Anthropological Theory

http://ant.sagepub.com/

The repugnant cultural other speaks back : Christian identity as

ethnographic `standpoint'
Brian M. Howell
Anthropological Theory 2007 7: 371
DOI: 10.1177/1463499607083426

The online version of this article can be found at:

http://ant.sagepub.com/content/7/4/371

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Anthropological Theory can be found at:

Email Alerts: http://ant.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

Subscriptions: http://ant.sagepub.com/subscriptions

Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

Citations: http://ant.sagepub.com/content/7/4/371.refs.html

>> Version of Record - Nov 5, 2007

What is This?

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

 Anthropological Theory

Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications

(London, Los Angeles, New Delhi and Singapore)
http://ant.sagepub.com
Vol 7(4): 371–391
10.1177/1463499607083426

The repugnant cultural

other speaks back
Christian identity as ethnographic
‘standpoint’

Brian M. Howell
Wheaton College, USA

Abstract
Looking at Christian identity in terms of standpoint theory, this article takes up the
argument introduced by Susan Friend Harding more than 10 years ago that
Christianity and Christians are stigmatized within anthropology as a ‘repugnant
cultural other’. Drawing from my own fieldwork in the Philippines and other recent
work on Christianity, I argue that Christianity is a subject position analogous to other
committed subject positions outside androcentric, enlightenment modernity (e.g.
feminism). As such, the Christian voice should be welcomed and encouraged in the
academy as a valuable ethnographic perspective.

Key Words
Christianity • epistemology • ethnography • native ethnography • positionality •
standpoint theory • subjectivity

In 2001, the journal Social Anthropology published a theme issue around the question
of whether anthropology is inherently secular. Grappling with various terms – ‘secular’,
‘belief ’, ‘religion’ – the contributors came up with a variety of provocative points and
no real consensus. One of the participants called for ‘minimal secularism’ (Gellner, 2001:
339) as a requirement in the criteria of anthropological analysis, while another differen-
tiated between ‘secularism’ and ‘atheism’ (de Pina-Cabral, 2001). What the collection
did not include was an anthropologist who explicitly identified him- or herself as having
a specific religious commitment. Charles Stewart, the guest editor of the issue, ended
his article with a call for overcoming the potential bias against those who profess particu-
lar religious convictions:

At the moment we assume that people with strong religious convictions must lose
these before they can properly do anthropology. It might be, however, that we could
learn much from the studies of committed Christians, Muslims, Hindus or even

371

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 7(4)

Wiccans. A rejection of the constraints of secularism might be just what anthropology

needs. (Stewart, 2001: 328)

While this signals a willingness to consider the relevance of personal religious perspec-
tive in the ethnographic enterprise, it continues to beg the questions: Is faith (of any
sort) compatible with anthropology? Is religious commitment a relevant issue in anthro-
pology? If it makes any difference, what might that difference be?
In this article, I argue that those committed to religious positions should be under-
stood as occupying a subject position analogous to other subject positions which are
characterized by moral/ethical commitments, for example, feminism (cf. Luhrmann,
2001). Specifically, I will refer to – and speak from – a religious position that, in the
USA, has often been the most problematic for anthropologists, theologically conserva-
tive Christianity (Cannell, 2006b: 3–4; Harding, 1991; 2000; Robbins, 2003).
In her now classic article, Susan Harding (1991) identified conservative Christians as
anthropology’s ‘repugnant cultural other’. She argued that we, these cultural others,
should be studied with the same care as other minority positions (specifically mention-
ing class, race, gender and sexual orientation as analogous categories). Yet, as she noted
then, when she pursued research on conservative Christians within the USA, she was
not only questioned about her choice of topic, she was ‘constantly’ interrogated by
colleagues and advisors who suspected that she, too, might be ‘one of them’. She
presented this as evidence for the resistance of anthropologists to consider Christianity
as a legitimate object of study, but she did not (could not?) address the concern behind
the query: Could a committed conservative Christian be an anthropologist?
Foregrounding my own Christian identity and drawing on my fieldwork among
conservative Protestant Christians in the Philippines, I want to focus on the scenario that
seems most problematic in this context: a Christian anthropologist studying other
Christians (Gellner, 2001: 339–40). This is the situation that is most relevant to what I
argue are analogous discussions of subjectivity and perspective as related to the issue of
positionality intersecting with ethnographic research. It is when engaging in ‘nativist
anthropology’ that Christian anthropologists might be accused (or at least suspected) of
being apologists rather than anthropologists, yet this should also be the very area in which
we might expect Christian anthropologists to have insight. I argue that the self/other
dynamics of a shared religious identity in the presence of cultural otherness can lead to a
particular understanding of the nature of Christian commitment as a kind of ‘standpoint
epistemology’ analogous to others of gender, race, sexual orientation, and so forth
(Denzin, 1997; Harding, 1998). This is not an attempt to carve out a position of privi-
lege or superiority for my (or anyone’s) perspective (see Salzman, 2002; also Sprague,
2005: 62–6). Nor will I argue for a generalizable outcome of ‘the’ Christian standpoint.
Rather, I will share from my own experience as a researcher and now as a professor of
anthropology in a confessional institution to illustrate how a Christian standpoint produc-
tively informs the practice of ethnography. Thus, to the extent that a religious perspective
aligned with very particular beliefs has been considered problematic, if not anathema, to
the anthropological enterprise (Engelke, 2002; Ewing, 1994; Geertz, 1973), I make the
case that not only is a committed religious point of view not deleterious or opposed to
ethnography, but it represents a particular standpoint that can be valuable or relevant to
specific anthropological research (see Gellner, 2001; see also Marsden, 1997).

372

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

HOWELL The repugnant cultural other speaks back

To work through this argument, I begin with a brief review of the so-called nativist
ethnography literature and the sort of claims that have been made and critiqued within
this body of work. This will lead to some conclusions I have drawn from the self/
other distinction, intrinsic to my own research, that shed light on the nature of post-
enlightenment Christianity. Specifically; I argue that religious identity is not merely
defined by the cognitively drawn notion of ‘belief ’, but more widely as ‘commitment’
(cf. Keane, 2007: 75). Drawing religious – specifically Christian – identity narrowly
around ‘belief ’ has led to an essentializing of Christianity that limits our understanding
of Christians as ethnographers and subjects. Instead, I propose referring to the relevance
of commitment when exploring the nature of Christian subjectivity. I briefly illustrate
the ethnographic emergence and the analytical relevance of this perspective in relation
to my own work among Baptists in the Philippine city of Baguio. Ultimately, this
discussion demonstrates that the self-consciously committed religious position is not an
inherently dogmatic subjectivity narrowly circumscribed by liberal secular categories,
but displays the embodied, flexible and contingent aspects present in other positions,
specifically as what Harstock (1983) and others (Collins, 1991; Haraway, 1988) have
called ‘standpoint epistemology’.
Sociologist Joey Sprague offers a clear explanation of standpoint theory when she
writes:

[It] is not the spontaneous thinking of a person or a category of people. Rather, it is

the combination of resources available within a specific context from which an under-
standing might be constructed. Standpoint theorists reject positivism’s pretense of
creating a view from nowhere in favor of the postulate that subjects are specific,
located in a particular time and place. This locatedness gives access to the concrete
world. (2005: 41)

It is this positioning of Christians through the adopted and voluntarily maintained

position of their religiously defined commitments that becomes relevant to the anthro-
pological enterprise in potentially profitable ways.

KNOWLEDGE AND NATIVES

The question of knowledge and difference has often been posed in terms of the strong
epistemological discussion of how an ‘outsider’ can have any knowledge whatsoever of
another culture. In McIntyre and Winch’s venerable debate on the nature of rationality,
they question the extent to which western rationality can be a universal principle by
which to understand others’ beliefs, religious beliefs in particular (Wilson, 1970).
McIntyre, himself a confessing Christian, takes the position that understanding how one
uses or applies a religious concept does not necessitate sharing a personal application of
that concept, a position that currently seems more compelling than Winch’s contention
that to some degree understanding the meaning of an idea requires an ability or willing-
ness to use the idea in socially significant ways (Geertz, 2000; Sahlins, 1996; Spickard,
et al., 2002: 244–51). Following MacIntyre, I do not suggest that an inability or unwill-
ingness to personally embrace concepts (religious or otherwise) precludes any ‘real’
understanding of those things. However, the Winch and McIntyre debate does not get
us to the heart of the discussion about what it matters if anthropologists and subjects

373

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 7(4)

do happen to share religious identities and convictions. In focusing on the question of

‘rationality’, Winch and MacIntyre treat religion and culture as isomorphic entities. That
is, they do not consider that a single religion can be embraced by members of different
cultures. What if the researcher shares ‘religious’ convictions but not a ‘cultural’ context?
Can we draw such clear lines of who is the ‘insider’ and who is the ‘outsider?’1
Subjectivities of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender are not cultural other-
ness, but subject positions within cultural climes. But what of religion? Specifically, what
about Christianity? If Christianity were thoroughly wedded to a cultural system defined
by capitalist individualist subjectivity which served to invariably remake social worlds in
particular terms (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1997: 5–8), then it might follow that
Christians studying Christians were engaged in a straightforward nativist anthropology
in which religious identity and cultural identity would be irrevocably merged. But my
own experience, and I think our common sense, tells us that two people identifying as
Christians, one from North America and one from, say, the northern Philippines, do
not share as much ‘culturally’ as would the North American Christian and his or her
secular neighbor, regardless of how ‘orthodox’ the beliefs of the Filipino and secularized
the identity of the non-Christian North American. But then is the Christian identity
meaningless to the ethnographic enterprise? While the Christian anthropologist
studying Christian communities in another culture is certainly not a ‘native’ in the
commonsense meaning of the term, the term has relevance as a way of dislocating
categories used to domesticate the Christian and Christianity.
It might be argued that within anthropology, ‘native’ no longer has a commonsense
meaning. Although anthropology gained academic prominence on the idea of learning
‘the native’s point of view’ (Geertz, 1973; Malinowski, 1961: 25), the notion of the
‘native’ versus the ‘outsider’ has been widely criticized as positioning non-western others
vis-à-vis the Enlightenment West for the purposes of essentializing, delimiting and
constructing a notion of who ‘we’ are against who ‘they’ are (Appadurai, 1988; Malkki,
1997; Said, 1979; Trouillot, 2003). The category of ‘native’ is routinely deconstructed
as a political tool rather than a legitimate analytical category (Sprague, 2005: 64–5).
In a similar way, nativist anthropology typically calls to mind the western-trained
anthropologist ‘returning home’ to study his or her ‘own’ people or perhaps the second-
generation member of a diasporic community going ‘back to the homeland’. But, as a
number of recent scholars who might fit that description have recently acknowledged,
the question of what it means to be an ‘insider’ cannot be reduced to national or ethnic
identity (Appadurai, 1988; Jacobs-Huey, 2002; Kondo, 1990; Motzafi-Haller, 1997;
Narayan, 1993). Indeed, many of these self-identified native anthropologists use their
personal connection to the identities or characteristics of their subjects to question the
very nature of those identities rather than claim privileged or ‘insider’ status. Thus, the
category of the ‘native’ has been transformed from a given identity to a heuristic device
for problematizing static identities. Lanita Jacobs-Huey (2002: 799), reviewing the
literature on nativist anthropology, argues that in many cases, claiming the status of
‘native anthropologist’ is not a self-serving move to claim privileged epistemological
access, but rather a move to ‘constitute a space for the creation and validation of native
as a signifier of postcolonial repositioning of the subject and native anthropology as a
more general means of evoking the decolonization of anthropological thought and
practice’ (emphases in original).

374

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

HOWELL The repugnant cultural other speaks back

Turning back to the discussion of ‘religious natives’, it might seem odd to think that
Christianity – so often a powerful tool in the hands of colonialists – should benefit from
‘decolonization’, but certainly to the extent that western rationalism has positioned the
orthodox/conservative/fundamentalist’ Christian within a tradition of religious studies
and phenomenology (Kapferer, 2001), anthropology and other social sciences have
‘colonized’ Christianity through a secularist mandate; the move to evoke ‘native’ status
serves to dislodge these assumptions. For the anthropologist to explicitly write as a
‘native’ does not necessarily, or even profitably, draw a distinction between ‘insiders’ and
‘outsiders’ as privileged versus limited, but it does, or can, serve to reposition the subject
and ‘decolonize’ (that is, enrich and liberate) anthropology in productive ways. To draw
out one possibility for this sort of enrichment, we can turn to the basic discussion of
how religious identity intersects with a notion of the ‘self ’ and the ‘other’.

RELIGIOUS SELVES/ANTHROPOLOGICAL OTHERS

As suggested earlier, within a religious framework there is a complex intersection as
religious selves are often anthropological others. In order to understand some of the
dynamic, this can best be considered through the lens of an analogous position,
feminism. Although there are important differences between the religious dimension of
a Christian identity and the commitments of feminism, the questions of positionality
and representation are markedly similar. First, both promote a specific view of person-
hood and the human condition. For the feminist this may be rooted in a western
liberalism, or in a communitarian ethic, but like Christianity, feminism represents a
commitment to a value-laden conception of persons rooted in transcendence (Collins,
1991; Denzin, 1997; Mahmood, 2005). Similarly, both are deep-seated identities that
shape the worldview of the adherent. Perhaps most important for the argument at hand,
both Christianity and feminism are remarkably slippery sorts of identities based on
voluntary commitments which imply a general content but also encompass a tremen-
dous variety of practices and beliefs; and both complicate the questions of ‘self ’ and
‘other’ in important ways.
Posing a question that could be asked about a Christian anthropology, Lila Abu-
Lughod (1990) famously asked the question ‘Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?’
In a statement directly relevant to the question here, she writes, ‘To ask whether there
could be a feminist ethnography is to ask what difference feminism could make to the
doing of anthropological research and/or to the writing of accounts of the lives of other
cultural groups’ (Abu-Lughod, 1990). Her answer builds on a critique of objectivity to
argue that a ‘women’s point of view is in some sense privileged because, like any sub-
altern view, it never could pretend that it wasn’t a view from somewhere’ (1990: 15).
Methodologically, this awareness of positionality permits a much more critical approach
to the production of ethnography and the ways in which subjects are created in the
ethnographic process (Minh-ha, 1993; Sprague, 2005). Moreover, this assertion
becomes the basis of her argument that feminist commitments contribute to a structural
dynamic by which power relationships, types of essentializing and identity boundaries
become blurred (Abu-Lughod, 1990: 25).
Many anthropologists committed to particular feminist/ethnic/political subject
positions made explicit in their ethnographies and methodologies have created just
these sorts of ‘boundary-less’ ethnographies with very fruitful and widely praised results

375

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 7(4)

(e.g. Kondo, 1990: 33–48; Reed-Danahay, 1997; see also Wolf, 1992). What these,
and similar, theorists have produced is a more complex view of the subject and the
constitution of subjects than was previously available. In the same way, to understand
the ‘where’ of the Christian position is to re-evaluate the nature of the Christian
subject.
In my own work, I participated in the religious lives of four congregations of Baptists
in the Philippine city of Baguio, focusing on the ways in which class, ethnicity and social
context intersected with the interpretation and practice of the global discourse of their
religion. As a fellow Christian believer, I had no problem fully participating in their
worship, prayers and daily religious life. Indeed, as an educated visitor with some experi-
ence working in Christian churches, I was periodically asked to lead Bible studies or
speak at retreats.2 I am sure that this role affected my relationship with members of the
congregations, primarily in ways that I believe offered access and openness. More signifi-
cantly, by sharing a religious commitment, I was in many ways very much a member of
the community even before I arrived. Though my cultural experience shared features
with the kind of anthropological otherness typically associated with fieldwork, I was a
religious ‘self ’. This blurring of the lines of identity between those I encountered in the
field and me served to make the experience one of intense specificity – of locality – in
which the difference of religious practice did not take on a generalized or essentalized
‘otherness’ but stood out for its contextuality and locatedness. This is, Abu-Lughod
(1991) argues, precisely the value of the ‘halfie’ ethnographer, that is, the ethnographer
standing in two places, both as ‘self ’ and ‘other’ at the same time. The subject cannot
become a generalized object but remains in specific relief, revealing the nature of the
object in that time and place (see also Neitz, 2002; Wilcox, 2002).
For the anthropology of Christianity, this is an important way to understand that
which holds the religion together even in the multiple forms and emphases seen across
time and space. Marla Frederick’s (2003) work on black Christian women in North
Carolina provides an apt illustration. Focusing on the ‘everyday experience of faith’
among African-American women, Frederick positions herself as a coreligionist, a woman
sharing the experience of being black and Christian in the US South, even as she employs
the methodology of a rigorous anthropology to her subject. By complicating the
traditional anthropological category of self and other, her study brings out the daily
dimensions of faith in the lives of these women and the relations of power that work in
multidimensional ways. Although Frederick never repudiates the insights of previous
work on black US Christianity, she notes that these studies have often spoken in total-
izing terms about the political struggles, gender politics and social position of black
Christians without digging into the lives of members themselves (Frederick, 2003:
6–18). This represents the sort of essentializing and generalizing that Abu-Lughod
suggests too often accompanies the ‘unpositioned perspective’. In demonstrating how
seeming contradictions of black women finding power within a patriarchal and politi-
cally specific institution reveals something very fundamental about Christianity itself,
Frederick illustrates the power of a ‘partial truth’ and a positioned perspective to
illuminate the whole.3
This alone is a valuable point regarding the shear possibility of a Christian anthropol-
ogist doing valid anthropological work, while it further suggests that there is actually
benefit to having Christian voices speaking on the issues about which we might imagine

376

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

HOWELL The repugnant cultural other speaks back

Christians being most inclined to speak: religion. In Frederick’s case, her position
encompassed a great deal of affinity with her subject as a black, woman, Christian
southerner, such that she can make a case that is much more akin to the ‘nativist’ anthro-
pologist typically understood. In my own work, the most salient connection I had to
the communities I studied was my faith.4 But just as Frederick and Abu-Lughod argued,
this position not only brought some methodological benefit, it foregrounded some
aspects of the subject relevant to a more general anthropological understanding. It led
me to question whether particular features of my own identity commonly assumed in
anthropological analysis were in fact those features that were central to the subject
position of ‘Christian’ and the selfhood experienced between us.

BELIEF AND COMMITMENT IN CHRISTIANITY

When I entered my field site, it was with a public connection to the local seminary and
an introduction from a US missionary-professor there who was well respected among
the churches that would become part of my research. I cannot recall that I ever had to
officially state, ‘I, like you, am a Christian’ to those in these congregations. They typi-
cally assume that most foreigners, particularly white people, are Christians of some sort.
Furthermore, coming to their congregation surely marked me as a coreligionist as they
saw me singing, praying, and listening to the sermon with all the hallmarks of a believer.
Although I was clearly the ‘other’ in terms of standard anthropological categories of
ethnicity, language, culture and history, I shared this one important, if not fundamental,
element of identity. The question, however, is what did we really share?
My own religious identity had, from the earliest years, been framed in terms of the
‘beliefs’ I held. This was only amplified by my involvement in a ‘nondenominational’
Christian group in college, where the ‘essentials’ (e.g. doctrines of Christology, atone-
ment, the Trinity, the nature of scripture) were emphasized over what were considered
denominational distinctives, including ritual or liturgical activity. What I found among
the Baptists of Baguio, both in terms of the ethnographic data and my personal experi-
ence, was that as central as ‘belief ’ often seems, this was not at the center of our
‘selfhood’; rather, at the center, lay a common commitment.5
What I found for myself and among the Baguio Baptists is that for Christians who
identify with a form of Christianity marked by volunteerism, personal decision and
evangelical Protestant doctrines of salvation, the question of Christian identity is
primarily one of commitment.6 In entering these communities, there were, for the most
part, few conversations that focused on questions of ‘doctrine’ or ‘belief ’ properly under-
stood. Rather, the most common concern for most Christians, and certainly the category
most used to understand Christian life, was that of commitment. For instance, at one
point in my work, I asked members of the congregations to complete a survey in which
they were asked to identify other religious movements (such as Pentecostals and
Catholics) as ‘Christians’ or not. One woman caught up with me afterwards to change
her response. She had classified ‘Methodists’ as not Christians, but she told me, ‘I was
thinking of just one congregation, not all. Methodists, they are Christians, but this
congregation, they are not really’. When pressed to explain she did not point to
theological or doctrinal error (that is to say, beliefs), but she brought up her observation
that members of this congregation and the leadership were unconcerned with personal
spiritual growth and evangelism, in other words, uncommitted. Membership in a church

377

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 7(4)

is never enough to guarantee true religion in this view; true religion is known through
personal commitment and practical activity.
My own involvement was surely one of shared beliefs in some realms, but it was also
marked by divergence of beliefs in many others. People in the congregations of my
research often engaged me in theological discussions where we either disagreed over some
particular doctrine or we talked about others in the congregations who expressed
theological positions we felt were different from ours, if not in theological error. But in
these discussions rarely did they cast the true Christian identity of me or another
into question. There were, occasionally, accusations that someone was ‘not really a
Christian’, but these tended to be very rare, extremely serious and often clearly conflated
with personal or social discord. Instead, even these doctrinal disagreements or
discussions between us often served to highlight the common commitments we and
others shared to the community of Christians and a Christian identity. While this is not
unlike the linguistic identity formation identified by Harding in her more recent work
on Christian Fundamentalists (Harding, 1987; 2000), I recall that even as I spoke with
Baptists in Baguio, and certainly in retrospect, I was conscious of Harding’s theories
(among others) about the nature of language in religious communities. I was very much
aware of the language and interpretations of my interlocutors, ones that were similar and
divergent from my own, in theological, social, cultural and individual ways. Although I did
not convert with the Christians of my research, I nonetheless had the sort of ‘multiple forms
of awareness’ sociologist and convert to Apostolic Christianity Bennetta Jules-Rosette
identified as the anthropological consequences of her conversion in the midst of research
(Jules-Rosette, 1975: 135). On one level, it struck me, rather deeply, that I held to cultur-
ally embedded religious commitments that always existed in tension with my faith, just like
the Baptist Filipinos of my research and Christians everywhere (see Walls, 1996: 7–9). As
an anthropologist, I perhaps had a somewhat more theoretically nuanced way of constru-
ing the contrast of immanent and transcendent in cultural, if not theological, terms, but
clearly we were all grappling with this question of how universal beliefs were to be
negotiated with an understanding of culture-in-the-abstract, culture-in-the-particular,
faith-as-universal and faith-as-personal. This process of social ordering, religious creation
and moral positioning was something very particular and local among these Baguio Baptists
yet distinctly Christian and transcendent; this would become a major focus of my
research there. Thus I found inquiry into what these Christians ‘believe’ to be relatively
unfruitful, as this invoked an individualist religion unsuitable for ethnographic inquiry,
but also, I discovered, insufficient for Christian community and Christian selfhood.

THE PROBLEM OF BELIEF

This question of how belief does or does not constitute the Christian subject serves as
one example of how my own Christian identity provided ethnographic insight. The
distinction of belief and subjectivity contrasts sharply with how many anthropologists
understand both the problematic nature of religious ethnography and even the nature
of Christianity itself (see Robbins, 2007). It is often thought that ‘belief ’ generically is,
in fact, the essence of what separates the secular anthropologist from the religious
subject. In his article on belief, Matthew Engelke invoked Clifford Geertz to say that
‘the problem of belief is the problem of remaining at the proper remove from “natives’
inner lives”’(Engelke, 2002: 3). In a similar way, Katherine Ewing (1994) has argued

378

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

HOWELL The repugnant cultural other speaks back

that her temptations to ‘believe’ in the context of her work with Sufi mystics were
mitigated by a powerful anthropological taboo against ‘going native’. In the end, both
of these articles argue that drawing a sharp line between ‘belief ’ and conditions of
ethnography as mutually exclusive is problematic, part of the modernist legacy of the
discipline rather than any sort of intellectual or theoretical imperative.7 In various forms
they affirm the assertion of James Clifford regarding the intellectual legacy of mission-
ary and anthropologist Maurice Leenhardt that ‘one can, in fact, be a Christian and be
something else’ (Clifford, 1997: 6).
But they do not directly confront the implication that perhaps ‘belief ’ is not even the
proper term for the real issue at work. Engelke, following Malcolm Ruel (1997), ques-
tions whether the so-called problem of belief is ‘a specifically Christian – even a Catholic
– viewpoint’ (Engelke, 2002: 8). This recalls Talal Asad’s critique of Geertz as assuming
a post-enlightenment view of religion, and the centrality of ‘Christian belief ’ as relevant
cross-culturally (Asad, 1993). Yet where Asad attacked Geertz for suggesting that the
post-enlightenment Christian notion of belief (as well as ‘religion’) could be profitably
applied cross-culturally and to other religious traditions, others have extended the
argument to suggest that even within Christianity the notion of ‘belief ’ is neither a stable
nor singular component of Christian identity and practice (Kirsch, 2004; Ruel, 1997).
That is to say, within contemporary Christianity, it may be a mistake to assume that
‘belief ’ is the central category constituting the Christian subject.
Recent research on non-western Christianity bears this out, where the emic categories
of ‘belief ’ are not the ‘stable and perpetual interior state of religious practitioners [but]
. . . the practice of cyclically regenerating a condition of internalized believing’ (Kirsch,
2004: 700). Among the Zambian Christians of Kirsch’s research, belief was not prior to
or definitive of an identity subsequently acted out, but rather belief itself ‘had a certain
performative power directed at “the world outside”’. Likewise, Deborah Tooker (1992;
Rhum and Tooker, 1993), writing about Christian Akha peoples in Thailand, notes that
upon conversion, there is not a corresponding ‘conversion’ of the category of belief.
Belief, she notes, remains a characteristic of ‘exteriority’ rather than an internalized state
of assent. To invoke what she calls ‘idioms of ‘belief ’’ is to impose a category that does
not correspond to indigenous notions of so-called religious identity or the relationship
of the Akha to Christianity.
Commitment, on the other hand, corresponds to the lived experience (certainly my
own and the Filipinos I came to know) in which ‘belief ’ is expanded beyond the
cognitive or intellectual sphere into the public realm in a way that validates and substan-
tiates a claimed identity. This is true not only for so-called non-western Christians, but
for Christians experiencing their religious identity from any number of cultural frames
(Bramadat, 2000; Csordas, 2002). A great deal of contemporary research on Protestant/
evangelical Christianity in North America emphasizes the centrality of embodied
experiences of commitment above, or at least alongside, affirmations of specific doctrinal
or theological positions (Luhrmann, 2004). While this is particularly true in the case of
Pentecostalism, in which ‘belief ’ or doctrinal commitments are often considered valid
or authentic only in the presence of physical manifestations or embodied rite, my own
identification with the Christians of Baguio was rooted in an assumption of shared
beliefs that could only be considered valid in the presence of physical comportment,
social location and interests. It is these elements (along with ‘history’) that philosophers

379

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 7(4)

of science such as Sandra Harding (1998) identify as the crucial elements delimiting a
particular epistemological standpoint (‘standpoint theory’).
What makes Christianity a standpoint, then, cannot simply be the assent of an indi-
vidual to a particular set of propositions, but is the historically, socially, institutionally
and bodily context in which ‘believing’ takes place (Norris, 2003). Recently, another
example of how this creates a self/other dynamic fruitful for Christians in ethnographic
work came in the context of a new class I taught, ‘Culture, Travel and Tourism’. Here,
at a college that has retained its historic Christian identity, now strongly identified with
US Evangelicalism (though not as circumscribed by the social and political implications
of that identity as some might think), all my students identify as Christians, the vast
majority with Evangelical Protestant or other non-liturgical traditions. As a final project
to the class, we drove to northeast Indiana to conduct ethnographic fieldwork on Amish
tourism, some students focusing on the tourists, some on the providers of tourist services
(or ‘tourates’), and some the Amish themselves. Many of those who engaged Amish
people came back profoundly struck by the sense of similarity and difference they felt
while doing the research. One student wrote of the encounter this way:

At one point, I was speaking with a young Amish woman in her late-teens or early
twenties. She wore the traditional dress of the Amish, including a bonnet, ‘plain dress’
without buttons, and an apron . . . We began talking about her dress and the way
tourists might perceive her. She said that she hoped her appearance and conduct
would ‘be a witness’ and ‘draw people to see Jesus’ in her. I was surprised that her
language sounded so similar to what I hear in evangelical circles. I found that
although our cultures seem quite different, our faith was the same.

Several students were similarly struck by the connection they found between their
own understandings of faith and identity and those of the Amish, while clearly aware of
the different social worlds in which these beliefs are lived. Our short time ‘in the field’
did not allow for a fuller exploration of how the Amish had developed their religious
language or at what points the linguistic and religious worlds of the Amish and non-
Amish Christian communities overlapped, but there was no question that the experi-
ence of encountering Amish Christians was rooted in a sense of a shared commitment
my students had with these Christians of a radically different social world. For my
students, who largely entered into Amish Country with many of the same views of
Amish life as those expressed by the tourists (for instance, the Amish seek to withdraw
from ‘the world’; they represent life as it was lived in the 19th century; they hold
‘outsiders’ in contempt or fear or both), they came away with at least the ability to see
how the Christianity of the Amish may not be the reactionary, deterministic feature of
their communities it is often characterized to be.8 This forced some students to recog-
nize the distinction between ‘beliefs’ (which were shared) from practices (which were
divergent) even as they simultaneously felt the powerful intersections of Amish faith and
culture as well as of their own religious identity with their own cultural context. Several
experienced the dialectic of doctrine and practice as they were confronted with these
believing selves as distinctly cultural others.
While ‘belief ’ remains an important part of the lexicon of virtually all Christians,
employing the term from outside the standpoint in which it has emerged risks doing to

380

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

HOWELL The repugnant cultural other speaks back

contemporary Christianity generally what Asad (1993) suggests has been done to Islam,
imposing an enlightenment rationality where an embodied, relational dynamic is at
work. Taking the Christian subject position as a fully formed standpoint refocuses the
conversation on the embodied, lived and relational aspects of the religion, not as inci-
dental or ‘cultural’ manifestations, but as central to the religious identity itself. This is
not a repudiation of ethnographies of orthodoxy or the emic importance of doctrine
within Christian communities (see Keller, 2005; Toren, 2006). Nor is it simply about
contrasting more cerebral forms of Christianity with those emphasizing emotion or
ritual. The point is, that in identifying the selfhood of commitment between me and
my Christian interlocutors, I became aware of the situatedness of our cerebral and
emotional subjectivity; our subject positions – shared and divergent – were not simply,
or even primarily, in our shared doctrines, but in the context in which those doctrines
were embraced. This certainly echoes the insights of many recent anthropologists
of Christianity who demonstrate that ‘it is not impossible to speak meaningfully about
Christianity, but it is important to be as specific as possible about what kind of
Christianity one means’ (Cannell, 2006b: 7). The notion of Christianity as a standpoint
enhances the possibility of that specificity, by attending not only to the sort of
Christianity in question, but also what constitutes the position, the ‘view’ (Haraway,
1988) that is particularly Christian. From the perspective of the ethnographer, this
Christian view, as both a bodily (that is, practiced) reality, as well as cognitive assent,
becomes a standpoint like those of other identities for how it serves as an encompassing
social theory (Bourdieu, 1980: 35 ff.).

THEOLOGY AS THEORY
In placing the Christian standpoint alongside other standpoints, the payoff comes in an
enlarged ability to interpret the practice and development of Christian communities in
their own terms, outside the colonizing and neoliberal categories of western enlighten-
ment. Anthropologists who personally inhabit the religious worlds they study can engage
in the kind of split-level analysis necessary to retain the integrity of the subject without
abandoning the possibility of understanding. Like the subaltern scholar, or the afore-
mentioned ‘halfie’ anthropologist, Christians can critically interact with key symbols and
ideas without vacating those ideas of their moral or uniquely Christian content.
Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), in his analysis of the concept of the subject as it emerged
through the writings on Bengali widowhood and suffering, argued that in order for the
subject of the ‘suffering widow’ to become visible in the West, it was first translated (and,
in fact, reduced) into the categories of European enlightenment thinking. But lost in
this universalizing interpretation, Chakrabarty argued, were both the real concerns of
Bengali widows and the context of Bengali history (2000, see, in particular, Chapter 5).
Instead, the framework requires a religious, cultural and historical setting that draws
substantively from the unreduced, unsecularized categories of the subjects themselves.
‘The subject of Bengali Modernity who demonstrates a will to witness and document
oppression is thus inherently a multiple subject, whose history produces significant
points of resistance and intractability when approached with a secular analysis that has
its origins in the subject of European modernity’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: 147).
In the same way, Christianity, run through the analysis of secularized social theory,
becomes the colonized territory of another, as Christians qua objects of analysis become

381

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 7(4)

imaginary object of the Enlightenment. Theologian John Milbank (1991) is the most
well-known proponent of this critique, encouraging Christian thinkers to reject these
secular theoretical shadows for the irreducible theological categories which are neither
the self-evident phenomena of the enlightenment or the products of postmodern
linguistic violence. Milbank argues for a recovery of irreducible theological categories
(harkening to Augustine) as those which should be used to understand the Christian
approach to humanity and social life (Milbank, 1991; 1997; also Reno, 2000; Ward,
1995). Unlike Milbank, whose formulations lead to an intellectual exclusivity, I am not
arguing that only practicing Christians can grasp the life-worlds of other Christians.
What the integrity of theology does suggest, however, is the validity of theological
categories for social anthropology and the potentially fruitful ways in which those
inhabiting (that is, committed to) such theology could bring them to bear on the
ethnographic task (see Robbins, 2006).
For example, among Ecuadorian Protestants, anthropologist Kent Maynard (1993),
who did not identify as a Christian, argued that approaching his subject through ‘an
ontology presupposed by the concept of faith’ allowed for him to interpret the ‘paradox
of faith’ in which evangelical Christians asserted the ‘reasonableness’ of their faith, even
while strongly affirming the priority of that faith to any ‘evidence’ for its reasonableness
(Maynard, 1993: 261, 256–57). This is not to say that Maynard, or other ethnographers
of Christianity, cannot employ secular social theory in explaining their context (e.g.
Peacock and Tyson, 1989), but what he suggests is that the best explanation for the social
world of these Christians – for understanding how they, themselves, view the world – is
productively viewed through irreducible theological categories lived out in their context.
Moreover, he suggests that his own theoretical framework was ‘honed and articulated’
in terms of such unreduced theological categories (Maynard, 1993: 261).
In one of the few instances of a Christian anthropologist writing from the subject
position of his faith, Robert Priest (1993; 2000) has made the case for the same sort of
approach to theological categories in Christian thought. Speaking of that most anthro-
pologically odious of theological categories, sin, Priest suggests that such a morally
weighted term, encompassing elements of individual will, divine sovereignty, human
nature and communal relations can provide important insight into communities that
regularly employ and embrace such a category (Priest, 2000: 65 ff.; see also Robbins,
2004: 14, 215). Moreover, by failing to take such categories as integral components of
a subject’s world – or even deliberately misappropriating such concepts – ethnography
relocates the subjects into a world of the secular anthropologist without ever fully accept-
ing a world that may be as full of moral agency, spiritual vitality and interpersonal
responsibility as a person actually says that it is. In reference to Irving Hallowell’s classic
article on the history of anthropology, in which Hallowell (1976) notes the gradual
supplanting of moral categories for ‘scientific’ ones, Priest writes:

Following Hallowell, I suggest that anthropological concepts and categories are indeed
used as replacements of, and not simply as compatible with, such prior concepts.
Furthermore, I suggest that anthropologists are generally hostile to concepts implying
ethical choice, moral accountability, conscience, human evil and the like, and there-
fore that changes in concepts reflect changes in value positions and philosophical
assumptions as much as they do refinements in scientificity. (Priest, 1993: 98)

382

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

HOWELL The repugnant cultural other speaks back

In dogmatically replacing theological concepts with anthropological ones, Christianity

becomes decentered in its own discourse, its voice drowned out by the ‘objective’
language of social science. Yet it may be that for many non-Christians, this provides the
only access to some aspects of the Christian life. Reflecting on his own fieldwork in
Morocco, Paul Rabinow observed that in normal circumstances (in other words, the
classic fieldworker–informant relationship), ‘the informant must first learn to explicate
his own culture, to become self-conscious about it and begin to objectify his own life-
world’, offering a kind of instant translation to the anthropologist in categories he or
she can manage (Rabinow, 1977: 152). For the Christian informant, this translation may
emerge in the self-identified genre of ‘witnessing’ or ‘testifying’, but it remains a trans-
lation – a product for ‘outsiders’ – all the same. The Christian ethnographer, though
eventually translating into the language of anthropology, can work, at least partly, within
the untranslated world of the Christian to explore the possibilities of the ideas,
theologies, and ‘beliefs’ of Christians to explain Christians themselves. Thinking again
about my students researching the Amish, there was one young woman who launched
an independent study project at the conclusion of the class. She found links, questions
and issues that were firmly rooted in her own Christian subjectivity, even as she worked
out the anthropological translation. Focusing on the semiotics of clothing for the Amish
and their interpreters (in other words, the tourists, non-Amish tourates marketing
‘Amish’ goods, and touristic publications), she commented to me how similar were the
‘struggles’ of the Amish to present themselves to the ‘outside’ to evangelical efforts to do
the same. That is, where she, as a conservative Christian, chafed at associations between
her faith and the words of media-generated spokespeople such as Pat Robertson or Jerry
Falwell, she could identify with the Amish conundrum of being defined by sources
outside their community and faith. At the same time, she could see that Amish theology
discourages self-representation as the sin of pride. ‘Perhaps’, she once speculated,
‘evangelicals should be more like the Amish. Perhaps our desires to define ourselves are
also rooted in pride’. Reflected through her position as a Christian, theological categories
such as ‘pride’ and ‘sin’, and her encounter with the Amish as self and other, all come
together to suggest a line of inquiry (into evangelical self-identification) that is, at the
very least, an interesting aspect of Christianity likely to be invisible to the non-
Christian ethnographer.
Whether or not the exclusion of theological categories is rooted in hostility, repulsion,
or a different and equally-valid value position, the historic inability of anthropologists
to see such a notion as analytically fruitful brings us back to the importance of the
Christian subject position as the position from which such views are likely to emerge.
By offering a Christian standpoint as intellectually legitimate and socially significant, we
can, as feminist Helen Longino (1989) argues in the case of feminist epistemologies,
remove obstacles in critical academic discourse and bring (seemingly) old ways of
thinking to bear on new ethnographic and theoretical problems.

CONCLUSION
Naturally, this issue is a much wider one than simply anthropology. Historian George
Marsden (1997) is perhaps the best known and most articulate apologist for the position
of Christian identity as relevant and beneficial for the academy. He readily admits that in
particular disciplinary contexts (say, physics) or areas of inquiry (ecology) there will be

383

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 7(4)

little, if any, discernable effect of Christian commitments on the method or process of

scholarship in which any person is engaged. Indeed, the same qualification can be made
for many areas of anthropological inquiry, not simply in the obvious example of research
on the prevalence of lactose intolerance or statistical studies of caloric intake in a particu-
lar population, but even in the data-gathering methods employed in qualitative research
of much cultural anthropology. Some standard ethnographic methods – interviews,
surveys, conversations and note-taking – would proceed for the Christian (or feminist,
or queer, or other committed subject position) in much the same way as for any scholar.
Marsden goes on to argue, however, that while some parameters of scholarship and
academic inquiry might remain constant, how Christians, secularists, Muslims, femi-
nists and other positions that interpret data ‘have to do with large-scale beliefs about
what the world is, or should be, like’ (Marsden, 1997: 62). This is precisely the point,
as summarized by Marilyn Strathern, of bringing feminism into the orbit of anthropol-
ogy (or vice versa?): ‘Practices are constituted by theoretical frameworks, by conceptual
givens and assumptions, and also by the kind of relationship which an investigator
establishes with the subject itself ’ (Strathern, 1987: 277). The importance of feminist
and anthropological theory–practice running into each other, she suggests, is in the
ability of one to ‘mock’ the other, pointing out the weaknesses and flaws in an overly
distanced, ethically void position on the one hand – anthropology – against the intrin-
sically engaged, always asymmetrically constructed position on the other – feminism –
(see also Robbins, 2006).
The relevance of positionality and inclusion, then, runs much more deeply than
methodology or academic fairness. Acknowledging the particularity of, in this case, a
Christian as either anthropological subject or anthropologist should bring about
(re)orientations of our understandings of these positions themselves. To be a Christian
is to orient one’s physical and moral being towards particular commitments – a
hermeneutic of (holy) text, a relevance of spirituality, an agency of divinity – and
communities – a local church, the global and transcendent Body of Christ – that consti-
tutes the Christian epistemological standpoint. Christians hold together a constellation
of often overlapping, if not conflicting, beliefs over which we wrestle, argue and debate,
without necessarily breaking ranks as sharing the same subject position. Our position-
ality is rooted in these shared historical, locational and theological commitments which
are not reducible to cognitive categories, ‘worldview’, discourse or practices alone. All
these must be understood in dynamic relation within the individual and community.
While the other subject positions mentioned throughout this article – feminists,
gender/sexual minorities, ethnic and racial identity – have had to assertively promote
their legitimacy within academic discourse and institutions, a number of scholars have
noted that the Christian position seems to face particular hurdles. In his article elabor-
ating the possible contours of an anthropology of Christianity, Robbins (2003) noted
that perhaps the greatest barrier to Christianity being viewed as a legitimate anthropo-
logical subject (and, by implication, to the idea of Christians as holding a valuable ethno-
graphic subject position) is not theoretical or methodological but social. While evidence
such as the growth of anthropological literature on Christianity (within and outside the
West) and the number of graduate students pursuing research on Christianity suggests
that the climate may be changing (see also Cannell, 2006a). In more than the decade
plus since Harding’s article, there have been several published references to the

384

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

HOWELL The repugnant cultural other speaks back

problematic nature of studying and representing Christianity within the anthropo-

logical academy (Arnold, 2006; Meneses, 2000; Paris, 2006; Priest, 2001). This suggests
that barriers remain to the inclusion of a Christian subject position into the ethnographic
enterprise, barriers that have little to do with theoretical objections. Regardless of the
presence or absence of social stigma attached to Christian commitment within anthro-
pology, the inclusion of the Christian subject position should be made in such a way as
to bring the sorts of fruitful possibilities such as the explicit inclusion of other perspec-
tives. In other words, we must acknowledge the Christian perspective as a legitimate view
from somewhere.
For the Christian ethnographer, this commitment suggests that bracketing beliefs is
not the same as bracketing that which is central to our selfhood – a commitment to the
Incarnation of Jesus, the self-revelation of God and a particular understanding of
Divinity. Although this Christian subjectivity appeals to transcendence as intrinsic and
irreducible to selfhood, it is ‘a subjectivity from below’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1963; Prins,
1995) that is worked out in the embodied and phenomenological world of community,
behavior and speech. It is in this way that I, and the Filipino Christians of Baguio City,
could understand ourselves as sharing a subject position that was decidedly ‘somewhere’
even as we could leave any particular beliefs unspoken or unshared.
By separating the particular ‘beliefs’ of a community or subject from our common
commitment, I could begin to navigate the always difficult realm of objectivity and
subjectivity. This central problematic of so much contemporary social theory (Bourdieu,
1980; Derrida, 1976; Merleau-Ponty, 1963) became clearer and more manageable as I
allowed my ‘view from somewhere’ to inform my reflection on my experience with the
Christian Filipinos of my work. The postmodern truism that everyone is somewhere can
inform the Christian anthropologist’s work with no more jeopardy attached than for the
feminist studying women, the leftist studying labor unions or the Muslim studying
mosques. The commitment that created the selfhood of common identity is not iso-
morphic with cognitive beliefs such that otherness cannot co-exist with self-ness.
In his reply to Robert Priest’s article about evangelical Christians and/in the academy,
James Clifford wrote:

Beyond invoking the negative experience of exclusion, Priest does not (yet) offer an
academic defense of religious content, an explicit Christian analysis rather than a
discussion of the Christian academic predicament. It would be interesting to know
how Priest thinks about the stronger claim, particularly in relation (and alliance?)
with recent attempts by indigenous scholars to make room in the academy for non-
western epistemologies. (Clifford, 2001)

While this article may not provide the response Clifford had in mind, the point is
certainly here: the religious subject position, properly understood, is a similar standpoint
epistemology that destabilizes prior categories (Christian/non-Christian, belief/commit-
ment) while potentially incorporating others (faith, sin) in significant ways.

Acknowledgements
This article began as a paper presented during the American Anthropological Meetings
of 2003. I would like to thank my co-organizer for that session, Erin Stiles, as well as

385

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 7(4)

the other participants and discussants. Thanks to Tanya Luhrmann, Robert Priest, Jenell
Williams Paris, and Naomi Haynes for their comments at various stages along with three
extremely thoughtful and helpful anonymous reviewers. Much thanks to the editors of
Anthropological Theory, Joel Robbins and Jonathan Friedman. Several conversations with
Joel, in particular, greatly helped to focus this article. My apologies to the many conver-
sation partners and others (particularly at Wheaton College) who have encouraged this
article. You are too numerous to mention. All omissions and errors remain my sole
responsibility.

Notes
1 These are venerable questions, of course, but ones that have not typically been posed
in terms of anthropologist subjectivities. For an excellent discussion of the ‘culture’/
‘religion’ dichotomy see Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the
Missionary Encounter (2007: Chapter 3; regarding Christianity and culture in the
missionary encounter). See also Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian
History (1996).
2 The leaders of the congregations asking me to speak or otherwise be involved were
never concerned that I did not share their Southern Baptist commitments. Some
assumed I did, but when they found otherwise (I identified myself as ‘Evangelical’,
but with a Presbyterian/Reformed theological orientation for those who wanted more
information), it was never a concern. This reveals something, again, about the ways
in which ‘belief ’ and ‘commitment’ worked in our Self/Other encounter.
3 Although Frederick’s work could be criticized as more empirical than theoretical,
several reviewers have noted that her shared subject position with that of her
collaborators (including, if not especially their religious commitments) makes her
work particularly significant within the overall literature. See Casselberry (2004);
McDaniel (2004).
4 It is not insignificant that my wife, who was with me in the field, is a Filipino-
American, and we had our young daughter with us. I know that this shaped the
response of Filipinos towards me and created a kind of connection. Furthermore, I
acknowledge that I had a powerful ‘connection’ as a member of the former colonial
ruling state. I do not intend to diminish the importance of these personal and politi-
cal contexts. But I would still assert that in the context of these churches, given my
presence and interest in religious contexts, and the relevance of my Christian identity
for my interactions there, this proved to be consistently more salient for my
collaborators and me.
5 My formative Christian experience in college (a nondenominational campus group
on a secular campus) definitely echoed what Keane (2007: 67–72) calls the ‘creed
paradigm’. While the Baguio Baptists certainly operated under a semiotic ideology
like the creed paradigm, my experience of ‘self ’ among these Christians was, as I argue,
more about these embodied commitments than verbal sincerity.
6 One way of talking about this distinction is in terms of ‘bounded sets’ versus ‘centered
sets’ (Hiebert, 1994: Chapter 6). That is, a ‘Christian’, in this view, can be understood
in terms of his or her orientation towards a community and idea of the divine, rather
than as mastery of or even simply assent to a body of doctrine. This idea, of course,
butts up against the differences between Catholic, Orthodox and various Protestant

386

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

HOWELL The repugnant cultural other speaks back

ecclesiologies. These are important questions, although not ones that can be dealt with
sufficiently here.
7 In his recent article on the anthropology of Christianity, Joel Robbins (2007) makes
a related argument through a distinction between ‘belief that’ and ‘belief in’, with
‘belief in’ corresponding to what I am characterizing as commitment. Though he goes
in a distinctly different direction in his article, his work also points out how the study
of Christianity has suffered from an inattention to the ‘deep structures’ of both
Christian communities and anthropological theory, in ways that have hampered the
ability of anthropologists to address the complexities of conversion, religious change
and non-western Christianity generally.
8 Note that the class was an exploration of tourism, pilgrimage and travel from an
anthropological perspective, not a course on the Amish. Although I knew enough of
the tourist industry among the Amish to bring my class there, I am not a scholar of
Amish culture or religion and, thus, cannot comment on how these few insights may
or may not stand out in the extant anthropological work on the Amish. I intention-
ally made the experience one in which my students and I were all encountering Amish
life and tourism without a great deal of specific background knowledge outside of
tourism theory generally.

References
Abu-Lughod, Lila (1990) ‘Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?’, Women and
Performance 5(1): 7–27.
Abu-Lughod, Lila (1991) ‘Writing Against Culture’, in R. Fox (ed.) Recapturing
Anthropology: Working in the Present, pp. 137–62. Santa Fe, NM: School of
American Research Press.
Appadurai, Arjun (1988) ‘Putting Hierarchy in Its Place’, Cultural Anthropology 3:
37–50.
Arnold, Dean E. (2006) ‘Why Are There So Few Christian Anthropologists?
Reflections on the Tensions between Christianity and Anthropology’, Perspectives on
Science and Christian Faith 58(4): 266–84.
Asad, Talal (1993) Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in
Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1980) The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bramadat, Paul (2000) The Church on the World’s Turf. London: Oxford University
Press.
Cannell, Fenella, ed. (2006a) The Anthropology of Christianity. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Cannell, Fenella (2006b) ‘Introduction: The Anthropology of Christianity’, in
F. Cannell (ed.) The Anthropology of Christianity, pp. 1–50. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Casselberry, Judith (2004) Review of Between Sundays by Marla Frederick. The North
Star 7(2). URL (accessed 14 August 2007):
http://northstar.vassar.edu/volume7/frederick.html; last
Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Clifford, James (1997) Person and Myth. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

387

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 7(4)

Clifford, James (2001) ‘Comment on Missionary Positions: Christian, Modernist,

Postmodernist’, Current Anthropology 42(1): 47–8.
Collins, Patricia Hill (1991) Black Feminist Thought. London: Routledge.
Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff (1997) Of Revelation and Revolution: Dialectics
of Modernity on a South African Frontier, Vol. 2. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Csordas, Thomas J. (2002) Body/Meaning/Healing. New York: Palgrave.
Denzin, Norman K. (1997) Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st
Century. London: Sage.
de Pina-Cabral, Joao (2001) ‘Three Points on Secularism and Anthropology’, Social
Anthropology 9(3): 329–32.
Derrida, Jacques (1976) Of Grammatology (trans. G. C. Spivak). Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Engelke, Matthew (2002) ‘The Problem of Belief: Evans-Pritchard and Victor Turner
on “the Inner Life”’, Anthropology Today 18(6): 3–8.
Ewing, Katherine (1994) ‘Dreams from a Saint: Anthropological Atheism and the
Temptation to Believe’, American Anthropologist 96(3): 571–83.
Frederick, Marla (2003) Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Geertz, Clifford (2000) Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical
Topics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Gellner, David N. (2001) ‘Studying Secularism, Practicing Secularism.
Anthropological Imperatives’, Social Anthropology 9(3): 337–40.
Hallowell, Irving (1976) ‘The History of the Anthropologist and an Anthropological
Problem’, in R.D. Fogelson and F. Eggan (eds) Contributions to Anthropology: Selected
Papers of A. Irving Hallowell, pp. 21–35. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Haraway, Donna (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism
and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies 4(3): 575–99.
Harding, Sandra (1998) Is Science Multicultural?: Postcolonialisms, Feminisms and
Epistemology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Harding, Susan (1987) ‘Convicted by the Holy Spirit: The Rhetoric of Fundamentalist
Conversion’, American Ethnologist 14: 127–81.
Harding, Susan (1991) ‘Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the
Repugnant Cultural Other’, Social Research 58(2): 373–93.
Harding, Susan (2000) The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Harstock, Nancy (1983) ‘The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a
Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism’, in S. Harding and M. Hintikka (eds)
Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and
Philosophy of Science, pp. 283–311. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co.
Hiebert, Paul (1994) Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues. Grand Rapids,
MI: Baker Books.
Jacobs-Huey, Lanita (2002) ‘The Natives are Gazing and Talking Back: Reviewing the
Problematics of Positionality, Voice and Accountability among “Native”
Anthropologists’, American Anthropologist 104(3): 791–804.

388

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

HOWELL The repugnant cultural other speaks back

Jules-Rosette, Bennetta (1975) ‘The Conversion Experience: The Apostles of John

Maranke’, Journal of Religion in Africa 7(2): 132–64.
Kapferer, Bruce (2001) ‘Anthropology: The Paradox of the Secular’, Social
Anthropology 9(3): 341–4.
Keane, Webb (2007) Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter,
Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Keller, Eva (2005) The Road to Clarity: Seventh-Day Adventists in Madagascar. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kirsch, Thomas G. (2004) ‘Restaging the Will to Believe: Religious Pluralism,
Anti-Syncretism and the Problem of Belief’, American Anthropologist 106(4): 699–709.
Kondo, Dorinne K. (1990) Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in
a Japanese Workplace. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Longino, Helen (1989) ‘Feminist Critiques of Rationality: Critiques of Science or
Philosophy of Science?’, Women’s Studies International Forum 12: 261–69.
Luhrmann, Tanya (2001) ‘Comment on “Missionary Positions: Christian, Modernist,
Postmodernist”’, Current Anthropology 42(1): 66.
Luhrmann, Tanya (2004) ‘Metakinesis: How God Becomes Intimate in Contemporary
US Christianity’, American Anthropologist 106(3): 518–28.
Mahmood, Saba (2005) Politics of Piety: Feminist Subject in Islamic Revivalism.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Malinowski, Branislaw (1961) Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: E.P. Dutton.
Malkki, Liisa H (1997) ‘National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the
Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees’, in A. Gupta
and J. Ferguson (eds) Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology,
pp. 52–75. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Marsden, George M. (1997) The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press.
Maynard, Kent (1993) ‘Protestant Theories and Anthropological Knowledge:
Convergent Models in the Ecuadorian Sierra’, Cultural Anthropology 8(2): 246–67.
McDaniel, Michallene (2004) ‘Review of Between Sundays by Marla Frederick’, Gender
and Society 18(5): 664–5.
Meneses, Eloise Hiebert (2000) ‘No Other Foundation: Establishing a Christian
Anthropology’, Christian Scholars Review 29(3): 535–47.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1963) The Structure of Behavior (trans. A.L. Fischer). Boston:
Beacon Press.
Milbank, John (1991) Theology and Social Theory. London: Blackwell.
Milbank, John (1997) The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture. London:
Blackwell.
Minh-ha, Trinh (1993) ‘The Language of Nativism: Anthropology as a Scientific
Conversation of Man with Man’, in L. Kauffman (ed.) American Feminist Thought
at Century’s End, pp. 107–40. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Motzafi-Haller, Pnina (1997) ‘Writing Birthright: On Native Anthropologists and the
Politics of Representation’, in D.E. Reed-Danahay (ed.) Auto/Ethnography:
Rewriting the Self and the Social, pp. 195–223. Oxford: Berg.
Narayan, Kirin (1993) ‘How Native is a “Native” Anthropologist?’, American
Anthropologist 95(3): 671–86.

389

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 7(4)

Neitz, Mary Jo (2002) ‘Walking Between Worlds: Permeable Boundaries, Ambiguous

Identities’, in J.V. Spickard, S.J. Landres, and M.B. McGuire (eds) Personal
Knowledge and Beyond: Reshaping the Ethnography of Religion, pp. 33–47. New York:
New York University Press.
Norris, Rebecca Sachs (2003) ‘Converting to What? Embodied Culture and the
Adoption of New Beliefs’, in A. Bucksner and S. Glazier (eds) The Anthropology of
Religious Conversion, pp. 171–81. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.
Paris, Jenell Williams (2006) ‘A Pietist’s Perspective on Love and Learning in Cultural
Anthropology’, Christian Scholars Review 30(3): 371–85.
Peacock, James, and Ruel W. Tyson (1989) Pilgrims of Paradox: Calvinism and
Experience Among Primitive Baptists of the Blue Ridge. Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institute Press.
Priest, Robert (1993) ‘Cultural Anthropology, Sin and the Missionary’, in D.A. Carson
and J.D. Woodbridge (eds) God and Culture, pp. 85–106. Grand Rapids, MI:
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
Priest, Robert (2000) ‘Christian Theology, Sin and Anthropology’, in W.R. Adams and
F. Salamone (eds) Anthropology and Theology: God, Icons and God-Talk, pp. 59–75.
Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Priest, Robert (2001) ‘Missionary Positions: Christian, Modernist, Postmodernist’,
Current Anthropology 42(1): 29–69.
Prins, Baukje (1995) ‘The Ethics of Hybrid Subjects: Feminist Constructivism
According to Donna Haraway’, Science, Technology and Human Values 20(3):
352–67.
Rabinow, Paul (1977) Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Reed-Danahay, Deborah E., ed. (1997) Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the
Social. London: Berg.
Reno, R.R. (2000) ‘The Radical Orthodoxy Project’, First Things (100): 37–44.
Rhum, Michael and Deborah Tooker (1993) ‘Understanding “Belief ”’, Man 28(4):
801–3.
Robbins, Joel (2003) ‘What is a Christian? Notes toward an anthropology of
Christianity’, Religion 33(3): 191–201.
Robbins, Joel (2004) Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua
New Guinean Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Robbins, Joel (2006) ‘Anthropology and Theology: An Awkward Relationship?’,
Anthropological Quarterly 79(2): 285–94.
Robbins, Joel (2007) ‘Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture:
Belief, Time and the Anthropology of Christianity’, Current Anthropology 48(1):
5–38.
Ruel, Malcolm (1997) Belief, Ritual and the Securing of Life: Reflexive Essays on a Bantu
Religion. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Sahlins, Marshall (1996) How ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, For Example.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Said, Edward (1979) Orientalism. New York: Vintage.
Salzman, Philip Carl (2002) ‘On Reflexivity’, American Anthropologist 104(3):
805–13.

390

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013

HOWELL The repugnant cultural other speaks back

Spickard, James V., Shaun J. Landres and Meredith B. McGuire, eds (2002) Personal
Knowledge and Beyond: Reshaping the Ethnography of Religion. New York: New York
University Press.
Sprague, Joey (2005) Feminist Methodologies for Critical Researchers: Bridging
Differences. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Stewart, Charles (2001) ‘Secularism as an Impediment to Anthropological Research’,
Social Anthropology 9(3): 325–8.
Strathern, Marilyn (1987) ‘An Awkward Relationship: The Case of Feminism and
Anthropology’, Signs 12(2): 276–92.
Tooker, Deborah (1992) ‘Identity Systems of Highland Burma: “Belief ”, Akha Zan,
and a Critique of Interiorized Notions of Ethno-Religious Identity’, Man 27(4):
799–819.
Toren, Christina (2006) ‘The Effectiveness of Ritual’, in F. Cannell (ed.) The
Anthropology of Christianity, pp. 185–210. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph (2003) Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern
World. New York: Palgrave.
Walls, Andrew (1996) The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the
Transmission of Faith. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
Ward, Graham (1995) Barth, Derrida, and the Theology of Language. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Wilcox, Melissa (2002) ‘Dancing on the Fence: Researching Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual
and Transgender Christians’, in J.V. Spickard, S.J. Landres and M.B. McGuire (eds)
Personal Knowledge and Beyond: Reshaping the Ethnography of Religion, pp. 47–63.
New York: New York University Press.
Wilson, Bryan R., ed. (1970) Rationality. London: Basil Blackwell.
Wolf, Margery (1992) Thrice-Told Tales: Feminism, Postmodernism and Ethnographic
Responsibility. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

BRIAN M. HOWELL is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wheaton College, Illinois. He received his
PhD in anthropology from Washington University in St Louis in 2002. He has published work on Philippine
Baptists and Christian anthropology in such journals as Religion and Christian Scholar’s Review as well as several
edited volumes. His book, Christianity in Local Context: Southern Baptists in the Philippines, is forthcoming
from Palgrave Macmillan. In addition to his work on Philippine Protestantism, he has published on race in
US Christianity (This Side of Heaven, edited by R. Priest and A. Nieves, Oxford, 2006) and the ‘Short-Term
Missions’ phenomenon (Journal of Communication and Religion). He is currently conducting further research
related to short-term ‘missions’ and Christian service travel. Address: Department of Sociology and Anthro-
pology, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL 60187, USA. [email: Brian.M.Howell@wheaton.edu]

391

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on April 23, 2013