Please note that due to software, not everything recorded in this transcript will be accurate.

Anthropology

Researcher Al ordering a coffee

Studio – John Dickson

That’s Researcher Al ordering a mocha of all things at a recent Undeceptions team workday in Sydney. You can tell a lot about a person based on their coffee order. In fact, according to a headline from Mamamia, ‘Your coffee order tells me everything I need to know about YOU’. So, according to this article Al is “extroverted and the life of the party, but still has some growing up to do!” Ha … that checks out!! Then we’ve got Director Mark’s order …

Director Mark ordering coffee

Studio – John Dickson

According to Mamamia’s “Tea Horoscope”, Mark’s very pedantic order makes him a “lady face” and a “reliable do-gooder” who “always leaves for work five minutes earlier than necessary”.  That’s … disproven!  And then finally, we have Producer Kaley.

Producer Kaley ordering coffee

Studio – John Dickson

Now, a Gingerbread Latte is such a weird order that Mamamia hasn’t got anything to say about it! But normally, Producer Kaley is a fan of Lattes. That apparently means she’s a fan of morning routines, “prefers life to be straightforward”, and “(the) simple things in life make (her) happy (like her morning routine)”.  That sort of fits. My coffee? Well, I don’t really buy coffee in America—sorry— I make my own, with my own machine, at home and at the Wheaton office. My go to is definitely the piccolo—which you can’t even order in the US.  Like the piccolo flute, it’s the small version of the classic latte. It’s a 30ml espresso pour with about 60ml of steamed milk. No, that’s not a US cortado, which is equal measures of espresso and milk. The piccolo is precise, intense, and much quicker (to make and drink) than a normal latte. What that says about me … I’ve no idea … but we’ve linked to those articles in the show notes so you can see how your coffee (or tea) order compares. 

Producer Kaley:

Hey, producer Kaley here. The Mamamia article doesn’t have anything to say about Piccolo’s specifically – but it does have this to say about people who drink Espressos (essentially a Piccolo but without the milk): They generally “have a strong personality, and can teach people a lesson or two about assertiveness … but while (they) always get what they put their mind to, sometimes they might be a bit ‘much’ for people.” I won’t comment any further on whether or not I agree with that ….

Studio – John Dickson

The point, though, in case you were wondering if there was one: is that there is an entire cultural phenomenon over the last two decades around “specialty coffee”.  One site called Anthropology in Practice recently observed that since the turn of the century:

Reading

Coffee (has become) more personal and more accessible. The group that the market feared it had lost, the 20 – 29 year olds, had been netted. People began to drink coffee because it meant something to them: a flavour for everyone, a style for every lifestyle—we have methodically been taught to socialize over coffee, to look for a boost in productivity from this drink. We’re identified by the brand that we drink, by the coffee houses we frequent, and by the process by which the beans are grown and harvested.

Studio – John Dickson

How coffee became a mode of self-expression and socialisation is just one question studied by anthropologists. Anthropology, at its heart, is the study of human culture, and why we all act in certain ways. At a micro level, that’s asking what’s behind our coffee orders. At the MACRO level, anthropologists are interested in questions like where the obsession with coffee first came from or how it became arguably the most valuable legally traded commodity in the world (after oil). Antony Wild in his book Black Gold: A dark history of Coffee wrote:

“Plots have been hatched, blood spilled and governments toppled to keep your mug filled with fresh espresso.” 

As important as an episode on coffee might be, this is not that episode. We’re interested in anthropology and its focus on belief systems in social context. Anthropologists strive to see close-up how, for example, religious beliefs evolved over time – the similarities and differences in belief systems of different cultures. The possible origins of our beliefs and practices. And what it all tells us about universal humanity. Anthropology has morphed over time, but its impact on how we see things, especially religion, is significant. The so-called ‘Father of Anthropology’, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor abandoned his Christian faith, declaring all religions “were based on the crude animalistic theories of savages”. It was an anthropologist who first pointed out that some of the stories in the Bible sounded similar to stories one could find in other ancient cultures. And it’s from anthropology that we get the idea that religion represents a primitive form of human development … which must give way to a more advanced and enlightened pattern of meaning. Anthropology is the study of what makes us human. It’s right there on the label: ἄνθρωπος / human. And one common perception of this discipline—certainly one I’d picked up, until talking to my guests today—is that anthropology is arguably the most anti-Christian of all the disciplines. Being the study of humanity, so the cliche goes, there can be little room in anthropology for gods and spirits, other than as cultural projections of basic human desires. I’ve been putting off an episode on this topic, because I hadn’t found the right books or guests to give us the inside story on the anthropologists … but – we found them. I’m John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson:
Just tell me what you had for breakfast so that I can get a good level on this mic.

Tim Larsen:
I had an everything bagel with butter.

 John Dickson:
Okay.

Tim Larsen:
And black coffee.

Studio – John Dickson

That’s my guest Tim Larsen. His coffee choice of a long black apparently makes him someone who “enjoys colour-coded Excel docs and will show it off to anyone who seems like they care” – that’s according to that coffee study, by the way. It doesn’t capture this Renaissance man! Tim is a colleague of mine here at Wheaton – his office is up on level five where the smart people live. He’s a historian of ideas and the McManis Professor of Christian Thought. He’s also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute. His book The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith is an excellent guide for today’s topic. 

 Tim Larsen:
So anthropology, at the simplest definition, is the study of humanity, but its roots are really in the idea that there are exotic other cultures, especially so-called primitive cultures, that might unlock some secrets about being human if we were to study them.  So it began with this very much, uh, sense of a gaze on the other, and especially the so-called primitive other. It’s very much coming out of a colonial or imperial context. So the British Empire, I studied primarily Britain, and so I know the British story best, but there are versions of it for other countries, is in Africa, it’s in Asia, it’s in huge chunks of the world, you know, the sun never sets on the British Empire. And so that makes the British ruling class have a need to say we need to understand these people that we’re trying to control. So can somebody give us an insight into how they think, how they’re motivated, how they behave? And so I think there’s a natural confluence there between those two things, that there is a desire from the government to have information and then there are the natural curiosity of scholars that say, well, I’m pretty interested in that. I’m, you know, just for its own sake, I’m, I’ve always wondered about, let’s say, marriage patterns or the ways that tools have developed or whatever it is. And so you have those two things starting to converge together and funding happening to make that kind of research possible.

Christine Jeske:
So, um, I think of anthropology as study of humans, as the name would suggest. Specifically, we look at human culture.

Studio – John Dickson:

And that’s my other guest – Christine Jeske,  an Associate Professor of Anthropology also here at Wheaton. She’s a real life anthropologist. Before coming to Wheaton’s hallowed halls, she worked all over the world, with stints in China, Nicaragua, and South Africa. That’s the perfect anthropological CV. I asked Christine for her coffee order, by the way. She said she’d stopped drinking coffee because it was giving her headaches, so she’s on green tea instead! Until that tragedy though she was a mocha latte human. Researcher Al felt validated. 

Christine Jeske:
One thing people often don’t know about anthropology is that it includes four sub-disciplines, at least in how Americans think of anthropology, which includes archaeology. So sometimes people hear I’m an anthropologist and they’re like, Oh, have you heard about that interesting dig in Israel or something? And I’ll say no, because I do cultural anthropology, which is another sub-discipline of it, which is looking at usually present-day culture. And then, uh, there’s physical anthropology, which is looking at ancient remains of people or present-day remains, but looking at sort of the physical aspects of bodies and what that tells us about culture. And then the other aspect is linguistics. So it includes all those. One catchphrase that sometimes helps people understand what anthropologists do is not from an anthropologist, from a philosopher, but the, the phrase is “making the familiar strange and the strange familiar”. So we study, uh, people who are very near to us and familiar to us and see what’s strange about that. And we look at people who might initially seem strange and see what is normal and familiar about that.

John Dickson:
Yeah, because we all just assume that the way we do things is the way all things should be done everywhere at all times, right? So anthropology stops and says, why is that? Yes. What is that? Et cetera, et cetera. How does it differ from sociology? I mean, they seem to my mind related, but how would you say they’re different?

Christine Jeske:
So they have a lot of common theory and there is so much overlap. We both draw on a lot of the initial influential theorists like, uh, max Faber, Emil Durkheim, Karl Marx, W. E. B. Du Bois. And so we’re both thinking about society, how it works, how humans make the decisions that they make in the context of society. Historically where it diverged was anthropologists started out studying non-Western societies. And so it was this, uh, Um, answering the questions that European and white American colonizers were asking about the world. How do these strange people do the things that they do? And over time, it became very self critical of that. And, uh, now today, anthropologists study people anywhere, everywhere, including their own cultures. So I have done research in South Africa, which is not where I was raised. I’ve also done research on white American Protestant Christians, which is totally a description of myself.

Studio – John Dickson

There are lots of different ways of doing anthropology – different lenses for looking at humans. In some ways, it’s like critical theory – we did a whole episode on that can of worms with Christopher Watkin a while back, episode 80 (link in the show notes). What critical theory does for intellectual ideas, anthropology does for entire cultures. It asks, What’s behind this pattern of life? What does it say about the inner workings of the humans involved?

 John Dickson:
Tell us about the father of anthropology, Edward Tylor, and in particular his three stages of progress.

Tim Larsen:
Yes. So he was raised a very devout Quaker, and there’s a lot of Quaker instincts that get smuggled into his anthropology, even though he is pretty agnostic as an anthropologist. So he thinks he’s shed his faith, but he’s kept a lot of the instincts of a Quaker about seeing the world, even though he is not self-identifying as a Quaker or probably as a Christian anymore. So he’s certainly become more. cagey about that. So he is the father of anthropology. And at this time, there was a huge assumption of progress. People thought of history in terms of progress. And of course, they thought of the white European As the apex of progress, this is where humanity has been heading, and we’re at the top of it.  And so you have all of these statal schemes, schemes that talk about going through different stages. A French thinker who wasn’t an anthropologist, but was very influential, Auguste Comte, talked about there being a religious stage and a metaphysical stage, and then a positive or scientific stage. And what is kind of sneaky about those kind of schemes is it feels like an argument, but it’s actually just an assertion. So you’ve just made up like three things and put them in a row, uh, and so you haven’t proven anything. You haven’t

 John Dickson :
There are the things I don’t like, the things I’m okay with, and the things I like.

Tim Larsen:
Exactly. And now you can find out where you are and if you’re in the wrong place, then you’re just behind the times and you’re too primitive. So Tylor is thinking this way, but he does it in his kind of version of anthropology and he has the savage, the barbaric, and the civilized. And of course, he represents the civilized, uh, but there around the world are people who are barbaric, are savage, and he imagines that that will tell us about the origins of human thinking and some of the problems that we have today because we have lingering savage holdovers that we need to deal with.

John Dickson:
And is religion one of them?

Tim Larsen:
Exactly you got there. Yes. So, so in that scheme, religion is something that is part of a savage mentality. So, um, for early anthropologists, everybody in the same stage has the same mentality. It’s sort of like the kind of, uh, and they talk about savages as children a lot. So it’s kind of like the stages of child development. And so religion is essentially a childlike as in a savage, early primitive way of thinking for human beings, but it gets stuck. Um, Tylor calls them, um, survivals. Survival is something that doesn’t make sense to modern, civilized, logical, rational human beings, but it’s just kind of hanging around by sheer conservatism. And so it no longer has a rationale, but it’s just here, and we need to see it for what it is. 

Studio – John Dickson

This idea of ‘survivals’ is really important in the thinking of Edward Tylor – the father of anthropology.  “Survivals” are the cultural phenomena that outlive the conditions in which they developed. Take a banal example. Pottery. Once upon a time, people made their pots out of clay. That doesn’t make much sense any more because we have far more durable materials and methods for making our crockery. But still, lots of us love clay things because they’re quaint and cosy despite the practical limitations. For Tylor, religion was also a “survival”. Quaint. Cosy. But no longer necessary. It’s a remnant from a less developed time. 

John Dickson:
Was he a contributor to that classic view that there’s some sort of war between science and religion?  Which emerges in that same time frame. But did his schema help that do you think?

Tim Larsen:
Absolutely. It’s another version of it. Anthropology thinks of itself as a science, and it’s kind of another way of bringing evidence and a discipline in. Part of that warfare that I think people don’t often understand is it was professional turf warfare. In Britain at that time, in almost every position where you can get a salary and do anything scholarly, you had to be ordained a professor. or at least in the Church of England and sign the Statement of Faith of the Church of England. If you taught in a good school like, you know, Eton or Harrow, if you, uh, had a fellowship at Oxford or Cambridge, almost any position you could think of where you needed to get a salary and people did science was connected to the church. And so part of what the warfare model was is saying, actually, if you’re ordained, you can’t do science because you’re biased. Therefore, you people have to leave these positions. And give them to us, which the people were on the outside who were like, I need a job, and I need a salary, but I can’t sign this statement of faith, and I don’t know how to get one. And so the argument was, it’s only true science if you don’t believe, then you are a scientist. And they made that argument precisely in order to make room for themselves to get these jobs. 

 John Dickson :
Why does the study of anthropology have this reputation for being, I don’t know, the most godless of all the disciplines? I mean, I met an anthropologist the other day who said to me, uh, you know, I teach anthropology but I actually am a Christian believer. It’s like, uh, it sort of, uh,  named the caricature of the anthropologist. Why, why does it have this reputation? 

Tim Larsen:
Yeah, so there’s multiple threads, um, and to begin with, of course, there is this initial intellectual reason, that presumption that religion is inherently outdated and something that humanity needs to shed in order to become civilized. What is fascinating about that is nobody believes that as an anthropologist anymore. That is a completely discredited way of thinking. They see it as, uh, ethnocentric and, uh, racist and colonial. All the things that anthropologists very much stand against are baked into that view and yet somehow they lost the reason why they were anti, uh, anti religious but didn’t lose the anti religion. It was like, we, we, we are against religion but the, the reason why, became discredited and nevertheless the result was

 John Dickson :
it’s just a tradition.

 Tim Larsen:
So that’s a kind of survival in a tower

 John Dickson :
Oh my goodness boom, a survival. We go all the way back to the beginning.

 Tim Larsen:
So that’s that’s one thread… there’s a personal thread many of them saw their own life story as seeing through the narrowness of the culture that they had come from, the people who had raised them. They were broad-minded, they were intellectually vivacious and curious and, and adventurous. And so that often took the foil of people who were Christians who were part of their growing up.

Christine Jeke:
Anthropology was born around the late 1800s at this time when there was the secularization thesis that was just assumed by so many people, which is to say, they assumed that religion would die out and modern humans would overcome religion and not need it anymore.

READING

“But the comparative study of the beliefs and institutions of mankind is fitted to be much more than a means of satisfying an enlightened curiosity and of furnishing materials for the researches of the learned. Well handled, it may become a powerful instrument to expedite progress if it lays bare certain weak spots in the foundations on which modern society is built – if it shows that much which we are wont to regard as solid rests on the sands of superstition rather than on the rock of nature.
It is indeed a melancholy and in some respects a thankless task to strike at the foundations of beliefs in which, as in a strong tower, the hopes and aspirations of humanity through long ages have sought a refuge from the storm and stress of life.Yet sooner or later it is inevitable that the battery of the comparative method should breach these venerable walls, mantled over with the ivy and mosses and wild flowers of a thousand tender and sacred associations. At present we are only dragging the guns into position : they have hardly yet begun to speak. The task of building up into fairer and more enduring forms the old structures so rudely shattered is reserved for other hands, perhaps for other and happier ages. We cannot foresee, we can hardly even guess, the new forms into which thought and society will run in the future. Yet this uncertainty ought not to induce us, from any consideration of expediency or regard for antiquity, to spare the ancient moulds, however beautiful, when these are proved to be out-worn. Whatever comes of it, wherever it leads us, we must follow truth alone. It is our only guiding star :hoc signo vinces.”

Studio – John Dickson:

That’s an extract from the preface of the second edition of James Frazer’s famous and controversial book – The Golden Bough. The Golden Bough was published in 1890 and established James Frazer as one of the leading anthropologists of his time, following in the footsteps of Edward Tylor. Frazer proposed that human societies develop through stages: first a reliance on the magical, then the religious, and finally on the scientific. As he surveyed the rites and beliefs of different cultures, Frazer also identified what he believed to be recurrent motifs in so-called ‘primitive religion’, that reflect a universal pattern about how humans see the world and our connection to nature and its cycles. Frazer saw Christianity as just a more civilised refinement of the primitive pagan religions that predate it.  For example, Frazer argues that the ritual killing of a god in human form has been a central feature of the vast majority of the world’s religions since time immemorial. 

Tim Larsen:
The Golden Bough is a hoot of a book. It is just a magpie collection of all kinds of mythologies and rituals from so many different cultures and time periods and parts of the world. And he sees patterns throughout all of these things. He thinks it all connects if you can follow the thread. It was an enormously exciting book. It was a highly influential book in ways, uh, that it’s hard to grasp today. He thinks it is magic and then religion and then science. Um, and he is trying to uncover these, again, primitive ways of thinking that are still lingering around.

 John Dickson:
Yeah, it’s a kind of, um, parallelomania. Um, there was a famous New Testament studies article called Parallelomania, um, which criticized a lot of New Testament scholars for trying to find parallels in every other religious tradition that relates to something to do with the New Testament and saying, “aha, influence”. He sort of does that, doesn’t he? With, with religion.

 Tim Larsen:
Absolutely, and

Studio – John Dickson

That article, by the way, is from 1962 by Dr Samuel Sandmel, a Jewish New Testament scholar who spent his life looking at the similarities and differences between Judaism and Christianity, as well as different kinds of Judaism and different kinds of Christianity. He says he got the term ‘parallelomania’ from a French scholar but he gave his own concrete definition for biblical studies: “We might for our purposes define parallelomania as that extravagance among scholars which first overdoes the supposed similarity in passages and then proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying literary connection flowing in an inevitable or predetermined direction.” We’ll link to the article in the show notes. He called this scholarly habit a “disease” that spreads wildly whenever new texts or artefacts are found, especially, he pointed out, with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Sandmel’s point was that not every similarity is real. It can just be our pattern-seeking minds at play. And even where the similarities are  … similar … that doesn’t mean they are significant or that there was any borrowing between cultures and texts. Once you know about this concept of parallelomania, you start to see it everyone — not just in scholarship, but in cultural analysis, media reporting, and much more. Then again, maybe spotting parellelomania everywhere can be a form of parallelomania!! Back to Tim and his description of James Frazer’s Golden Bough … 

Tim Larsen:
It is kind of maddening to read because he also will say, well, this crucial part of it is left out, but we know this part is a feature of this whole process because we can find it in this completely different culture somewhere else, you know? And so it’s like, you can’t see the main thing in the middle of this one culture here in Africa, for example, but he’ll just throw in something from Japan and say, now you can see the pattern that I want you to see.

John Dickson :
Yeah. So, so for instance, the resurrection of Jesus is, is really just a, like a fertility cult or a, um, um, a corn cult. It’s, it’s death and rising. They’re all the same thing.

 Tim Larsen:
Absolutely. Uh, uh, it’s a corn cult. He is Victorian enough, um, to be not too explicit about sexuality. And so, so there’s a lot of vegetables in the Golden Bough. But the point is it’s about fertility. And yes, he imagines that there is a connection between, uh, a dying and a rising god and, you know, the crops dying and coming back in the annual cycle and the need for that to happen. So the sacrifice as a way of eliciting the, favor of, of nature to bring about fruition.

Studio – John Dickson

In 1937, an English newspaper ran a rather extravagant article about James Frazer titled ‘He discovered why you believe what you do.’ According to revered classicist Mary Beard from Cambridge, there was widespread adoration and idealisation of Frazer in the 20s and 30s. She attributes much of Frazer’s – and The Golden Bough’s – popularity to its theme of exploration and travel rather than genuine intellectual impact. But ironically, Frazer had never visited most of the countries or witnessed the customs or rituals that he described. The anthropology of the 19th century was very much an armchair anthropology – he sat for hours every day in the Wren Library in Trinity College Cambridge, pouring over books on which he based his work. Other scholars, like Robert Fraser (no relation), argue that the appeal of The Golden Bough was that it addressed “deep religious anxieties” in his culture. The Golden Bough doesn’t say a word about Jesus of Nazareth, but still the message was clear: the similarities among religions are too big to ignore. They are imperfect understandings of the natural cycle of birth, growth, death, and rebirth. Robert Ackerman, who wrote a biography of Frazer, calls him “one of the most important advocates of secularism in the English-speaking world in the twentieth century”. It’s this anti-religious aspect of Frazer’s work that has continued to draw people to The Golden Bough long after its anthropological thesis has been discredited. Scholars have picked apart the flaws in Frazer’s methodology, listed in detail the inaccuracies in his research, and criticised his “overly universaling tendencies”.  And yet, this kind of comparative religion is still a hugely popular idea that sells a lot of books in airports. People have constantly tried to tie Christianity to other belief systems – for example, some have claimed Christianity is just a front for the cult of the Greek God Mithras, a re-brand of Zoroastrianism, or even an alternative to the Roman Emperor cult  … I could go on.

But I’d rather not! 

Check the show notes for a Q&A episode we did where I discuss “comparative Jesus” questions. Frazer introduced anthropology to a mass audience, but anthropology itself was about to change completely.  Stick around.

Media – Witchcraft among the Azande

Studio – John Dickson

That’s from the documentary series Strangers Abroad, produced in 1980 by Central Television and funded by the UK’s Royal Anthropological Institute. One of its episodes focused on the work of our next anthropologist, Evans Pritchard, who was one of the first anthropologists to actually spend time amongst the people he was studying – the Azande people of Central Africa. 

 John Dickson:
I want to talk to the, uh, about the best named anthropologist who is Edward Evan Evans Pritchard. I mean, let’s just pause and soak  that up. That is not a typo. That is not a Dickson stumble. Edward Evan Evans Pritchard.

 Tim Larsen:
You could even add sir at the front if you wanted to.

 John Dickson :
Am I right that he, he sort of stepped out of the ivory tower, uh, all this kind of armchair pontificating about reality and actually went on to the. into the field. Um, what did he do? Where did he go? What was his focus?

Tim Larsen:
Yeah, so that transition is important because, as you’re saying, up until now, Fraser, Tyler, they are reading reports from people who are living in these areas, but they’re not actually doing any original work themselves. One of the ironies of that work is that it almost always came from missionaries. And if they didn’t like something, they would say it’s biased because they’re a missionary. But if they liked it, they would just use it. So there’s this very unscientific way they’re handling the evidence secondhand. So anthropology comes to a point where field work becomes the best practice. You have to actually go and do it yourself. And you have to stay there long enough to really figure out how this culture works, what people value, what they’re doing, see the process unfold over time. So Evans Pritchard does that. He does that particularly in the South Sudan. What he discovers, which is so kind of fascinating and turns this story from what we’ve done so far, is that these are not irrational, unscientific kind of illogical savages, that these are cultures that have a great deal of internal logic and rationality to what they’re doing and how they’re behaving.

 John Dickson:
In what way did he change the field? I mean, after he went out in the field, did everyone then think, ‘Oh, you have to go out in the field now since he’s done it?’

 Tim Larsen:
Yes, it literally became a requirement. You couldn’t get a doctorate without without doing it. Um, it is essential to what it meant to be an anthropologist. And of course anthropologists love to turn kind of, um, the things that they find in the field back on themselves. So it became, of course, a rite of passage. What it meant to turn yourself into an anthropologist was to have done field

John Dickson :
Am I right though that he, um, ended up becoming a firm Christian believer of some kind, I mean, a Catholic or, um, anyway, he, he, he converted. Um, how, why, what, and um, how did that influence his career after that?

 Tim Larsen:
Yes, he is a very established, successful anthropologist, in Oxford, and he will say, like, tell you this in retrospect, that, like, the unwritten code was, you have to be secular to be an anthropologist. This is what everybody is in the field. It’s a kind of culture of the club. We don’t believe in God. We’re anthropologists, you know? 

READING 

All the leading sociologists and anthropologists contemporaneous with, or since, Frazer were agnostics and positivists … and if they discussed religion they treated it as superstition for which some scientific explanation was required and could be supplied. Almost all the leading anthropologists of my own generation would, I believe, hold that religious faith is total illusion, a curious phenomenon soon to become extinct and to be explained in such terms as ‘compensation’ and ‘projection’ or by some sociologistic interpretation on the lines of maintenance of social solidarity … Religion is superstition to be explained by anthropologists, not something an anthropologist, or indeed any rational person, could himself believe in.”
E.E. Evans Pritchard, 1959 

Tim Larsen:
And so that was the way he was socialized, and he fully imbibed that. He lived a very secular life and a very secular mentality. And it just broke down to him in midlife, it was actually during World War II, and that might be possible. Reading his accounts of it, he is, um, guarded as one should be about kind of these personal sacred things, but one gets a sense that he was burdened by his own personal sin, that he was looking for a way to be cleansed and to have a fresh start, that he’d come to a point of exhaustion with how he had thought and how he had lived, And he was looking for a new way forward. He converts, he becomes a Catholic, and he continues to grow in his anthropological career. He has the most important chair in anthropology at Oxford. He’s at All Souls College, which is just a jewel of a college in the Oxford world. He writes the theory setting books for the discipline over and over again. And to me, what’s fascinating is people try very hard in the discipline to bracket his Catholicism. They want to, to just enjoy him as a theorist, but minimize, marginalize, not take seriously his faith.

John Dickson :
So did it affect him or did this bracketing actually clear the path for him to keep going?

 Tim Larsen:
It’s a kind of willful blindness. If you read his books, he’s just openly quoting scripture and theologians, like quoting theologians in it. Anthropological monographs being published by university presses. So it’s not a secret. He’s not hiding his faith. People just refuse to take it seriously, to engage with it. So they think they’re finding in him, uh, what they want to find in terms of anthropological theory. But he’s finding all these other things that are spiritual insights that they’re not interested in hearing, but just kind of. Let’s just carry on and kind of give a tacit, kind of ignoring of it is what most that can happen.

Studio – John Dickson

In his anthropological studies, Evans Pritchard (or I should say Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard) championed the notion that people groups that had previously been labelled as ‘savages’ or ‘primitive’ were not “pre-logical” but actually deeply rational. His study of the Azande and the Nuer peoples of Southern Sudan showed for the first time “how a pre-literate people’s apparently irrational beliefs about witchcraft could form a coherent system of ideas. Those ideas, in context, made good sense as a means both of thinking about misfortune and of doing something about it.” It didn’t sound at all like “primitive thinking”. Evans Pritchard challenged the argument of Frazer and Tylor that religion was a “survival” from an ignorant age, being carried unnecessarily into the modern, advanced world. With a newfound respect for the people he was studying, Evans Pritchard could see a place for spirituality in his own life. And he wasn’t the only one.

 

 John Dickson :
The only anthropologist I’d really heard of before reading your book, um, was Mary Douglas. Was, is that just an accident or is her name really a big name in anthropology for a reason?

Tim Larsen:
Her name is absolutely a big name for a reason. She is one of, still, the kind of touchstone theorists. So she’s in no way somebody who like is now discredited, or their theory was, like, had a moment and it’s completely gone now.

John Dickson :
Unlike Fraser and Tyler,

Tim Larsen:
Yeah, totally, yes. People will still use her theory and still quote her. She’s still a kind of canonical author if you’re, you know, going through graduate school or whatever. You have to be able to interact with her. 

 John Dickson :
Yeah, and she’s a pretty serious Christian believer.

Tim Larsen:
Oh yes, and I should have said also what we were talking about. Part of why you know her name is because she kind of transcended everything. anthropology as just a public intellectual. People knew her in general in the public. She was a major thinker on a kind of wider scale.

 John Dickson :
And wrote books on Leviticus or something too,

 Tim Larsen:
She did. Absolutely.

Studio – John Dickson

Mary Douglas’ seminal work is Purity and Danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo, which she published in 1966. In it, she considers the differences between sacred and secular, clean and unclean, in different societies and times and has an entire chapter on ancient Judaism as presented in the book of Leviticus, and all its rules and regulations. Douglas was pretty public about how her faith was strengthened by her work. When asked in an interview about how she reconciled her beliefs and her work, she said:

READING

“I don’t feel God needs to be defended as much as many do; I don’t feel we need to look after God and protect him in various ways, and I feel the benefit of doing anthropology and having faith is that you can relax and let Him look after Himself and go and do the questions, holding in suspense any particular commitments, but feeling, in the end, they would be to the greater glory of God, the results. Or at least trusting Him to make it come out alright.”

Tim Larsen:
Yeah, so she, um, loves patterns. So in that sense, she is a lot like Fraser, um, doing it, uh, from a believing rather than unbelieving perspective. And so, uh, she’s all the time looking for patterns in society. And some of the ways that really caught people’s imagination was when she started talking about Catholicism herself, which she cared about deeply, and when she started talking about ancient Judaism, which, as you’ve said, will lead on eventually to her, you know, actually kind of turning towards biblical studies in some ways, which is quite surprising and amazing. So for ancient Israel in her reading, there’s a natural tendency to try to categorize things. She’s a very Durkheimian, uh, anthropologist in some ways. And so that’s the tradition that she’s in. 

Studio – John Dickson

Just quickly, Émile Durkheim was a French social scientist who had a huge influence in the early 20th century. He argued that facts have no intellectual meaning unless grouped into types and laws—a categorization method that deeply influenced Douglas. 

Tim Larsen:
And she learns from from him, partially this idea that there is categorization. And of course, if you read Genesis, you see that a lot. It begins in the beginning with separation 

John Dickson:
According to their kinds, and so on …

Tim Larsen:
Yes, land and sea, light and dark, you know, like we’re going to put things into, into their place.  And so then she comes up with a theory. This is just an example, but it’s the kind of thing that comes up. capture people’s imagination, that a lot of the unclean animals are unclean because they seem to blur a category. That they’re a creature that is both of the land and the sea. And there’s a kind of learning that you are gaining through these, um, taboos about categories. And so that is partly what’s happening in the Hebrew imagination. And it was an exciting new way to see things.

John Dickson:
A lot of scholars still think of it that way, don’t they?

Tim Larsen:
I, I have colleagues in, um, old Testament who will bring me current books and commentaries whenever they cite Mary Douglas and say, look, they’re still citing her.

John Dickson:
At the time, anthropologists thought that secularity was the evolutionary pinnacle of humanity. Uh, Douglas didn’t quite go along with that. Can you tell her, tell us how she thought about secularity?

Tim Larsen:
She saw it as a very kind of thin culture. It was, it was a taking away of meaning of symbol of the kind of texture of life. It was a dead end in lots of ways. She looked at people who were kind of very deeply raised in a very secular context and thought often they looked kind of lost and sad to her. So what is interesting about that is if you are a person of faith in this intellectual world, you’re supposed to be apologetic in, in the sense of embarrassed. And you’re supposed to kind of like say, you know, I agree with science and I’m sorry about this, but this is something that I believe. And what has really surprised me and interested me about Mary Douglas is how comfortable she was in her own skin as a believer. And so she wasn’t, um, belligerent. She wasn’t trying to, you know, berate other people, but she was just saying, you know, you look at Catholicism as something that is outmoded and oppressive and that people need to be liberated from, but I’m in a rich cosmopolitan world of meaning and I love it and I can tell you about it if you’re interested.

Studio – John Dickson

We have some bonus content on Mary Douglas just for you guys, on – of all things – sex! 

*Break*

Christine Jeske:
I was taking a lot of classes about African history, African culture, uh, Latin American economics. And so I was very interested in an inequality around the world. And it was also very tied to my faith.

Studio – John Dickson

That’s Dr Christine Jeske again, telling me a little bit about how she became an anthropologist. 

Christine Jeske:
One way I would look back on that time is say, I was trying to figure out what Jesus meant when he said, blessed are you who are  poor. And. My husband and I met in college, got married after college, spent time in the United States with a community of people that included a lot of refugees from around the world and also a Nicaraguan family. And we told them, okay, we speak some Spanish, we would be interested in living somewhere Spanish speaking, we’re interested in what God is doing among people experiencing poverty. And they said, well, come to Nicaragua. They just introduced us to friends of friends, and we ended up living in a Nicaraguan village for a year, not as part of the Peace Corps or any organization, just living there and making tortillas and weeding the coffee plantation and like just doing ordinary things with people. And seeing development organizations come and go and sort of, you know, drop off donations, and missionaries come and go and give talks and just living an ordinary life, I think, flipped my view of what it means to be an American outside of America, that we have so much to learn just among everyday people. So that was in the background. My husband and I ended up doing an MBA in economic development. So I went a business direction and a nonprofit leadership direction. We spent two years in China teaching English and then moved to South Africa to work with a microfinance organization. Three years into that, I got asked to teach a class for a seminary that was called Intercultural Communication and Anthropology. And I didn’t know what that meant, but they had a textbook. And so I read that textbook and taught with it to students from all over the African continent, and it was so fascinating and it answered, or at least I didn’t necessarily answer my questions, but I found people who were kindred spirits asking the same kinds of questions about how culture shapes, um, the efforts of development organizations. Why do poor places stay poor and rich places stay rich. And, uh, and I stuck with it. And, um, eventually realized I like teaching. I like asking people questions. I like writing. And that all fit together into a Ph. D. in Anthropology. I started studying just, just the narratives that people have around what is good work, how you should live your life well, and, uh, Well, so one of the things I realized in that research about how people think about work is that, um, development organizations, and I had worked in these development organizations. So I realized they often have this preconceived idea of what development is supposed to be. Development is, you’re supposed to have jobs and you’re supposed to make more money. And sometimes it means you’re supposed to put up like a high rise apartment building where there was one to forest. And it means all different things to different people. And so I realized, And what we need is actually a bigger term, like, does development, what does it produce? What’s the goal of development? And I found in South Africa, people often talked about the good life. What is the good life? And that’s also a philosophical term. So it worked well as an everyday word that people wanted to talk about. And so I started asking people, what is the good life? And I realized that development organizations don’t necessarily even lead to what people want out of the good life. And one thing. I realized was that when people are looking for work, they’re not just looking for money. They want all kinds of different things that fit into a good life. Um, but the, the white and western view of work is often that you just are supposed to work because it’s an end in itself. You just, you’re a good person if you have a job and what I heard from these South Africans who often didn’t expect to be able to have good jobs because there just weren’t enough of them and also because there’s so much discrimination around the workplace was that they wanted respect, they wanted dignity, they wanted to be able to care well for their families and they wanted it. And here’s where it circles back to anthropology is you can’t put a number on that. And so I think anthropology was really valuable as a way of studying this because there’s a phrase I often think about, which is not everything that counts can be counted. And what people really want In, say, a job or even in a, in a, in a life without a job, is things like respect and dignity and community. And it’s hard to count those. It’s hard to measure those things, but they are real and they’re really important. So one thing that anthropologists do is get at the everyday descriptions of those things and say, here’s a thing, it matters. Pay attention to it.

Studio – John Dickson

Religious belief is one of those things that “counts” but is hard to be counted. It’s a puzzle for anthropologists that just won’t go away, Tim Larsen told me.  And that brought us to some other greats of 20th century anthropology: Victor and Edith Turner. 

John Dickson:
Tell me about the work of Victor and Edith Turner. Uh, they, they, they seem very interesting, but can you tell me about their anthropological work? And then I want to ask about, um, their religious journey.

Tim Larsen:
Yeah, so they also are continuing to do fieldwork in Africa, just like our last, uh, couple people that we’ve talked about have done.  But they’re looking for new ways of doing it. Some of it was hitting a dead end.  Uh, it got a little kind of repetitive and tired.  And in particular, there was a Assumption that primitive cultures, savage cultures, again using those terms, were kind of static. They just stayed the same from time immemorial, and you could kind of look at them as this kind of museum exhibit and see something pure.  And that was never true. Uh, but anthropology was finally being able to break free from that. And so they were part of the Manchester School, which emphasized process. A lot, that things are actually changing, that there is a drama here, that we can see the symbolism and the drama of what’s going on in these cultures and unfold patterns that are not static, but are dynamic, and so that was part of the excitement of their work.

 John Dickson:
And like so many other anthropologists before, Mary Douglas aside, they were religious skeptics for much of their work. Is that, is that right? Before having some kind of experience, uh, communists and religious skeptics.

 Tim Larsen:
Yes. And yeah, the Communist part is important because in, in the Communist world at that time, you were not just agnostic, you were anti-religious. It was considered a zero sum game. There were two forces, you know, that was, that wasn’t a metaphor, that was Spain, you know, you know, it was, it was a real sense of there are two sides. And there’s a religious side, which is holding back progress. And then there’s an anti religious side, which is bringing in the modern world. And so they were militant in that way, they were utopian in that secular way. And so being anti religious was key to their intellectual identity. It wasn’t just a kind of, I don’t happen to care about religion kind of attitude

John Dickson:
And then they made the fatal mistake of converting. Am I right?

Tim Larsen:
They did! It is, it’s so surprising. And they would also laugh. It surprised them. And, you know, what’s interesting about that they also, uh, found faith in Catholicism. But they would be the first ones to say that studying African ritual very closely reawakened them to the reality of the spiritual world, which then set them on a spiritual journey that landed them in the Christian faith. And so that, and that, and that was possible in a different way because the older anthropology was very patronizing. These people don’t actually know what they’re doing. They think this ritual is about this one thing, but  it’s actually about this other thing that I can tell you as an anthropologist. But they don’t know what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. They’re just simple souls who are doing something they don’t understand. And so by the time we get to, time we get to the, Turners, it’s like, no, I’m actually going to listen to what they say about what this means to them, what they think is going on, what are they trying to achieve through this ritual. And so it took the realm of the spirit more seriously, having its own integrity, and that awakened into them a kind of sense that there was spiritual reality, and then where would they connect with that spiritual reality, and that turned out to be the Christian faith.

 Studio – John Dickson

In his book, The Slain God, Tim shows how Evans Pritchard was the turning point in the anthropological understanding of religion, because he insisted on trying to see things from the perspective of the religious themselves, to discover what the internal logic or longing might be, without imposing on them snobbish western notions of progress. Edith Turner expanded on this approach. In fact, she took it so far that she held the view that if a villager says that a local goddess has worked miracles, then that’s what happened. She believed, in some sense, in all religions, Tim told me, but she chose to be Catholic. I’m not sure what I think about that. I’d love to have been able to sit down with Edith Turner and ask if she really believes in all gods or if she just thinks that this relativism is the most sympathetic, most revealing heuristic for doing good anthropology. Alas I won’t have the oppotuity … I did get to sit down with Christine Jeske and ask about her experience of anthropological relativism  … 

Christine Jeske:
Anthropologists are just curious and they practice what’s called cultural relativism of assuming that you need to understand someone else’s view from their own viewpoint, they were very curious about me. So they find out I was a Christian and often it was like, Oh, wow. Why? You know, and so people ask me questions and we’re nonjudgmental. I don’t know if they wanted to become Christians, but I mean, they, they They wanted to know and understand and that was very respectful most of the time.

John Dickson:
But do you think anthropology, um, because of that curiosity, that objectification of culture and beliefs. can lead anthropologists to think, well, there’s no truth. It is entirely relativistic and no culture is better than another. Therefore there’s no truth, you know, to Christianity. It’s an interesting thing to observe. That’s it. Does that exist? 

Christine Jeske:
I think it definitely has. You know, anthropology includes many different theories, and there’s internal debates about these kinds of questions. Is there an absolute truth? Is there not? What is objective? What is only subjective? That is a constant question in anthropology. We would say that many things are subjective. Probably more things than we realize are subjective. But does that mean there’s nothing objective? One shift that’s really happened in my field of study, which is in racism, is that people have looked back at this sort of post-modern era where there was an assumption that no one can say anything for sure, and that view is really problematic if you’re trying to study actual harms against people. And so people studying racism often will say, well, we have to be objective about some things and we have to say that there is actual harm done to people and there’s better and worse ways to treat each other as human beings.

 John Dickson:
 I guess there is an assumption that there is an ultimate right and wrong. Any anthropologist that studies racism must believe that racism is wrong.

Christine Jeske :
I think they do. I think it’s really hard to keep studying it if you don’t. Yeah. Um, but it’s also hard to figure out what the standard is. Yeah.

 John Dickson:
And why the standard?

Christine Jeske:
Yeah. And what are we hoping for? That is the question that I found I really wanted to dig into with my research. Because often, even in the term anti racism, there’s a reason that term is useful because we are trying to get rid of racism, right? But it’s only an anti thing. So what are we pro? What are we trying to accomplish? And that is actually where I see Christianity having a lot to offer, for me anyway, as a Christian anthropologist is the idea of a prophetic imagination, that we imagine a different way of living in the world, and we have something we’re seeking after. We move towards something, not just away from something or just critiquing something. And anthropology, I think, can get just caught up in like, what are we doing here except critiquing things? Even if you go to an American Anthropological Association conference, sometimes people comment on that, that you just go from one session to another and all we’re doing is critiquing everything, including ourselves. And one thing I find very helpful in studying anthropology is it brings together the micro with the macro. It brings together how do people make meaning in their everyday lives? How do cultures unfold and where do they come from? How do they change? And also, what are the big social structural things that shape our lives even when we can’t see them? And as a Christian, I think, you know, if we are pursuing the kingdom of God, a better way of life in the world, we need to see both of those levels, not just everyday life, but also what is shaping us at a larger level.

Studio – John Dickson

Let’s press pause. I’ve got a Five Minute Jesus for you. Anthropology and Christianity have had a kind of love-hate relationship. But I’d argue that Christianity is the most anthropologically affirming of all spiritual perspectives. Bear with me. First, human beings are undeniably spiritual creatures. We are Homo religiosus just as much as we are Homo sapiens. Every known culture, past and present, has made religion a key part of its identity. Think of the famous rock paintings in Lascaux Cave—17,000 years old—depicting both animals and shamanistic symbols. Even older are the rock carvings in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, possibly 50,000 years old, illustrating both natural and spiritual realities. Fast forward to today: 80% of Americans say they believe in God. Even among the 20% who don’t, half admit they believe in a “higher spiritual power.” Two recent studies in China found that, despite atheism being the state norm, children—before formal education—intuitively believe that Someone made and moves the universe. There’s no getting away from religion if you’re an anthropologist. Evans-Pritchard, one of anthropology’s founding figures, observed that for the Nuer people of Africa, meaning ultimately depends on an awareness of God. He admitted: “At this point, the theologian takes over from the anthropologist.” Victor Turner, another giant in the field, came to a similar conclusion: “I became convinced that religion is not merely a toy of the race’s childhood, to be discarded at a nodal point of scientific and technological development, but is really at the heart of the human matter.” The Bible has a ready explanation for this. Paul writes in Romans 1: “What may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” Paul is saying that certain qualities of divinity press upon human beings as an objective reality. It’s not just that we feel spiritual; we are drawn toward something beyond ourselves. There is an outside pressure, pull toward the divine And science hasn’t supplanted this. In fact, I’d argue it has only strengthened the case. We’re often told that scientific progress explains away God, but the opposite is true. The caveman looked up and saw a mathematical order in the stars. Thanks to science, we now know that this order is built into everything—from the tiniest particle to the furthest reaches of the cosmos. The discoveries of science don’t push God to the margins; they reveal that rationality, order, and meaning are the very fabric of reality.  Science and the religious outlook depend on the same reality about our world: weirdly, the world keeps making sense! If the universe were truly random, if it didn’t make sense at all, that would be a problem—but not just for religion. That would sink science itself, since nothing rational or mathematical could be said about nature! So why do I say Christianity is the most anthropologically affirming worldview? Sure, humans are spiritual. But maybe Christianity is just another intuitive response to the world. Well, Christianity makes a bolder claim than any other faith. It doesn’t just say that humans long for the divine. It says the divine has stepped into human history. More precisely, God became an anthropos—a human being. Many religions have gods who appear in human-like form. Hinduism, for example, has deities who manifest as people or animals. But even Hinduism stops short of saying that Brahman itself—the divine behind all divinity—took on actual flesh and blood. Christianity, however, makes this claim outright. John 1:14 says it plainly: “The Word became flesh.” Christianity inherited from its Jewish and Old Testament back story that God loves creation, loves humanity, and that creation is fundamentally good and that humans have inestimable dignity.  But Christianity took that story way further … in a manner that both Judaism and (later) Islam would call a blasphemy: God loves creation and humanity so much that God entered the world as an actual human being. What greater theoretical endorsement of the anthropos could there be than that the eternal God and creator took on human flesh.  Humans matter to anthropology. That’s wonderful. But Christianity says humans matter to a degree that anthropology could never discover on its own!  You can press play now.

 John Dickson :
Then flipping it around, um, positively as, as you’ve reflected on anthropology or the history of anthropology, what do you reckon, um, good anthropology can teach us about? Reality about God, about humanity, about the Christian faith?

Tim Larsen:
Yeah, it’s a beautiful discipline. I loved studying it. I love a good ethnography. Just to read about a very careful study of how people live, how they practice their way of life, how they think. A classicist saying that anthropologists love, which is, I’m human, everything human belongs to me. And so you are really learning a lot about the human condition. I’m a historian myself, uh, but anthropologists And historians are very similar in lots of ways. One way is that we both like gossip, so I’ve learned that very early on. I could get along with anthropologists great because they love gossip too. But we love to kind of see the human condition through a refracted way. This is not the fight that everybody around me is in right now. It’s another time and another place, but people also had to work out this same kind of issue. How to deal with a sense of, you know, open or closed borders. Whatever the issue is that is right now your culture is like, Worried about another culture, another place has also done this and you can think it through with them and you can learn Insights that are human insights because another culture has come up with them and they’re there for you to enjoy

 John Dickson :
Does it do you think? Anthropology done. Well can actually, you know, so lift our gaze from the merely human to the divine

Tim Larsen:
Absolutely, because human beings have encountered God throughout history, around the globe, in every culture, in every generation, and so they’re bearing witness to what they have, um, experienced and what has been revealed to them. And you that can be contagious. You’re like, Oh, this person has something. I mean, that’s how, again, I feel about Mary Douglas is her confidence in her own way of thinking is contagious. You, you’ve showed me a different way to live in the world. And that happens all the time when you study anthropology.

Undeceptions theme