THE IDEA OF AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF CHRISTIANITY

Abstract

The writings of Talal Asad offer a consistent and singular reflection on the anthropological function of concepts. In a variety of manners, the use and mention of a concept identifies the practice of a collective speaker before it testifies to a designated object, real or imagined. The Christian baggage of the concept of ‘religion’, indeed, the Christianity of the subject of religion, however, is at once affirmed and denied by Talal Asad. Is Christianity a religion? Does the concept of religion teach us something about Christianity? This essay attends to Asad's body of work and seeks to show that the idea of an anthropology of Christianity – much more than an anthropology of religion (which Asad shows to be a reductive endeavour), and different from an anthropology of Islam – remains both urgent and elusive.

Keywords:

• asymmetries of power
• Christianity
• concepts and their anthropological function
• religion

Notes

¹Deploying the notion of a ‘locutionary act’, J. L. Austin (1962: 99, 101) distinguished illocutionary acts (‘performance of an act in saying something as opposed to performance of an act of saying something’) from perlocutionary acts (whereby ‘saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons’); and see Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (1993: 128); henceforth abbreviated as GR.

²On the ‘compulsive nature’ of social concepts (which exceeds the philological matter of whether a term existed in other days or ages), see GR (176); on the link between race and religion, see Anidjar (2007). Asad juxtaposes the terms in a subtitle (‘“Other Races”, “Other Religions”: Ex-colonial Labour Comes to Britain’ in GR 253), but religion is not explicitly mentioned in this section. Only race is.

³The phrase ‘structures of possible actions’ appears in GR 15.

⁴Fenella Cannell writes of Asad's role toward what she calls ‘the anthropology of Christianity’ (2006: 4). In what follows I mean to explore the ground for her claim in Asad's work.

⁵Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (1986: 5); henceforth abbreviated as IAI.

⁶A recent collection of essays (de Vries 2008) appears to advocate that we go so far as to move ‘beyond’ the concept of religion.

⁷This expression, which precedes but also announces Asad's reading of Foucault, appears in the conclusion to his first book, The Kababish Arabs (1970: 235); henceforth abbreviated as KA. One could argue that the phrase also belongs to a wider concern with hegemony, colonial and imperial power, but I would argue that Asad's interest in the polemical, and comparative, dimension of concepts warrants my emphasis on the latter as a general mechanism of the former. David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (2006: 5) also underscore the fact that, for Asad, ‘anthropology is best thought of as the comparative study of concepts across space and time’; and consider the inspiration Asad finds in Franz Steiner's work, most relevantly, to my mind, Steiner's concern with the broad significance of comparative categories (Steiner 1956).

⁸In this and in many other ways, Asad announces and parallels the political anthropology of Pierre Clastres, most particularly in Clastres (1974); see also Clastres (1999).

⁹Asad's contribution to Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter is exemplary as a study of the scholarly operations of the concept of ‘political domination’ (see Asad 1973).

¹⁰Asad, ‘Trying to Understand French Secularism’ (henceforth abbreviated as TUFS) in de Vries and Sullivan (2006: 497); and consider an earlier and proximate formulation, on the ‘theoretical choice and treatment of what social anthropology objectified’, to the effect that ‘any object which is subordinated and manipulated is partly the product of a power relationship, and to ignore this fact is to miscomprehend the nature of that object’ (Asad 1973: 7–18). ‘Religion’, needless to say, is at once ‘concept and practice’ as well as ‘a modern historical object’ in GR (1–2, and see 167 as well).

¹¹I borrow these last expressions from TUFS (501); one might recall the history of science here, and particulary Ludwik Fleck's formulation of concepts as bound to ‘the prevailing thought style’ of a period, and to its ‘operative socio-cogitative forces’ (Fleck 1979: 2, 23).

¹²Asad, ‘Reading a Modern Classic: W. C. Smith's “The Meaning and End of Religion”’ (henceforth abbreviated as RMC) in de Vries and Weber (2001: 139).

¹³I would also point to the relevance of Paul de Man here, whose discussion of the relation between grammar and rhetoric seems to me quite pertinent to Asad's own deployment of the notion of grammar (see de Man 1979: esp. 3–19). Although he has read de Man, Asad more readily refers to Wittgenstein; see, for example, RMC (133, 139), and Asad, Formations of the Secular (henceforth abbreviated as FS) (25).

¹⁴Asad quotes from Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger: ‘The right basis for comparison is to insist on the unity of human experience and at the same time to insist on its variety, on the differences that make comparison worth while. The only way to do this is to recognize the nature of historical progress and the nature of primitive and of modern society. Progress means differentiation. Thus primitive means undifferentiated; modern means differentiated. Advance in technology involves differentiation in every sphere, in techniques and materials, in productive and political roles … Differentiation in thought patterns goes along with differentiated social conditions’ (quoted in GR 22n21). It should be clear that Asad advocates the use of more differentiated concepts, that would not reinscribe grand distinctions (past/present, primitive/modern, etc.), but precisely interrogate their very distribution across the hierarchical differential of power, that is, externally and internally, and indeed, questioning the very boundary between inside and outside.

¹⁵The word religio was used by Latin and Christian writers, of course, but any Saussurean minded (not to mention historically minded) reader would have to ask about the translation necessary to equate, or even compare, words and concepts, across space or time, within distinct languages, systems of meaning, and indeed, grammar. At the same time, the hierarchical differential of power cannot be abstracted (or rather, it can, but the question becomes: for what purpose? And with what effects?). Interestingly enough, when it comes to religion, continuity trumps the otherwise massive assertion of a historical break as ‘modernity’.

¹⁶See, for example, GR (212, 214–15), where the Arabic word dîn is repeatedly translated as ‘religion’ without additional commentary except for a postponed remark that the word is, in fact, ‘invariably translated as religion’ (219); later fiqh, ‘usually translated as jurisprudence’, will be offered as an equivalent for ‘knowledge of the principles by which religion regulates life’ (226).

¹⁷See FS 36n41, where the issue of translation from Arabic is brought up again.

¹⁸I borrow this formulation from FS 69.

¹⁹Asad, ‘The Trouble of Thinking: An Interview with Talal Asad’ (henceforth abbreviated as TT) in Scott and Hirschkind (2006: 273); the interview was conducted by David Scott.

²⁰Beginning with his contribution to Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, and through a number of publications, Asad has conducted a constant and substantial debate with Orientalism in its many disciplinary guises, a debate which is echoed here as well (see Asad 1973, as well as the rejoinder to Clement Dodd (Asad 1980); and all the way to GR, of course). For a related discussion of Edward Said and the question of religion, in terms indebted to Asad, see Anidjar (2006: 52–77).

²¹I quote from what I believe is the same typescript used by Asad, which was kindly shared with me by Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (May Jayyusi, ‘Subjectivity and Public Witness: An Analysis of Islamic Militance in Palestine’, unpublished typescript, 9).

²²‘Religion has long been seen as a source of violence, and (for ideological reasons) [why only ‘ideological’?] Islam has been represented in the modern West as peculiarly so (undisciplined, arbitrary, singularly oppressive)’ (FS 9).

²³See, for example, ‘Redeeming the “Human” Through Human Rights’ in FS 127–58.

²⁴Asad had announced this reversal from the outset, asking ‘how is the image of the suicide bomber, bringing death to himself and others, addressed by Christians and post-Christians?’ (OSB 1), as well as in the assertion that ‘it is not sensible, in my view, to talk about the overriding need for reform in so-called Islamic civilization without at the same time reappraising the attitudes, institutions, and policies in western countries’ (14). Another brilliant instance of such reversal (‘a good critique is always an internal critique’: GR 189) can be found in Asad's treatment of the ‘Rushdie affair’ in GR (239–306). Finally, one should consider the striking reversal that occurs on the cover photograph of On Suicide Bombing. But who was it, Asad seems to ask, that had turned heaven and earth upside down? Who was it that brought down the heavens onto earth?

²⁵Elsewhere as well, Asad wants to ‘caution that liberalism's secular myth should not be confused with the redemptive myth of Christianity, despite a resemblance between them’ (FS 26, and see also 61–2). Have we accounted for the confusion, then? Or for the resemblance? And who is at risk if such caution is not exercised?

²⁶Note another reference in OSB to the ‘space of violence’, upon which, Asad says, ‘all constitutional states rest’. He continues: ‘In a liberal democracy, all citizens and the government that represent them are bound together by mutual obligations, and the actions of the duly elected government are the actions of all its citizens … There may be criticism by particular citizens of the government's actions … but until these are conceded constitutionally by the government, all citizens remain bound to the space of violence that its representative government inhabits’ (OSB 29). One understands why, like the West and like the modern state, Christianity could contain ‘many faces at home’, while presenting a unified front abroad.

²⁷One may be reminded of the similar logic operating in the distinction between ‘social life’ and ‘documents’ in the history of anthropological fieldwork. As Asad convincingly writes, there ‘“documents” are not regarded as part of social life itself but as (unreliable) evidence of it – not as elements that enable or prevent or subvert social events, only as (incomplete) traces that record them’ (GR 8n6). Asad's surprising point, made later on and as it were in passing (while arguing about the importance of science and its combined operations with technology), corresponds quite precisely to his description here: ‘my point is that science and technology together are basic to the structure of modern lives, individual and collective, and that religion, in any but the most vacuous sense, is not’ (GR 49n33).

²⁸At this point, one may consider that the extraordinary phenomenology of horror conducted by Asad in OSB would have to account for the response to and investment in all suicide bombings (‘I turn now specifically to the dissolution of the human body and the horror this generates’ [OSB 76], unless one explained why no such response has been registered or publicly expressed at the Tamil Tigers [who initiated the practice of suicide bombing in its current form]). And if horror is not a universal emotion (Bataille was horrified, of course, but ‘one needs to look at the faces of the onlookers and of the executer in the picture: they do not seem to express horror’ [OSB 82]), if, as Asad shows, the site of the response has something to do with Christianity (or at least with the Crucifixion), should not the very site of the Crucifixion, the specific investment in this site, be considered as well? Might one be forgiven the suggestion that a Christian investment in Jerusalem and in its surrounding bears some connection to Asad's ‘deliberate’ focus on the United States and Israel in their relation to suicide bombing (OSB 2)? It is puzzling to note that this connection is neither mentioned nor thematized in the book.

²⁹My cursory treatment of this important anthology is in no way a reflection of its worth in my eyes. I do consider it a significant breakthrough and a rich contribution to the very issues I am trying to engage (or more precisely, that I see Asad as engaging). The volume should also be considered along with Serge Margel (2005), a momentous work that scrupulously attends to the conceptual mechanism at work in distinguishing between ‘religion’ and ‘superstition’ as well as its scholarly inheritors in the study of ‘religions’ (‘in Christian lands’, as the book title has it, marking an important continuity).

³⁰One should however note that, at the explicit level, the chapters of Genealogies of Religion are not presented as an anthropology of Christianity. They are rather ‘intended as a contribution to a historical anthropology that takes the cultural hegemony of the West as its object of inquiry. More precisely, they explore ways in which western concepts and practices of religion define forms of history making’ (GR 24).

³¹‘It is sometimes forgotten’, Asad points out in a footnote relevant to this matter, ‘that in the world outside Europe, evangelical Christianity often played a central political role in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries … Missions were also extremely important in the modernization of secondary and higher education in the Middle East. Local Christian minorities, educated and sometimes converted by European missionaries, not only played a notable part in popularizing western ideas of history, archeology, politics and so on, but their role in adapting western nationalist ideologies to local conditions was also outstanding’ (GR 207n13). From the perspective of the receiver, the West presents a single face, Asad says elsewhere. Is this the face of religion (not mentioned as such here)? The face of Christianity?

³²I wonder whether Asad does not naturalize the teleological relation to the future he describes as belonging to the ‘Christian modern’ (as Webb Keane beautifully calls it), when he writes in OSB that ‘inscribed in the body is an image of the future that is nothing more than a continuous unbinding or emptying’ 83). Does this refer to every body? Does it not recall instead the kenosis of God in Jesus Christ?

³³I do not mean to suggest that there can be such an anthropology, nor to ignore the possibility that anthropology is a ‘Christian science’ (after the manner of psychoanalysis as a ‘Jewish science’). Were this the case, the expression ‘anthropology of Christianity’ might simply be redundant, indeed, pleonastic. And perhaps it is. Be that as it may, my attention to this problem was heightened by Asad himself, of course, as well as by the meticulous study of the concept of ‘superstition’ offered by Serge Margel (2005). As I mentioned above, Margel magisterially shows how constitutively linked superstition is to the concept of ‘religion’ within the Christian tradition and so all the way to the modern study of religion. Interestingly enough, and as his title indicates, Margel does not explicitly propose the concept of ‘Christianity’ as the object of his inquiry, although, as with Asad, the argument could be made that he does nothing else.

³⁴On ‘anthropology at home’, elaboration and critique, see Panourgià (1995).

³⁵Another incarnation of this essay was meant to borrow another title (from Susan Sontag this time), namely, ‘against interpretation’. One could in fact follow the thread of opposition to hermeneutics throughout Asad's work. See, for example, OSB (31, 41, 81) and TT (257, 269, 272).