The Anthropology of Christianity: Situation and Critique

Abstract

This article seeks to identify and place the recent scholarship termed the ‘anthropology of Christianity’, to offer an account of its originality and achievements, and to point out some limiting tendencies. The argument in brief is this: anthropologists have neglected Christianity for reasons that now seem implausible. There is a small body of work that overtly recognizes this neglect and seeks to rectify it. In this work of rectification, there is a particular relationship to theology; some anthropologists of Christianity seek to rehabilitate Christian categories, drawing on John Milbank's writing in particular. While applauding this approach, I point to Susan Harding's work as offering a particular emphasis: it recognizes that when categories of investigation and the phenomenon under examination change simultaneously (which we may term an ‘event’), a more subtle ethnographic and explanatory performance is called for.

Keywords:

• Anthropology of Christianity
• theory of events
• Susan Harding
• Joel Robbins
• John Milbank

Acknowledgements

My thanks are due to the organizers of the seminar ‘Foregrounds and backgrounds: ventures in the anthropology of Christianity’, Andreas Bandak and Jonas Adelin Jørgensen, and the participants who met in Copenhagen in April 2009. I am grateful too to the participants in the graduate reading group in Cambridge, Autumn 2009, which considered a series of texts in the anthropology of Christianity, to Joel Robbins, Andreas Bandak, Anthony Shenoda, Ashley Lebner, Nick Adams, Aparecida Vilaça and Laur Vallikivi for their comments on this paper, and also to the editor of Ethnos and to the two anonymous reviewers for their careful attention and help.