Engaging the Religiously Committed Other: Anthropologists and Theologians in Dialogue

Abstract

Anthropology has two tasks: the scientific task of studying human beings and the instrumental task of promoting human flourishing. To date, the scientific task has been constrained by secularism, and the instrumental task by the philosophy and values of liberalism. These constraints have caused religiously based scholarship to be excluded from anthropology's discourse, to the detriment of both tasks. The call for papers for the 2009 meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) recognized the need to "push the field's epistemological and presentational conventions" in order to reach anthropology's various publics. Religious thought has much to say about the human condition. It can expand the discourse in ways that provide explanatory value as well as moral purpose and hope. We propose an epistemology of witness for dialogue between anthropologists and theologians, and we demonstrate the value added with an example: the problem of violence.Since its inception, anthropology has been engaged in two main tasks. The first is the scientific task of seeking to understand the full dimensions of the nature and expressions of humankind. The second, based on the first, is the instrumental task of using those understandings to press for processes, projects, and policies that will protect and nourish the best of that nature and its expressions.It is our contention that the depth of anthropology's perspective on humanity, and therefore the relevance of its instrumental uses, has been constrained by the modernist epistemological assumptions and commitments that have generally governed Western academic discourse. In particular, the commitments to secularism and to liberalism, operating in the background of the discourse, have led to the exclusion of religiously based perspectives as intellectually coequal. That exclusion has resulted in a limiting of the theoretical and practical insights available for the advancement of anthropology's perspective in the contemporary world.

Occupying the Ontological Penumbra: Towards a Postsecular and Theologically Minded Anthropology

“…Since they have already been dealing with the differentiation and the dynamics of the secular and the religious at a personal and existential level, they are in a unique position to occupy the ontological penumbra with all its human and nonhuman counterparts by engaging and developing this line of postsecular anthropology while drawing on theology. In fact, we can hardly think of any other anthropologists who would be better suited to bring the experience of the religious back to secular anthropology while at the same time maintaining the merits of the discipline's secular tradition ( [13], p. 84).…”

“…Secularism has been so strong in anthropology that at times those within the discipline exhibit manifestly anti-religious traits and have largely distanced themselves from other disciplines that deal more explicitly with the religious ( [1], p. 267; [2,4,12,13]). When faced with anthropologists who admit to religious interests, some secular anthropologists have expressed their contempt and have frowned upon their colleagues' religious orientations or conversion, as Larsen ([14], see also [15]) has documented for E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Victor and Edith Turner, who were all established anthropologists when they converted to Catholicism.…”

“…Clearly identifiable minorities of anthropologists became more vocal and claimed specific subject positions or standpoints that they recognized as influencing their research and writings and that helped them to articulate better their perspectives within the discipline of anthropology. This included Christian anthropologists, who started to justify and defend their own position by elaborating their own standpoint [13,22,29]. In view of the bewildering varieties of Christianity [17,30], however, a Christian standpoint needed to be broad enough to be sufficiently inclusive.…”

“…Consequently, in order to uphold their respective standpoints, both religious and secular anthropologists sometimes behave like two dogs snarling at each other as they fight over the same bone, in the hope of being heard and taken seriously. We admit that we have been guilty, together with other Christian anthropologists, of accusing our secular counterparts of being elitist and prescriptive, and of occupying "the moral high ground" ( [13], p. 89), while from a secular perspective we and other Christian anthropologists have been discredited and held responsible for the deficiencies and faults of Western Christendom's excesses merely on the basis of calling ourselves "Christian." Although there are usually kernels of truth in such broad accusations, it seems ironic that anthropologists are less ready to be anthropologically minded towards others within the discipline with whom they have a bone to pick.…”

“…In spite of this, theology, even in its secular academic orientation, retained a religious and often Christian flavor and was thus largely ignored or frowned upon by secular anthropology. Since the postsecular turn brings the religious back to the secular, both Christian and secular anthropologists have become interested again in turning toward Christian theology, albeit with different objectives [2,5,13,48,51]. While in principle such a move may be valuable, we believe that it is important to engage with theology critically, since the discipline also shares the same Judeo-Christian heritage as anthropology, and thus has a distinctly Western and Christian intellectual and epistemological tradition.…”