Since its inception, anthropology has been engaged in two main tasks.1 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.
We the authors are Christian scholars, anthropologists and theologians, who wish to make a contribution to anthropology’s current consideration of its own ends. In what follows, we unpack first secularism for the limitations it places on anthropology’s scientific task, and then liberalism for the limitations it places on anthropology’s instrumental task. We suggest that religiously based perspectives can expand the discourse in ways that provide explanatory value as well as moral purpose and hope, and we proceed to illustrate this point with an example of the value added by addressing the problem of violence. Finally, we conclude that the discipline itself is recognizing the time is right to expand its discourse if it is to fulfill its twin purposes of scientific study and instrumental engagement with its public.
Secularism and anthropology’s scientific task
In terms of its scientific task, anthropology has been a secular undertaking. Charles Taylor (1998) traces the history of secularism, from Christendom’s two spheres of the church and the world, through the search for common theological ground during the terrible time of Europe’s religious wars, to the eviction of religion from the public arena by its transformation into a private and optional good. Western society has moved from “a condition in which belief was the default option, not just for the naïve but also for those who knew, considered, talked about atheism; to a condition in which for more and more people unbelieving construals seem at first blush the only plausible ones” (Taylor 2007: 12). The result in anthropology is that religion has been taken as an object of study, viewed as an epiphenomenon to be understood by analysis in secular terms.
Secularism rests on the notion that the consensus formerly provided by a common religious tradition will instead be established by rational debate. The appeal to human reason is a kind of faith in humanity that suggests we can understand the world and solve our problems if we but hold in check the particularities of our backgrounds, identities, and experiences. In praxis, if not in theory, it postulates a transcendent perspective, objectivity, from which reality can be correctly perceived.
For anthropologists, this proposition has been plenty problematic due to research results obtained from the field. For anyone reading the text with appropriate self-reflection, Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1976) revealed the hermetically sealed nature of our own thinking, along with its imperviousness to the counter-data. All people, it seems, employ explanations that account for the data from within an epistemological system, making it difficult to determine the exact location of the supposed transcendent vantage point. In fact, as “merchants of astonishment” in the academy (Geertz 1984, 2001: 44), anthropologists have relished the use of the data obtained from the field to reflect on the very foundations of their own project. Long before Lyotard and Rorty took up the task, a whole generation of anthropologists – including Boas and his students – were questioning the West’s intellectual assumptions, its moral evaluations, and its technological goals. They did so simply by describing the subjective worlds of remote peoples in comprehensible terms. The result was a soul-searching investigation into their own cultures that revealed the arbitrary nature of their own thought. Of course, since the advent of post-modernism, the existence or nonexistence of a transcendent vantage point has been a matter of much ambivalence in the field, with some defending traditional views of science, while others are celebrating the situated character of all knowledge. Still, the reliance on ethnography, that is, on empathetically comprehending the object of study’s subjective understanding of the world, has made naïve rationalism difficult to defend.
Yet, anthropology is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, and it has tried to solve the problem of what is and is not reasonable by the division of reality into two parts, natural and supernatural. It has used this division as an operating assumption, relegating all observable phenomena of human life to the former as the object of study, and declaring agnosticism with regard to the latter. This overly simple solution to the matter of religious claims is no longer viable. Asad has deconstructed “the doctrine and practice of secularism” (2003: 17) and the abstract category, “religion” (1993), demonstrating both to be products of Western history. Lambek (2012: 6) remains committed to anthropology as a secular discipline but acknowledges that it is “pulled between explanation and interpretation, demystification and appreciation, transcendent reason and immanent experience.” Chakrabarty (2000: 16) has openly identified with the enchanted world of Hinduism in his treatment of the impact of postcolonial thinking on the social sciences. Coming from less secularized cultures, non-Western scholars are more likely to be religiously committed and must learn the secular idiom in order to gain entrance to the academy; they must sideline significant elements of their thought and experience and write in terms that will be acceptable in the West (Kevin Birth, personal conversation, October 20, 2010).
Steven Smith (2010) suggests that, even in the West, secularism is failing because of the inevitably shallow nature of a discourse that does not permit the declaration of normative commitments, commitments that must be “smuggled” in to resolve problems that secular principles cannot work out. Ramadan (2005) promotes Islam as a means of reviving ethical discourse in contemporary European politics. And Farr (2008) notes the ill effects of secularism on international diplomacy, as diplomats anxiously avoid potentially fruitful religious discourse on human experience and peacemaking.
At issue is the fear that the elimination of the secular, or rather the reduction of secularism to one doctrine among many, will result in an intellectual free-for-all, without grounding or potential resolution. Those already rooted in secularism may well wonder whether an academic discourse is possible under such a circumstance. In part, this fear is a product of twin myths: “the myth of religious violence” (Cavanaugh 2009), which exaggerates the dangers of religious thought, and “the myth of religious neutrality” (Clouser 2006), which denies the existence of fideistic assumptions in secular theorizing (cf. Milbank 1990). In part, it is simply a natural response to the realization that one’s own perspective has been deeply privileged.2
In any case, with secularism being deconstructed, its unspoken ontological claims will have to be reexamined, and other possibilities considered (cf. Alberti et al. 2011). We believe that all understanding is achieved by an interpretive process conducted against the background of a narrative, or “framing story” (Smith 2009). In the context of lived communities, these narratives produce plausibility structures rendering the world comprehensible and meaningful. In conversations between scholars with different background narratives, understanding is achieved partly through rational discourse, in which cases must be made with sufficient logical force as to convince others, and partly through pure depiction, or illustration, of the data in narrative context (cf. Hart 2003). Scholars find themselves persuaded, or not, of one another’s propositions through a process of careful listening and consideration – the very same skills used in ethnography. A thick description of our beliefs and operating assumptions for the sake of a transparent and ongoing dialogue with those whose assumptions are different can work toward the end of suggesting how various beliefs illuminate, critique, and expand the subject.
The works of contemporary philosophers such as Habermas and Gadamer are helpful in describing the process. Habermas’s (1985) 50-year project was to rescue the notion of rationality by grounding it in the speech community rather than the individual. Gadamer drew on Heidegger to suggest that the so-called “prejudices” or limitations of our perspectives are actually necessary to the productivity of the conversation. “In fact our own prejudice is properly brought into play by being put at risk. Only by being given full play is it able to experience the other’s claim to truth…. The hermeneutic task consists in not covering up this tension by attempting a naïve assimilation of the two but in consciously bringing it out” (Gadamer 1989: 299). Gadamer was more pessimistic than Habermas about the efficacy of human reason, but he was optimistic that “in the process of understanding, a real fusing of horizons occurs” (Gadamer 1989: 307), that is, that participants can come to a new understanding by way of the encounter.
We the authors believe that our dual identities as scholars and as believers give us a valuable vantage point from which to contribute to the current debate over epistemology in anthropology. We are Christians working within a socially engaged and intellectually open theological framework deeply shaped by the Christian story as articulated by the earliest strands of the Christian tradition. Our perspective can be described as orthodox, evangelical, ecumenical, and critical in nature. We believe we have something to offer to anthropology in part because of similarities we see between the current contest over epistemology in science and the last century’s contest over biblical faith in the Christian scholarly community (Franks 1998). In fact, the destabilizing hermeneutical process currently being experienced in the social sciences had its nascence in Protestant theological history and discourse beginning with the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher in philosophical hermeneutics (Thiselton 1992). Having come through that development in theology, we believe that real understanding is possible across narratives in the social sciences as well.
Liberalism and anthropology’s instrumental task
In terms of its instrumental task, anthropology has largely embraced the political philosophy of “socially democratic liberalism” (Geertz’s term).3 Anthropologists do not typically share liberalism’s construction of the individual and certainly not its defense of capitalism, but they do share its moral values on freedom and equality, and they generally support and promote its projects such as democracy, human rights, and tolerance. The classical promise of liberalism is that, through reason-based negotiation of interests in the public square, a moral order will be constructed in which different cultural enclaves can coexist peaceably. All this makes liberalism seem generous in its treatment of alternate points of view. In practice, however, liberalism’s claim to a transcendent perspective and superior set of values has dominated the Western public square since the church held that role, and its hegemony in academic discourse is nearly complete.
Despite his own commitment to the philosophy, Geertz takes his fellow liberals to task for their unwillingness to recognize their position as one among many:
Those who would … promote the cause [of socially democratic liberalism] … need to recognize its culturally specific origins and its culturally specific character. They need … we need … most especially to recognize that in attempting to advance it more broadly in the world, we will find ourselves confronting not just blindnes...
