Anthropology on Shifting Grounds

Abstract

In my afterword to this special issue, I provide my own theoretical framing of issues relating to foregrounding and backgrounding Christianity, and argue that the sheer ambiguity of what occurs in so-called religious ‘contexts’ can be seen as constitutive of both subjectivity and religious attachment. I add that if our creation of an ‘Anthropology of Christianity’ is an act of foregrounding a particular religion for analytical purposes, this act must always be seen as a temporary move, inevitably open to being ‘backgrounded’ by other analytical framings.

Keywords:

• Anthropology
• Christianity
• subjectivity
• scale
• landscape

Notes

See, for example, http://mathworld.wolfram.com/YoungGirl-OldWomanIllusion.html

See, for example, Hann (2007) for an analysis of such tensions.

Compare Coleman and Collins (2000).

Victor Turner, one of the earliest anthropologists to write seriously about Christianity in both Western and non-Western contexts, moved from a concern with ‘schism and continuity’ into a more historically-oriented, flexible interpretation of Christian pilgrimage as a ‘field’ to be studied across time as well as space (Turner & Turner 1978). For a view of ‘perspectival anthropology’, see Viveiros de Castro (1998).