... Introduction ...

The Anthropology of Christianity

Fenella Cannell

Just because something is ‘‘well-known,’’ it does

not always follow that it is known. —G. W. F. Hegel

hat di√erence does Christianity make? What di√erence does it

W make to how people at di√erent times and in di√erent places
understand themselves and the world? And what di√erence does it make
to the kinds of questions we are able to ask about social process?

Anthropology and Christianity

Propositions about the di√erence made by Christianity played a critical
role in the fashioning of the broad comparativist theories of society that
founded sociology and anthropology. For Émile Durkheim, Marcel
Mauss, and Max Weber, each in their di√erent ways, the characterization
of the new social sciences as distinctively secular never precluded a clear
recognition of the importance of Christianity. Mauss ([1938] 1985) con-
sidered Christianity decisive in the formation of modern Western under-
standings of the self. For Durkheim, Judeo-Christian religions consti-
tuted one important stage in the development and progressive abstraction
of the ‘‘conscience collective,’’ before the humanist values he predicted
would emerge in later modernity. For Weber ([1930] 1992), while all
world religions involved features of systematization and innovative
thinking that might promote social change, the ‘‘elective a≈nity’’ be-
tween capitalism and Calvinist Christianity in Europe had produced
Western modernity’s distinctive forms.
 fenella c annell

Durkheim and his nephew Mauss were, of course, both nonpracticing

and agnostic members of originally Jewish families, within a French
culture divided between Catholicism and secularist republicanism that
still contained powerful anti-Semitic tendencies.∞ Weber was an agnostic
of Christian background, teaching and writing in Weimar Germany. For
all three of them, it seems, the world in which they lived appeared to be
... becoming less religiously observant, and yet religious practice as the
..
2 .... norm also seemed a recent, almost tangible memory. This modernist
...
sense of being just ‘‘after’’ religion marks the tone of all three in some
way, while Durkheim and Mauss were obviously doubly outside conven-
tional Christianity.≤
It is now commonplace to observe that each of these writers was a
social evolutionist, at least in the loose sense of speaking of one form of
society giving rise to another, more complex and less ‘‘primitive ’’ form,
over time.≥ Criticism of the evaluative aspect of social evolutionism,
which ranks one person or community as more ‘‘advanced’’ than another,
has been a constant feature of anthropological writing for many years. It
is also widely understood that such models are teleological, in that they
assume that societies are all tending toward the goal of some singular
civilization.
It is certainly true that each of these writers invoked a sense of the
development of history through successive stages; indeed, each one pro-
posed that Christianity played a key role in the creation of a series
of complex but definite one-way changes in social process. It is also
well recognized, however, that all three of these writers were skeptical
about the advantages of modernity; Mauss’s most famous work, The Gift
([1924] 1990), in particular is best read as a critique of capitalist ideology
(see Parry 1986), while Weber’s prose is darkly evocative of the ‘‘iron
cage ’’ of contemporary work practices and bureaucratic systems that
have lost sight of the values they were intended to serve. They were not,
therefore, teleologists in the sense of assuming that society was tending
toward some straightforwardly ‘‘higher’’ goal. Moreover Weber was ex-
plicit in insisting that the patterns of historical development followed by
European modernization would not necessarily be replicated in other
parts of the world.
This makes it somewhat ironic, therefore, that anthropological and
sociological approaches to Christianity have long tended to become mired
in a highly teleological reading of the foundational anthropologists, and in
particular certain kinds of readings of Weber. The prevailing orthodoxy
introduction

for several decades has been a focus on the seeming inevitability of

secularization and of the advance of global modernity, while Christianity
has been identified as, above all, a kind of secondary or contributory aspect
of such changes. In the process, there has often been a tendency to assume
that Christianity is an ‘‘obvious’’ or ‘‘known’’ phenomenon that does not
require fresh and constantly renewed examination.
Alongside the general preoccupation with charting processes of mod- ...
...
... 3
ernization, there has been a widespread although not total disciplinary ...
bias within anthropology in favor of the claim to be exercising a com-
pletely secular analytical approach. As the theologian John Milbank has
succinctly noted, this claim is a fiction: ‘‘Once there was no ‘secular’ . . .
The secular as a domain had to be instituted or imagined ’’ (1990: 9). This
invention was given a distinctive form in the modern social sciences.
While this idea of a secular anthropology and sociology certainly does
derive from Durkheim, again it is ironic that the treatment of religious
topics in foundational anthropology was on the whole much less hostile
than has been the case in some later writing.∂ As a significant minority of
commentators have noted (Bowie 2002; E. Turner 1992; Engelke 2002),
anthropology sometimes seems exaggeratedly resistant to the possibility
of taking seriously the religious experiences of others. Religious phe-
nomena in anthropology may be described in detail, but must be ex-
plained on the basis that they have no foundation in reality, but are epi-
phenomena of ‘‘real’’ underlying sociological, political, economic, or
other material causes. It is not necessary to be a believer in any faith, or to
abandon an interest in sociological enquiry, to wonder why the discipline
has needed to protest quite so much about such widely distributed aspects
of human experience.
In the context of this disciplinary nervousness about religious experi-
ence in general, the topic of Christianity has provoked more anxiety than
most other religious topics. It has seemed at once the most tediously
familiar and the most threatening of the religious traditions for a social
science that has developed within contexts in which the heritage of Euro-
pean philosophy, and therefore of Christianity, tends to predominate.
Unease about the political a≈liations of some types of Christian practice,
especially in the United States in the period after the rise of the Moral
Majority, has produced the kind of situation described by Susan Harding
(1991) in her accounts of Jerry Falwell’s church, as the problem of study-
ing liberal anthropology’s ‘‘repugnant social other.’’ In addition, the
understandable desire to acknowledge the complex part played in Euro-
 fenella c annell

pean and American history by Jewish, Islamic, and other religious tradi-
tions has sometimes resulted in blanket suspicion of all intellectual inter-
est in Christianity and the variety of Christian practice around the world.
As I found when I embarked on some recent research on Mormonism in
the United States, it is surprising how many colleagues assume that a
research interest in a topic in Christianity implies that one must be a closet
... evangelist, or at least ‘‘in danger’’ of being converted—an assumption
..
4 .... that would not be made about anthropologists working with most groups
...
of people around the world.∑
For these and other reasons, I would suggest that Christianity has
functioned in some ways as ‘‘the repressed’’ of anthropology over the
period of the formation of the discipline. And, as the repressed always
does, it keeps on staging returns. The complexity of the relationship
between Christianity and anthropology has in fact been pointed out early,
well and repeatedly, if only by a few. It is noted, for example, by E. E.
Evans-Pritchard (1960), in a typically acute essay delivered to a religious
audience after his conversion to Catholicism. Both Malcolm Ruel (1982)
and Jean Pouillon (1982) analyzed the di≈culties of employing the word
belief in anthropology, given the specifically Christian theological freight
of that term, which tends to distort many other kinds of religious reality.
More recently, and again from the acknowledged perspective of a Cath-
olic convert, Edith Turner (1992) has sought to develop an anthropologi-
cal method which allows the possibility that religious phenomena might
be real, while at the same time maintaining high standards of ethno-
graphic accuracy. There have also, from the earliest period of anthropol-
ogy, been some ethnographers who became fascinated by the ‘‘syncretic’’
and missionary Christianities they observed, and who analyzed these in
important accounts.
The curious fact is, however, that these insights remained marginal to
mainstream anthropology and sociology for a long period and indeed
have come to be more widely read again only relatively recently. With a
more recent wave of prestigious commentators, including most famously
two brilliant contributions by Talal Asad (1993) and Marshall Sahlins
(1996), the topic of Christianity has started to move to a more central
place again on the disciplinary agenda. Asad, drawing on Foucault, has
written of the genealogy of the idea of religion in anthropology, analyz-
ing elements taken from the history of both Christianity and Islam. In an
important article on the native anthropology of Western cosmology,
Sahlins has observed the extent to which assumptions about the world
introduction

that inform the intellectual frameworks in which we operate are drawn

from the Christian theology of human ‘‘fallenness’’ and its consequences,
including a world that exists in a state of lack.
This book had its inception in teaching and collegiate workshops that
took place at about the time that this new wave of writing on Christianity
was beginning. The ideas presented here are not based directly on either
Asad or Sahlins, although they share more common ground with the ...
...
... 5
latter. ...
The book contains eleven original essays on localities in di√erent parts
of the world where people consider themselves to be Christians. It makes
no claims to ethnographic completeness. We have, for example, no con-
tribution solely devoted to continental Africa.∏ It does, however, o√er a
significant contribution to the range of comparative material available
explicitly addressing what it means for people to be Christian. The au-
thors included here argue from diverse and sometimes opposed theoret-
ical positions. They are united in taking the Christianity of their infor-
mants seriously as a cultural fact and in refusing to marginalize it in their
accounts of the areas in which they work. This means setting aside the
assumption that we know in advance what Christian experience, practice,
or belief might be. We o√er eleven fresh accounts of particular, localπ
Christianities as they are lived, in all their imaginative force: a body-
building Jesus, a nonimmortal God, a fetishized Bible, Scripture study as
‘‘normal science.’’ Together they begin to suggest ways anthropology
might begin to renew its thinking about a religion whose very proximity
has hitherto rendered it only imperfectly perceptible.
At the same time, this book makes a contribution to the questions
asked by Milbank, Evans-Pritchard, and Sahlins, among others. How has
anthropology’s attitude to Christianity—which we understand as both an
attempt to separate from Christian metaphysics and a simultaneous as-
similation of key ideas derived from those metaphysics—limited the de-
velopment of the discipline? What in fact is the relationship between
anthropology and Christianity?
In considering this question, it is necessary to reach some provisional
working definition of the term Christianity itself. This is more di≈cult than
it might first appear. Some theoretical discussion in the social sciences rests
on the supposition that Christianity has clear, inherent properties leading
to repeatable e√ects when it is introduced into other societies around the
world. On the other hand, some anthropologists have reacted against
strong predictive theories of the e√ects of the introduction of Christianity,
 fenella c annell

and might argue that most of the supposedly defining features of Chris-
tianity are chimerical, and can as well apply to many other sorts of
religious practice, whether within the so-called world religions or not.
One among many possible examples of this kind of tension would be
the diverse views taken on the e√ects of Christianization on attitudes to
the dead. Meyer Fortes (1970, 1979), following an earlier article by Max
... Gluckman (1937), had placed much stress on the idea that ancestral
..
6 .... religion stood in contrast to later world religions. In particular, ancestral
...
religions should not be confused with cults of the dead. Ancestral reli-
gions were supposed to be distinguished by the focus of the ancestors on
participation in the lives of their living descendants. There was little or no
elaboration of ideas about where or how the ancestors went after death
(in a way, they were still among the living).
This was contrasted with the situation in salvationist religions, where
the fate of the dead person and their arrival in the afterlife was of key
importance. In such situations, as in Catholic Europe, the living might
pay attention to the dead, but with the main aim of changing the situation
of the dead souls (e.g., getting them out of Purgatory by saying Mass)
rather than changing the situation of the living.
It is not in doubt that the Christian church as it evolved introduced
deliberate policies and practices designed to manage believers’ attitudes
to their dead, and these teachings changed over time, perhaps most fa-
mously with the elaboration of the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, and
with the challenge to that doctrine at the time of the Protestant Reforma-
tion (see Le Go√ 1986; Schmitt 2000). Some writers questioned the basis
of the Fortesian comparison, by pointing out that the terminology of
‘‘belief ’’ ill described what was central to African ancestor worship in
particular (Kopito√ 1968). More recent writing in a cognitivist tradition
has challenged the paradigm in a di√erent way, suggesting that such
di√erences may be less significant than underlying cognitive similarities.
This work proposes that all humans consider the dead as gone or as
having some kind of continued existence, depending on the eliciting con-
text (see Bloch 2002). While in this example the two kinds of approach
are not necessarily incompatible, it is clear that the cognitivist analysis
allows for a much greater degree of skepticism about any homogeneous
or automatic e√ects following from Christianization.
Many of the contributions to this volume balance these models of what
Christianity does against the specificities of local interpretations, and they
do so in diverse ways. My own approach in this introduction, as well as of
introduction

related work elsewhere (Cannell 2005b), is that Christianity is not an

arbitrary construct, but that it is a historically complex one. 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.
Christianity—more perhaps even than other salvationist religions—is
also a complex object in a di√erent sense. This is because, as historians of
the early church such as Peter Brown (1988), Caroline Walker-Bynum ...
...
... 7
(1996), and Averil Cameron (1991) have clearly shown, part of its distinc- ...
tive character is that it is essentially built on a paradox. The central
doctrines of the Christian faith are the Incarnation (by which God be-
came human flesh in Christ) and the Resurrection (by which, following
Christ’s redemptive death on the Cross, all Christians are promised phys-
ical resurrection at the Last Judgment). Although most writing on Chris-
tianity in the social sciences has focused on its ascetic aspects, on the ways
in which Christian teaching tends to elevate the spirit above the flesh,
Christian doctrine in fact always also has this other aspect, in which the
flesh is an essential part of redemption. As Brown in particular shows, this
ambivalence exists not just in theory, but as part of the lived practice and
experience of Christians.
We will not be specifically concerned in this volume with institutional
church history, since so much has already been written on this topic by
those better qualified to do so. We will be concerned, however, to take up
the insight of Brown and others, and to use it to question the ascetic
stereotype of Christianity as it has become embedded in anthropology. I
would moreover suggest that a recognition of the centrally paradoxical
nature of Christian teaching allows us to move some way further in
conceptualizing its historical development and, of special concern to
anthropologists, local encounters with missionary Christianities.
The nature of this contradiction is such that even where particular
Christian churches have, at given times and places, adopted certain theo-
logical positions as orthodox and policed them as such, the unorthodox
position remains hanging in the air, readable between the lines in Scrip-
ture, and implied as the logical opposite of what is most insisted upon by
the authorities. Hence the heretical is constantly reoccurring and being
reinvented in new forms. Such recurring inventions may take place in the
heartlands of Europe or America, or they may develop in fascinating and
variable ways in quite di√erent cultural contexts.
This introduction explores the range of issues briefly anticipated here,
under several headings. First, I review in more detail some of the contexts
 fenella c annell

in which Christianity was for many years marginalized in the ethno-

graphic account. Second, we contribute to the debate on the relationship
between anthropology and Christianity when we consider carefully the
proposition, central to all dominant anthropological views of Chris-
tianity, that transcendence is at the center of the religion, and suggest a
link between this idea of transcendence, and the idea of Christianity as a
... religion of radical discontinuity. Third, we review the diversity of Chris-
..
8 .... tian practice described in the contributions to this book, which challenge
...
both the notion that Christianity is a merely arbitrary category, and the
notion that it is a completely homogeneous phenomenon. Fourth, we
consider and reevaluate the defining place that ideas about orthodoxy and
conversion hold in the ethnography of Christianity. Fifth, we consider
the problems inherent in defining Christianity through theories that pri-
oritize narratives of modernity. Finally, we ask whether it is possible to
draw on anthropology’s origins to formulate a revived understanding of
the relation between the discipline and Christianity and also ask whether
we should move beyond the paradigm of Christianity as the ‘‘impossible
religion.’’

Ethnography without Christianity

Perhaps surprisingly, Christianity was the last major area of religious
activity to be explored in ethnographic writing. Since Durkheim, if not
before, the attention of anthropologists has been directed as much to the
supposed elementary forms of the religious life as to the supposed under-
lying structures of kinship, and with a similar assumption: that by exam-
ining what was prior to and other than our own society, we would
uncover simultaneously what was universal in the composition of human
interaction and what was distinctive about both the worlds of both the
examined and the examiners. So much is familiar. Less often remarked,
however, is the way in which the investigation of Christianity was pushed
to the margins of this inquiry. While anthropology proceeded from the
examination of ‘‘primitive ’’ religions to the analysis of world religions
such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, the study of Christian areas of
the world was, generally, considered the least urgent object of study.
Two kinds of enquiry were theoretically open to anthropologists of
religion. They might have examined Christian practice at home, espe-
cially in various European or American contexts. Or they could have
worked on the Christianization of colonial populations in other conti-
introduction

nents. Di√erent limiting factors seem to have been at work in each case.
An instructive instance of the disincentives to focusing on Christianity at
home is o√ered by the beginnings of interest in Mediterranean ethnogra-
phy in the late 1950s and early 1960s (e.g., Campbell 1964). When young
ethnographers began to imagine that interesting fieldwork sites could lie
closer to home than the Trobriand Islands, they felt obliged to justify
their choice by emphasizing the di√erence and distinctiveness of the ...
...
... 9
apparently more familiar cultures they were studying—an imperative ...
that probably also influenced the choice of a relatively remote pastoral
culture for Campbell’s groundbreaking study. In the resulting paradigm
of the Mediterranean, this cultural distinctiveness came to be guaranteed
by reference to so-called shame and honor behaviors, and to the rigid
gender divisions through which these were supposed to operate. Perhaps
in part because men were seen as the active enforcers of this culture,
women were at first thought of as having less to say. When Ernestine
Friedl first went to the field (Friedl 1962), she was assured by her super-
visors that Greek women would have nothing ‘‘cultural’’ to tell her.∫
These culturally unmarked women were usually associated with specifi-
cally Christian activities. In Julian Pitt-Rivers’s innovative People of the
Sierra, which in 1954 dealt seriously for almost the first time with Spanish
small town ethnography, cultural activities are strongly gendered as
male, while women are regarded as those to whom society has assigned
the role of appeasing the church by a demonstration of orthodox religious
observance. A kind of functional division is assumed between the sexes.
The black-clad, rosary-telling women of these Mediterranean ethnogra-
phies are figures of conformity rather than of local ‘‘cultural’’ autonomy
and resistance. Of course such ethnographies reflected in part a real gen-
dering of roles within some Catholic communities in Europe, in which
women may often have adopted a role of greater observance and piety,
while men (especially in peasant communities) indulged in a flamboyant
anticlericalism in which the priest was set up as the butt of jokes from
‘‘real males’’ (Pina-Cabral 1986: 117). But it is also clearly true that this is
not always a predictable or su≈cient account of Catholic practice in
such communities; compare the accounts of male religious enthusiasm in
Christian 1972, for example. In advancing the well-known division be-
tween male culture and female domesticity, some of these early ethnogra-
phers also made a less widely noticed assignment of Christian practice to
the female and therefore implicitly noncultural sphere.
A complementary deficit in the consideration of Christian experience
 fenella c annell

can be found even in that feminist scholarship which helped to correct the
assumption that women had nothing to say. Marina Warner (1976) ar-
gued that women in Catholic countries through di√erent historical peri-
ods were oppressed through the church’s romance with the figure of
Mary. Because Mary was unique in being both virgin and mother, she
necessarily made women aware of their own failure to emulate her.
... Catholic women were thus said to understand themselves, at the instruc-
..
10 .... tion of the church, as being centrally and inevitably failures. Certainly,
...
Christian theologians have reproduced over long historical periods both
an emphasis on the value of female virginity, which can easily produce a
somewhat punitive form of asceticism (Brown 1988), and an attitude to
the superior spiritual authority of men that, while not without space for
alternative interpretations, might reasonably be called patriarchal. How-
ever, it is now clear that women’s experience of Mary and Christ is
historically and regionally variable (Walker-Bynum 1987); that the ap-
peal of Mary for some Catholics may lie instead in a di√erently con-
structed notion of her mediatory, almost mediumlike powers (Bloch
1994); and that Catholic women may invert the notion of Mary as model,
choosing instead to understand Mary as a woman whose experiences are
modeled on their own, most human, experiences of maternal love and
grief (Cannell 1991, 1999). Warner tends to identify the whole of Catholic
religious experience (women’s or men’s) with the policies of the church,
as though the pronouncements of the Vatican could perfectly determine
the experience of Catholics. This has a curious result. The view that
women are entirely subject to formation by the church ends by replicat-
ing a view of female Catholic experience worthy of the most austere of
the Desert Fathers.
Some exceptional anthropologists gradually began to give illuminat-
ing accounts of European Catholicism (e.g., Christian 1972; Catedra
1992). These, though, have been mainly focused on rural and peasant
communities in the south that could be seen as su≈ciently distant from
the industrial northwest to allow for an analytic distance from the acad-
emy. Protestant Europe and the United States have proved even more
di≈cult for anthropologists to tackle. Both Weber’s legacy and modern
folk theory tend to lead to the assumption that late market capitalism is
formed by Protestantism at the most profound, if secularized, level. But
with the return of Protestant groups to the center of the political stage in
the American New Right of the 1980s, some anthropologists began se-
riously to address these issues (Ginsburg 1989; Harding 1981, 1984). This
introduction

kind of work is now beginning to be published at length (Harding 2000;

Coleman 2000; McDannell 1995) and represents a crucial development,
but such writers are still few in number. For many anthropologists, it
seems that, unless special circumstances bring it into view, Christianity is
still an occluded object.
The treatment of Christianity away from home developed slightly
di√erently. For the British Africanists of the mid-twentieth century, for ...
...
... 11
instance, the dominant models of lineage, tribe, and ancestor worship ...
tended to focus attention away from the issues of Christian missioniza-
tion, as the notion of honor cultures had eclipsed interest in Mediterra-
nean Christianity. Nevertheless, there were astute and distinguished eth-
nographers of that period, such as Monica Wilson, whose interest in
Christian conversion and social change led to an important early publica-
tion (M. Wilson 1971). Wilson tended to view Christianity in terms of its
role in social transformation, but James Fernandez (1982) provided an
example of the exploration of a distinctive African Christian imaginary in
his richly detailed study of Fang syncretic Pentecostalism.
However, in mainstream anthropological circles the most influential
view of African Christianity has probably been that provided by Jean and
John Comaro√. And it is arguable that this major body of work, despite
its valuable accounts of the reception of missionization in South Africa,
ultimately subordinates the exploration of Christianity to the narrative of
modernization.
Anthropological interest in colonialisms and postcolonialisms has of
course both stimulated and required a nuanced view of local Chris-
tianities. Yet Christianity often took on a curious relation to that catch-
word of Marxist-influenced anthropology in the 1980s, ‘‘resistance.’’ Jean
Comaro√ ’s earlier work (Comaro√ 1985), for instance, explores some of
the resonances of Tshidi Pentecostalist practice. She o√ers an illuminat-
ing discussion of the combination of Tshidi and U.S. Pentecostalist spatial
symbolisms. Yet it is clear that what mainly interests her is the way in
which (by, for example, recapitulating the color symbolism of precolonial
Tshidi initiation rites) Tshidi Pentecostalist ritual resists incorporation
into an ‘‘orthodox’’ Christian practice. Pentecostalism’s role in resistance
from the margin to the processes of nineteenth-century U.S. industrializa-
tion makes it an appropriate signifier for black experience in South Africa.
As other Christian experience in Tshidi regions is not easily construed as
a vehicle for ‘‘resistance,’’ it remains unexplored. The religion of Tshidi
Wesleyans is associated with a direct capitulation to the values of the
 fenella c annell

white, colonialist, and industrializing state under apartheid. The Coma-

ro√s’ more recent historical works on South African Christianity draw
attention to the particularity of Christian agents as they meet forms of
local understanding (Comaro√ and Comaro√ 1991). But despite the
value of this work and its wealth of illuminating historical detail, Chris-
tianity is nevertheless primarily identified with colonial agency and the
... compulsory imposition of modernity. A number of other questions, in-
..
12 .... cluding the question of whether there are intrinsic dynamics of change
...
and transformation within Christian theology itself, are thereby some-
what sidelined, and the association between Christian experience and
subjugated orthodoxies—in this case the orthodoxies of modernity—is
maintained. Many anthropologists who become interested in Christianity,
then, do so almost against their will, initially seeing it as a kind of second-
ary phenomenon or top coat that has been applied by external forces to
the cultures they are studying. This is particularly and understandably
true when Christianity has been forced upon people by the actions of the
state or of colonial missionaries. With honorable exceptions, anthropol-
ogy has tended to come at the problem of the significance of Christianity
rather simplistically, and has even tended to view it as a homogeneous
thing, often covered by the label ‘‘the church,’’ whose main distinguish-
ing feature is taken to be its hostility to local patterns of understanding
and behavior.
One key body of work for a di√erent kind of anthropology of Chris-
tianity, then, may be work by historians on the early church, as it defined
itself first as a quasi-millenarian sect within the Roman Empire, and then
became at much-debated times and by a series of strange, uneven trans-
formations the o≈cial religion of the empire itself. Peter Brown’s work
on Romano-Christian burials (1981), to take only one of the most famous
examples, has subtly and convincingly demonstrated how the relation-
ship of Roman citizens to their ancestors was transformed into the origins
of the first Christian saint cults. Both Brown and Averil Cameron are
among those historians who have begun to build up a concrete picture of
how such shifts in social imagination actually came about (Brown 1988;
Cameron 1991). Historians have focused on some of the central dilemmas
of Christianity as it created itself as a changing social force—what for
instance, could replace the cult of the first Christian martyrs as Christians
ceased to be persecuted; how would those strands of Christianity whose
millenarian, otherworldly tone most stressed the repudiation of existing
kinship ties be reconciled with the continuity of Christian communities
introduction

that actually emerged? How could it be that Christianity was inevitably

thought through the concepts and intellectual methods of late Classical
education, and by those who had been educated in it, but yet developed
something new to say? How did the essential paradox of Christianity—its
elevation of death to triumph—work to prevent the total assimilation of
an evolving Christian theology to secular Roman modes of thinking after
Constantine? ...
...
... 13
Such work forces us to acknowledge the extreme complexity of the ...
questions being asked. The notion of transcendence usually taken to be
characteristic of Christianity, for instance, can certainly be traced not
only to Christianity but also to the Platonic philosophies of the Greeks
and Romans, and perhaps also the Stoic philosophies of Rome, each of
which in di√erent ways argued for the existence of a set of abstract moral
principles (Justice, etc.) that stood above social obligations, might come
into conflict with them, and might require a man to choose them above
such social obligations. The demand that a human being cultivate an
internal barometer of such matters—that he create his own view of
himself in terms of his relation to a form of conscience separable from
social rules and obligations—certainly foreshadowed the development of
the subjectivity that has usually been presented as distinctively Christian.
Insofar as influential early Christian converts of the Roman Empire were
themselves steeped in such teachings, they can also be said to have made
Christianity in crucial ways. Similarly, the influence of the contemporary
Judaism out of which early Christianity grew, and the relationship be-
tween Jewish, Latin, and Hellenistic strands in the early church, is itself a
complex and intensely debated field in theological and historical scholar-
ship (Ehrman 2000, 613–16).
As Cameron (1991) has pointed out, therefore, the questions which
anthropologists, if they are at all alert, ought to be asking themselves—
what, in any situation is Christianity, and how can one possibly discern its
lineaments from that of the social context in which it lives—are not only
the questions of historical colleagues, they are also the questions of
Christian thinkers, teachers and o≈cials at all periods in the history of the
church. Therefore, the writings of the early fathers on heresy, and of the
o≈cials of the Inquisition not only in its later flamboyant stages but also
in the centuries of gradual development in the Middle Ages, can all be
read as the pursuit of an answer to this question from di√erent points of
view. Moreover, as Averil Cameron has noted (albeit with reference to a
Kuhnian notion of paradigm shift, rather than an anthropological notion
 fenella c annell

of social transformation), the evolution of the early church is one of the

most important potential areas on which historians, like many anthropol-
ogists, are working on the dynamics of what used to be called ‘‘culture
contact’’ (Cameron 1991).
The di≈culties facing such a renewal of attention, however, are se-
rious indeed. Christianity’s comparative invisibility as an interpretative
... problem for contemporary ethnography, a problem with its own con-
..
14 .... tours, not identical with those of modernity, is by no means a problem of
...
recent origin. It has tangled and still strong roots in the long emergence
of social science and social theory themselves out of deist, and then
Enlightenment, critique of religion. Social science takes some of its ear-
liest and most important steps toward a separate disciplinary identity by
means of a unilateral declaration of independence from metaphysics,
including Christian theologyΩ —a declaration which, however, it has
proved easier to make than to fulfill. I now turn briefly to consider some
aspects of that prehistory which had particular consequences for current
anthropological thinking about Christianity.

Christianity as Radical Discontinuity

The idea that Christianity constructs, through the Incarnation, an abso-
lutely new relation between man and the world might be said to be the
central proposition of the religion. This proposition has itself had a fateful
influence upon critical conceptions of Christianity. One of the most power-
ful—as well as influential, albeit di√usely—formulations of the thesis of
Christianity’s qualitative distinctiveness is found in the work of the Ger-
man philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel’s interest in the history of religion
developed out of a structural contrast between classical, especially Greek,
religion∞≠ and the Judeo-Christian tradition. The many aspects of this
contrast turned on the di√erence between a form of religion in which the
divine was present in the world and one in which the divine was essentially
thought of as belonging to a world transcending, superior to, and radically
incommensurable with the world of time and space. Thus while in Greek
religion as Hegel imagined it there could be no statue of (say) Pallas
Athena, in which Athena was not in some way actually present, in Chris-
tianity a statue of the Virgin Mary is intended in essence as a representation
of what is not there—an evocation of the divine beyond this world, and a
means to approach it that is necessary precisely because of the distance
separating mortals from an ine√able God:
introduction

‘‘The divine ’’ in Christianity is supposed to be present in consciousness only,

never in life. This is true of the ecstatic unifications of the dreamer who
renounces all multiplicity of life . . . and who is conscious of God alone and so
could shake o√ the opposition between his own personality [and God] only in
death. It is equally true later. . . . This is either the felt opposition in all actions
and expressions of life which purchase their righteousness with the sense of
the servitude and the nullity of their opposition, as happened in the Catholic ...
...
... 15
church, or the opposition of God [to the fate of the world] in mere more or ...
less pious thoughts, as happens in the Protestant church; either the opposition
between a hating God and life, which is thus taken as either a disgrace or a
crime, as in some Protestant sects, or the opposition between a benevolent
God and life, with its joys, which are thus merely something received. (Hegel
[1807] 1975: 301)

Leaving aside the details of Hegel’s chronology and typology of vari-

ous Christian formations for the moment, we can see here the kernel of
much later thinking about the di√erence Christianity makes. The separa-
tion of man from the divine—the origin of the ‘‘unhappy consciousness’’
that recognizes this loss—sets up problems to which anthropologists and
historians have recurred again and again in accounts of Christian think-
ing, including the need for mediation with this distant God, the centrality
of a salvationist emphasis in which death (the only place in which man
and God can be reunited) becomes the crucial defining moment of life,
the setting up of a hierarchy between life and afterlife, with crucial
implications for ideas about economy and exchange, and the creation of a
new notion of interiority that has its origins in the need of the Christian to
consider the fate of his or her own soul.∞∞
Hegel’s influence spread in many di√use ways in nineteenth-century
thought, and it is often powerfully evident even in the work of those who
had read little or nothing of his writing, or who are not known as
Hegelian thinkers. We could observe, for instance, how closely Durk-
heim’s account of Christianity, within his own argument about the de-
velopment from mechanical to organic social solidarity, appears to follow
the logic elaborated by Hegel.
Like Hegel, Durkheim in The Division of Labour in Society ([1893]
1997) makes a strong contrast between Christianity and Greek and Ro-
man religions, which, again in an explicitly developmental framework
that we will find in all these models, he thought of as intermediate
between animism and Christianity. ‘‘Gradually,’’ according to Durkheim,
 fenella c annell

‘‘the religious forces became detached from the things of which they were
at first only the attributes.’’ Over history, he thinks, people stopped
worshipping the divine element in rocks and other features of the natural
world and started worshipping spirits on their own ‘‘but still present in
space and near to us.’’ For the Greeks, the gods had moved further away
to Olympus and only rarely intervened in human life, but were still
... present and accessible in their temples and statues. ‘‘But,’’ he writes, ‘‘it is
..
16 .... only with Christianity that God finally goes beyond space; his kingdom is
...
no longer of this world. The dissociation of nature and the divine be-
comes so complete that it even degenerates into hostility. At the same
time, the nature of divinity becomes more general and abstract, for it is
formed not from sensation as it was in the beginning, but from ideas. The
God of humanity is necessarily not so comprehensible as those of a city or
clan’’ (230–31).
Although it refers explicitly neither to Hegel nor to Durkheim, the
continuity of this line of thought can be seen, for instance, in the impor-
tant 1972 essay by Edmund Leach on the dynamics of Christianity in
social process, ‘‘Melchisedech and the Emperor: Icons of Subversion and
Orthodoxy.’’ Leach begins this essay∞≤ by claiming that ‘‘the origin of
Christianity lay in a wide-ranging cultural situation rather than in any
single event’’ (Leach [1972] 1983: 68). The ‘‘wide-ranging cultural situa-
tion’’ is that of a continuous ‘‘oscillation’’ in Christian practice between
the cropping up of small, democratic and radical cults (some of which we
might call millennial), which challenge the authority of the church, and
which he claims share certain structural features with the original Chris-
tian community in its earliest form, and the establishment out of and
against these cults, of a more hierarchical and institutional church struc-
ture, which can be closely linked with rather authoritarian state forms
beginning with the Roman Empire, to which it may lend legitimation.
Leach links this political ‘‘oscillation’’ to an essential ambiguity in the
structure of Christian thought. Like Hegel and Durkheim, Leach argues
that Christianity’s radical separation between man and God lies behind
this oscillation. Two extreme, opposed positions were logically possible
within the doctrine of the Incarnation:

At one extreme, it was held that Christ was always God and his human form
only an appearance; at the other, the human Christ and the divine Logos,
though housed in one fleshly body, were separate rather than fused. . . .
doctrines of the latter kind . . . imply that any inspired human prophet who
introduction

feels himself to be possessed by the Holy Spirit is really no di√erent, in kind,

from Christ himself. Hence the Incarnation ceases to be a unique historical
event in the past; it becomes a perpetually repeatable event belonging to the
present. (Leach [1972] 1983: 75)

Such dilemmas were, thinks Leach, central to many of the arguments

about the Arian ‘‘doctrine ’’ (later heresy), which the Council of Nicaea ...
...
... 17
firmly established as what one recent historian has called Christianity’s ...
‘‘archetypal heresy’’ (R. Williams 1987).∞≥ For Leach, the argument that
each person of the Trinity was eternally and equally God reinforced the
nonrepeatability of the Incarnation. Since no man could rival Christ’s
union with the divine, God’s power was to be channeled through estab-
lished intermediaries, especially through the priesthood and the emperors
who could be consecrated only by them. Yet the possibility of direct union
with the divine could be repressed only partially and is continually liable to
revive in, for example, inspirational Protestantism (Leach [1972] 1983: 88).
Whatever the accuracy of Leach’s account of historical Arianism, we
may for now simply note the influence of his general line of thinking,
traceable back to Hegel; the struggle over the mediation of divine power
is one of the aspects of local Christianities that has been best documented
in ethnographic writing. The pioneering work of William Christian on
Spanish Catholicism and other writing on saints’ cults in Catholicism, on
alternative forms of priests, and on struggles to achieve church endorse-
ment for locally chosen mediators has highlighted the extent to which
struggles for control of mediation may be taking place not episodically,
but continuously (Pina-Cabral 1986; Catedra 1992; Christian 1972, 1992;
Ladurie 1981; P. Brown 1988; Cannell 1999). The work of Pina-Cabral, in
particular, lucidly formulates a particular kind of insight into European
popular Christianity. Pina-Cabral describes for the Portuguese Alto
Minho region the characteristic cults of the ‘‘incorrupt bodies’’ (local
people popularly declared saints because their bodies are found not to
have decayed after burial), the ‘‘noneaters’’ (local people said to subsist
on the Communion wafer alone), and other connected practices. He
declares, ‘‘The Portuguese peasant, like all Christians, lives in a fallen
world, one of hardship and despair, permanently threatened by impend-
ing death. Yet he believes that there is a state of perennial life which can
already be achieved in this world. To overcome this contradiction, he has
recourse to entities which, because they are not clearly classifiable as dead
or alive, can be used as mediators’’ (Pina-Cabral 1986: 235).∞∂
 fenella c annell

The mediation of the power of a God withdrawn from the world of

mortal men thus becomes a key trope in the anthropology of Christianity.
The same perception also drives most anthropological treatments of asce-
tic practices in Christianity; because God has withdrawn from the world,
spirit and matter have become opposites that can never again be fully
reconciled. Moreover, spirit may be perceived as ‘‘beyond’’ and ‘‘better
... than’’ flesh, since spirit is that of which God is made.∞∑ This becomes the
..
18 .... reason for fasting and other forms of self-mortification, in which the
...
person limits the claims of the flesh in order to increase the space in himself
that is given to the spirit, and thus come a little closer to the divine ideal.
And the irreconcilable divergence between spirit and flesh, or spirit and
matter, becomes in turn, it is argued, the basis for many other kinds of
dualistic opposition in which one element is thought of as ‘‘beyond’’ the
other, including symbolic oppositions between the genders.
However important this focus on mediation and asceticism has become,
however, the definition of Christianity as determined by transcendence in
Hegel’s sense was also taken up in a range of connected propositions about
changes in human understanding of the universe and of the self. At this
point we need to remind ourselves of one such aspect, which is perhaps
best known to anthropologists through the work of Mauss on the concept
of the person (1938), but more recently discussed in the important volume
edited by Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes (1985), The Category of the Person.
Mauss was particularly interested in the e√ects of Christianity in creating a
new concept of the socially defined self or, in Mauss’s terms, ‘‘person.’’
Here, as in The Gift, Mauss relied (like the early kinship theorists) on
material drawn from comparative law and contracts. Working from the
evidence of the ‘‘rules’’ of a society, he claimed, it would be possible to
extrapolate its values, and to trace the development of the definition of
what constituted the person, legally and ethically understood. His essay is
therefore concerned with the movement from the personnage of tribal
society, who is no less a self, but simply a di√erent kind of self, to the birth
of conscience as a sense of interiority connected with morality. While, like
a number of other commentators both ancient and modern, Mauss saw this
shift as being in several ways foreshadowed in Greek Platonic and Roman
philosophy, he was also like them in attributing the most important change
to the influence to Christianity: ‘‘It is Christians who have made a meta-
physical entity of the ‘moral person’ ( personne morale) after they become
aware of its religious power. Our own notion of the human person is still
basically the Christian one ’’ (358).
introduction

So obvious was the truth of this argument to Mauss that he dealt with
the Christian person in a page and a half, remarking that he could here do
no better than to rely on long labors already undertaken by the theolo-
gians (Mauss [1938] 1985: 358). He notes, however, the importance of the
Trinitarian controversy. In it the concept of the person passed through a
crucial stage: ‘‘Unity of the three persons—of the Trinity—unity of the
two natures of Christ. It is from the notion of the ‘one ’ that the notion of ...
...
... 19
the ‘person’ ( personne) was created—I believe that it will long remain ...
so—for the divine person, but at the same time for the human person,
substance and mode, body and soul, consciousness and act’’ (20). From
this, all later Western philosophy on the development of the person as
‘‘psychological being’’ has taken its starting point (361).
As N. J. Allen (1985: 41) points out, Mauss’s much-criticized (and
easily criticized) evolutionist framework for the comparison of societies
is not a reason to discard all the observations of his essay. Much of what
he suggests about the West is translatable into the terms of historical
investigation, rather than a priori assertion. It is worth comparing the
thesis with Foucault’s account of the growth of the ‘‘scientia sexualis’’ in
The History of Sexuality (1976). While Mauss proposes a developmental
paradigm of societies, which perhaps still implicitly retains some notion
of the progressive movement of history, for Foucault the history of the
self can be excavated only archaeologically, by means of the examination
of the discontinuously successive forms of knowledge-power that have
produced it. Nevertheless, Foucault’s excavations still place Christianity
in a crucial position in the creation of the modern self, a position that it
occupies for him in part because he sees it as producing a form of
interiority that foreshadows and enables the growth of modern psycho-
logical and psychoanalytic regimes. ‘‘The confession,’’ says Foucault,
‘‘became one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing
truth . . . Western man has become a confessing animal’’ (60). The
contemporary belief in sexuality as the key and hidden foundational truth
about identity grows for Foucault out of the Christian sacrament of
confession, which teaches people to believe in the reality of something
hidden, inaccessible at first not only to their interrogator, but also to
themselves, which must be brought slowly into the light of day as a form
of o√ering (61–79).∞∏
Like the philosophers who preceded him (but of course unlike Mauss
and Durkheim), Foucault is in fact discussing the history of Western
‘‘power/knowledge,’’ and not undertaking a comparative exercise across
 fenella c annell

cultures.∞π Here we should note that we have moved from the original
notion of transcendence as the ‘‘unhappy consciousness’’ to theories
(both before and after Foucault) in which what unfolds from that is the
notion of personal interiority.
Whether considered as a fact or as an illusion, this notion of interiority
has been applied especially to the analysis of Protestant, and particularly
... Calvinist, thought and cultures. And these, in turn, have been widely
..
20 .... considered at least since Weber ([1930] 1992) to have been formative in the
...
creation of the modern Western person under capitalism. Weber’s thesis is,
of course, that it was the ironic fate of seventeenth-century European
Puritanism finally to run its course as a religion and become absorbed in
the development of capitalist process. Once-religious concepts, such as the
‘‘calling,’’ are uncannily transformed in secular capitalism, he argues, so
that they retain much of their power as tools of self-fashioning, while
being emptied of the otherworldly impulse which previously gave them
real meaning.
This famous text is often remembered in the social sciences as a locus
classicus for Weber as a prophet of universal secular modernity. This view
traduces both Weber’s careful historicism and his genuine interest in
religious experience. We should also remember, however, another aspect
of Weber’s argument, which is that it, too, assumes the logic of asceticism
in Christianity. That is, in Weber a Protestant variant of Catholic ascetic
practice becomes the work ethic, and a Protestant transformation of the
Catholic ascetic religious vocation becomes the calling in Protestant, and
later secular, daily professional life.
An interesting inversion of Weber’s secularization argument has been
o√ered by Louis Dumont (1985: 93–122) in an essay inspired by Mauss’s
essay on the person. Some elements of Dumont’s argument are familiar.
He again traces the notion of the person as an interior, reflexive self back
to Platonism and Stoicism, via Christian conceptions of the soul under the
early church controversies. The Calvinist reading of God as Will, most
clearly shown in the doctrine of predestination, completes the creation of
the capitalist individual. The Calvinist person has internalized the duty to
imitate God thus conceived of as Divine Will and must therefore act on
himself in continual self-fashioning, in order to show forth a reflection of
the Almighty.
If Weber’s is a secularization theory of modernity, Dumont’s can thus
be said to be in a sense a Christianization theory. Certainly, both point to
the internalization of asceticism and its accommodation with the world:
introduction

Weber’s worldly ascetic and Dumont’s homo economicus share much of

their genealogy. Yet there is also a key di√erence of emphasis. For Du-
mont, the modern state is ‘‘a transformed church.’’ With Calvinist theol-
ogy, a model of the individual that was originally developed in the
context of asceticism and orientation to the life beyond becomes the
central type of the modern person. The Calvinist vision of God as above
all Will produces the notion of the Christian as necessarily imitating God ...
...
... 21
through a process of the constant exercise of the will in the processes of ...
self-fashioning. These theoretically equal individuals, the homo aequalis
to a South Asian homo hierarchicus, are increasingly imagined as the basis
of the state. For Dumont, the foundation of the modern state in individu-
alism is precisely what most deeply attests to its fundamentally ecclesial
character.
One of the most important explicit attempts to define the question of
the relationship between the ideology of capitalism and the ideology of
Christianity (although here subsumed within the general category of
‘‘salvationist religions’’) is o√ered in Parry 1986. In this article, Jonathan
Parry o√ers a rereading of Mauss that draws attention to Mauss’s insis-
tence on the notion of gift versus commodity as an artifact of contempo-
rary Western ideology. In Parry’s reading, Mauss’s work on the Maori
and other famous examples is really intended to demonstrate not that gift
societies preceded commodity societies, but rather that an absolute gift-
commodity opposition had little purchase in precapitalist societies and is
an artifact of capitalism.
Parry proposes that there is a link between the contrast between
altruism and business and the introduction of an economy of salvation.
(His 1994 work on Hinduism makes it clear that this is not confined to
Christianity, but also readable in other ‘‘world religions.’’) The idea of
salvation is correlated with a realm of exchange that is superior to (and
transcendent of ) ordinary, earthly exchange, and whose distinguishing
feature is that it is premised on unidirectional transactions, in which gifts
pass out of the worldly frame and into the beyond. Such gifts are there-
fore not in any ordinary sense reciprocated, although the believer may
hope that the reward for altruism will be salvation in the next life; that his
gift will, as it were, be converted from one economy to the other on the
condition that he acts in the spirit of the heavenly economy while still on
earth. But Parry (1986) suggests that, like the mutually dependent gift
and commodity identified by Mauss, such an unearthly economy can exist
only in opposition to a still-acknowledged worldly economy in which
 fenella c annell

ordinary reciprocation and sociality play a much greater part. Parry’s

punctilious style of argument enables us to isolate what in many other
works is somewhat blurred over—that is, the complexity of the suggested
connections between Christianity and the late capitalism of which this
bifurcated ideology is typical.
This suggestion is of course in some ways consonant with the Webe-
... rian story of capitalism and the rise of Protestantism. But while Weber’s is
..
22 .... essentially a trajectory of modernization, in which Christianity plays an
...
ironic if intimate part that ultimately leads toward the disenchantment of
the world, theses like Parry’s and Dumont’s suggest a more complex and
active role for Christian thought and Christian institutions.

Diverse Christianities
Fundamental to any understanding of Christianity’s diversity today is the
opposition between broadly Protestant and Catholic Christianities. Four
of the essays included here concern parts of the world that are predomi-
nantly Roman Catholic, and seven concern areas that are predominantly
Protestant. All are committed to a historically particular understanding of
Christianity. Anthropologists writing on Catholicisms have long had
available the example of William Christian’s work, which has shown that
popular Catholicism cannot be described without an integrated account
not only of the impact of changes in Vatican policy and teaching at the
local level, but also of the distinct histories of the di√erent religious
orders and their varied relationships to forms of religious practice.
Among these, the nineteenth-century Jesuits were central actors in the
construction of local practice in Tamil South India, as described by David
Mosse in this volume. Mosse argues that South Indian Catholic person-
hood had been and still is widely enacted in dramatic rituals of possession
and exorcism, in which Hindu demons are expelled by Catholic saints.
These saints are themselves governed by a nonviolent Christ within a
hierarchical model of Christian divinity reminiscent of caste, and Mosse
associates this pattern with the accommodationist policies of the Jesuits
who converted this area in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but
who were eventually disgraced and expelled. When reformed French
Jesuits returned to Tamil South India in the nineteenth century, it was as
the agents of the new orthodoxy of personal agency and personal respon-
sibility, which took an austere attitude to both saints and spirits. These
priests demanded that local Catholics replace explanations of personal
introduction

su√ering centered on demonic possession, with those in which the sin or

folly of the individual was the cause, and confession was central to the
cure. Exorcism remained an area of tension within this form of Catholi-
cism, as while resisting local demand as largely frivolous, the Jesuits were
never able to divorce themselves entirely from the possibility of a ‘‘legiti-
mate ’’ need for exorcism, since this of course continues to be acknowl-
edged in contemporary Catholic doctrine. ...
...
... 23
The devotion to the Sacred Heart found ubiquitously in Catholic fish- ...
ing households in Kerala, as described by Cecilia Busby, apparently car-
ried with it few such orthodoxies of an interiorized Catholic practice. The
area seems to have retained the relatively relaxed attitude to religious
accommodation that characterized its first Portuguese Jesuit priests in the
sixteenth century. Indeed, Busby describes the logic of the Keralan Sacred
Heart as being driven by an idea of renewable, material power. She
further argues that the Sacred Heart is not construed just in terms of
local Hindu ideas of religious power (shakti ), but also in terms of local
(Dravidian) kinship, best understood as a processual flow of gendered
substance.
By contrast with these essays from South Asia, Olivia Harris and I both
write on areas originally converted and predominantly organized by Fran-
ciscans as part of the late-sixteenth-century expansion of the Spanish Em-
pire. The particular interest of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation
Franciscans in a structuring of time into the ages of the Father, Son, and (in
millennial time) Holy Ghost has been studied by historians including
Phelan (1959, 1970). What has most often been said of the Catholic
practice both of the Laymi area and of historic Bicol is that given the
relative shortage of priests, native or syncretic concepts have survived in
the absence of complete institutional control. However, this kind of state-
ment reveals very little of the logic of such interactions or of the ways in
which local peoples were responding to specifically Franciscan ideas. Both
the Laymi preoccupation with successive epochs and the Bicolano refer-
ence to ages of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost clearly demonstrate this
interaction, but time has been construed di√erently in each area. For the
Laymi, epochal time is central to their understanding of their own Chris-
tianity; in Bicol, it is a more marginal concept, evoked most often in
discussions of the decline of virilocal marriage and associated kinship
forms, not of religious conduct (Cannell 1999: 52–54). Franciscan doc-
trine features in the Bicol ethnography primarily as a message evaded;
while eighteenth-century Franciscan sermons stressed the risen Christ (as
 fenella c annell

Danilo Gerona explained to me) and the nineteenth-century reformers

stressed the transcendent God, I argue here and elsewhere (Cannell 1999:
133–200) that Bicol Catholics are deeply devoted to a ‘‘dead Christ’’ and
are little concerned with the economy of salvation.
If Catholicism is diverse despite the central control of the Vatican, the
multiplicity of Protestant churches is even more so. Most of the main-
... stream Protestantisms that figure in this volume are either Lutheran or
..
24 .... Calvinist (rather than Anglican or Episcopalian). Two of them are di-
...
rectly historically linked: both Danilyn Rutherford and Webb Keane
discuss areas of the former New Order Indonesia, which were colonized
by the Dutch and converted by Dutch and German missionaries. Harvey
Whitehouse ’s discussion of Papua New Guinea is also mainly centered on
mainstream Protestant practice. The Fijians discussed by Christina Toren
are strong Methodists, the Malagasy described by Eva Keller are Seventh-
Day Adventists, the Piro of Peter Gow’s essay were converted by the
secretive Summer Institute of Linguistics (sil), whose public and non-
missionary arm is the Wycli√e Society, which works on the translation of
Bibles into native languages, and the Swedish arm of the Word of Life
group (described by Simon Coleman) is one of a proliferating number of
charismatic Faith churches, based in the United States.
All these churches define themselves against Catholicism, and they
share a good deal of theological common ground. But they have also
diverged widely from each other. Methodists follow the emphases of the
English brothers John and Charles Wesley, whose eighteenth-century
movement stressed the need for revival of both spiritual experience and
social conscience in Christian practice, and whose view of the need for
Christians to work all their lives at ‘‘perfecting’’ themselves in Christlike
conduct softened the teaching on salvation through grace alone. Seventh-
Day Adventism, often regarded by other Protestant churches as a cult, is
one of a group of churches that emerged around modern-day prophets in
the religious revivals of East Coast mid-nineteenth-century America.
The sil, although in many ways sui generis, especially in how little is
known of its teachings, belongs to the aggressive American Protestant
missionization of third world countries. It is clearly linked to a nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century politics in the United States both ambitious
of global influence and deeply suspicious of and competitive with Roman
Catholicism, especially when the latter is apparently connected with so-
cialist or Communist regimes. The Faith movement of which the Word of
Life Church forms a part, on the other hand, is a form of religious
introduction

revivalism that is part of America’s religious discourse with itself as much

as with outsiders. As Coleman points out, it aims to address the dissatis-
factions many people have with religious experience within the main-
stream churches and deliberately proposes a di√erent view of the rela-
tionship of faith and the physical world.
It is also important to bear in mind that Roman Catholicism and
Protestantism did not cease to oppose and mutually define each other at ...
...
... 25
the time of the Reformation. Indeed, much that is central about the tone ...
of religious teachings in any given period is a product of the relationship
between the two, especially because the Catholic Church has at times
sought to disarm its Protestant critics by selective imitation. The asceti-
cism and (relative) rationalism of the nineteenth-century French Jesuits
described by Mosse in this volume, for example, in many ways evoke
stereotypical mainstream Protestantism of the period. One could also
look at instances of innovation in church policy. The Catholic Church of
the twentieth century became increasingly concerned that it was losing
ground to Protestant missionaries in Latin America and other traditional
Catholic strongholds. This perception influenced moves around the pe-
riod of Vatican II away from hierarchical and conservative styles of
pastoral authority at local level and the replacement of the Latin Mass
with services in local languages. All the Christians in this volume are
indirectly linked together through the complex shared histories of the
churches to which they belong.

Orthodoxy and Conversion

Anthropologists and sociologists looking at Christianity have often ex-
pressed the inherent di≈culty of deciding whether nonstandard Christian
practice is or isn’t really Christian. On the one hand, they are aware that
Christianity is a changeable phenomenon; on the other, it seems some-
how unsatisfactory to class together all sorts of practices and beliefs that
have little resemblance to each other, or to metropolitan or theological
Christianity. This problem has been particularly acute in the study of
convert populations, a domain of special interest to anthropology. Robert
Hefner concludes that conversion is best defined as ‘‘not a deeply system-
atic reorganization of personal meanings’’ but a ‘‘new locus of self-
identification’’ (1993: 17), while Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw
(1994: 2) tackle the issue by proposing a reclamation of the term syncre-
tism from its pejorative connotations to describe religious synthesis and
 fenella c annell

urging alertness to the ways in which political capital can be claimed

through the construction of either mixed or pure identities.
This amended, nonpejorative language of syncretism points in useful
directions, for example by reminding us that the Catholic Church has
always had its own theory of syncretism and its acceptable limits, cur-
rently known as inculturation theory. Inculturation theory presents quite
... a sophisticated attitude to local culture, claiming that local forms of
..
26 .... approaching God may all be acceptable, and even necessary, as long as
...
the presence of a transcendent deity presiding over all is acknowledged.∞∫
This definition would cover many of the cases presented in this vol-
ume, but it would not cover all of them. As I show in my essay on the
Philippines, Bicolano Catholics have only a very muted and ambiguous
interest in the economy of salvation, and in most contexts they do not
focus on the transcendent idea of God.∞Ω Yet given their profound devo-
tional engagement with Christ and the Catholic saints, it would make no
sense to say that they are not Christians. I shall argue that while the idea
of transcendence usually defines the limits of Christianity’s own self-
definition, not all local Christianities are Christian in this way (nor do
they all put together all the elements that have been identified as belong-
ing to transcendence). Indeed, while most of the exported Christianities
have historically been transcendent Christianities, Christian thinking has
always carried other selves within it.
The question of how far one can go without ceasing to become a
Christian has always been the subject of active and explicit debate in
missionizing churches. The original function of the medieval Catholic
Inquisition was to distinguish what was mere superstition in European
folk practice from what was pernicious error, idolatry, or heresy. The
Catholic Church has taken a relatively tolerant approach since Vatican II.
Protestant churches have sometimes been less permissive about con-
tinuities in existing social customs. Much has depended in each case on
what the church defines as religion and what it allows as culture in a
particular locale. Yet this distinction, as a number of anthropologists have
recognized, is problematic because it is in itself a characteristic of Chris-
tian thinking and tends to be meaningless in many other systems. Mis-
sionary decisions as to what custom could harmlessly remain and what
must be abandoned have therefore tended to seem arbitrary from the
point of view of the people they are serving, and have often, as in the case
of the korwar described by Rutherford, or the Fijian funerals of Toren’s
introduction

chapter, provided the opportunity for much greater continuities of

thought than the missionaries had ever intended.
This volume joins this debate by supplying a comparative ethnogra-
phy of orthodoxy itself. The contributors do not ask simply whether the
people they describe are ‘‘orthodox’’ by mainstream Western standards;
they also ask to what extent, if at all, di√erent groups share the main-
stream Christian interest in ‘‘orthodoxy’’ and boundary maintenance. For ...
...
... 27
the Bicolano Catholics about whom I write, four centuries of Roman ...
Catholicism have rendered familiar the idea of ‘‘religion’’ as a separate
sphere of life. It is also well known that several commonly held ideas are
not popular with the clergy, and this is a cause of some anxiety. Thus far,
one could say that Bicolanos are interested in the orthodox.
On the other hand, these anxieties come into play only because people
engage daily in activities on which the Catholic Church frowns—most
notably, spirit mediumship and healing. For most people, dealing with the
spirits is not undertaken in a mood of countercultural defiance toward the
church and the priest; rather, there is constant discussion of how the two
can actually be reconciled. Thus, while acknowledging that priests say
that spirits are ‘‘demons,’’ ordinary Catholic Bicolanos give a wide vari-
ety of reasons for continuing to treat with them. They will say, for
instance, that while other spirit mediums may deal with evil spirits, they
themselves deal only with good, Catholic ones. Or they may explain that
although spirits are of a lower order of powers than Christ and the saints,
they are ‘‘all under God’’ and that the e≈cacy they have in healing is in
fact given to them by God himself (Cannell 1999: 134). Spirit mediums
are in fact among the most regular devotees at saints’ shrines and pil-
grimage sites, although they, like most Bicolanos, may not flock so ea-
gerly to confession and other activities directed by the priest, usually
placing more importance on religious devotions carried out at home.
Somewhat comparable situations seem to exist in both Kerala, as de-
scribed by Busby, and Tamil South India, as described by Mosse, for in
each of these places local Catholics are much less concerned than their
priests to separate Catholic worship from local Hindu traditions and are
in fact resistant to pressures toward increased exclusivity of worship.
On the closely associated point of whether or not local Christians are
interested in the idea of conversion, we have two strongly contrasting
examples in this volume. The Piro of Amazonian Peru demonstrate an
impressive indi√erence to it, closely analyzed by Gow. From the point of
 fenella c annell

view of Christian missionaries, the Piro are a kind of ultimate challenge;

they resisted several prolonged attempts to convert them, made by both
Catholics and Protestants, before being suddenly and dramatically won
over by the sil. Gow explains that for the Piro, the idea of conversion
had so little relevance that they immediately forgot it, claiming that they
‘‘have always been’’ Christians. The Piro do recall the advent of the sil
... but describe it primarily as a reorganization of social relations—or rather,
..
28 .... seen through a shamanic lens, a restoration of proper social and trade
...
relations—with whites through which the Piro have gained access to
goods and education earlier withheld from them by rubber plantation
owners.
For the Bolivian Laymi, at the other extreme, the idea of conversion to
Christianity is so compelling that they constantly dwell upon it, and
particularly on the idea of its incompleteness. According to Harris, not
only do Andean saints’ shrines have to be periodically ‘‘charged’’ with the
power of the Mass to prevent them turning against the community, but
the Laymi doubt that they themselves can ever be absolutely proper
Christians, a self-perception that seems to fill them with melancholia
rather than with defiance. Laymi rituals play out again and again the
problematic and unresolved relationship between a Christianity clearly
understood as dominant and ancestral powers that nonetheless cannot be
entirely abandoned. Christianity, then, does not always and equally con-
vert people to the idea of conversion.
The di≈culty of understanding the force of conversion and orthodoxy
in particular ethnographic contexts is finely illustrated in Christina To-
ren’s piece on Fijian Methodism. Toren’s piece is important because the
people with whom she worked are, by the standards of mainstream Meth-
odism, highly observant and correct Methodists. Unlike many of the
other groups of people discussed here, Fijian Methodists do not express
understandings of Christian teaching that are in obvious tension with
those of their church authorities, nor do they avoid church services or
deliberately relocate religious activity away from those areas where min-
isters have close control. On the contrary, as Toren shows, they are
regular churchgoers and encourage their children to attend Sunday
school. Indeed, Fijian adults say that there is no contradiction between
‘‘the way according to the church’’ and ‘‘the way of the land,’’ and they
argue that their children are learning the two together. This is a case,
then, not only of orthodoxy but also of orthopraxy. Yet Toren argues
convincingly that Fijian Methodists’ conception of God is ultimately
introduction

shaped after the pattern of Fijian chiefs, whose power is not otherworldly
in origin but is dependent on the support, attendance, and compassion of
their followers. For Toren, this equivalence is maintained through the
attitude to kin learned in daily interaction, and in rituals such as funerals
for dead relatives. These rituals are most emphatically not anti-Christian;
they follow the Methodist liturgy and are directed toward the Christian
God. However, Toren shows that a child gradually learns, as he or she ...
...
... 29
grows up, a set of procedures for dealing with the immediate bereave- ...
ment, the treatment of the body, the gathering of the mourners, and the
conduct of the funeral. Through following these procedures, children
learn the emotion of social compassion and share in the experience of
attendance on God that is at the center of Fijian worship.
Toren’s example illustrates possible shortcomings in some accounts of
colonial Christian conversion as the ‘‘discipline of the body.’’ The ten-
dency of these (usually Foucauldian-leaning) accounts is to suggest that
while Christian doctrine may fall on uncomprehending ears in non-
Western milieus, profound changes in subjectivity can be and are wrought
mainly through the drilling of convert bodies in Christian practices.
Neither of these propositions seems to hold true in Fiji. First, here as in
many Christian locales, doctrinal content is in fact of considerable interest
to convert populations. Yet, second, neither the embracing of this doctrine
nor the following of Christian bodily observances of all kinds has resulted
in the Fijians having the same idea of divine power as Charles Wesley did.
It might be objected, of course, that if disciplinary regimes were extended
to Fijian kinship practices, we would see a more thoroughgoing change in
outlook. The historical fact is, however, that this has not happened,≤≠ and
that it seems that neither orthodoxy nor orthopraxy automatically pro-
duces such changes.
If Toren’s piece directs us to consider that the meaning of orthodoxy is
not self-evident, so too with perhaps even more force does Keller’s ac-
count of pious and observant Seventh-Day Adventists in Madagascar.
Keller’s essay resonates with two of the central arguments of this book:
first, that it is not su≈cient to assume that we know in advance what
Christian experience is—even when popular practice appears to be most
highly conformist to the standards of the church concerned; second, that
it is unhelpful to treat Christianity as simply a secondary phenomenon of
underlying political or economic change. Keller argues against explana-
tions of conversion to Adventism which claim that it is a reaction to slave
status, an attempt to reestablish dislocated communities in conditions of
 fenella c annell

urban migration, or has some other clear socioeconomic cause. Indeed,

her informants gain no particular advantage from conversion, and she
argues that their continued adherence to their religion must therefore be
explained in terms of the religious experience itself. Keller’s ethnography
of Adventist Scriptural study provides an illuminating sense of the intel-
lectual excitement and satisfaction of Adventists engaged on the pursuit
... of truth.
..
30 .... Adventist worship emerges in this account as surprisingly cerebral;
...
indeed, Keller notes that Adventists look down on what they view as the
extreme emotionalism and drama of neighboring Malagasy Pentecostal-
ists. This draws our attention to a final connected point: religious engage-
ment in Christianity can come in a wide variety of forms. The intense
expressiveness that the analytical Adventists shun is precisely what at-
tracts the members of the Word of Life Church, for whom the ideal
worship form is speaking in tongues, which frees spiritual and ecstatic
communication from the shackles of any single language or specific se-
mantic content. The devotional intensity of Bicolano Catholics’ relation-
ship with the dead Christ is expressed in dreams, visions, stories, and the
singing of the Pasion; the commitment of Mosse ’s South Indian Catholics
is expressed through exorcism; Biak Protestants compose hymns on the
model of traditional wor. Anthropology needs to develop further a com-
parative ethnography of devotional practice, without privileging some
forms over others. In the existing literature, accounts of mainstream
Protestant worship tend to be particularly flat. It may sometimes be true,
as both Whitehouse and Keane argue here of Protestant services they
describe, and as has also been claimed of mainstream Catholic liturgy,
that public worship can at times be mechanical, drained of a√ect, and can
become boring even to its participants. Such routinization may even be a
deliberate policy on the part of church leaders, in the interests of member
control. But we have also seen that these conformist appearances can be
deceptive and that (as Keane has also shown) even where they are true,
they do not necessarily exclude a deep engagement with questions of
Christian faith; this is expressed in other contexts, including debate with
missionaries and church leaders.

The Problem of Modernity

Like some other recent work, this is skeptical of the proposition that the
modern world will see religions declining and religious faith ceding to
introduction

secularism. This dissenting opinion is not confined to students of funda-

mentalisms but has certainly been given support by the recent interest in
Christian, Islamic, and Hindu movements thus classed together.
Susan Harding’s important book on Jerry Falwell’s Southern Baptists
explores some of the ways in which these movements have been tied to
explicit and politicized discourses on modernity. Agreeing with other
authors that American Biblical Fundamentalists had been placed through ...
...
... 31
most of the twentieth century in the symbolic position of the other of ...
modern secularism, she explores in detail the attempt made by Falwell to
break out of that position and occupy the widest possible terrain in
American cultural and economic life, without making any change of
doctrinal direction toward liberal secularism. For Harding, this attempt
was made through a characteristic deployment of rhetorical language that
functions through preaching and conversion, through moral campaigns,
and through mass marketing and the creation of a ‘‘sacrificial economy’’:
‘‘God does miracles because people give sacrificially; because they obey God
and act on faith’’ (Harding 2000: 124). Even the occasional doubts of
Falwell’s own congregation as to his financial probity worked to his
advantage. They challenged believers to assert the faith, which would
bring them blessings in return.
This area of literature, then, is concerned with what one might call the
further adventures of the Protestant-capitalist nexus originally identified
by Weber. Here we must be careful in our attributions. Weber himself
certainly described ‘‘elective a≈nities’’ between Puritanism and its appar-
ent converse, capitalism, and certainly also argued that the alliance be-
tween the two had led, strangely, toward secular modernity in the West.
But Weber did not thereby commit himself to the view that modernity
could take only this one possible form; nor did Weber regard the study of
religion as of little interest except insofar as it contributed toward the
study of secularization. Still less did Weber take a triumphalist view of
the process of secularization; witness his melancholic account of the mod-
ern capitalist caught in the ‘‘iron cage ’’ of asceticism without religion, a
meaningless drive toward wealth-creation (Weber [1930] 1992: 182).
While some neo-Weberian commentators have retained the nuance and
complexity of Weber’s own attitude to social change, it is ironic that other
forms of neo-Weberian analysis have appeared to lend weight to accounts
of the inevitable spread of modernity and globalization, in which religion
is treated as a topic clearly subsidiary to the processes of secularization,
and where the claims of modernity as an ideology in itself are never
 fenella c annell

properly analyzed. Even for balanced and clear-minded commentators

such as the sociologist Steve Bruce, the idea that secularism succeeds a
religious outlook is understood as factually established beyond serious
question, while attempts to qualify that idea are for Bruce simply revision-
ist tinkering (Bruce 1996: 6–7).≤∞ Such tendencies appear even in work of
considerable historical and ethnographic sophistication, such is the power
... of the notion that the key ‘‘meaning’’ of Christianity is that, like John the
..
32 .... Baptist, it ushers in a mightier reality that will succeed it.≤≤
...
But a lesson we can derive from Harding’s material is that Weber’s
ideas have themselves fed into a widely held folk theory in Europe and
America. Harding’s ethnography is based on the fact that for many
ordinary Americans, whether they practiced a faith or not, the idea that
the world was becoming less religious as it became more modern was
accepted as fact. So too, perhaps less explicitly, was the idea that main-
stream religions were weakening in the contemporary world, and that
Protestant churches were perhaps more liable to such draining of vigor
than Catholic ones.≤≥ Thus, Falwell’s fundamentalism is pitted not only
against a truly secular modernity, but also against more liberal and cul-
turally mainstream Protestant churches—churches regularly described as
progressive. The practice of one ’s religion is always conceived of in
contemporary America as in some way a defensive (if not o√ensive)
reaction to the threatened erosions of the modern world. The ethnogra-
phy Harding gives us therefore makes an important point for our pur-
poses: all those concerned are acting as though some crude version of
Weber’s theory of secularization were an absolute truth. They are enact-
ing one particular myth about modernity; they all believe in the essential
opposition of modernity to Christianity, or at least fear it might be true.
So in considering the relation between the two, we have to reckon up not
only how far it may be true that institutions and ideas have changed in the
ways Weber predicted, in any given locality, but also how far it might be
true that the people in these localities believed that this would be so and
therefore to some extent enacted that belief as history. In that sense,
ironically, Weber himself has been treated as a prophet.
This returns us to a point close to that made by Mauss on capitalism
and brilliantly explicated by Parry (1986): the most tightly tied bond
between Christianity and modernity is at the level of the ideology of
modernity. Thus, neo-Weberian arguments that proceed from the actual
links between modernity and Christianity in the West to propose that the
introduction

same developments will proceed everywhere are flawed. This proposi-

tion is in fact part of the ideology of modernity itself.≤∂
Coleman’s contribution to this volume considers a further develop-
ment of this complex of ideas about Protestantism and modernity. The
Faith Christians with whom he works constitute a church of more recent
origin than the Southern Baptists, and they define some of their central
understandings of divine power di√erently. While the separation of lan- ...
...
... 33
guage from materiality is crucial to Harding’s account of Falwell’s church, ...
Coleman argues that Word of Life Church members precisely elide the
distinction between language and spirit and the body. Placing an emphasis
on the spoken word, rather than the Bible text, Faith Christians conceive
of language as objectified and corporeal; that is, language is not opposed
to the physical world (cf. Cannell, Rutherford, Keller, and Keane in this
volume). ‘‘To read and listen to inspired language is to fill the self with
such language, even in a physical sense,’’ Coleman writes. ‘‘To ‘speak out’
is to give an aspect of the stored self.’’ Faith Christians conceive of both
the media and the world of monetary exchange as arenas that can be
dealienated by the extension into them of the self thus understood. Faith
Christians regularly make gifts of alms, but these are ideally made to
strangers and not to members of the church community who might be
expected to return them. The gift instead stands as a token of one ’s
spiritual growth, and its giving away is part of a contract with God. By this
act of faith, the giver is insured that God will bless him with further
accumulation, and that his self will therefore not be lost in the anonymous
world of capital. Word of Life members are therefore refusing the central
ideological opposition between gift and commodity that capitalism pro-
poses. Significantly, they are doing so simply with the resources of capital-
ist Protestantism itself, and not (as in Pina-Cabral’s argument) by engag-
ing an alternative folk tradition that will supply the deficiencies of a
transcendent Christianity’s discourse on the body. Coleman’s account
shows how such Christians accept the economic structure of capitalism as
inevitable, yet refuse to allow it to be an ‘‘impersonal’’ power, reconstru-
ing it as ruled by a higher contract between God and Christians inserted
within it. While conservative Protestants achieve similar outcomes with-
out contesting the separation of spirit and matter, however, Faith Chris-
tians take a di√erent route, asserting that money must in the end partake of
the same nature as prayer, and thus cannot act independently of it.
The single issue over which the contributors in this volume most
 fenella c annell

diverge is that of the relationship between Christianity and modernity.

These di√erences are, perhaps, partly accounted for by the areas in which
they are working. Those who work in regions dominated by mainstream
Protestantism—especially where it collaborated with a colonial regime
like that of the Dutch in Indonesia—are probably especially inclined to
focus on these questions. In doing so, they are responding both to the
... strong Weberian tradition of analysis, which of course traced the connec-
..
34 .... tion between Calvinism and the rise of the capitalist work ethic back to
...
the seventeenth-century Netherlands, and to the stated intentions of the
Dutch government and missionaries themselves. Moreover, many local
informants will themselves discuss their Christianity in terms of ‘‘being
modern,’’ especially when, as was the case in New Order Indonesia, the
postcolonial government explicitly demanded that all its citizens should
modernize themselves by acquiring a world religion. The link between
Protestantism and discourses of modernity is, therefore, in some parts of
the world a demonstrable historical fact.
I suggest that to say this is not, however, the same as claiming that
disenchantment and modernization are proceeding everywhere and in
similar ways where conversion takes place. Harvey Whitehouse takes up a
position at one extreme on this question, arguing in relation to his Melane-
sian evidence that there is such a thing as a universal transformative e√ect
of the introduction of Christianity, and that the introduction of Protestant-
ism in Papua New Guinea supplies the paradigm. For Whitehouse, con-
version to Protestantism introduced a new and distinct form of cognitive
experience for Melanesians, centered around the learning and reproduc-
tion of text-based religious liturgies. Standardization and replicability
enabled the rapid spread of these new forms, in an account highly reminis-
cent of Weberian rationalization. However, there are key di√erences in
Whitehouse ’s argument. For him, these new religious forms are defined
primarily by their cognitive features. This is not simply a matter of
institutional transformation, nor changes in the group identification of
individual converts, but a literal acquisition of a new way of thinking by a
population. However, this radical new form of religion or thought does
not simply displace and replace preexistent forms. Older forms of Melane-
sian religion, exercised in rituals that evoke a di√erent, more bodily and
sensory based and less abstract kind of cognition, continue to exist along-
side the new forms. Indeed, Whitehouse argues elsewhere (1995) that the
new rationalized religion is itself inherently limited in its appeal because it
cannot tap into these sensory and emotional forms of cognition.
introduction

Webb Keane also sees evidence in Sumba of the gradual intrusion of

specifically Protestant formulations of interiority and agency, here sup-
ported by the demands of the Indonesian state. For Keane the transforma-
tion is by no means as sudden or wholesale as Whitehouse suggests it has
been in Melanesia but is conducted through a complex series of renegotia-
tions of meaning that, for both missionaries and Sumbanese Protestants,
center on di√ering understandings of the power of words and other ...
...
... 35
symbolic communication. Here and elsewhere (e.g., Keane 1998), Keane ...
shows that Protestant anxieties focused on what they saw as native idola-
try, which implied a confusion between God and images of gods, between
spirit and matter. The Sumbanese, on the other hand, objected to the
Protestant notion that God always hears our prayers; for them, this
seemed to be placing an almost idolatrous reliance on words themselves
rather than recognizing the uncertain nature of all communication with
the divine. Keane further develops in this volume the insight that al-
though distinctive Sumbanese understandings of the relationship of
words, things, and agency still continue, many local people are being
increasingly called on to enact attitudes, such as sincerity of speech and
intention, that rely on Protestant notions of authenticity and moralized
interiority. For Keane, this is occurring even though the absolute body/
spirit distinction toward which the missionaries are striving is less realis-
tic than the categories through which his Sumbanese informants view the
world, and even though he thinks that modernity is a destination at which
no one ever fully arrives.
It is perhaps Danilyn Rutherford’s ethnography of Biak—poised be-
tween Indonesia and Melanesia—that o√ers some of the most serious
obstacles to the narrative of Christianity as inevitably promoting moder-
nity. Paying careful attention to the ways in which missionaries were
addressing the Dutch faith revival back home as well as their immediate
Biak audience, Rutherford outlines an evangelizing movement based
equally on a belief in the working of the Word of God on the inner person
and on the example of self-disciplined labor set by the missionaries in
building houses and other appurtenances of civilization. While mass
conversions in Biak apparently confirmed the success of this campaign,
and while Biaks certainly entered with some willingness, even enthusiasm,
into the disciplinary regimes of modernity—in some cases competing to
send brothers to Jakarta to become government o≈cials—the e√ects were
not what the missionaries had anticipated. Rather than the Word of God
doing its work as ‘‘a vehicle of meaning that would sink into the souls of
 fenella c annell

men everywhere,’’ the Bible in Biak came to be treated as booty. The

authority behind the Bible was understood by Biaks not as a single,
omnipotent voice of God, but as a mysterious absence, an untranslatable
potential. Power continued to be understood by Biaks, Rutherford writes,
as ‘‘the lure of the ancestral . . . of kinship . . . and of the foreign’’—
something that had left Biak and gone missing, but which constantly
... promised to return in surprising forms, available for appropriation.
..
36 .... Here in fact is the crux of the matter for Rutherford. For the mission-
...
aries, conversion to Christianity was envisaged as a single, blazing reve-
lation of a universal Truth. This Truth is expected to have a permanently
transformative e√ect on men’s minds, but ‘‘the surprise that leads to
conversion should be the heathens’ last,’’ since once the Truth is known,
nothing can surpass or supersede it. Biaks, however, refused to be sur-
prised by surprise; given their understanding of how power works, that
arrival of the new was exactly what they had learned to expect. Rather
than disrupting the categories through which they understood the world,
rather than appearing as something beyond local truth, the advent of
Christianity suggested to the Biaks that they had been right all along.
This example is suggestive in a number of ways. One might briefly
reflect on the nature of the Christian missionary encounter in general,
from the point of view of the missionaries. Most Christian missionaries
take with them as explicit theology the idea that they are the bearers of a
unique Truth, knowledge about God, which is di√erent in kind and
potential to any other knowledge. Whatever their level of tolerance of
local practices, most of them also believe that this Truth is communicable
to all God’s creatures, so that all of them may have access to the promise
of Salvation. They also believe themselves in the power of conversion,
perhaps on the Pauline model. Light enters the soul and nothing is ever
the same again.
Missionaries often experienced discomfort and dislocation in areas
where conversion was persistently declined, or where they feared it had
been accepted for the wrong reasons. In discouragement, missionaries
have generally taken refuge in two alternative conclusions. Either God is
testing his servants, spiritually refining them by withholding success, or
there are powerful forces working against them: the devil is struggling to
keep souls out of heaven, perhaps. Sometimes, however, the confusion
felt by missionaries is extreme. They may even abandon the perception
(which, as Nicholas Thomas [1994] has pointed out, has often been an
advantage of Christianity over secular colonialism) that people of all
introduction

races are equally human under God and wrestle with the temptation to
view their potential converts themselves as devils, or alternatively, as less
than human, sullen, deanimated.
Encounters with cultures whose ontologies fit poorly with Christian-
ity’s most basic and unrecognized assumptions tend to trigger such de-
stabilizing e√ects. We have already noted the attention anthropologists
have paid to missionary misunderstandings. Missionaries in Madagascar ...
...
... 37
rejoiced when the Merina abandoned their ‘‘idols’’ (sampy) without real- ...
izing that sampy are always disposable and renewable in Merina culture
(Bloch 1986: 21). The narrow definition of religion that most Christian
missionaries shared led them to disregard kinship practices in many parts
of the world, although in fact these were integral aspects of local ideas of
power, fertility and renewal, and so on. But in addition to these misun-
derstandings, one can see in some cases a process of more radical lack of
fit between the unspoken ontology of Christianity and that of local sys-
tems of thought with which it comes into contact.
Christian missionaries have been relatively comfortable with systems
that do not place value on the idea of a single, exclusive Truth; competi-
tion with other divinities has been a familiar problem for Christianity
since its inception. But systems of thought that place no emphasis on
moral interiority of the particular kind that Christians call the soul have
been more confusing. Early Philippine missionaries rejoiced over the
readiness of their Tagalog, Bikol, and Visayan converts to enter into the
rituals and gestures of repentance, yet Vicente Rafael (1988: 100) has
convincingly shown that they were soon bewildered and frustrated by
their parishioners’ refusal to understand the point of the sacrament of
confession. Rafael has argued that a di√erent set of understandings of the
‘‘inside ’’ of a person and the ways in which someone entered into rela-
tions of exchange with others were persistently at work in the postcon-
version Christian Philippines, and I have argued in this volume that
Rafael may even have understated his case in some respects. Against
Keane ’s interesting account of how Protestant missionaries are working
to encourage behaviors in their Sumbanese converts that produce in them
the notion of ‘‘sincere ’’ interiority, we can therefore place the example of
the Philippines where the chain of connections soul-guilt-repentance-
salvation/damnation does not appear to have been completed even in the
course of more than four hundred years.
Most unsettling of all, perhaps, are those groups of people who, like
the Piro and Biak discussed in this volume, accept Christianity but reject
 fenella c annell

that idea that in becoming Christian something both unprecedented and

unrepeatable has occurred. Societies that recount conversion as part of a
narrative of traumatic change—as is the case in many parts of the Andes
—are much more readily comprehensible from a Christian perspective
than those that ‘‘forget’’ it has happened, or which construe it as just one
in a series of similar foreign arrivals in the past and the future.
... At work here, I would suggest, is an underrecognized link between
..
38 .... Christian ideas of time and event and Christian ideas of transcendence. It
...
is clear that the idea of the unique and irreversible event in many ways
has to underlie the idea of transcendence. The dominant Christian ideas
of personal conversion depend on a break in time. Conversion changes
the individual, and however much he might backslide, the event itself
cannot be undone.≤∑ We might say that the hierarchical relation of the
‘‘world beyond’’ and the ‘‘world of the here and now’’ established in a
salvationist Christianity has a temporal dimension. Time following con-
version is not just time after but time beyond. Even though he has not yet
entered eternal time, the convert is thought to be touched by the tran-
scendent and enter into its economy. But because it is less explicit in
Christian doctrine than other ideas about time, such as the various es-
chatologies and end-time scenarios or the regeneration of the world at the
crucifixion (Bloch and Parry 1982: 14) or other ideas about the implica-
tions of transcendence, such as the need not to mistake matter for spirit,
this assumption of nonreversible event may be the most disturbing when
it is contradicted. In Rutherford’s language, the ‘‘shock’’ of Christian
revelation was intended for the Biak converts but rebounded instead on
the missionaries.
Universal theories su√er from the di≈culty that they need to be appli-
cable in all cases. It should be clear from this section that I would not
claim with Whitehouse (and the neo-Weberians) that Christianity is
rightly seen as inevitably a modernizing force, even if in some parts of the
Protestant world processes akin to what Weber described as ‘‘rationaliza-
tion’’ are in progress. It seems to me in fact that the proposition is placed
the wrong way around. It may be that the history of modernity is inex-
tricably bound up with the history of Christianity, but this does not mean
that the meaning of Christianity is su≈ciently explained by the history of
modernity. The potential for meaning contained in Christian doctrine is
in fact demonstrably always in excess of any particular social situation to
which it might be considered functional.
In the hunt for ‘‘a view of our origins’’—that is, a glimpse of the
introduction

origins of capitalist thought—we may first ignore every other aspect of

our own Christian history and then think of Christianities of conversion
only in terms of the teleologies of modernity or global capitalism. Chris-
tian experience cannot be seen properly if it is tied exclusively to a
supposedly destined trajectory of modernity, nor indeed to a postmo-
dernity that so often tacitly repeats the logic of modernity (Osborne
1995: 3–4). Talal Asad’s important 1993 study persuasively understands ...
...
... 39
the category of religion as a product of Christian thinking that has en- ...
tered anthropological theory. Yet might it not also be the case that the use
of the term modernity itself has become superstitious in the social sci-
ences?≤∏ Insofar as it implies an irreversible break with the past, after
which the world is utterly transformed in mysterious ways, it is itself
modeled on the Christian idea of conversion. Is it possible that anthropol-
ogists, as well as missionaries, find di≈cult the idea that one might
encounter a transcendental Truth without becoming part of its logic?

Beyond the Impossible Religion

Most theories of Christianity and its e√ects consider it as a religion of
transcendence, and for the greater part of this introduction this is what we
have also been doing. God withdraws from man, and as a consequence
man is left in a state of incompleteness that can be resolved only at death,
when he will pass into the other world. From this view are derived those
minority of arguments in recent anthropology that have asked about the
character of Christian thinking as such, rather than its connection to
modernity. Many of these arguments, such as those by Pina-Cabral,
emphasize the inevitably dualistic character of Christianity (particularly
its mind/body split) and propose that ascetic Christianity deals badly
with issues related to bodily life: folk beliefs and figures of local power
drawn from outside the Christian repertoire, such as ancestors, are then
said to be called into service to supply the deficiency. Similar arguments
have also been applied to situations in which Christianity is present
together with another complex religious tradition (see, e.g., Stewart
1997: 204–31; Ileto 1979; and Rafael 1988).
Many of these arguments draw on Bloch and Parry’s influential for-
mulation of the significance of mortuary ritual (1982). In that collection,
the editors propose that funerals are ritual mechanisms through which,
symbolically and ideologically speaking, the continuity of the community
is asserted over the disruption caused by the death of an individual
 fenella c annell

member of that community. Mortuary ritual enfolds a range of symbolic

assertions that death is not incomprehensible and arbitrary, but is or-
dered, anticipated, or even chosen, and forms part of a wider whole of
renewal. In the process, the authority structure of a society is legitimated,
and the collection makes a very strong connection between the super-
natural powers that a society venerates, and the sources of political power
... and—still more—political legitimacy.
..
40 .... The primary objective of the Bloch and Parry volume is to look not at
...
Christianity, but at universals in religious processes, which for the pur-
poses of their argument are there defined almost entirely as ritual pro-
cesses.≤π Nevertheless, a consideration of the approach taken in that work
to Christianity is relevant here, not only because the book has been
widely influential, but because it prompts a direct confrontation with
some of the most di≈cult issues we have been attempting to raise in this
introduction.
The central example given in the Bloch and Parry volume of a Chris-
tian context is Olivia Harris’s rich essay on the Catholic Laymi (1982).
Harris states that the Laymi maintain an ‘‘uneasy truce ’’ between Laymi
ancestors, who remain charged with important aspects of the reproduc-
tion of fertility, and the Catholic saints and deity (73). Thus far, the book
seems to conform to the ‘‘impossible religion’’ model of Christianity we
have already discussed. Elsewhere in Bloch’s own work, Christianity
features as a religion inimical to natural kinship and superimposes on it a
logic of superior, church-authorized artificial kinship terms (Bloch and
Guggenheim 1981). However, for Bloch this tendency in Christianity is
only an instance of a tendency in almost all religious ritual; for him,
almost all religion≤∫ is in this sense seen as impossible, since all ritual
applies a transcendental logic whereby the value of a real life beyond this
world is asserted at the expense of the immediate and mortal world.
Bloch’s first two books, on the ethnography of the Merina of Madagas-
car (Bloch 1971, 1986) are in fact concerned with Christian populations,
since the Merina have long been Protestant converts, while their former
slaves mostly became Catholics. However, in some ways Bloch’s account
of the Merina su√ers from the same indi√erence to the properties and
significance of this Christian experience, as many of the other Marxist-
influenced works cited in the early part of this introduction; indeed, for
the most part, Malagasy Christianity is of interest to Bloch only insofar as
it seems to him to have been entirely absorbed into the preexisting forms
introduction

of Merina social organization and ancestral religion, whose ideological

resilience is one of his central topics.≤Ω
Because of this characteristic lack of interest in local Christianity per
se, it is in some ways di≈cult to assess Bloch’s claims. Certainly, Bloch
demonstrates a powerful transcendental logic in Merina religion, which
repeatedly stresses that the ancestors are the only source of moral good
and of the ‘‘real life ’’; however, he never explicitly discusses whether any ...
...
... 41
of this transcendentalism is due to the influence of Christianity on Merina ...
social logic, rather than vice versa. We might also ask whether he has
fully recognized that the model of the transcendent which defines this
analysis of ritual is itself a profoundly Christian model; in one sense,
indeed, the work belongs to that long tradition of antireligious social
science that incorporates Christian models by its refusal of them.≥≠
At the same time, the Bloch and Parry thesis that (in e√ect) transcen-
dent logic is a property of ritual in general, rather than Christianity or
‘‘world religions’’ in particular (however much these might have their
own forms of the transcendental), serves as an important counterbalance
to the assumed contrast between ‘‘world religions’’ and ‘‘local religions’’
that follows from the kind of Christian exceptionalism we have traced
back to the di√use originary influence of Hegel.≥∞ It may be that we need
to reassess the notion that Christianity is so easily distinguished from
other religions by its celebration of the impossible world beyond, and to
think of the attitude that religions take to transcendence understood in
this way as much more of a continuum.
If transcendence is not necessarily exclusively Christian, then it is even
more clearly true to say that Christianity is not exclusively a religion of
transcendence.
Once again, we may take our cue from historians of the early church,
including Brown (1988), Cameron (1991) and others. For scholars of this
period, while the Christian church was becoming established in the Ro-
man Empire and in post-Rome Europe, there are of course intense de-
bates about continuity of thought and tradition. But these debates tend to
be less heavily burdened with the teleologies of modernity, and some-
what less inclined to blur the ‘‘Christian’’ and the ‘‘Western.’’ Historians
of this period see with clarity that Christian doctrine is not a monolith but
a constantly evolving object, in which what is orthodox for one genera-
tion may come to be defined as heretical in the next, depending not only
on the development of theological controversy but also on the history of
 fenella c annell

the struggle for authority within the emergent central authorities of the
church.
The central dilemmas of Christian theology are clearly visible in the
period in which the division between heresy and orthodoxy was first
defined. The Trinitarian controversy; the problems over the nature and
limitations of reason in Christian discourse; the sense of unspeakable
... mystery, with the consequent relativization of the role of verbal debate
..
42 .... and the rise in the role of visual imagery and imagistic speech but its
...
counterpart in the mystical notion of the Word—these sources of tension
are already present in the late classical world Cameron describes. From
these debates emerged the dominant paradigm of Christianity as the
religion of transcendence, but this paradigm always carried with it, even
if only as negation, the other possible visions of Christianity that existed
in relationship to it. Some later heretical movements, like the Pyrrennean
Catharism described by Ladurie (1981), are said to have a direct historical
connection with earlier heretical thinking (in this case, Manicheanism).
But such genealogical connectedness was not necessary for the reemer-
gence of similar problems. One might see the endless return of the
problem of idolatry, from the iconoclastic controversies of Byzantium to
the perplexities of Sumbanese Calvinists, as just one instance of Christian
doctrine being haunted by its own expurgated other self.
Heresy—a term only ever applied as abuse—thus has a much more
complex history than orthodox narratives would sometimes have us be-
lieve (Williams 1987; Wiles 1996). As Peter Brown has shown, the ambi-
guity of the Christian message could never be entirely eliminated. Even
ascetic Christianity was never entirely hostile to the body; indeed, asceti-
cism’s intense focus on the body could convert it into a privileged site of
spiritual struggle as well as of spiritual peril. Contemporary Christian
movements, such as the Seventh-Day Adventism discussed in this volume
by Keller, or American Mormonism (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-
Day Saints), on which I am currently conducting research, also propose,
in di√erent ways, a vision of the afterlife far less distant than that of
mainstream Christianities. The Mormon Celestial Kingdom is unhesitat-
ingly described by most ordinary Mormons as ‘‘very much like this
world,’’ only perfected, and Mormon doctrine states that it will literally
be this world, renewed and transfigured at the final Resurrection. More-
over it is a unique and central teaching of Mormonism that kinship will be
not abandoned but completed in the next world.
One response to such examples is to dismiss the Adventists and the
introduction

Latter-Day Saints as cults: their teachings can have no bearing on the

essential nature of Christianity. Yet this assessment has little more analyt-
ical weight than does the label heresy. Although there are elements of
innovation in both churches (based on the teachings of their respective
prophets), however, there are also overwhelming elements of continuity
with earlier Christian teaching. Indeed, all of Mormon teaching and
prophecy is cast as a further revelation of the meaning of the Old and ...
...
... 43
New Testaments and a restoration of parts of that meaning which have ...
been lost. Mormonism therefore draws both on earlier forms of orthodox
Christianity and, as John Brooke has argued (1996),≥≤ also on those
Christian traditions that were themselves marginalized and considered
heretical in English and American Puritanism.
Even transcendent Christianity, therefore, was never unambiguously
otherworldly, and even orthodox Christianity contained within it the
shadows of its own alternative ways of thinking. Christianity is a complex
historical object whose parameters are by no means arbitrary but which
also cannot plausibly be described except as being in tension with itself.
Thus, as Reynaldo Ileto (1979), for example, has elegantly demonstrated,
Christianity’s meaning is always underdetermined by any single histor-
ical, social, or ideological context in which it is deployed; its meaning
inevitably exceeds such contexts, even if, as in the case Ileto gives us, it is
deployed by power holders for the purposes of domination, and even if
most of the potential interpretations of Christian doctrine inevitably re-
main unrealized in social action at any one time. Thus we must be
cautious of anthropological paradigms of Christianity that present it as
solely an ascetic tradition, rather than as a fundamentally paradoxical
tradition, a fault of which even Sahlin’s magnificent article ‘‘The Sadness
of Sweetness’’ (1996) is partly guilty.≥≥
The implications for anthropological studies of non-Western Chris-
tianities are twofold. First, when a locality encounters Christianity, it is
never obvious in advance what that ‘‘Christianity’’ is; it can be defined
only in reference to its own historical development. Second, however
unyieldingly orthodox the form of Christianity that may be visited on
another culture, it can never contain only a single message with single
possibilities of interpretation, because Christian doctrine is in itself para-
doxical. Although anthropologists may recognize in theory that Chris-
tianity has this complex character, in practice, as we have seen, most
anthropological writing tends to revert to a rather simplistic modeling.
The concept of a distinctive formulation of the transcendent is powerful
 fenella c annell

in Christianity, and is a predominant, although always historically de-

veloping, idea in most forms of orthodox Christian thinking, including
most colonial Christianities. It is therefore appropriately a central focus
of anthropological discussion. However, encounters between Christian-
ity and local cultures cannot in fact be adequately typified as encounters
between transcendent and nontranscendent religious conceptions, both
... because the transcendent may not be the sole preserve of Christianity and
..
44 .... other world religions, and because Christian thinking itself is never solely
...
or unequivocally otherworldly.
One belief which all orthodox Christians, together with those they
dismissed as heretics, held in common was a belief in Christian excep-
tionalism. Christianity, like Judaism, has taught that it is an unprece-
dented and a singular revelation of the truth, a ‘‘new song’’ sung to the
Lord. It is when this vision of itself is met with indi√erence by another
culture that Christian thinking seems to fall into most confusion. As
anthropologists, we may in part have this expectation about Christianity
embedded into our own theoretical expectations. Christianity always
makes a di√erence, but that di√erence may not be as one-dimensional as
we have supposed.
A central aspect of the tradition of Christian exceptionalism that we
have been considering here is the transferal of that exceptionalism onto
the trope of modernity. We saw that the model of the unrepeatable event
in Christianity, after which the world is irreversibly changed, is key to the
understanding of conversion as well as to Christian cosmology and es-
chatology.≥∂ I have argued that this notion of the event after which
nothing is ever the same again has become annexed by the ideology of
modernity. In anthropology, this has happened perhaps above all through
the medium of neo-Weberian interpretations. Yet Weber himself was
profoundly interested in religious experience and saw the ebbing away of
religion in contemporary capitalism as by no means a cause for celebra-
tion. I have argued that what began as a critical hypothesis o√ered by
Weber (that secularization paradoxically proceeds through Protestant
ethics and institutions)—a hypothesis that certainly illuminates historical
change in some places and times—has become confused with a wide-
spread popular conviction that religion is inevitably inimical to moder-
nity, and that for better or worse modernity is winning. This conviction,
which ought to be regarded as an ethnographic datum about the ideology
of the West, has instead become lodged in much sociological and anthro-
pological writing as though it were established fact. That only a minority
introduction

of writers have been skeptical of these arguments must certainly be due to

the peculiar relationship between anthropology and theology noted at the
beginning of this introduction. Anthropology, as part of social science,
defined itself in its origins as what theology was not; since the theology it
was repudiating was specifically Christian theology, anthropological the-
ory has always carried within it ideas profoundly shaped by that act of
rejection, from which there can therefore never be a complete separation. ...
...
... 45
Moreover, because of this uneasy relationship, anthropology has on the ...
whole been less successful at considering Christianity as an ethnographic
object than at considering any other religion in this way.
What answer, then, could we make to the question posed at the begin-
ning of this introduction: What may we take from the legacy of the
founders of the discipline? Durkheim, Mauss, and Weber all regarded the
arrival of a transcendent Christianity as an irreversible moment of trans-
formation, and each built this perspective in di√erent ways into sociol-
ogy: because this seemed to them to be well known and well established,
because debates over the nature of Christianity were still politically sensi-
tive ground, and because the thrust of their inquiring energies lay else-
where. Yet they also shared a deep sense of the importance of under-
standing the history and theology of Christianity. Mauss read widely on
the history of the Christian church; Durkheim debated issues in religion
with Catholic friends such as Charles Péguy; Weber’s immersion in
nineteenth-century debates about the nature and history of Christian
revelation is obvious. This sense of engagement has to an important
extent been lost in recent anthropological writing. Anthropologists have
in certain ways remembered the letter and forgotten this spirit of their
mentors. This has tended to promote the inflexible attachment of the
study of Christianity to a theory of modernity, and a downgrading of any
serious engagement with what Christianity, in all its historical particu-
larity, might mean. We might do well to recover some of the serious
comedy of Marx’s German Ideology (Marx and Engels 1970). That text is
not only a critique of religion but also a critique of the critique of religion.
Marx, who lacked a paid position as an explainer of society, understood
better than perhaps anyone else before or since the depth of the subterra-
nean connections between Christianity and its ideological and sociologi-
cal critics and investigators. If we can stop presupposing that Christianity
changes everything forever, we may be able to begin to see the experi-
ences of Christianity, in all their diversity, complexity, and singularity, for
what they are.
 fenella c annell

......

Notes
1 As demonstrated by the Dreyfus a√air, on which Durkheim wrote (1969).
2 This serves as a powerful reminder of the many ways in which Christianity
is absolutely rooted in Judaism, both historically and theologically. For
... Mauss and Durkheim, interestingly, it sometimes seems as though the exten-
..
46 .... sive analysis of such similarities is being lightly stepped around, in favor of
...
an emphasis on the distinctive features of Christianity as such.
3 The dominant intellectual evolutionist model is Lamarkian and not strictly
Darwinian.
4 One thinks here, for instance, of Weber’s almost wistful remark that he had
‘‘no ear’’ for religion (Weber [1919] 1946), or of Mauss’s doctoral thesis
(published as Mauss 2004) on types of prayer.
5 Whenever I teach a course on the anthropology of Christianity, my students
without fail are curious to know what my own religious position is; in the
interests of transparency, it may be useful to the reader to know that I am not
a member of, or a regular attender at, any church (although I have a
Methodist family background), and that I would describe myself as a sympa-
thetic agnostic who takes seriously the religious experiences of others and is
open to the possibility that these might at some point occur even in my
own life.
6 This particular omission is purely a matter of the contingent history of this
volume. Our original contributors included the Africanist Maia Green, who
has done fine work on Pogoro Catholic Christianity in Tanzania (e.g., Green
2003), but who was later unfortunately prevented from pursuing her contri-
bution because of work commitments abroad. I will take this opportunity to
acknowledge, in the absence of this essay, some of the other recent work
written on Christian groups, particularly Pentecostals, in Africa, including
Peel 2000, Meyer 1998, and Englund 2002.
7 That is, contributors are attentive both to local cultural practice and to the
particular type of Christianity prevailing in the area they study. Clearly, one
needs to know not only which church or religious order is involved, but also
at what period and with what specific doctrinal and social emphases it
arrived in a locality, as well as how these have evolved. For a concise and
useful review of the long-standing general debates in the anthropology of
world religions about the relationship between the global and the local, see
Stewart and Shaw 1994: 13–17.
8 This tendency was of course part of the wider (and well-known) debate in
the anthropology of the period about the theorization of gender and the
independence or otherwise of women’s perspectives in di√erent cultures,
which it is not the intention of this introduction to reproduce here.
9 Among other key references on this complex area, see Milbank 1990, which
critically discusses the claims of social science to have freed itself from
introduction

religious thought. Some of the analysis o√ered here, although arising from a
di√erent impetus, coincides closely with some of Milbank’s arguments, espe-
cially his reading of the influence of Weberian sociology. However, I would
not wish to go as far as Milbank in a despairing dismissal of the social
sciences tout court, or to share Milbank’s conclusion that, because it is
incompletely self-recognizing, all social science thinking is vacuous insofar
as it di√ers from historical thinking. One element in Milbank’s impatience
with social science, it seems to me, is a lack of familiarity with those elements ...
...
that are concerned with ethnographic empirical work, and their ability to ... 47
...
generate relevant theoretical questions.
10 Hegel, like other authors since, proposed that Christian developments were
partly anticipated by elements of later classical philosophy, especially Pla-
tonism (in relation to the idea of the soul) and Stoicism. However, the
central point for our discussion is that Christianity is always perceived in
these theories as a paradigm shift; it is not necessary to argue that none of its
elements had existed in any previous system.
11 Of course, the whole notion of transcendence arguably applies to the wider
Judeo-Christian tradition, and not just to Christianity. Interestingly enough,
Judaism (and related topics, including anti-Semitism within the history of
the discipline) have also been understudied within anthropology.
12 The essay appears to me to have provided continuing theoretical impetus
behind much more recent collections, such as the important volume Sha-
manism, History and the State (Humphrey and Thomas 1994).
13 Rowan Williams (1987: 14) points out that Leach may himself have mis-
recognized Arianism, and that Arius’s own doctrine was di√erent, and more
conservative, than the Arian heresy, which was an artifact constructed post
hoc by Arius’s enemies. While historically important, this observation does
not a√ect our argument here.
14 Like most other anthropologists writing in this area, Pina-Cabral does not
explicitly refer to his debt to Hegel or, indeed, Leach, and he may not be
aware of it; his immediate reference here is to the work of Maurice Bloch on
death, funerals, and fertility (Pina-Cabral 1986: 224). The way in which
Bloch’s work of this period itself incorporates certain assumptions about
transcendence is discussed below. Bloch’s work in itself, however, in some
ways demonstrates the influence of Leach’s teaching on this point.
15 I say ‘‘may be ’’ because it has long been clear from the scholarship that such
extreme positions are taken only at certain times within Christianity, and that
even in apparently dramatic ascetic practices there may be a significant
symbolic space that is given to the flesh, and which revalidates it at least
in some degree (Walker-Bynum 1987). See later in this chapter. The point
is that after the inception of the unhappy consciousness there can suppos-
edly never be a perfect reconciliation between flesh and spirit, and in-
deed, that the contrast between those two categories can never again be
unthought.
16 For an outstanding account of the use of, and reaction to, the confessional as
 fenella c annell

a colonial instrument intended to create a new, Christian interiority, see

Rafael 1988, chapter 3. Rafael’s argument is discussed in more detail in my
essay in this volume.
17 Foucault does make occasional contrastive references to ancient Hindu tra-
ditions of attitudes to the body.
18 Some Protestant churches have been less tolerant, although this is also
highly variable.
... 19 This argument takes o√ from Rafael’s (1988) important account of the
..
48 .... contracting of Catholic hierarchies of power in the Tagalog areas of conver-
...
sion. See my essay in this volume for an account of Rafael’s argument and
the similarities and di√erences of my own interpretation of the Bicol region.
20 It often appears to be the case that nineteenth- and twentieth-century mis-
sionary colonialism misrecognized the significance of local kinship rituals
and underestimated the degree to which religious meaning was embedded in
family practices, therefore placing people under less pressure to alter or
abandon this kind of activity. However, in other instances, kinship ritual has
become intensely targeted—for example, when it is linked to missionary
concerns with sexual respectability, or to population control, and/or when it
is identified as being linked to the rituals of the local state (see, e.g., Kendall
1996 and Pemberton 1994).
21 Bruce (1996: 6) cites himself as a robust defender of the secularization
theories of Talcott-Parsons, Peter Berger, and others, as well as of Weber—
that is to say, of a particular reading of Weber. Much of his argument
depends on developing a contrast between a historically earlier world of
greater church participation and a modern world of increasingly individu-
alistic beliefs. The argument thus bypasses the kind of examination being
made in this volume. Bruce concedes that in some parts of the world,
including America, religious participation remains high, but he argues that
in fact American religion is increasingly concerned with the ‘‘mundane ’’
(147). The idea that it is a simple matter to identify the mundane is one I and
others would contest (see McDannell 1995).
22 One recent example might be Albert Schrauwers’s accomplished and schol-
arly account of To Pamona Protestants, Colonial ‘‘Reformation’’ in the High-
lands of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia (2000). The argument is driven by the
notion of ‘‘the rationalization of a world religion in the periphery’’ (16),
derived from Weber refracted through Foucault and others. The focus is on
Christianity e√ectively understood as the Calvinist Church, its relationship
to ‘‘pillarized’’ Dutch society, and its disciplinary and discourse-creating
e√ects, all of which are understood as tending toward rationalized moder-
nity. While Schrauwers is right to argue that new, often coercive, definitions
of religion are generated in colonialism, this volume would want to make
more analytic space for the potentially unexpected and underdetermined
nature of such encounters, and for the importance of local interpretations of
Christian teachings. Lorraine Aragon’s Fields of the Lord, also on highland
Sulawesi Protestants (Aragon 2000), provides an interesting comparison.
introduction

23 This kind of assessment could be viewed as the corollary of the Protestant

(and Protestant-secular) perspective on Catholicism as superstition. It is as
though the Protestant world fears that Catholicism might retain more power
against modernity by dint of those very practices that Protestants have for
centuries condemned as magical or idolatrous. Thus many Protestants ap-
pear at some level to have internalized Weber’s theory that Protestant-
ism leads to secularism. This move anticipates in some ways the secular
world’s classification of fundamentalisms and contemporary cults as irra- ...
...
tional fanaticism. ... 49
...
24 In pursuit of a new perspective on Christianity in anthropology, we are
again treading here in the di≈cult terrain of the actual historical relationship
between Christianity, capitalism, and modernity. We might note that one
answer to the question implied in Parry’s brilliant 1986 rereading of Mauss
discussed above—whether it is world religions or capitalism that introduces
the dualistic split between the idea of the free gift and the idea of interested
exchange—is that, at least in the West, it is both, simply because capitalism is
never free of the language of Christianity, however far back in time you push
capitalism. This is presumably one part of what Milbank (1990) means by
calling capitalism a heretical deviation from what he defines as real (i.e.,
Augustinian) Christianity. (See also Jarvis 2000.) As I argue here, however,
it does not follow that the whole history of Christianity can be adequately
conveyed by the history of capitalism (or of modernity).
25 Of course, this is to some extent a simplification: most Christians recognize
that the enlightenment produced by conversion needs to be cared for and
can be lost sight of. Mormons, and perhaps other Christians, sometimes talk
as though conversion were at least in theory a continuous process rather
than a one-o√ event. Yet, these ruminations are mainly sidelights on the
central Christian perception that conversion itself (like the Incarnation) is an
irreversible event; nothing can undo the fact that it has happened.
26 Talal Asad (1993: 54) also concentrates his discussion on the transcendental
and ascetic forms of Catholic Christianity. For Asad, to make this comment
is precisely to miss the point of his argument, because he is attempting to
establish that the category of religion itself (and Christianity as a generative
example of it) is misconceived, in that religions are inserted in such di√erent
ways in relations of power, economics, and personhood in di√erent places
and periods as to have no meaningful connection with each other. I cannot
ultimately see how the Foucauldian category of knowledge-power, which
replaces other explanatory categories, itself escapes these objections. To this
extent, I think, Asad’s analysis ultimately shares some of the problems of the
less subtle ways of reducing religion to power that we have already dis-
cussed. Nonetheless, Asad provides an attentive, highly original, and il-
luminating reading of various Christian formations and communities. For
another interesting set of comments on the relationship between anthropol-
ogy and Christianity that share some ground with the current discussion, see
Robbins 2003.
 fenella c annell

27 Both these authors are of course perfectly well aware of fields of religious
activity that do not fall within the usual definition of ritual. Yet for their
arguments, especially as defined at the period of the 1982 volume here
discussed, as well as in Bloch 1986 and elsewhere, ritual is really the most
important problem in the analysis of religion, because it defines the intersec-
tion between religion and power.
28 An exception would be some religious practices in unusually egalitarian
... societies.
..
50 .... 29 That is, topics of Merina kinship and state formation; Merina Protestant
...
churches turn out to be structured by Merina kinship (endogamous demes).
(Bloch 1971).
30 This is a particularly well-established tradition in France. Much of Pascal
Boyer’s 2001 work on religion as a dysfunctional by-product of forms of
cognition certainly has this ancestry.
31 The tension between the idea that the transcendent is in some important
sense brought into being with world religions, and the idea that it belongs to
all ritual insofar as it describes the mystifying power of ritual, does not
appear to have been much remarked upon by those who have used Bloch and
Parry’s work in ethnographies of Christian locales.
32 This book is very highly regarded academically but is considered by some
devout members of the Latter-Day Saints Church to be anti-Mormon in
tone. Critics point out, with some justification perhaps, that many of the
elements Brooke points to as having their origins in hermeticism are in fact
scripturally derived; to me, these two possibilities do not seem mutually
exclusive.
33 Sahlins’s arguments are often compatible with the line taken here. However,
while the interdependent relationship between postlapsarian Augustinianism
and unorthodox Christian theology is set aside in Sahlins’s article, it is
essential to the argument o√ered here. I also feel, as Sahlins seemingly does
not, that it is impossible for anthropology to step outside its theological
inheritance entirely, even in the process of critiquing it. See also Cannell
2005b.
34 Bloch and Parry in the same volume (1982) o√er some interesting remarks
comparing Christian symbols of death and regeneration (the crucifixion and
resurrection) with Hindu cyclical cosmologies. These remarks bear the hall-
marks of Parry’s attentive work on Hindu asceticism. Although it is true that
Christianity has its own symbolism of eternal cycles, to my mind this com-
parison omits a consideration of the equal importance in Christianity of the
idea of the unalterable transformation in time (that is, with the advent of the
Messiah).