Years ago the anthropologist Akbar Ahmad argued for a specific “Islamic anthropology,” one that merged the principles of anthropology with those of his religious faith. An orthodox believer who accepts the Quran as the literal word of God, like the Evangelical Christian who insists the original Biblical texts were verbally inspired by God, is not free to see the world as it presents itself. Theology, no matter of which religion, is concerned with making sense of the world through a predefined frame that cannot be challenged, not being open to the diversity of human beliefs and behavior. This kind of cut-and-paste approach to study of humanity is an unequal yoke from the start.
In accessing the AAA website recently, I was surprised to see an advertisement for an MA in “Theological and Cultural Anthropology” advertised as “a faith-based approach to anthropology.” It seems, the program suggests, that in a single year, the “primary theories and concepts in anthropology, as articulated by the most renowned anthropologists, are critically examined and put into dialogue with excellent theological thinking.” There is even a course entitled “Faith-based Ethnographic Methods.” I recognize that there are many brands and strands of anthropology, and not just in the Americas, but the notion of a theological anthropology strikes me as an extraordinary oxymoron.
It is obvious that the use of theological for this MA is entirely Christian and a particular Evangelical form. I recognize that individual anthropologists can identify with any number of religious persuasions, but if there is one common element in the long and diverse history of our discipline, it is that anthropology is thoroughly secular and not linked to any specific religion or theology. The same Edward Tylor who gave us a starting holistic definition of culture also provided a naturalistic explanation for the origin of all religion. Anthropology can be exploited to promote specific ideological views, but the starting point cannot be a statement of faith from a religious creed. There is no anthropology that can avoid our evolutionary past, even if some nebulous Creator is seen as calling the shots from a nonempirical distance.
I have heard the argument that what we call “secular” in our discipline is really a smokescreen for “atheist.” Whether or not an individual anthropologist is an atheist or practices any kind of religious system is not the issue. The value of anthropology and any other social or scientific discipline is that it must approach the world willing to challenge accepted wisdom, to seek the kind of evidence that can be verified to the best of our knowledge, rather than an a priori offered by a religion which demands faith in the unseen. As anthropologists we study the idea and practice of religion, but it is not our mission to fit what we seen into any pre-existing theological frame nor to convince those we study that they should convert to a specific religion other than their own.
The 19th century historian F. William Maitland once said that “anthropology will have the choice between being history and being nothing.” Writing at the time when the simplistic cultural evolutionary models of Edward Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan were being taken to task by Franz Boas, Maitland was right to criticize the lack of empirical data to support the wild claims being made. Anthropology has not morphed into history, at least in an academic sense, but neither has it become the handmaid of a religious group. Tylor’s anthropology built on Darwin’s scientific exploration of evolution, not a literal Adam and Eve, a universal Noah’s flood, nor a Tower of Babel origin for language. To suggest that the theories and methods of anthropology can be used to promote a particular religious worldview goes against the grain of the discipline. Bible translators can contribute linguistic knowledge on disappearing languages, but the idea that anthropological theory and methods can aid conversion to a conservative brand of Christianity reduces their use to propaganda.
In Evans-Pritchard’s concluding remarks to his Nuer Religion, he noted wryly that he had reached a point where anthropology ended and theology began. I suspect Evans-Pritchard, who had converted to Catholicism, did not think that anthropology should give way to theology, but that to probe any deeper into the inner world of individual consciousness would lead one into the subjective mine field of the theologian. An individual anthropologist can certainly be a theist, but he or she cannot really be a theologian without denying the very rationale for the discipline.
Daniel Martin Varisco is President of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies. He is Research Professor of Social Science at Qatar U. Since 1978 he has conducted ethnographic and historical research in Yemen, Egypt and Qatar. His latest book is Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (U of Washington Press, 2007). He currently serves as editor of Contemporary Islam and Editor-in-Chief of CyberOrient (www.cyberorient.net).