Introduction

This introductory chapter outlines the basic premises underlying—as well as the origins of—the book’s argument: anthropology has had a complex and potentially vital relationship with its other, theology. Reviewing the ways anthropology has comprised an ethical quest—responding to and constituting a crisis of theistic proportions (“death of God”)—this chapter advances the utility of applying an anthropological exercise on anthropology: regarding itself from the standpoint of an other, reflected in a theological “mirror.” It also justifies the book’s method of mining anthropology’s biographical register for understanding the discipline’s complex secular making and concludes with an itinerary of the book’s chapters.

Conclusions

Reviewing the ways this book examines anthropology’s fraught and contradictory relationship with theology and the potential the latter offers for revitalizing the former, this chapter extends this book’s exercise of critique. Examining anthropology’s fealty to secular sovereign reason, and by extension the sovereign state, it questions the discipline’s fear of revelation. Should anthropology reintegrate revelation, not only within its catalogue of topics for examination, but with its very own reason, it could attune to reason’s fragility, acquire an alertness to integrative capacities disavowed by the modern university, and more fully consider infinite multiplicity. In reconstructing paths back to “Athens” and “Jerusalem,” as well as beyond, we could wonder not only, “what is different?” but also “what is?”

Thoth

Heuristically evoking Thoth, an ancient Egyptian god of wisdom, architecture, crafts, and “science,” this chapter explores the ways anthropologists work to immure their discipline from its banished other, theology. Asking readers to imagine a proverbial “geodesic dome” housing anthropodom—anthropology constructed as a secular science—it discusses five types of “panes” that anthropologists “lay” in constructing their “home.” Derived from anthropology’s biographical and disciplinary registers, these panes safeguard anthropology from the threatening “theosphere” in order to secure its secular reason and its membership in the modern university. Pitting itself against theology grants anthropology a certain unity and identity, defining “what it is” by claiming “what it is not.”

Hubal

Heuristically evoking Hubal, an ancient Arabian god of the moon, the unknown, and divination, this chapter employs idolatry, a central category of critique from monotheistic theology, to explore ways in which anthropology falls prey to disorientations, conflations, and unwarranted concessions in its study of multiplicity. Concerned with a particular form of idolatry whereby the finite is taken for the infinite, entailing confusion about ends worthy of a life’s devotion, this chapter examines how “culture” and its cognates function as idols in anthropodom. It argues that by conceding to secular state power, and ultimately to principles of sovereignty, anthropology becomes complicit in a wider idolatry that unnecessarily limits its very capacities of reason.

Eucharist

Heuristically evoking the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, this chapter undertakes a counterargument to Chapter 1, asserting that anthropology in fact also preserves theology. In proverbial, genealogical, and analogical ways, anthropologists breach the very dome they construct, refracting some “harmful theospheric rays” while reflecting others. Excavating the theistic roots of anthropology’s concepts and practices, most notably its consummate practice of fieldwork, this chapter reveals the ways in which ethnographic immersion essentially betrays loyalty to Enlightenment dictates on reason by endeavoring to immerse the knower in that desired to be known, as well as enable a very theistic pursuit to “know thyself.”