Traditioning Disciples

The Contributions of Cultural Anthropology to Ecclesial Identity

Colleen Mary Mallon OP, PhD

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781608990887
  9781498254922
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630876456
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

In a globalized world and an "age that cannot name itself," how do Christian communities sustain a recognizable gospel identity? How might examining tradition and identity formation from both theology and cultural anthropology help churches approach the challenges of being a follower of Jesus today? With these questions in focus, Colleen Mallon studies symbol systems in the works of anthropologists Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, and Clifford Geertz and places her findings in dialogue with a "thick description" of discipleship gleaned from the great Roman Catholic ecclesiologist Yves Congar, OP. The result is a reflection on gospel identity that will be invaluable to Christian ministers, missioners, and students of theology interested in the social and theological processes of disciple formation.

1

Towards Naming the Present

Various disciplines have attempted to describe the present moment. Whether characterized as “tiempos mixtos”1 or polycentric, the implications of current discourse point towards a world of heightened complexity where marginalized and oppressed voices emerge, resist, reclaim, and rename the present. To paraphrase social theorist Michael Featherstone, the West is now confronted by the “the Rest.” This context challenges past understandings of social identity and traditions. While historical consciousness and ideological critique unmask the so-called autonomous, Enlightenment subject, current studies in cultural anthropology call into question essentialist understandings of ethnicity. Simultaneously, the resurgence of particular ethnic and religious enmities, often centuries old in duration, highlight the tenacity and endurance of social memories. In this light, can the symbolic sources of social identity be reduced to mere “invention,” the constructed results of various and powerful economic and political forces?

This descriptive overview offers representative anthropological and theological perspectives on the contested character of human belonging and the problem posed by the notion of tradition by drawing out some of the more distinctive threads shaping the contours of the historical present. In effect, this chapter presents the reader with a series of postmodern snapshots, each frame offering both perspective and insight. More kaleidoscope than collage, this chapter will draw out distinctive themes engaging the postmodern present in order to contextualize this study.

The first half of the chapter examines how current studies in cultural anthropology understand the task of ethnography and the challenges associated with the ongoing study of traditions, social identity, and social change. The second half of the chapter examines the current theological milieu, giving particular focus to “disputed questions” surrounding the nature of Christian theology within a pluralistic, globalized world. As with all rational disciplines, social science and theology share in the legacy and aftermath of the Enlightenment. Modernity and postmodernity are major themes woven throughout this chapter.

Towards Naming the Present: Cultural Anthropology

In order to flesh out the diversity of views in cultural anthropology, I investigate the perspectives of James Clifford, Michael Featherstone, and Talal Asad, giving an overview of their understandings of the task of cultural anthropology in the light of the current “crisis of representation.”2 James Clifford’s post-Geertzian perspective points out the radical situatedness of ethnographic writing and calls into question notions of culture as unified, homogenous, and continuous. Michael Featherstone’s analysis of the effect of globalization on modern and postmodern conceptions of culture calls for a critical reappraisal of the underlying assumptions informing the perception of a unified modernity versus a plural postmodernity. Finally, Talal Asad’s postcolonial critique exposes the manner in which Western conceptions of history-as-progress, inherently shaped by Christian teleology, inform the tacit presuppositions of contemporary postmodern ethnographers, thus, implicating the liberal discourse of difference and displacement. Each theorist, in response to the present “crisis,” offers distinctive views and identifies important ramifications for understanding social identity.

James Clifford

In Predicament of Culture, James Clifford describes the task of anthropology as a profoundly complex enterprise, the result of multiple intersections of cultural traditions.

Ultimately my topic is a pervasive condition of off-centeredness in a world of distinct meaning systems, a state of being in culture while looking at culture, a form of personal and collective self-fashioning. The predicament—not limited to scholars, writers, artists, or intellectuals—responds to the twentieth century’s unprecedented overlay of traditions.3

Accordingly, the exotic is no longer found at great distance. Indeed, “the ‘exotic’ is uncannily close.”4 The mixing of peoples as a result of voluntary or forced migration, travel, and via media channels compresses distance while simultaneously heightening difference. As will be seen in the development of this chapter, the renewed interest in difference is both applauded and viewed with suspicion. The flux of traditions, traveling in what has been described as cultural flows,5 has a destabilizing effect, calling into question social identity and the cultural sources from which communities construe (or construct) identity. From Clifford’s perspective the notion of an essentialized other is no longer tenable. “‘Cultural’ difference is no longer a stable, exotic otherness; self-other relations are matters of power and rhetoric rather than of essence. A whole structure of expectations about authenticity in culture and in art is thrown in doubt.”6

This new globalized terrain is far more than geographical in scope and nature. Ultimately the task of the ethnographer can be characterized as one of recording the glimpses of a participant observer. Once considered a much more unified and transparent science, cultural anthropology has repositioned the ethnographic lens, casting about introspective glances to expose the not-so-disinterested presuppositions of the ethnographer-scribe.7 While some find the new stance more biographical of the scientist than descriptive of the would-be subject of inquiry, the postmodern predicament demands a new, disabused understanding of power/knowledge and its function in the ethnographer-informant relationship. Can the ethnographer authentically describe and analyze the cultural system of a particular people? Who among the informants is the authentic voice of the group? Whose story matters and how does the ethnographer choose from among possible informants? These questions chasten any naïve sense that what is ultimately chosen for observation and analysis by the ethnographer is somehow free from the issues of power and interest.

I began to see such questions as a pervasive postcolonial crisis of ethnographic authority. While the crisis has been felt most strongly by formerly hegemonic Western discourses, the questions it raises are of global significance. Who has the authority to speak for a group’s identity or authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture? How do self and other clash and converse in the encounters of ethnography, travel, modern interethnic relations? What narratives of development, loss, and innovation can account for the present range of local oppositional movements?8

Clifford maintains that the new emerging subjects of ethnography are authoring cultural histories that resist easy transcription. These emerging histories require new ways of telling.9 There is no one, single path of proceeding because there are “several hybrid and subversive forms of cultural representation, forms that prefigure an inventive future.”10 This new terrain is least served by a sovereign, universally applied methodology. While it may not be possible for ethnographic writing to completely avoid re...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• American Society of Missiology Monograph Series
• Chapter 1: Towards Naming the Present
• Chapter 2: The Notion of Tradition in Roman Catholicism
• Chapter 3: Interpretative Anthropology
• Chapter 4: Yves Congar on Christian Discipleship
• Chapter 5: Traditioning Disciples
• Conclusion
• Bibliography