Received: 26 February 2023 Accepted: 6 June 2023

DOI: 10.1111/amet.13244

F O R U M : W H AT G O O D I S A N T H R O P O L O G Y ? C E L E B R AT I N G 5 0 Y E A R S
OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST

Anthropology as spiritual discipline

T. M. Luhrmann

Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, Abstract

Stanford, USA
This essay invites us to understand ethnography not only as a science-like comparative
Correspondence
enterprise but also as a spiritual discipline. This is because ethnography enables us to
T. M. Luhrmann, Department of Anthropology, imagine other ways of living in the world. The fieldwork, the writing, and even the
Stanford University, Stanford, USA. reading of ethnographies provide people with some external perspective on themselves.
Email: luhrmann@stanford.edu
Ethnography thus allows people to develop a more a nuanced sense of what, for them,
should constitute the good.
Funding information
National Science Foundation, Grant/Award Number:
185122; John Templeton Foundation, Grant/Award KEYWORDS
Number: 55427 ethnography, spirituality, the good

I have been wondering recently whether we should think about
ethnography as a spiritual discipline, as a practice that enables
us to imagine other ways of being and that draws us closer to
what we might call the good.
When I began to study anthropology, I thought of ethnog-
raphy as a kind of literature. The Interpretation of Cultures,
Clifford Geertz’s (1973) collection of essays, had recently come
out. In it, Geertz presents himself, as he puts it, not so much as
a scientist in search of facts but as a literary critic in search of
meaning. Some years later, his Works and Lives (Geertz, 1989)
explicitly treats ethnography as a literary genre. For him, the
question is not what anthropologists discover but what they do
with words to persuade their readers that what they describe
is really there. He seems less interested in whether what they
say is true and more interested in how their writing comes to
feel true. He sees them as writers—tellers of stories, singers of
tales, novelists manqué—who use what they have learned from
the field to invite the reader into a new experience of the human
condition.
That was how I read ethnography as well. I sat with Vincent
Crapanzano (1980) in his interviews with Tuhami, a Moroc-
can tile maker. I felt his sadness at the wound in Tuhami’s soul
and the weird awkwardness of the anthropologist who comes to
know someone so intimately and then gets on a plane to leave.
I was captivated by Lévi-Strauss’s (2021) own astonishment at
the artwork on Caduveo bodies, by his sense of the slow slog
through a dense and dangerous jungle, by the near mystical
merging he describes at the end of Tristes Tropiques, when he
seems to fall into the eye of a cat and disappear. I read ethnogra-
phies for the way they grabbed at my heart and for the wonder
of how differently one could live in the world.
Then came critique. I remember sitting in the seminar room
as Talal Asad invited his Cambridge seniors, those great shaggy
lions of Africanist anthropology, into an acknowledgment of
their complicity with colonialism. I remember opening Writing
Culture (Clifford & Marcus, 1986) when it was published in
1986 and reading Crapanzano’s (1986) frothing denunciation
of Geertz. In that essay, Crapanzano accuses Geertz, in effect,
of lying and of exploiting the people who took him in. I took
from James Clifford’s (1986) eloquent introduction the depress-
ing insight that by writing about people in other, poorer social
worlds, I too was compliant and coercive. The winds of change
had been blowing from the first day I arrived in Cambridge for
graduate study. I did my fieldwork in London, with middle-class
white people.
These days, I think of anthropology as a kind of science, a
word I would not have used when I was younger, although I
tend to use it in the more expansive French meaning, as a form
of systematic knowledge. I see us in the business of cultural
comparison, and I understand this as a political commitment to
make sure that white, middle-class European Americans are not
treated as the sole measure of humankind. This is a different
kind of political commitment from that of the politics of rep-
resentation, a politics according to which scholars should not
represent a social world different from their own. That way lies
intellectual apartheid.
In fact, I have come to think of my work as having “find-
ings,” by which I mean a conclusion that emerges from an
empirical investigation and that calls out for explanation. Here
are examples of findings from my own work: that persons with
schizophrenia in the United States report voices with more vio-
lent content and more violent commands than in many other

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2 AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST
parts of the world; that prayer practice can affect sensory expe-
rience; that the felt sense of spirits is shaped but not determined
by culture and faith.
Yet I also increasingly think about ethnography as a kind of
spiritual practice—that both the doing of ethnographic work
and the reading of ethnographic writing become practices in
which we engage repeatedly with narratives about people dif-
ferent from our selves. When we become aware of those
differences, we can be more thoughtful about our fundamental
commitments, and about whom we choose to be.
I have been teaching one of those required classes in my
department. We assign a series of ethnographies, and students
talk them through over the 10-week quarter. I began with Mar-
garet Mead, because I think the students ought to know about
Mead and because I think her memory has been poorly treated
by our discipline. I think our students should understand that
one of our discipline’s founding ancestors was a woman, and
one of the most important women of her era.
The students did not like Sex and Temperament (Mead,
1949). They thought Mead spoke from on high. They spoke
about colonialism and exploitation. They said she took but
never gave back. They did not seem charmed by the film in
which she compared the way people bathe babies in different
cultures. It was hard for them to imagine a social world in which
the concept of culture was novel, as it was, more or less, when
Bathing Babies came out in 1951 (Mead & Bateson, 1954). I
pointed out that Mead was likely having an affair with another
woman at the time she was writing the book, and that she’d
never been given the academic post that her work should have
assured her. I said I thought that for Mead, ideas about gender
were personal because she didn’t fit well into the categories her
society had handed to her. There was a pause. Then a student
said that what he liked about anthropology was that it showed
how the world could be different. He called it a spiritual insight.
Our next book was Keith Basso’s (1996) Wisdom Sits in
Places, a lovely account of the way that the Western Apache
use place-names to remind themselves of who they are and
how to live. Because Basso wrote his text in the shadow of our
discipline’s anxiety about whether and how we have been com-
plicit with colonial oppression, he takes care to spell out his
respect for his Apache interlocutors and what he did for them
in return for their tolerance. He writes about his own experi-
ence and about how much he himself has changed. He writes
that when he first arrived among these people, he did not under-
stand their terse mentions of this place-name or that one. They’d
be in conversation, and someone would say, “It happened at
Line of White Rocks Extends Up and Out, at this very place”
(Basso, 1996, p. 79), and then they would all fall silent. Basso
describes how he learned that those names held feelings for peo-
ple and, indeed, held wisdom. He explains that he watched a
young girl wear pink hair curlers to a family gathering, which
her grandmother found disrespectful. Her grandmother said a
place-name: “Men Stand Above Here and There.” Two years
later he drove that girl past the hill with that name. She said, “I
know that place. It stalks me everyday,” and she smiled. “Those
place-names are strong,” people say (p. 92).
Students began to talk and write about the ways they sur-
rounded themselves with objects that made hope real for them.
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One explained that his grandfather had given him a copy of Nel-
son Mandela’s No Easy Walk to Freedom and that he kept it on
his bedside so that both his grandfather and the moral vision of
that story would feel close. Another student, who had grown up
in a house with parents on methadone and in and out of prison,
described digging through dirty clothes and messy drawers
until he found a picture his mom had drawn of herself, tucked
inside his baby book. The student who said anthropology was
about possibility described the Cibecue world as charged with
meaning and quoted the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Then we read Lucas Bessire’s (2021) Running Out. The
book’s ostensible goal is to account for the Kansas farmers who
are pumping dry their precious supply of water, heading toward
an ecological disaster as predictable and human-made as the
Dust Bowl. It’s a story of the way white men came to be on the
Great Plains, with a sense that a man does whatever it takes to
keep going, and that big business always lies to the little guy.
And so the men keep pumping, knowing that if they reduce their
water, someone else will take their profit. There is a historical
story in the book, about the settlers’ slaughter of the tribes and
the bison that made the Great Plains one of the wonders of the
country, a story of destruction, dissolution, and death. But there
is also a more intimate story wound around the structure, like
a climbing rose on an iron trellis. That is the story of Bessire’s
relationship with his father, a Kansas farmer who left Bessire’s
mother and from whom the young Bessire seems desperately to
have sought to escape.
There was anger in that relationship, and distrust. But the
other farmers spoke to the latte-drinking anthropologist only
because his father introduced him to them, and his father came
to many of those conversations. Between them, as the project
went on, there grew both respect and a grudging trust and an
understanding that, as Bessire puts it, all of us enter a future
not of our own making. At the end of the book, the father told
his son to write the book he needed to write. “I am left to won-
der,” Bessire (2021, p. 180) writes, “whether any of you might
recognize something of your lives reflected in these stories of
mine.”
The students loved the book. They wrote about learning
to see responsibility in themselves for intractable problems
they did not create but with which they lived, and about
being inspired to approach these problems with honesty and a
willingness to change.
In The Subject of Virtue, James Laidlaw (2013) proposes
that we think of anthropology as a form of spiritual exercise. I
remember coming to that final paragraph in his brilliant text and
thinking: hmm. Now I think he is profoundly right. Ethnogra-
phy invites us to enter into a culturally different form of social
life, to identify with it at least while we read a book and cer-
tainly during our fieldwork, and to understand it as best we can.
In doing so, anthropology offers us a way to rethink our under-
standing of who we can be, how we should take responsibility,
and how in the end we should understand our freedom. It insists
that we recognize that, to quote Laidlaw (2013, p. 224), “there
can be more than one true answer to a question, more than one
good way to do something.”
Spiritual exercises are practices that are meant to transform
your life. They work by giving practitioners a vantage point

ANTHROPOLOGY AS SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE
from which to see their lives as if from without, and an invi-
tation to imagine how they could be otherwise. One of the best
known Christian examples, the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius
Loyola, asks participants to imagine different moments in the
scripture. Ignatius wanted people to be there in their minds,
using all their inner senses. Contemplating the flight into Egypt,
he wanted practitioners to feel that they stood by the donkey
hearing the cries of the new baby, smelling the acrid wool of the
blanket and the salt sweat on the leather bridle, feeling the heat
of the sun. He wanted to give those practitioners somewhere
else to be, and he cared more about how vividly they expe-
rienced the scripture than about what they actually imagined.
(“[See] with the eye of the imagination the road. … [Consider]
how long it is and how wide, and whether it is level or goes
through valleys and over hills”; Loyola, 1992, p. 123). Then,
every day, he asked each practitioner to examine what they had
done in the day and whether they had done it as they should,
and to do so with honesty and gratitude.
For Ignatius, and for most people of faith, spiritual exer-
cises are spiritual because they are about being in the presence
of God. But the word spiritual does not necessarily imply
a theological commitment. It implies something about spirit
or soul—both words with many definitions that point to the
kind of person we not only are but also wish to be. In that
sense, the doing of ethnographic fieldwork looks startlingly
similar to the Ignatian exercises. Fieldworkers immerse them-
selves in social worlds not their own, as vividly and as deeply
as they can. They seek to be present while still knowing the
specificity of their gaze. That immersion gives them a vantage
point to see themselves as if from outside and to come back
changed.
This is a point Khaled Furani (2019) makes, although I do not
walk so far down the road as he does. Furani argues that the dis-
cipline of anthropology was created by its break from theology.
He suggests that humbling our anthropological reason to a the-
ological commitment can remake anthropology as profoundly
as fieldwork remakes anthropologists. I would say, rather, that
attending to anthropology as a spiritual practice offers us a
chance to reimagine what our work can do. It offers us an alter-
native to our sense that, as Joel Robbins (2006, p. 292) puts
it, we as a discipline have resigned ourselves to serving as wit-
nesses to the horrors of the world, that “the tropics as we portray
them, wherever they happen to be, have never been so tristes.”
That alternative is to understand our work as oriented toward
moral possibility rather than moral doom. Lawrence Rosen
once told me that anthropology and literature were the two
fields that best allow undergraduates to imagine adulthood from
a point of view different from their own. Literature has always
done that. Its admixture of verisimilitude and artifice, in James
Wood’s (2008, p. xvii) phrase, invites readers to think about
what it is to be a certain sort of person. As Clifford Geertz
(1973, p. 450) remarked, quoting Northrup Frye, we watch
Macbeth to understand what it feels like for a man to gain a
kingdom but lose his soul.
Unlike the characters in fiction, anthropology’s certain sorts
of persons are real. Ethnographies demand that we see the way
that ordinary people are caught in the entangled cultural ropes
of a specific social world—the way a Bedouin woman handles
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3
an abrupt dismissal from her marriage (Abu-Lughod, 1986), or
a Malagasy teenager comes of age in a city where she cannot
get a job (Cole, 2010), or, for that matter, the way an anthro-
pologist feels when holding the bones of someone murdered by
a brutal regime (Hagerty, 2023). And as we grapple with these
different real experiences, we learn and we grow. We consider
our moral commitments anew. Ethnography invites us to under-
stand the way that people choose within the constraints of their
social limitations, and what those limitations afford and fore-
close. By calling ethnography a spiritual practice, I mean to
draw attention to how, in doing and reading ethnography, we
come to know ourselves better through imagining what it is to
be another, and to see in the possibility of difference a potent
seed of hope.
AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S
This essay comes out of many years of friendship with James
Laidlaw and Joel Robbins; it is a pleasure to thank them here.
I am grateful for a morning coffee with Lawrence Rosen, many
years ago, and for my conversations with students, who have
taught me so much. In particular, I would like to thank my
student Noah Scott Sveiven for conversations on faith, and
Cordelia Erickson-Davis for the insistence that I share my
views.
ORCID
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9923-4234
T. M. Luhrmann
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4 AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST

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