Reading and Time: Two Approaches to the Materiality of Scripture

Abstract

In this article I examine Christian approaches to conceptions of time as expressed in approaches to reading the Bible. The first main focus in this effort is upon the work of Saint Augustine, whose arguments about the connections between reading and time have been, as I try to show, very influential. The second main focus is more ethnographic in nature, and comes from my work in Zimbabwe on a small group of apostolic Christians whose views differ significantly from Augustine. These two cases are framed by some more general remarks on Christian temporalities, as well as a call for the newly-emerging interest in the anthropology of Christianity to take note of more general work on literacy and the ethnography of reading.

Keywords:

• Christianity
• reading
• materiality
• temporality
• semiotics

Acknowledgments

Funding for research in Zimbabwe was provided by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at the 2005 AAA meetings in Washington, DC and the anthropology departmental seminars at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Edinburgh University, and Cambridge University. I would like to thank the participants on those occasions for many helpful comments, as well as for the feedback of Birgit Meyer, Bambi Schief-felin, and the two anonymous reviewers for Ethnos.

Notes

I say ‘temporality of their Christianity’ to differentiate my position from that developed by the theologian John Mbiti (1990:15–28). Relying on a common variety of the primitivist stereotype, Mbiti has argued that it was mission Christianity that introduced the idea of the future to Africans – that ‘African thought’ is tethered to the past. On the face of it, of course, my characterization of the ‘live and direct’ approach might seem to make the apostolics even more primitive and simplistic than this, since I have emphasized how they are not even invested in the past – and are certainly not positively invested in the African past (see Engelke 2004; cf. Meyer 1998). It is here that the works of Gell (1992) and Munn (1992) prove their worth, for of course the only simplistic thing would be to take the principles of a live and direct faith as an exclusive and exhaustive approach to the mechanics, meanings, and varieties of time of relevance to any given apostolic's life.