Michael W. Scott

‘I Was Like Abraham’: notes on the anthropology of Christianity from the Solomon Islands

This article offers a detailed exegesis of what I term the ethno-theology of Timothy Karu, a Solomon Islands Anglican whose understanding of the nature of his matrilineage is informed by the Pauline account of the election of Israel. The analysis suggests a non-essentialising treatment of Christianity that nevertheless demonstrates how Solomon Islanders engage simultaneously with multiple interlocking macro and micro Christian logics in ways that aspire to systematicity. The starting point for this analysis is the identification of an unacknowledged tension between the approaches of John Barker and Joel Robbins, two influential anthropologists of Christianity whose work reflects a wider divide between anti-essentialism and cultural analysis in current anthropology. The article contributes to an overall rapprochement between these two orientations within the anthropology of Christianity.

The anthropology of ontology (religious science

Through engagement with a range of recent publications, this article offers a mini-ethnography of wonder discourses in the anthropology of ontology, leading to a rethink of the concept of religion. It has sometimes been suggested that science and religion are antithetical orientations to the experience of wonder: whereas science seeks to banish wonder by replacing it with knowledge, religion remains open to wonder in the face of the unknowable. With this criterion of difference in view, this article identifies certain trends in the anthropology of ontology that appear to enjoin and pursue open-ended wonder in ways that might be read as constituting anthropology as religious science. This coincidence of supposed opposites recommends, I conclude, a relational account of religion.

Hybridity, Vacuity, and Blockage: Visions of Chaos from Anthropological Theory, Island Melanesia, and Central Africa

Marshall Sahlins (1996) argues that anthropology has been the bearer of a “bourgeoisified” Judeo-Christian cosmology according to which an original state of chaos, akin to the Hobbesian state of nature, gives way to the order of society or the state. The central conundrum that this anthropology has sought to explain is how fallen and needy individuals come together in cooperative organization. Sahlins furthermore contends that, by universalizing this problematic as the key to interpreting human societies and social action, anthropology has subverted its attempts at cross-cultural understanding. My aim in this paper is to draw attention to a growing commitment within anthropology to a different cosmological paradigm with an inverse structure. Today, the elevation of ethnic and cultural hybridity as both an approximate return to primordial human unity and an emancipatory moral high ground renders socio-cultural difference at once the presumed telos of many social practices and a scandal to be overcome. Whereas the older anthropological cosmology uncovered by Sahlins posited progress from atomistic privation to social solidarity, this new cosmology posits the politically motivated splintering of essential human unity by the construction of ethnicity and culture. Although I iterate the caution that this emergent paradigm too has the potential to reproduce itself as ethnography, I emphasize as more important its promising and troubling potential to revalorize anthropological thinking on cosmology. Specifically, ownership of the meta-cosmology encoded in hybridity theory ought to prompt anthropologists to question our recently acquired aversion to the idea that cosmologies inform human action. At the same time, however, we need to scrutinize our fascination with hybridity for signs of an unintentionally Nietzschean glorification of dissolution or aestheticization of periodic destruction as the necessary foundation for political and moral renovation.

The Matter of Makira: Colonialism, Competition, and the Production of Gendered Peoples in Contemporary Solomon Islands and Medieval Britain

Since civil tension disrupted Solomon Islands between 1998 and 2003, the Arosi of Makira have elaborated discourses according to which their island contains a secret and preternaturally powerful subterranean army base. These discourses have clear antecedents in Maasina Rule, a post-World War II socio-political movement sometimes analysed as a “cargo cult”. Offering an alternative interpretation, I compare Arosi discourses about the Makiran underground to the Matter of Britain as represented in Geoffrey of Monmouths History of the Kings of Britain (completed c. 1138). I argue that both sets of discourses arise from the dynamics of mutually precipitating communities mythologizing themselves and each other in terms of the analogous oppositions colonizer is to colonized as allochthon is to autochthon as male is to female. This comparison, I conclude, recommends the medieval European phenomenon of a “matter” as a productive model for understanding contemporary ethnogenetic myth-making in and beyond Melanesia.

The Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT), The University of Manchester: The 2011 annual debate – Non-dualism is philosophy not ethnography

Does the concept of non-dualism have ethnographic purchase or is it mainly of philosophical interest? This article comprises the edited presentation and discussions of the 2011 GDAT debate on the motion ‘Non-dualism is Philosophy not Ethnography’. The debaters proposing the motion were Michael Scott and Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov. They were opposed by Christopher Pinney and Joanna Cook. Marilyn Strathern acted as jester – playfully and rigorously engaging with all four speakers. The presentations and the discussions that followed were wide ranging, lively and stimulating.

God is other(s): Anthropological pietism and the beings of metamorphosis

Rejoinder to Willerslev, Rane, and Christian Suhr. 2018 . “Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer’s divine revelation.” Hau : Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (1): 65–78

Getting more real with wonder: an afterword

Abstract This Afterword is part apologia for an ontology-centred approach to the anthropology of wonder, part diplomatic mission to bring the articles in this special issue into dialogue to yield new insights about wonder. The latter endeavor identifies five key areas in which the articles enhance understanding about wonder. First, they help to clarify the relationship between wonder and socio-political change. Second, they present ethnographic examples of what makes wonder practices work. Elsewhere, I have suggested that wonder can be a practice through which people resist existing ontological premises and advance lived alternatives. Going beyond this observation, these articles disclose how wonder practices persist and become routinized. Third, these articles not only show how wonder confers authority, they also show that the authority wonder confers is ontological authority – authority to lay down or revise ontological premises and their ethical and political implications. Fourth, the articles attest that wonder engages our received imagery and discourses about origins and stimulates us to generate new versions that revise, replace, or compete with the old. A fifth issue raised is whether nonhumans can wonder. Pushing against anthropocentric tendencies in some of the contributions, I suggest how we might imagine a nonhuman affective cognate to wonder.