even Protestants
religious activities cannot entirely dispense with (Keane b, ; cf.
Coleman ; Engelke ).
The dominance of a Protestant model is in certain respects easy to
understand. Charismatic and fundamentalist Protestants are certainly
among the most actively expanding Christian currents globally (Cole-
man ; Robbins b). Pentecostalism has enjoyed great success
everywhere (for Latin America see Lehmann ; for Africa, Meyer
; for Melanesia, Robbins a; for postsocialist Ukraine, Wanner
). Most of these works document the fact that the religion that
appears on the one hand to be thoroughly modern, notably in its

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emphasis on scripture and direct communication with the divine, is

usually at the same time deeply emotional and highly critical of many
features of modern society, e.g. concerning consumerism and morality.
Similar tensions can be explored with reference to other currents of
Christianity. William Christian () has pioneered the historical-
anthropological study of Catholic visionaries and Thomas Csordas
() has investigated contemporary charismatic Catholicism with
particular reference to healing and ‘‘cultural embodiment’’. Galina
Valtchinova has investigated the activities of an Orthodox visionary in
postsocialist Bulgaria (). Michael Herzfeld has shown how, in
neighbouring Greece, a current he labels ‘‘Neo-Orthodox’’ has emerged
in opposition to the official Church, which is perceived as corrupt and
compromised by ‘‘rationalistic modernity’’. In a sense, argues Herzfeld,
the Orthodox Church came to be seen as ‘‘Protestant’’ by traditionalists
who continued to see their religion not as a matter of interiorized faith
but as the suffusing of all human life with the sacred. Their rejection of
Western technology and consumerism was marked by a more general
‘‘cultural fundamentalism’’, expressed first and foremost in Greek
nationalism but also in demonstrating solidarity with other Orthodox
Churches, notably the Serbian Church during the years of conflict in
Bosnia (Herzfeld ). Other analysts of the Greek case have opted for
the term ‘‘rigorist’’ rather than ‘‘fundamentalist’’ (Makrides ).
Similar observations concerning the links between Orthodox funda-
mentalism and anti-Western nationalism have been made by anthro-
pological observers of the Russian Orthodox Church (Caldwell forth-
coming). The general effect is to suggest a Weberian spectrum that
ranges from Calvinism (individualist, extreme modernist) to Orthodoxy
(collectivist, anti-modern), with Roman Catholicism positioned along-
side Anglicanism (Jenkins ) somewhere in the middle ground.
The study of Christian pilgrimage exemplifies some common theo-
retical trends and is perhaps one of the few areas in which writings about
Christianity have had a significant impact on the anthropology of reli-
gion more generally. At the opening of the period under review the most
influential work was undoubtedly that of Victor and Edith Turner
(). Pilgrimage was understood in a rather idealized way as ‘‘anti-
structure’’. Combining the traditions of Durkheim and van Gennep,
pilgrims were said to experience communitas in the liminal time during
which they abandoned their profane lives. John Eade and Michael Sall-
now () did not so much reject this model as place more emphasis on
social and political factors, which often intrude from the profane world
and lead to contestation at sacred sites. This approach proved itself

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fruitful in the s, but Coleman () has argued that analysts of
pilgrimage should not confine their research to either of these para-
digms. Currently fruitful avenues include considering pilgrimage as
performance and paying closer attention to local narratives, e. g. those
constructed to authenticate sites that are not recognized by the church
(Coleman and Elsner ). For example, Ellen Badone has recently
analysed the ‘‘routinization of charisma’’ at a shrine in Brittany, where
the Virgin Mary appeared to a peasant girl from  onwards. The
Church has refused to authorize the apparitions and miracles performed
at this site, and the local villagers have been largely sidelined. Following
William Christian and Simon Coleman, Badone notes multiple interests
and audiences for both written texts and oral narratives. There is com-
petition to ‘‘own’’ the shrine, primarily between different groups of lay
outsiders, and to this extent the ‘‘contestation’’ paradigm in the study of
sacred journeys remains valid. At the same time it is crucial to study the
selection and modification of the narrative themes through which the
various actors strive to provide ‘‘authoritative accounts of sacred his-
tory’’ (Badone , p. ). Badone has also been an active contributor
to another trend in the recent literature, namely to approach pilgrimage
from the perspectives of consumerism and tourism (Badone and Rose-
man ).
Finally, it is impossible to overlook a spate of recent publications in
which anthropologists have applied evolutionary biological and cogni-
tive approaches to the study of religion, including Christianity. Thus the
biologist-cum-anthropologist David Sloan Wilson () thinks of
society as an organism (an analogy long rejected in mainstream socio-
cultural anthropology) and takes Calvinism as a good example of how a
religion can be efficient and adaptive in sustaining group solidarity (in
the social unit called Geneva). The most influential cognitive model at
present is probably that of Harvey Whitehouse, developed in part on the
basis of his fieldwork among Christian converts in Melanesia, during
which the anthropologist himself became caught up in the emotional
turbulence of a cargo cult (). Whitehouse distinguishes between
two ‘‘modes of religiosity’’, each of which has a different basis in
memory and cognition. The doctrinal mode is epitomized by the more
pure versions of Protestantism. However, it is always in danger of rou-
tinization: boredom and stagnation set in, and the religion can only
regain its dynamism through triggering extraordinary emotions in the
‘‘imagistic mode’’, which are recalled in episodic memory (Whitehouse
, ). It is tempting ¢ perhaps too tempting ¢ to connect this
theory to the established dichotomies of ‘‘doctrinal’’ versus ‘‘practical’’


  

religion. It has already been applied to a wide range of cases, Christian

and non-Christian, in different historical periods (Whitehouse and
Martin ). However, it has also been subjected to criticism from
colleagues within cognitive anthropology, who draw attention to
counterexamples and offer contrasting interpretations of the very same
evidence (Atran ).
If my reading is correct, anthropological work on Christianity over
the last two decades, like the anthropology of religion more generally, is
characterized by a diversity of theoretical approaches. There has been a
continuous simmering reaction against the Geertzian approach to reli-
gion as ‘‘local cultural system’’. Some anthropologists have prioritized
questions of power and authorization and stressed the politico-
economic factors which have shaped the expansion of particular variants
of Christianity in the postcolonial era. However there has been a lot of
continuity in key themes: doctrinal versus practical expressions of reli-
gion, conversion, missions, and syncretism. Recent innovative work has
been influenced by developments in linguistic anthropology, the study
of material culture, and also performance theory (the legacy of Victor
Turner is by no means restricted to the topic of pilgrimage). As with the
continuing spate of cognitive approaches, there is a tendency in much of
this work to relegate political and economic factors to the background;
and to this extent Geertzian idealism remains very influential.

. Three recent collections

I turn now to a detailed consideration of three recent publications

which explicitly invoke ‘‘the anthropology of Christianity’’. Joel
Robbins’ introduction to the symposium he edited for the journal Reli-
gion in  is a clarion call for recognition of this sub-field. Robbins
bemoans the fact that there is no ‘‘anthropology of Christianity for
itself’’. Although the work I touched on in the preceding section might
seem a far from inconsequential corpus, Robbins asserts that there is no
scholarly community of the kind which exists for the ‘‘anthropology of
Islam’’ and the other world religions. He hints that there might be some
intellectual problems in using the robust singular for religious traditions
that contain enormous internal variation, but he skips over these diffi-
culties. According to Robbins, the anthropologists who study Islam have
made progress by getting on with the job: new accounts of local diversity
have been slotted in to cumulative discussions about this world religion

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as a unified entity. He then suggests two very broad headings under

which the anthropology of Christianity might develop. The first is
the tension found between everyday life and the pursuit of ‘‘ultimate
meaning’’. The second is the relation of the world religion to local
cultures (he uses the terms ‘‘indigenization’’ and ‘‘localization’’, but does
not wish to discard the concept of syncretism).
Robbins’ own contribution to this symposium deals with global
Pentecostalism and is an impressive comparative survey with far-
reaching theoretical implications concerning anthropology’s bias
towards what he terms ‘‘continuity thinking’’ (b). Andre Droogers’
chapter is a carefully constructed theoretical-methodological argument
which recommends a cognitive approach, modified by what he terms
‘‘methodological ludism’’ (in the wake of Huizinga and Victor Turner).
Most of the remaining papers are case studies; Rebecca Lester describes
Roman Catholic nuns in a Mexican convent, with particular respect to
their notions of time; Brian Howell investigates Baptists and Pentecos-
talists in the Philippines and elsewhere; and the subjects of Rodolfo
Otero’s paper are spirit possession and Pentecostalism, also in Mexico.
Finally, the historian Tamar Frankiel provides a review of the papers in
which she notes the difficulties that scholars like herself have expe-
rienced in US academia in establishing ‘‘History of Christianity’’ as a
field distinct from Church History. While it is clear, she argues, that
Christian religious orientations display certain ‘‘family resemblances’’,
and that it is possible to identify specific differentiating ‘‘schemata’’ in
certain Christian ideas (e.g. ‘‘Jesus died for our sins’’), Frankiel asks
whether ‘‘traditional anthropological concerns’’ are best promoted by
creating a new sub-field:
What do we learn in addition from the fact that our subjects claim to be Christians?
What do their struggles at integration of old and new, their ecstasies and ordinary
lives, their formulation of what it means to be powerful and effective teach us that
we could not learn from studying Islam, Buddhism, or traditional religions?
(Frankiel , pp. -)

Frankiel does not have a positive answer to these crucial questions.

She considers the arguments of Lester concerning transcendental time
but points out that similar transcendence can be found in Buddhism.
She is sympathetic to Robbins’ focus on ‘‘disjunctivity’’ but points out
that ascetic disjunction is also a conspicuous feature of Judaism. In
short, though Robbins and other contributors to this symposium
demonstrate the insights to be gained from the comparative study of
contemporary Pentecostalism, the case made in this collection for a more
general ‘‘anthropology of Christianity’’ is less convincing.


  

Fenella Cannell begins her fifty-page introductory chapter with a

discussion which echoes the starting point of Joel Robbins. Anthropo-
logists have been ‘‘nervous’’ about Christianity, the proximity of which
‘‘has hitherto rendered it only imperfectly perceptible’’ (a, p. ).
This religion is both familiar and threatening, and there has been a
continuous tension between ‘‘an attempt to separate from Christian
metaphysics and a simultaneous assimilation of key ideas derived from
those metaphysics’’ (ibid). Later in this introduction she cites Maurice
Bloch, her colleague at the London School of Economics, as an example
of an anthropologist who is guilty on two major charges. First, he has
failed to do justice to the Christianity of the people about whom he has
written so much, the Protestant Merina of Madagascar. Secondly, his
Marxist theory of ritual, which is based on notions of mystification and
alleges that ritual serves the interests of powerholders, implies a notion
of transcendent truth which is ultimately deeply Christian; Bloch’s
theory is therefore castigated as belonging to ‘‘that long tradition of
antireligious social science that incorporates Christian models by its
refusal of them’’ (ibid, p. ).
Cannell explains that Christianity is very difficult to define. For her
the key feature seems to be a paradoxical opposition of spirit and flesh.
The former is identified with orthodoxy, but unorthodox, ‘‘heretical’’
concerns with the flesh have constantly subverted Christianity’s ‘‘ascetic
stereotype’’. Recognizing this basic dualism will help us, argues Cannell,
to understand the religion’s historical development. In the following
sections she reviews the ethnographic record to date and finds it meagre:
the pioneers were more interested in the ‘‘elementary forms’’ of religion,
and when anthropologists did finally begin to study world religions they
still remained reluctant to tackle Christianity. In the early Mediterra-
neanist literature the greater religiosity of women was overlooked
because men were considered to be the more ‘‘cultural’’. Only the
works of William Christian () and João de Pina-Cabral () on
popular beliefs and practices in the Iberian peninsular are exempted
from her strictures. In colonial contexts the anthropologist typically
judged Christianity to be an inconvenient intrusion from abroad,
which frustrated the task of understanding the local cultures. If atten-
tion was paid to the impact of the missionaries, this was driven by the
enquiry into modernization and resistance (as with the Comaroffs).
Christianity per se again escaped closer scrutiny. The record is so dismal
that Cannell advises instead turning to the work of historians (Peter
Brown and Averil Cameron are named as examples) for better
insight into Christian dynamics, particularly into the way in which the

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early church was consolidated from its origins in a Jewish millennial

cult.
The thinness of Christian ethnography is then contrasted to a thick
intellectual ‘‘prehistory’’, which according to Cannell continues to dog
investigations into Christianity. She begins this section with Hegel’s
account of transcendence. Christianity (she concedes in passing that
there might be precedents in Judaism and in the abstractions of Plato’s
philosophy) transforms religion by spreading the ‘‘unhappy cons-
ciousness’’ of a supreme God who is not immanent in this world and
who encourages new practices of ascetism (though in popular practices
many methods for mediation develop). From Hegel Cannell traces a
lineage, primarily in France. Durkheim took over Hegel’s basic dualism,
and Mauss showed how Christianity is responsible for our notion of the
modern individual, for whom morality becomes entirely a matter of
‘‘interiority’’. To Foucault we owe the insight that the Christian practice
of confession lies behind ‘‘modern psychological and psychoanalytic
regimes’’. Dumont adapted a variant of Max Weber’s Protestant ethic
thesis, which was itself an adaptation of earlier Catholic ascetism.
Finally in this section (tellingly titled ‘‘Christianity as radical disconti-
nuity’’) Cannell pays homage to Jonathan Parry’s well known discussion
of the gift, in which (in her account) he probes the links between
Christianity and the ideology of ‘‘late capitalism’’.
The central sections of Cannell’s introduction are devoted to ques-
tions of orthodoxy, conversion and modernity. How are Christians to be
defined? Few anthropologists would disagree when she says that we
must not be restrictive and impose the criterion of theological ortho-
doxy. For the Catholics with whom she herself worked in Bicol the
‘‘dead Christ’’ is more important than the living Saviour and there is
little interest in transcendence. There is, on the other hand, a general
awareness that many of their practices diverge from mainstream, i.e.
Western-determined, orthodox teachings. Such an awareness is even
more strongly present among the Laymi of Bolivia (Olivia Harris), and
it is also to be found among the Catholics of South India (Cecilia Busby
and David Mosse). By contrast, Fijian Methodists (Christina Toren)
maintain a happy unity of orthodoxy and orthopraxy, thanks above all to
continuities in kinship and socialization practices.
The bottom line would seem to be that you are a Christian if you say
you are one, but this emphasis on self-ascription becomes problematic
when Cannell moves on to discuss conversion and modernity. Some of
her contributors apply rather sharp notions of conversion, including the
various shades of evangelical Protestantism discussed by Eva Keller


  

(Madagascar), Harvey Whitehouse (Melanesia) and Simon Coleman

(Sweden). Whitehouse argues that Christianity introduces not
merely new institutions but a new cognitive paradigm. Cannell distances
herself from this line and draws attention instead to Webb Keane’s
analyses of a more gradual emergence of modern attitudes, such as
individualized, interiorized ‘‘sincerity’’. But her strong general
argument in these pages is that the very notion of modernity derives
from Christian notions of transcendence and conversion. Christianity,
like modernity, is predicated on a notion of rupture, a break in time
that is caused by a ‘‘unique and irreversible event’’ (p. ). However, a
difficulty then arises in classifying peoples such as the Amazonian
Piro (Peter Gow) who, though they say they are Christian, do not have
any such notion of rupture, let alone Christian ideas of soul and
personhood. The Biak of Indonesian Papua (Danilyn Rutherford) are
also problematic: for them, conversion to Christianity seems to be no
different from other changes they have made in the past. These are
to be classified as ‘‘cultures whose ontologies fit poorly with
Christianity’s most basic and unrecognized assumptions’’ (p. ).
Cannell concludes that we must still recognize them as Christian, but
evidently Christianity does not everywhere entail ‘‘modernity’’ (a
concept which in her estimation ‘‘has become superstitious in the social
sciences’’, p. ).
The final section of Cannell’s introduction is titled ‘‘The impossible
religion’’. She returns to the duality she outlined at the beginning and
argues that, because Christianity ‘‘deals badly with issues related to
bodily life’’ (ibid), we must expect non-orthodox spirits and other agents
to be called upon to compensate for this deficiency. Iconoclastic strug-
gles are ‘‘just one instance of Christian doctrine being haunted by its
own expurgated other self’’ (p. ). The anthropologist must pay due
attention to heretical as well as orthodox elements. Christian doctrine
itself (even before we consider the practices) has always been multivocal
and paradoxical. In these final pages Cannell seems in danger of
committing the sin which Robbins calls ‘‘object-dissolving’’: Chris-
tianity is ‘‘not exclusively a religion of transcendence’’ (p. ), and at the
same time transcendence is not exclusively Christian. Where does this
leave the anthropology of Christianity? For Fenella Cannell, at the end
of the day Christianity is ‘‘a complex historical object whose parameters
are by no means arbitrary but which also cannot plausibly be described
except as being in tension with itself’’ (p. ).
Webb Keane (whose own work on Indonesia and numerous theore-
tical contributions have obviously been influential since they are fre-

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quently cited by contributors to all three collections) takes up some of

Cannell’s themes in his Epilogue to her volume. He too is dismissive of
‘‘a tendency to subordinate Christianity as a religion of transcendence to
its institutional forms or its service to the this-worldly problems with
which the secular scholar, naturally, feels more at home’’ (, p. ).
He emphasizes ‘‘materiality’’ in religion and in more general processes
of ‘‘self-objectification’’, but his central concerns are abstract and
idealist. Christianity, for him, is ‘‘an especially rich ethnographic
domain’’ (p. ) to explore the modern subject.

The language employed by Cannell and Keane is frequently com-

plex, perhaps deliberately so in order to reflect their view that the object
of their analysis is very diverse, ambiguous and hard to pin down. In this
respect one turns with high hopes to the collection edited by Matthew
Engelke and Matt Tomlinson, to which Joel Robbins contributes an
‘‘Afterword’’, because they address not ‘‘the anthropology of Christia-
nity’’ in its entirety but a more specific theme, which they illustrate with
Christian case studies. The theme is meaning, or rather the limits of
meaning, particularly as revealed in cases of ‘‘failure’’. The introductory
chapter is mostly devoted to an outline of the theoretical background.
The linguistic philosophy of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein (arguably
anticipated by Malinowski’s work on language in the Trobriands)
provides one baseline, but the editors argue that it needs supplementing
by the work of (among others) John Searle (since individual intentio-
nality is so important for Christians) and Charles Peirce (for sign theory,
in particular indexing). Tomlinson and Engelke (the order of the names
is reversed for the introduction) applaud Talal Asad’s criticism of the
Geertzian stress on the interpretation of meaning, since this privileges a
Christian concern with intellectual coherence and deflects investigators
away from questions of power and discipline (Asad ; ).
However, Tomlinson and Engelke defend Geertz on the grounds that in
his empirical work he manages to avoid the traps of his apparently
essentialized definitions. Issues of power should also be addressed, they
say, (as Robbins points out in his Afterword, few of their contributors
actually do so), but this is not necessarily inconsistent with a focus
on ideas. Rather, Tomlinson and Engelke insist that the concept of
meaning remains a useful focus, not in order to rescue the coherence of
Geertzian webs of significance but in order to see, particularly when
studying ritual performances, where meaning is not conveyed. As the
editors sum up, ‘‘an emphasis on meaning entails the potential of its
absence, negation, or irrelevance. In the meaning-saturated world of


  

Christianity where understanding God’s message becomes paramount,

meanings as a result become slippery in performance’’ (Tomlinson and
Engelke , p. ).
Meaning, it seems, cannot always be accomplished (this is a problem
which the Biak, who figure again in this collection, seem to share with a
charismatic Branch Davidian in Texas). Sometimes meaning cannot be
articulated and preachers fall silent (Coleman again, and also Tomlinson
with a further case study of Fijian Methodists). As Robbins notes in his
Afterword, it is not clear just what is explained by these cases of failure.
The other case studies are by Engelke and Erica Bornstein on Zim-
babwe, Andrew Orta on Bolivia, and Ilana Gershon on the Samoan
diaspora in New Zealand. The materials are fully as diverse as the case
studies in the other volumes reviewed here, with a similar bias towards
evangelical and charismatic varieties of Protestantism. Nonetheless the
editors lodge a claim for the coherence of their collection by maintaining
that Christianity is indeed, as charged by Asad and other critics of
Geertz, uniquely concerned with questions of meaning. This is why this
concept can provide ‘‘a useful heuristic for an anthropology of Chris-
tianity’’ (p. ). The claim is ultimately grounded in Christianity’s
‘‘energetic sacralization of new languages’’. Christianity is ‘‘notable
because it posits meaning as an achievable, superlinguistic entity’’
(p. ). The main evidence advanced to support these contentions is the
fact that Christians have generally been more willing than others to
authorize translations of their sacred texts, whose truths are thereby
made available in vernacular languages.

. Critique

In the above exegesis of three recent collections I have concentrated

on the synthetic chapters (introductions and afterwords). Space pre-
vents me from entering into any detailed discussion of the case studies
but it is instructive to summarize their locations: Amazonia, Bolivia
(two), Fiji (two), south India (two), Madagascar, Mexico (two), Papua
(two), Philippines (two), Sweden, Texas, Zimbabwe (two). Inevitably
questions of ‘‘culture contact’’, syncretism, inculturation and other
mission ideologies are among the most prominent topics covered. Some
of the studies raise general theoretical issues, notably Droogers (in the
Robbins symposium) and Whitehouse (in Cannell b), who both

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favour cognitive approaches. Some are adventurously postmodern,

notably Bornstein, who draws on theatre theory, and Faubion, who
draws on almost everything (both in Engelke and Tomlinson ).
Some attempt ethnography-based comparisons, and many integrate
historical analysis into their ethnographic accounts (in the case of David
Mosse, who writes about the Jesuits in Tamil Nadu in the Cannell
volume, it is more the other way around). However, none engage in
historically informed comparisons beyond their ethnographic contexts.
It is left to the historian Tamar Frankiel to make the case for a longue
durée view of interconnectedness:
For example, both Judaism and Christianity developed more stringent theologies
as they witnessed Islam’s rise to power after the seventh century [....] Particularly
after Muslim scholars introduced Aristotelian philosophy to Europe, the God
of all three traditions became more distant and impermeable. (Frankiel ,
p. )

Cannell implies the desirability of work at this level, e. g. when

recommending that we look to historians of the early church to remedy
the deficiencies of the ethnographic record and pointing out that
‘‘Roman Catholicism and Protestantism did not cease to oppose and
mutually define each other at the time of the Reformation’’ (a,
p. ). She also acknowledges that Christianity has no monopoly of the
key quality of ‘‘transcendence’; but only Robbins (a) makes refe-
rence to the interdisciplinary literature on the ‘‘axial age’’ in which this
topic has been systematically explored, and he does not follow up on this
point. Cannell invokes Jonathan Parry repeatedly, although this author’s
suggestion to explore the long-term links between world religions and
modern ideologies of disinterested giving actually derives from an
investigation of Hinduism and not Christianity.
Cannell’s (a) review of previous scholarly work on Christianity is
arguably just as truncated as her grasp of general history. Tomlinson
and Engelke (, p. , n.) are surely right to suggest that in struc-
turalist studies a little credit should be given to Mary Douglas as well as
Edmund Leach. Helpful openings to comparative agendas might also be
found through looking back to the work of Robertson Smith and even
Frazer in the late nineteenth century. This work built upon many
previous scholars. Social science investigations can plausibly be traced
back to the biblical criticism practised by the Protestant Pietists in Halle
from the beginning of the eighteenth century. Is such work not at least as
relevant for the anthropology of Christianity as the philosophy of
Hegel? Cannell draws on theology to justify treating Christianity as a
unified tradition at some level: should she not then pay some attention to


  

what contemporary theologians and Church historians have to say about

doctrinal orthodoxy and heterodoxy? ()
For Fenella Cannell, everything about Christianity seems contingent
and fluid, because the uniquely complex and ambiguous ideas at its core
make anything possible. A similar ‘‘anything goes’’ picture emerges
from the other collections. This stance has its advantages. If the
social consequences are not dictated by the core ideas, then it is open to
the empirical researcher to explore other factors that determine concrete
outcomes in particular cases. Some of the contributors to these collec-
tions attempt exactly this. But others have rather little to say about
economic and political contexts and the editors themselves are evidently
not too interested, presumably because they fear accusations of reduc-
tionism. The upshot is a deep-seated problem of idealism running
through these collections, especially the more programmatic statements
of the editors. Christianity is addressed primarily as a ‘‘cultural logic’’.
Frustratingly, however, this logic itself remains slippery. None of the
elements mentioned seem specific to Christianity, though not all are
evenly distributed across Christianity itself. For example, Keane notes
that Christianity ‘‘[...] has given rise to key discourses of iconoclasm,
spirituality, conscience, agency, worldliness, and transcendence that
persist even where their religious supports have fallen away’’ (b,
p. ). But what if anything is distinctively Christian about any of
these concepts/discourses? Keane goes on to point out that all these
concepts are embedded in everyday practices, as indeed they are in other
traditions. But his arguments fail to transcend the most familiar dicho-
tomies of Western philosophy, and his own preference is clearly for the
idealist tradition.
If transcendence, asceticism, the dialectics of orthodox versus
heretical, mediating institutions etc are not peculiar to Christianity after
all, then what is left to justify demarcating the anthropology of Chris-
tianity as a field of study? Tomlinson and Engelke have a candidate: the
Christian preoccupation with meaning. But are they right to argue that
only Christian worlds are so saturated with meaning? Their own volume
is full of evidence that, in reality, lots of Christians are not in fact so
() I list here a few more minor criticisms of colleague, Peter Loizos (). She would find
Cannell’s introduction. In her ethnographic a useful comparative discussion of ‘‘the sexual
review she overlooks many other contributions division of religious labour’ in Davis .
to the Europeanist literature, such as the well Finally, it seems to me that Cannell creates a
known works of Jeremy Boissevain () on curious straw man when she suggests repeate-
Malta and of Mart Bax () on Catholicism dly that Weber is commonly interpreted as a
in Bosnia. When criticizing Marina Warner’s triumphalist secularist. I do not know of any
interpretation of Marian cults it is surprising Weber scholars who hold such views.
that she does not cite the work of another LSE


    

preoccupied; they tend to become so only in specific circumstances.

They also note Charles Keyes’ observation that Buddhists have similar
Weberian concerns with meaning (Keyes ; for further comparisons
see Gellner ). Geertz himself is one of the outstanding commenta-
tors on the significance of meaning in Islam. In short, the evidence
provided by Tomlinson and Engelke for the distinctiveness of Chris-
tianity in this respect hardly convinces. Tensions concerning language
ideology, notably the preference that some people evidently feel for a
sacred language in ritual that differs from their vernacular, can certainly
be explored in other world religions.
I turn now to what I consider to be the most serious empirical deficit
of these collections (). Not only is there no case study from the world of
eastern Christianity but no consideration is given by any of the editors to
the possibility that these currents might differ significantly from the
western end of the spectrum. Cannell argues that ‘‘Fundamental to any
understanding of Christianity today is the opposition between broadly
Protestant and Catholic Christianities.’’ (a, p. ). She feels the
need to apologize for the absence of any African case study in her
collection, but not for the absence of any materials from the Middle East
or the former socialist bloc. Anglophone anthropologists had some
excuse for their ignorance of the latter countries in socialist days, when
access to the field was difficult and anything pertaining to contemporary
religious practice highly sensitive (as distinct from exotic ‘‘survivals’’
of pagan customs, which were meticulously documented by Soviet
ethnographers). But there is no excuse any longer. Indeed some
Western scholars have begun to investigate the postsocialist religious
field (Rogers ; Hann et al. ), but none of the contributors to
these recent collections are represented in the work reviewed here. The
result is silence concerning the religious ideas and practices of some
 million Orthodox Christians (). This might not be terribly impor-
() I note in passing two more general criti- researchers have documented popular religion
cisms applying to all the other works under for almost every European country; (e. g.
review here. First, these anthropologists of Dööö  for Hungary). For overviews
Christianity make very little effort to consider of a sample of these diverse research histories
non-Anglophone work. Thus a French tradi- see B .
tion of scholarship on popular Christianity () Of course many Christians in the former
from Robert Hertz to Élisabeth Claverie is Soviet bloc were not Orthodox and many
almost completely ignored in these collections, Orthodox Christians have never lived under
as is the work of contemporary German socialism. But the categories do overlap to a
anthropologists such as Thomas Kirsch (on considerable degree. Neither eastern Chris-
Zambia) and Thomas Hauschild (on Italy). tians nor other Christians in ex-socialist coun-
Second, I suggest that it is a mistake to ignore tries feature in the books described in the
altogether the large ‘‘folklore’’ and ‘‘ethno- preceding section.
logy’’ literatures in which generations of


  

tant if, for example, some plausible arguments were advanced to justify
assimilating eastern Christians to Roman Catholics. But no such
arguments are made by the editors of these collections and indeed it is
difficult to imagine what they might look like. The evidence suggests,
rather, that the differences may be considerable: for example, in the uses
which the Orthodox make of icons, in a greater general emphasis on
continuity rather than disjunctivity, and in more collectivist under-
standings of personhood and intentionality. Cannell might find that the
gulf which she finds between Bicolano Catholics and European Catho-
lics is by no means so wide if she were to extend the comparisons to
include Orthodox Christians (e. g. concerning ideas of sin, Purgatory,
and the central significance of managing relations with the dead; see
Kligman ).
More attention to the distinctive features of eastern Christianity
would complicate the theoretical agendas sketched by all of the works
under review here by introducing yet another ‘‘other’’, another category
of religious people who are both ‘‘like us’’ and yet significantly different.
It is possible that more attention to this anomalous group would reduce
the propensity to take for granted ‘‘Christian exceptionalism’’. It would
certainly yield fresh insights into the links between religion and moder-
nity. The great majority of Orthodox Christians were caught up in
socialist experiments for most of the twentieth century, in which religion
was severely repressed. This, too, was a model of modernity, and its
legacy is still felt across most of Eurasia. The authors reviewed above,
especially Cannell and Keane, seem to operate with a narrower, basically
Protestant conception of modernity. They would benefit from engaging
with the emerging literature on ‘‘multiple modernities’’, though it must
be admitted that here too, in this comparative sociological literature,
eastern Christianity has so far received only scant attention.

. Conclusions

The frequent complaint that socio-cultural anthropologists have

neglected the study of Christianity appears somewhat exaggerated.
Looking back over the work of the last half century, one finds that vir-
tually every new paradigm in the anthropology of religion has been
applied to Christianity. Although Lévi-Strauss refused to apply his
structuralist methods to such a ‘‘hot’’ case, Mary Douglas and Edmund
Leach did not hesitate. The Geertzian pursuit of meaning is evident in


    

much of the work on popular religion in southern Europe (notably in the

case of William Christian, though with more attention to the person and
to historical change than is found in the work of Geertz himself). The
wave of critique which stressed the need to study the power relations
behind ‘‘religious regimes’’ is well represented in the work of Mart Bax
and other contributors to Wolf (), and also in studies such as that of
the Comaroffs (). The recent popularity of cognitive approaches
owes much to Harvey Whitehouse’s work on Melanesian Christians.
Whitehouse has a chapter in Cannell’s volume, but reviewing these
collections in toto I would characterize the dominant trend of the present
phase as a reaffirmation of more idealist approaches, strongly influenced
by postmodern styles of writing. Because the ideas of Christianity are
highly complex, this cannot be a crudely predictive idealism. The chal-
lenge would be to integrate the ‘‘institutional’’ and/or ‘‘power’’ concerns
of previous writers to explain why particular ideas are taken up and have
an impact at particular times. A few authors do this to varying degrees,
but others present rather loose descriptions and then wrestle with issues
of agency, modernity and temporality in very abstract ways. In doing so,
implicitly and sometimes explicitly, they usually end up endorsing
‘‘Christian exceptionalism’’.
Exploration of the ways in which understandings of religious
phenomena in other places have been distorted by the Christian ways of
thinking deeply embedded in the discipline has in many respects been a
useful ground-clearing exercise. But if this deconstruction is pursued on
the basis of a very partial analysis of Christianity, it is almost bound to
end up reinforcing a dichotomy between Christianity and everything
else, hindering awareness of intra-Christian diversity and of the many
complex historical connections to other religions. The most glaring
omissions from all three of these recent contributions, including the
synthetic statements of the editors, are the mainstream Christians of the
West and the entire spectrum of eastern Christianity. The exclusion of
the East is not merely an ethnographic gap but a failure to engage with
the full spectrum of Christian ideas. The combined effect of these
omissions is to reinforce the familiar pattern, which confines the
anthropology of Christianity to studies of ‘‘the other’’, to remote and
‘‘marginal’’ groups, in a ‘‘West versus the rest’’ paradigm (nowadays
including the West’s own ‘‘repugnant’’ fundamentalists).
These objections could be met through the incorporation of eastern
Christianities (there are of course many varieties here too) into anthro-
pological research agendas and more investigations of mainstream
Christianity in its western heartlands. But the question remains: do we


  

really want to reaffirm the goal of a better, more complete ‘‘anthropology

of Christianity’’ as a priority? Joel Robbins has no doubts. By analogy to
the anthropology of Islam, similar progress could be made in the case of
Christianity if all those working on Christian groups were to prioritize
the theme of religion and engage systematically with each others’ work.
But why is it desirable to multiply sub-fields in this way? Why demarcate
one world religion as a suitable domain for comparison? Most of these
authors seem to approve of comparison in theory, but in practice they
avoid even intra-Christianity analysis. It seems that the task of identi-
fying the appropriate units and levels is too much of a challenge.
Although apparently comfortable in generalizing about Christianity,
Keane acknowledges (b, p. , n.) that for some purposes it may
be more appropriate to recognize ‘‘Judeo-Christianity’’ (the term
‘‘Abrahamic’’ crops up in other contributions), while for other types of
argument (such as those Keane adapts from Charles Taylor’s work on
the sources of the modern self) a ‘‘lower level’’ specification such as
Protestant or Calvinist will be necessary.
Given these difficulties, would it not make more sense to proceed on
the basis of problems, rather than treat the major traditions as the key
entities? For example, one might compare Christian and non-Christian
ideas about transcendence, or Catholic ideas and institutions of media-
tion to the divine to those of Islam (see Wolf ), or Orthodox ideas
about the accommodation of the world and the body with those of
Buddhism, or Catholic, Orthodox, Islamic and Buddhist pilgrimage
practices. The comparisons need not be limited to the so called world
religions: Protestant notions of the person might fruitfully be compared
and contrasted with those of eastern Christian traditions on the one
hand and those of African religious systems on the other. One may
sympathize with Robbins’ wish to advance the anthropology of Chris-
tianity to the level already achieved by the anthropology of Islam () and
yet maintain that problem-focused comparisons ranging across all intra-
and inter-religious boundaries, informed by longue durée analysis as well
as ethnographic minutiae, offer a better way forward.
I conclude that each of these recent collections has many merits.
There is much fascinating ethnography. Some chapters open up to
exciting theoretical perspectives (e. g. Joel Robbins has continued to
ponder ‘‘continuity thinking’’ in Robbins ). Some will inspire rea-
() But is this gap really so wide? Surely the addressed by scholars who spot the potential
deficit is greater again in the case of Judaism? here for demarcating yet another self-
The latter raises perhaps even more sensitive referential intellectual community.
issues for the profession, no doubt soon to be


    

ders to go off and read the authors’ monographs, including the mono-

graphs of the various editors. But the price paid for this ethnography,
even the chapters that are most historically sensitive and/or theoretically
creative, is too limited an engagement with comparison and with the
historical ‘‘big picture’’. On the basis of these collections a genuine
anthropological approach to ‘‘World Christianity’’ is still a long way off.
What we have here are many exhilarating samples of the Anglophone
ethnography of contemporary Christians belonging to the Western tra-
ditions, mostly rather marginal groups in remote places, loosely tied
together with the help of idealist theorizing which, in the final analysis,
reinforces the position to which ostensibly it is opposed, namely deep-
rooted Western assumptions of Christian exceptionalism.

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