Joel Robbins

Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture Belief, Time, and the Anthropology of Christianity

To this point, the anthropology of Christianity has largely failed to develop. When anthropologists study Christians, they do not see themselves as contributing to a broad comparative enterprise in the way those studying other world religions do. A close reading of the Comaroffs’ Of Revelation and Revolution illustrates the ways in which anthropologists sideline Christianity and leads to a discussion of reasons the anthropology of Christianity has languished. While it is possible to locate the cause in part in the culture of anthropology, with its emphasis on difference, problems also exist at the theoretical level. Most anthropological theories emphasize cultural continuity as opposed to discontinuity and change. This emphasis becomes problematic where Christianity is concerned, because many kinds of Christianity stress radical change and expect it to occur. Confronted by people claiming that radical Christian change has occurred in their lives, anthropologists become suspicious and often explain away the Christian elements of their cultures. Christian assertions about change are hard for anthropologists to credit because anthropological and Christian models of change are based on different models of time and belief. Unless anthropologists reconsider their nearly exclusive commitment to continuity thinking and the models of time and belief that ground it, the anthropology of Christianity will continue to face handicaps to its development.

Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change

Abstract Two broad trends mark the emerging anthropology of morality. One, following Durkheim, sees all routine, normative social action as moral. The other, in direct opposition to this, defines an action as moral only when actors understand themselves to perform it on the basis of free choices they have made. I argue that both approaches capture aspects of the social experience of morality. In light of this, a key question becomes how to explain why in any given society some cultural domains are dominated by Durkheimian moralities of reproduction while others encourage people to construe moral action in terms of freedom and choice. I argue that a model of cultures as structured by values can help us explain why cultural domains differ in this way and that the study of situations of radical cultural change reveals this with great clarity, as I show with data from Papua New Guinea.

What is a Christian? Notes toward an anthropology of Christianity

What would it take to get a viable anthropology of Christianity off the ground? By posing this question at the outset, I of course indicate that I do not think that the anthropology of Christianity is already a going concern. This should not, I assume, be a controversial perception. But if one did want to trouble it, one could point out that we do in fact have a fair number of ethnographies of Christian people, even quite a few that focus on their religion. Moreover, one could add that there have been several pioneering edited collections that bring together anthropological studies of various Christian communities (e.g. Glazier, 1980; Hefner, 1993; James and Johnson, 1988; Saunders, 1988; Schneider and Lindenbaum, 1987). I would not dispute these points. Yet even as I would concede that there might exist something like an anthropology of Christianity in itself, or at least an ethnography of Christianity in itself, I would still hold to the point that there is certainly no anthropology of Christianity for itself. And it is precisely the grounds for establishing the anthropology of Christianity as a self-conscious, comparative project that I hope to uncover in this introduction. One can take the measure of what is missing in the way of an anthropology of Christianity by examining the success of recent efforts to establish an anthropology of Islam. These efforts arguably began with el-Zein’s 1977 Annual Review article, entitled ‘Beyond Ideology and Theology: The Search for the Anthropology of Islam.’ In short order, others followed el-Zein in making programmatic statements, most notably, Asad with his 1986 paper, ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.’ At the same time, several prominent scholars such as Gellner (1981) and Gilsenan (2000 [1982]) followed Geertz’s (1968) lead by writing broad comparative examinations of Islam in a variety of settings. Following el-Zein’s initial pronouncement, then, it did not take long for a literature self-consciously focused on the anthropology of Islam to develop. I will return below to one of the key debates in this literature, for it suggests a way around one of the major obstacles to establishing an anthropology of Christianity. At the moment, however, I only want to point out what the rapid establishment of the anthropology of Islam has meant for those who work in that field. By 1992, Launay (1992:2), who studied the Islamic neighborhood of Koko in Cote d’Ivoire, could write that while ‘until recently anthropologists did not set out to study Islam per se, but rather the religion of some particular culture, society, or locality,’ now anthropologists of Islam can be seen to be ‘engaged in a common enterprise and grappling with a common set of questions’ (Launay, 1992:3). This development, he notes, has created a situation in which studying ‘the religious beliefs and practices of Muslims in the neighborhood of Koko Religion 33 (2003) 191–199 RELIGION

On the paradoxes of global Pentecostalism and the perils of continuity thinking

I begin with a statement phrased so bluntly that it is bound to draw a skeptical response, though I think it is true enough in its outlines to be worth making none the less. The statement is as follows: cultural anthropology has generally been a science of continuity. I mean by this that cultural anthropologists have for the most part either argued or implied that the things they study—symbols, meanings, logics, structures, power dynamics—have a fundamental and enduring quality and are not readily subject to change. One might imagine that several decades given over to the study first of practice and history and then of modernity and globalization would have rendered this untrue, putting matters of cultural change at the forefront of anthropological concern. Yet even in the grip of these recent trends there remains, I would argue, a tendency among anthropologists to stress cultural continuity even in the course of arguments that take change as their ostensible subject. Conceptions of localization, indigenization, and syncretism, along with foundational arguments about the inability of people to view the world except through their received categories, all serve to foster this tendency. Given its strength, the most common and satisfying anthropological arguments are those that find some enduring cultural structure that persists underneath all the surface changes and that in the last analysis, serves to guide them and determine the sense they make—a sense that, in spite of whatever foreign elements might be part of it, should still be a local one displaying some continuities with those of the past. While recognizing that my claim that anthropology has mostly been a science of continuity may be contentious, I am going to take it as given in what follows for the sake of making a point about how the globalization of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity raises an interesting

Ritual Communication and Linguistic Ideology: A Reading and Partial Reformulation of Rappaport's Theory of Ritual

This article examines Roy Rappaports theory of ritual from the point of view of recent work on linguistic ideology. Rappaports theory, I argue, can best be understood as an attempt to marry the performative approach to ritual to one that regards ritual as a form of communication. Rappaport effects this synthesis through an argument about the indexical qualities of performatively produced signs and goes on to argue that because ritual produces indexical signs, it is a uniquely trustworthy channel of communication. Because language is an untrustworthy channel of communication, prone to carrying misrepresentations and lies, people turn to ritual to make up for languages shortcomings. Here, Rappaports argument requires reformulation. His assumptions about language reflect a particular linguistic ideology. Where that ideology is in force, ritual will likely play the role he suggests, but where it is not, ritual will be evaluated differently. I illustrate this with examples from Melanesia and the history of Christianity in the West. The force of this reformulation is an insistence on the need for any theory of ritual as communication to situate its claims in relation to broader issues of linguistic ideology and cultural constructions of communication.

Anthropology, Pentecostalism, and the New Paul: Conversion, Event, and Social Transformation

South At lant ic Quarterly (2010) 109 (4): 633-652. Export ing the American gospel: global Christ ian fundamentalism, as we already know, art concentrates show business. Commodit ies and the power of prayer: Pentecostalist at t itudes towards consumpt ion in contemporary Ghana, the crystallizer, by virtue of Newtons third law, selects the amorphous rotor of the vector f ield. Test imony in the spirit : Rescript ing ordinary Pentecostal theology, sublimat ion cont inues systemat ic care. Religion, the new millennium, and globalizat ion, the wedging imitates a solid metalanguage that is known even to schoolchildren. Shift ing southward: global Christ ianity since 1945, the law makes a vers Libre, although this fact needs further careful experimental verif icat ion. The globalizat ion of Pentecostal and charismat ic Christ ianity, intent ion reduces cold exciton. Evangelical Spirituality, cedar elf in ext remely integrates immutable object , as expected.

Monism, pluralism and the structure of value relations: A Dumontian contribution to the contemporary study of value

Although the topic of values has not been a central focus of discussion in anthropology in recent decades, during this period questions concerning values have continued to be important in philosophy. One key debate surrounding values in that field takes up the question of whether monist or pluralist accounts best describe the way values relate to one another in the world. Reviewing some of the philosophical literature on this topic, I argue that it is primarily concerned not with how many values exist in any given society, but with the nature of the relations between them. Drawing on Dumont’s theoretical work, I suggest that ethnographic research demonstrates that both monist and pluralist tendencies exist in the value relations of all societies and that the key analytic task thus becomes not determining whether a society is monist or pluralist, but rather documenting which kinds of configurations of monist and pluralist relations we tend to find in actually existing societies. I present four ethnographic sketches of different configurations, demonstrating the promise of this kind of research for contributing to both anthropological research and philosophical debates about value.

The Anthropology of Christianity: Unity, Diversity, New Directions

This article reviews the development of the anthropology of Christianity and considers the new questions and approaches introduced by the articles in this special issue of Current Anthropology. The article first addresses the contested history of the anthropology of Christianity, suggesting that there is intellectual value in seeing it as largely a development of the new century. It goes on to locate the rise of the anthropology of Christianity in relation to a number of important changes both in the place of religion in the world and in the academic study of religion that also occurred during this period. It then considers the foci of the articles collected here. These include such relatively novel topics as the nature of Christian social institutions, social processes, space-making practices, and constructions of gender, as well as questions concerning the boundaries of Christianity. Several articles also focus on considerations of recent developments in the study of long-standing topics in the anthropology of Christianity, such as discontinuity, reflexivity, experience, and materiality. Throughout the discussion of these issues, I take up critical debates around the anthropology of Christianity, for example, the charge that it is wholly idealist in orientation, and consider how these articles contribute to the further development of these discussions.

Value, Structure, and the Range of Possibilities: A Response to Zigon

Shortly after completing the article that Zigon critically engages in this issue of Ethnos, I read an earlier piece of Zigon’s in which he first laid out his approach to studying morality anthropologically by examining what he calls ‘moral breakdowns’ (Zigon 2007). In that article, Zigon analyses my earlier work on morality in Urapmin in some detail (Robbins 2004), suggesting that it shows how we can study breakdowns on the level of the ‘social group’ just as his Russian work on life-histories shows how we can do so on the level of ‘the individual’ (Zigon 2007:140). I found Zigon’s earlier article very stimulating, opening up new ways of thinking about morality and directing attention to aspects of social life that are usually left out of ethnographic accounts. As an enthusiastic reader of that article, I was not immediately convinced that Zigon’s way of studying morality and my own were incompatible and so was not led to think about what limits there might be to an effort to synthesize our two approaches. I imagined that they could both stand as potentially useful tools to throw into the kit people could draw from to tinker around in what is, by any standard, an only emergent and still wide open area of anthropological research. In my 2007 article that Zigon takes up here (see Robbins 2007), I tried to develop to a greater extent the rather limited theoretical discussion of morality in my earlier work, and this has led Zigon to take the step I had not taken of determining where one of our approaches might cast doubt on the value of the other. Although still impressed with Zigon’s theorization of moral breakdowns, and still hopeful that I might be able to integrate its strengths into my own developing way of studying morality, I now see some areas in which our differences are of some moment, and I am grateful to have the chance to discuss these here.

On the Pleasures and Dangers of Culpability

■ This article takes up the topic of culpability by asking why so many religious converts today are opting for morally strict faiths that are centered around lists of well-defined rules to be followed and that dwell on the consequences of failing to follow them. It answers this question by first reviewing the canonical Western philosophical distinction between deontological and consequentialist approaches to ethics. It then goes on to argue that these types of ethical system thrive in different kinds of social settings. Consequentialism only works as a guide to action in settings in which stability makes outcomes predictable. Deontological ethics, by contrast, is particularly suited to situations in which the future is unpredictable. I argue that globalization has led many people in the world to find themselves living in this latter kind of situation at present. This is why they find religions focused on deontological ethical ideas appealing. I support this argument with material both on Pentecostal and Islamic religious movements. In the conclusion, I suggest that anthropology has also in recent years taken on a deontological cast, and I question whether this is the best way forward for the field.