Dialogues: anthropology and theology
2022; Wiley; Volume: 28; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1467-9655.13667
ISSN1467-9655
AutoresJione Havea, Matt Tomlinson, Talal Al‐Azem, Johan Rasanayagam, Venerable Juewei, Jonathan Mair, Elias Kifon Bongmba, Naomi Haynes, Ramdas Lamb, Deeksha Sivakumar, Khaled Furani, Ebrahim Moosa,
Tópico(s)Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration
ResumoThe past five years have witnessed an increased interest in a dialogue between anthropology and theology, evidenced in part by a suite of edited volumes (e.g. Lauterbach & Vähäkangas 2020; Lemons 2018; Tomlinson & Mathews 2018). Analyses informed by this interdisciplinary nexus have demonstrated the utility of theological concepts for anthropological inquiry (e.g. Robbins 2020; Tomlinson 2020; Williams Green 2021). The following series of dialogues between anthropologists and theologians builds on this growing body of work, expanding it at two main points. First, while the above conversations are all focused on Christian theology, mainly as a means of engaging Christian practice, our dialogues move beyond this religion. The following conversations engage the intersection of anthropology and Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, as well as Christian, theology.11 These conversations include reflections upon the suitability of the terms 'theology' and 'theologian' for each context. Second, many of these dialogues foreground particular experiences of scholars in both anthropology and theology who identify in some way with the religious traditions they study. Some of these dialogues took place between scholars who had an established relationship; others involved partners who had not previously met, but who agreed to correspond in view of a shared interest in this interdisciplinary dialogue. As a starting point, participants were given a series of questions to orient their exchanges, such as, 'How does faith relate to knowledge in both disciplines?' Conversations mostly took place over email and were later edited with the help of one of the journal editors, Adam Reed, and one of the members of our Editorial Board, Naomi Haynes. On 15 February 2021, the biblical scholar Jione Havea and the anthropologist Matt Tomlinson had a conversation online. Havea is based in Melbourne and Tomlinson in Canberra, lands which have never been ceded by the Wurundjeri and Ngunnawal peoples, respectively. Tomlinson had read Havea's work for a research project on contextual theology from Oceania; contextual theologians treat social context and personal experience as the grounds on which one can meet God. In preparation for this conversation, Havea read Tomlinson's resulting monograph God is Samoan (2020). Both participants approached the meeting as a talanoa, a genre of conversational interaction in central Pacific societies. As the reader will see, some of the talanoa was about the nature of talanoa itself. The recording was transcribed by Rhiannon Tanner. Tomlinson then edited the transcription to produce a new document reflecting the conversation's themes, checking the final product for Havea's approval. I've been reading a lot of contextual theology and contextual biblical studies through an anthropological lens. Your work stands out for two reasons. First, you've published extensively, with several monographs, around twenty edited volumes, and collaborations with many other theologians. Second, your interests are expansive. You write about Old Testament texts, culture and society, identity, sex and gender, dialogue, colonialism and postcolonialism, justice, and other topics. In the book of yours that I know best, Elusions of control,22 See Havea (2003). you draw on Derrida, Jameson, Ricoeur, Foucault and other theorists. My first question is how or if you see anthropology in relationship to your work. Does anthropology offer anything to theology and biblical studies, and if so, what? That's a heavy question. Let me answer in a kind of roundabout way – in talanoa fashion. I do think that anthropology and theology sit under the same umbrella of sociological study. But i33 Jione uses the lower case when he is the subject of the first person 'i'. For two reasons: first, because in English and Tongan the lower case is used with the second and third persons, and, second, because capitalizing the first-person singular is evidence of privileging the individual self (an ailment of modernity and of the English language). want to say first that any discipline, any theory, including the works of anthropology, can be helpful. It depends on who is the practitioner. For example, i would criticize Margaret Mead from the Samoan situation, even though the ethnographic element is very helpful for us. But you know, some theologians are equally bad. There is crossing or borrowing from anthropology in my theology, but it's a question of how it's done. I just had a conversation with a Māori colleague about how pakeha [European, 'white'] anthropologists have packed – this is her language – they have packed the bag for Māori, and they control both the bag and what goes into the bag. So for my Māori colleague, what needs to be done is, well, let's just weave a new bag and let Māori pack their own stories. When white anthropologists or historians pack the Māori bag, they do so for a fragile white readership: that is, for readers who can't handle the messy, filthy accounts of the savageries of their noble forebears. Whereas she as a Māori wants something that shows the savageness [courage] – how her people are resistant and enduring. That's a very political question, eh! I've read some of your work, and there are theologians whose work you discuss like Ama'amalele Tofaeono and Upolu Lumā Vaai who began as systematic theologians but now do contextual theology, if you want to use that label. But i would quickly qualify that i think contextual theology has become a 'white' project. Because in practice, it's a way of getting us natives – i prefer the term 'native', or 'brown people' – to appropriate a Western theological way of thinking, but giving it credibility. We say, 'Oh, we are contextualizing', but in the end we are also giving our bag to this language. Some of us are getting into public theology as well. So, what kind of theology? Contextual and public theologies would be engaging for anthropologists and so you can talk back. Theologies are opportunities for people to talk back. Yes, but also, i don't want to fall into this nativist drive, where only the Samoan can write about Samoan things. Jenny's right. And for me, this is part of my commitment. This is what i drive at in the Oceania Biblical Studies Association and in other talanoa: that we have to do it, we have to do it for ourselves and for the next generation, otherwise (and pardon my language) some white person from Europe will come and do it for us. And then he or she will go back to Europe and be the authority on these things. Which is not their fault. It's our fault for not doing what we need to do. We need to speak on behalf of our context as well. So it's a little complex. My partners go back to the kava-drinking circle, as you know from your own experiences in Kadavu, in Fiji. Also to the boys in prison [Havea has experience with prison chaplaincy], and all the way into church communities and conferences. My unfolding of what talanoa is has changed over time. I remember the first piece in which i wrote about talanoa, i focused on story and telling. I mean, conversation probably came third or fourth place in it. If it's the president of my church who calls for talanoa, nobody will speak up! So it depends on who is doing the talanoa. You can come as an expert and shut people down. Or you can come as an expert and open things up. So it depends on how it's done and what the relationship is. As you know, it's the same in Kadavu. Same in Tonga. There is power, status, class, that influence how talanoa take place. But it also depends on the subject matter – the story you are having the talanoa around. For example, in the Uniting Church in Australia, the Pacific Islanders will say, 'Let's not talk about this issue of sexuality, because our people don't like to talanoa across gender. Male and female can't sit down together in a room and have this conversation'. But every time i raise it with women, they've been quite open to talk about it even though i'm not a woman. And in many cases where there are male and female, when we have engaged in this taboo subject, people are open to it. But, you know, if you bring the president of the church in again, nobody's going to speak up. One of the things i've been annoyed with lately is, you know, the United Nations has a 'talanoa process' now.77 See Kirsch (2020). Since i heard about it, i've told Nāsili Vaka'uta and others that we need to bring talanoa back. Because once the UN takes this over it just becomes Westernized and we lose the spirit, eh? I mean, we lose what you mention in the last paragraph of your book where you describe the moment when talanoa ends and something happens.88 Tomlinson (2020: 108). With the UN using talanoa as a process, we won't get that moment in the corrugated iron hut where what we call the fū [Tongan; clapping at a kava session] happens. Talanoa, for me, enables that moment. But it's not just that. This afternoon, the last paragraph in your book has been bothering me, in a good way. Because i have these three understandings of talanoa which you mentioned [story, telling, conversation], but i need to add what happens at the end of talanoa. We have a joke in Tonga. Oh, let me try and put it a different way. A former student of mine at Siaˈatoutai Theological College described how he drinks kava – he'll be very drunk, and then he'll go home and, like most people, try to get something to eat. So, he will get a piece of taro or cassava, or whatever. And he'll eat and then fall asleep. And then wake up in the morning and finish what was left in his mouth. I think this is what talanoa needs to get at. That morning. This is what I feel from your last paragraph. The circle has ended and the divine happens when the circle is disbanded. I need to add that element to my description of talanoa. That moment of effectiveness when you wake up the next morning and something clicks. I haven't thought of it that way. Maybe that's what's happening. But it comes back to the question of talanoa being ongoing. A lot of people have spoken of Coconut Theology as an indigenous or contextual theology or whatever. But i don't think that was what he meant. He spoke of it as Coconut Theology, of course, but in his heart it was more of a practice. What was more important for him was that people can eat coconut if they don't have bread and say, 'This is the body of Christ'. That practical element was more important. So in that sense, the answer to your question would be 'yes'. I'm continuing it, even though i think it's been unconscious. Going back to my work in prison – when i used to go, the only time i would serve communion was the week of Good Friday. And that's the only Christian ritual i would practise in prison. We would talk about the Bible, do Bible study, but on Good Friday, i would take a nice loaf of bread and serve communion, and then after that we'll serve it again, and we'll serve it again until the bread is done. Because i don't want to waste the bread. It's the practical element. It's feeding rather than theology that's more important to me. And i think that's the side of my father's theology that people don't pick up. It was about the practice. If you wake up in Funafuti and there's nothing, you can pick up a piece of tapioca and say, 'This is the body of Christ'. That's what he was pushing for. There are many things that you haven't brought up. I'm not sure if they are worth talking about. [Laughs.] The thing i'm currently struggling with is – let me step back. One of the books i've worked on that came out this year is Theological and hermeneutical explorations from Australia: horizons of contextuality.1010 Havea (2021a). When we started the project, i wanted us to critically rethink how to do contextual theology. But it didn't go that way, and i want to revisit this question and redo this project. What is contextual? One of the things we need to do is redefine what is context. I've got two other projects coming out this year. One is on media as context.1111 Havea (2021b). And the other is on COVID-19 and doing theology in the 'new normal'.1212 Havea (2021c). But what is context in the pandemic? It's not really context in the geographical sense. It's not ideological. It's not even political. But we need to do theology in the context of COVID-19 while realizing the complexity of this thing called context and the natures of context. In early 2021, Talal Al-Azem, a specialist in Islamic studies and history, and Johan Rasanayagam, an anthropologist whose research focuses on Islam, had a series of conversations online. Talal has for some time been drawing on anthropology to inform his teaching and research in Islamic theology and Muslim societies of the past, and Johan has been developing an anthropological engagement with Islamic traditions of thought that shifts the focus from representing Islam and Muslims to thinking about human being in conversation with those traditions. Our conversations started with our research, and how our thinking has been shaped through our readings of each other's disciplines. We soon turned to our teaching, and how our own engagement with the other's disciplinary tradition has informed our teaching, or prompted us to reflect on our relationship with our students. The dialogue presented below is an edited version of those online conversations. An engagement with difference or alterity is central to anthropology as a mode of knowing. In an engagement with others, we de-centre our own perspectives and imagine other possibilities of thinking and being. But I've come to realize that while, as a discipline, we have embraced this in our research, many of us, or I at least, have failed to do the same in our teaching. Some years ago, I received criticism in the feedback forms from students on a course on the anthropology of religion I used to teach. One student wrote: I think the lecturer should be more careful about presenting the topics as theories because as a Christian I found some of what he said offensive when presented as fact. I also did not like having to defend theories I did not agree with in tutorial. On the same form, another student wrote: The lecturer stated that, 'and of course God does not exist', found this shocking that he said this to a room full of students, and offensive that he should put his opinion on us. My response at the time was that this was a misunderstanding. The course was designed to examine how religion is produced as an analytic object within contrasting theoretical frames, as a Durkheimian social phenomenon, as a Geertzian cultural symbolic system of meaning, through a Marxist approach, and with Bourdieu's concept of habitus. I had, in fact, stated in different lectures words to the effect that 'gods don't exist', and also that spirits, or witches, aren't real. However, when I did so I was quoting Durkheim, the structural functionalist John Middleton, or other anthropologists whose analyses I was presenting. It crossed my mind that this was a misunderstanding by students who heard the quote, but not the fact that it was a quote. They may also, I thought, have been failing to distinguish their own personal beliefs from an examination, detached from subjective positions, of how theoretical frames provide distinctive perspectives on social phenomena. I addressed the problem in future iterations of the course by stating clearly at the outset that I was not giving my own personal opinions about the existence or otherwise of God or spirit beings, but was providing a discussion of contrasting conceptual perspectives on religion so that students could develop a faculty for critical thinking. Reflecting back on the response of those students, and on my own, I think that there was something deeper going on. Even if students were fully aware that I was seeking to instil a critical, comparative approach to religion as a social or cultural phenomenon, the teaching itself produced a normatively secular space. By this I mean that a 'we' was assumed, comprising of lecturer, student, and the discipline of anthropology as a whole. 'We' were implicitly placed outside and above 'them', the subject matter of the course, so that we could perform a work of analysis. This was not a claim to objectivity as such. One of the aims of the course was to suggest that theory produces the object of its attention rather than neutrally describing a reality existing independent of any observer. A Durkheimian analysis produces, rather than simply describes, the object of society as a social fact, and religion as a manifestation of society. A Geertzian culturalist approach produces the object of religion as a symbolic system of meaning. Rather, secularity establishes a space in which objects of research are laid out in panoramic view before the analyst who stands outside and above them, in a position to comprehend those 'worlds', 'cultures', and 'social constructions' in comparative perspective, and to classify and manipulate them in pursuit of theoretical insights. Oppositions are set up, implicit and unacknowledged in the case of my own teaching on that course, between the reflective, critical production of knowledge and the unreflective living out of culture. Students in the course who may have been Christian, Muslim, or who identified themselves with other religious traditions could well have found themselves as the culturalized, objectified 'other' that the course produced, albeit unintentionally. It is no wonder that some felt alienated. In our professional practice of research, as opposed to teaching, this problem has been recognized by anthropologists as one of representation. Lila Abu-Lughod, for example, has expressed an experience that I think is somewhat similar to that of the students on my course. She writes that her subject position of a feminist and 'halfie', someone whose 'national or cultural identity is mixed by virtue of migration, overseas education, or parentage', makes it impossible to maintain the boundary between the anthropologist 'we' and an objectified, culturalized 'other'.1313 Abu-Lughod (1991: 137). Just as my students were, the halfie anthropologist is made uncomfortable by also occupying the space of the 'other' they are expected to produce through the work of analysis. I would like to pick up on the first notion raised by you, Johan: namely, that of 'engagement' with an other's tradition. You have already addressed some of the difficult questions of objectification and representation – of the 'we' and 'them' – that can arise in research as well as in the classroom. But there is, I think, another approach that might be helpful here: that in which another tradition serves not as object but as interlocutor. As regards Islam and Muslims, the fields of anthropology, theology, area studies, Orientalism, and Islamic studies have each had various hues of engagement over their chequered histories. The idea of entering into a conversation – a meaningful dialogue that not only attempts to disclose the other, but also highlights one's own self and concepts – is a movement currently led most obviously by a number of anthropologists, and in a different fashion by a few theologians, who study and teach Islam and Muslims. As you have highlighted, the central problem with how Islam is approached in all of these disciplines is with their construal of Islam as an object. In all of the dominant paradigms of the past century, the anthropologist – but also the theologian or Islamicist – must decide what is within 'the object' of Islam. In order to be able to speak about it at all, the question of how one defines Islam – what its essential and unique qualities are – remains a matter of contention, as evidenced in Islamic studies by the publication of the late Shahab Ahmed's What is Islam?1414 Ahmed (2015). In order to move beyond some of these impasses, a dialogical engagement with 'the other' needs also to be supported by an engagement across academic traditions. From a theological perspective, I submit that there are some 'essential' qualities of Islam that should not prove controversial, and can serve as starting points in first outlining, then engaging with, different traditions' 'anthropologies'. The first is that Islam is a religious tradition premised upon a realist ontology. It takes the existence of the divine as a starting point: 'There is no divine being save God' being the first part of the Muslim testimony of faith. The second and more pertinent part to our present discussion is that the Qur'an posits an understanding of the human being, and thus of the human psyche, premised upon this ontology. This vision of the human self is fundamentally transformationalist. And it is the normative 'way of the Prophet' (the sunna) – affirmed in the second part of the Muslim testimony of faith, 'Muhammad is the Messenger of God' – that is meant to operationalize this transformationalist psychology in history. These two credal points form the basis of a third understanding as to an essential Qur'anic notion of human society. Toshiku Izutsu, in God and man in the Qur'an,1515 Izutsu (1964). argues that what made Islam such a radical break from and threat to Arabian society of Muhammad's time was the way in which the Qur'an valued the individual. Whereas in pre-Islamic Arabian society the value was predicated upon the existence, strength, or weakness of the tribe, the Qur'an connected the individual as individual both to a spiritual prehistory and to an eschatological post-history. That is to say, the individual had a metaphysical and moral value in and of himself or herself, regardless of tribal affiliation. In all their variations, the historical Islamicate societies that followed shared in these basic understandings of ontology and what it meant to be human, individually and in society. I would argue that the various and varied institutions of these societies also assumed this metaphysic and psychology. Much of what I have outlined above are the fruits of philological and historical approaches to the ideas and concepts of Islamicate societies. But where these disciplinary approaches end is where the opportunities provided by theology and the social sciences, especially when in dialogue, begin. For what the latter can do is to help us better understand not just the structures of Muslim societies past and present, or the motivations, thoughts, and behaviour of Muslims as individuals in these societies. Rather, when put into conversation with the Islamic tradition, anthropology especially can provide an avenue to moving beyond impasses we face in our own endeavours; not by assimilating 'their' world to our own concepts, but by allowing their concepts – rooted in their ontology, their vision of man, and their historical conscience – to emerge as points of engagement and self-critique. Recently, within our discipline there have been calls for a 'post-secular' anthropology that takes the form of an engagement with theology of the sort you have just outlined. For example, Joel Robbins has described anthropology's past engagement with Christian theology as an 'awkward relationship'.1616 Robbins (2006). He argues that anthropologists, for the most part, either have critically interrogated the implicit Christian roots of the discipline, or have treated theology as data that informed them about the culture or worldview of the people they studied. Instead, he invites anthropologists to take seriously theology's intellectual positions and not just appropriate it as ethnography. Another proponent of this move, Joel Kahn, has posed the question as how someone, in his own case a person whose selfhood is rooted in what he calls 'scientific naturalism', can establish open and productive encounters with others whose 'horizons of belief', or 'ontological construals', differ radically from their own.1717 Kahn (2011). A common stance of an anthropologist encountering beliefs or ontologies not grounded in an immanent, disenchanted world is, he observes, a suspension of disbelief, a bracketing off of those beliefs so as to remain open to other modes of being and perceiving. However, this bracketing off is a problem for Kahn. It confines those differing construals to their own space, which is in the end the secular space of private beliefs and morality, placed outside a space of public interaction from which non-secular reasoning is excluded. This suspension of disbelief is what I expected of the students on my course, which enabled us to think about and represent 'their' cultural worlds, 'their' ontologies. The alternative that Kahn proposes is a space of conversation and dialogue, an active and mutually transformative engagement rather than a bracketing off. While secular and religious reasonings differ, dialogue can, he hopes, shift the horizons of both parties. Along similar lines, Philip Fountain has advocated an anthropology with theology rather than about theology.1818 Fountain (2013). He argues that a post-secular anthropology should start from a reflection on the profoundly secular modes of knowledge production in the discipline. As the experience of my own students attests, this excludes those who hold religious commitments, and forces them to occupy a stance of 'methodological agnosticism' that establishes atheism as the neutral, objective position. Rather than bracket off any personal commitments in order to engage in the work of analysis, for Fountain an anthropology with theology would entail what he calls a radical embrace of theology, an 'anthro-theology'. This is an engaged anthropology that does not simply observe and describe, but reimagines and promotes forms of human flourishing and hopeful futures, a project that Fountain identifies as being progressed through theological thinking. Anthropology cannot keep theology at arm's length, he argues, maintaining the superiority of a universalist secular thought, but needs to recognize and engage with a plurality of construals. A number of recent works have, I believe, demonstrated the possibility of such an approach. Brinkley Messick's most recent work, Shari'a scripts: a historical anthropology,1919 Messick (2018). is a powerful example of how the study of Muslims' legal ideas embedded in texts, and the ethnographic study of practitioners of those legal traditions, can be bridged. The result is not objectification, but a study that makes the ways of knowing and arguing practised by his Yemeni subjects intelligible and intelligent. Similar attempts at deploying the ethnographical to understand theologically engaged rationalities can be witnessed in the works of Stefania Pandolfo's Knot of the soul, Ellen Amster's Medicine and the saints, Hussein Agrama's Questioning secularism, and your own Islam in post-Soviet Uzbekistan: the morality of experience.2020 Agrama (2012); Amster (2013); Pandolfo (2018); Rasanayagam (2011). None of these works reduce individual Muslims' experiences to tropes of piety, nor do they flatten the human beings studied or their worlds. Rather, what unites them is their examination of the changes in various Muslim societies' concepts and practices when impacted by new bureaucratic, medical, or political rationalities in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. What it means for a Muslim to reason morally, to pursue psychological or physical 'health', or to seek just governance in relation to Qur'anic notions or Islamicate practices is made meaningful. And, for those willing, they allow engagement with those rationalities insofar as they are taken as alternative yet meaningful ways of being human. The value of such an approach has already borne fruit in my teaching theology and religion. In my own tutorials, I have assigned some of the above works alongside others in the history of the concepts, practices, and institutions of Islamic law and moral theology, such as Wael Hallaq's Shari'a or The impossible state, for example.2121 Hallaq (2009; 2011). Armed now with the tools of history, theology, and anthropology, students have been able to make meaningful connections between ideas and how these ideas were embodied (or not) in people and in their societies – connections that have surprised and delighted the students, whatever their theological stance. That is to say, understanding what it meant to be a Muslim in everyday life became a tangible possibility. Previously, even Islamic history textbooks promising insight into what it had meant to live as a Muslim often delivered nothing more than the same lists of dogma and ritual that philology and Islamic studies had long ago produced. Now, an anthropologically rooted engagement with Islamic history and studies has brought both to life much more vividly for my students of theology and religion. But this was only possible because the approaches did not abandon philosophy and theology for mere ethnography; they creatively fused them together, such that the sum was greater than the parts. A more nuanced appreciation of how various Islamicate philosophies and ideas were actually lived – the nature of their perception, their morality perceptions, their understanding of selfhood – was all now beginning to be possible. Likewise, when moving into the early modern period, how the rise of new notions of the nation-state, of governmentality, of law, or of medicine, for example, impacted Muslims from North Africa to Southeast Asia, and how this transformed many of their traditional Islamic concepts, allowed the students a greater appreciation of the questions of modernism, of colonialism, and of the rise of nation-states in the Muslim world. And this was achieved without reductively essentializing these Muslims' experiences to mere dogma, while also not dismissing or downplaying their engagements with the Islamic tradition. What is at stake in a dialogue between anthropology and theol
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