The Anthropology of Christianity

Abstract

This article surveys the literature that constitutes the newly emergent anthropology of Christianity. Arguing that the development of this sub‐discipline was impeded until recently by anthropology's theoretical framing and empirical interests, this article explains that demographic and world‐historical forces have made it such that anthropology has had to recently come to terms with Christianity as an ethnographic object. In doing so, anthropology also has had to address its problematic relationship with Christianity, either in the religion's direct effect on the formation of the discipline, or as reflected by Christianity's influence on modernity itself, which has been vital for anthropology as both a category and as a style of cognition. In addition to these meta‐theoretical questions, the anthropology of Christianity has become a space in which anthropology has been able to re‐examine issues of social and cultural continuity and discontinuity in light of conversion to Christianity. Specifically, the issue of social change (often thought through or against the issue of ‘modernity’) has involved specific ethnographic examinations of fields, such as the relation between linguistic ideology and language use, economic practice, changing formations of gender and race, and the modes through which the person is culturally structured, and how that category of the person stands in relation to the social. Rather than presenting an overarching theoretical narrative, however, this review notes that these issues play out in divergent ways in differently situated communities, especially where Christianity's individuating effect may be muted where is it functions as an anti‐ or counter‐modern force; this dynamic and contingent nature of Christianity underscores that Christianity itself is a heterogeneous object, and thus promises to be an area of rich empirical research and theoretical focus that should be beneficial not only for this sub‐discipline, but also for the field of anthropology as a whole.

Pentecostalism in a Rural Context

“…Their preaching did not address local people's concerns and largely fell on deaf ears. But the fact that the Pentecostals acknowledged the spirits, and at the same time appeared to have superior powers that could banish them, was an altogether different proposition, and one that Joel Robbins (2004) has argued has been central to the spread of Pentecostalism globally (see also Bialecki et al 2008). For people troubled by the spirits, or living in fear of them, the Pentecostal promise of being able to escape them and be free could be both meaningful and appealing.…”

Theology as an Ethnographic Object: An Anthropology of Eastern Christian Rupture

“…Asad (1993) argument that conceptions of religion have been coloured by the Christian emphasis on 'belief' is just one example of how fundamental Christian thought is to the discipline (Bialecki et al 2008(Bialecki et al , p. 1142. The relationship between Anthropology and Christianity has a curious history.…”

“…In a co-written article on the Anthropology of Christianity published in 2008, Jon Bialecki, Naomi Haynes and Joel Robbins argue that 'Within the past decade, a comparative, self-conscious anthropology of Christianity has begun to come into its own' (Bialecki et al 2008(Bialecki et al , p. 1139 3 . But there is ample evidence of good ethnography and anthropological debate about Christianity stretching back well before 1998, including classic anthropological texts by those such as Bond et al (1979), Brandes (1980), Campbell (1964), Christian (1972), Comaroff and Comaroff (1991), Ingham (1986), Stewart (1991), Turner and Turner (1995), Visvanathan (1993), and Wilson (1971).…”

Santidade e sinceridade na formação da pessoa cristã

“…Aqui, a Antropologia do Cristianismo tem se beneficiado das contribuições teóricas da Antropologia Linguística, em particular da noção de ideologia da linguagem, que se refere a "noções culturais sobre a natureza da linguagem e seu uso" (Robbins & Runsey 2008:411) 3 . Este conceito tem permitido que os antropólogos demonstrem que existe um modo específico de estruturação dos atos de fala e da comunicação no cristianismo (Robbins 2001;Keane 2002;Bialecki et al 2008;Coleman 2006).…”