INGIE HOVLAND
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What is Christianity in the anthropology of Christianity? Pyramid, bundles, generative field (Reading Jon Bialecki's "Virtual Christianity")

11/5/2013

 
What is the structure of Christianity? Christian traditions have sometimes presented it as something like a pyramid, making the theological claim that some Christianities are more Christian than others. Anthropological traditions, on the other hand, have sometimes imagined Christianity as bundles: each Christian community or tradition carries a bundle of attributes, and though many of these attributes reoccur, there is no single attribute that can be found across all the bundles. This month I read the article “Virtual Christianity in an age of nominalist anthropology” by Jon Bialecki (Anthropological Theory, 2012), and it has introduced me to thinking of Christianity as a virtual idea: a generative field of old, new, and unknown problems. 

But – some of you may ask – why do we need an analytical tool to tell us what Christianity is? Isn’t it rather obvious? Broadly speaking it seems to be a world religion in which members believe in God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and go to church and read the Bible and pray. Give or take some variations.

Since the anthropology of Christianity is interested in any community that understands itself to be Christian, the pool of all Christianities studied by anthropologists has started to take on a very wide range. You don’t necessarily know it when you see it, as evidenced by the anthropological studies of “Christians who don’t believe in God” (Rebekka King) and “Christians who don’t read the Bible” (Matthew Engelke). Drawing on the ethnographic injunction to step into the world of each community that is studied, anthropologists generally take care to treat these people’s self-professed Christianity as just that, i.e. as Christianity. Rather than taking on the task of theology and asking whether this is what Christianity should be, anthropologists ask what Christianity is in any particular community.

In other words, anthropological texts do not usually present Christianity as a pyramid, in which the most orthodox or "most Christian" Christianity is placed at the top, and the different forms of Christianity that follow on the lower tiers are viewed as progressively less and less Christian. Within the anthropology of Christianity, particular forms of Christianity are not presented as “Christianity gone wrong” in relation to a hypothetical “real Christianity” – rather, they are presented as Christianity. 

(And yes, that does raise other questions regarding how to prevent this form of cultural relativism from slipping into moral relativism, and how to acknowledge the ethical stance of the anthropologist. These questions were on my mind when I wrote about nineteenth-century Christian missionaries who, stated simply, thought European Christians were more Christian than African Christians – with tragic political ramifications. It is presumably unnecessary to say that I disagree with these Christian missionaries’ choices and the way they shaped their Christian practices and beliefs. At the same time, I wish to understand how this situation came about. This means taking their Christianity seriously and trying to see it from their point of view. Or, as Spinoza put it: “Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.”)

So if all kinds of communities are included within the anthropology of Christianity, how do we even know what “Christianity” is? Is it just anything and everything? Is it really that arbitrary?

This brings me back to Bialecki’s article. He argues that anthropologists of Christianity have avoided the task of trying to define Christianity. Partly, he suggests, this is due to the bewildering array of historical and current expressions of Christianity. And partly it is due to what he describes as an anthropological turn toward "nominalism" (individualism / particularism / specificity), which means that many anthropologists, especially from around the 1980s onwards, have tended to shy away from broad generalizations and to distrust anyone who claims that universals / categories / essences exist beyond human thought and use. So, in short (and I don’t think it is necessary to quite agree with Bialecki on the nominalist turn in order to see this), anthropologists of Christianity have tended to describe Christianity on a case-by-case basis – i.e. they have tried to understand a lot of different Christianities instead of trying to understand Christianity.

Therefore, the anthropology of Christianity may leave us with the impression that the label “Christian” is fairly arbitrary. But, Bialecki argues, it is not. And he uses “virtual Christianity” as a model to think about this.

Ok, “virtual Christianity” promises to provide some coherence to the field. What is “virtual Christianity”?

Bialecki draws the terms “virtual” and “virtual idea” from the works of Deleuze (and Guattari). He provides a three-page description of their philosophical concept in his article. The following offers a very brief summary:
“As reworked by Deleuze, the concept of the virtual … serves … as a way of speaking about an unquantifiable field of generative potential in being and thought, a potential intelligible yet specifically undeterminable in advance of development, a potential that is always threatening to run off at times in different and disparate directions, a potential which serves to constantly bring new ‘actual’ entities into being. … [I]t is a means of granting a sort of ontological status of real to both this potential and the objects they engender, and to demarcate this potential as having its own characteristic apart from those of the ‘actual’ world.” (p. 307)
The virtual, then, is not like the Platonic idea; it does not represent the essence or true identity of actual things. Rather, it is a “field of generative potential.” The virtual is multiple and mutable. It includes elements that spin on their own axes or fuse together. The virtual is a problem, or set of problematics. It encompasses various indeterminate aspects that are determined as they are actualized. The possible resulting variations in actual life are infinite, but not completely random. We can find traces of the virtual in the actual:
“the virtual is itself attached to, addressing, and predicated upon actual entities, creating a resonance between the actual and virtual as they go through their vicissitudes. … [T]he actual and the virtual run alongside each other … The actual, however, constantly obscures the virtual … Deleuze speaks of seeing the trace of the virtual in what has been actualized as if it were no easy task.” (p. 309)
How is this relevant to Christianity? It is relevant, Bialecki argues, in that the goal of the anthropology of Christianity should be:
“[to work] back from various actualized Christianities and, with an eye towards the specific local affects and precepts that ran through the virtual to create those actualizations, [to attempt] to intuit the virtual multiplicity that engendered that actuality. This can be done through working back from ‘solution’ to ‘problem’” (p. 312)
Bialecki does not provide examples of what this might look like, though he does refer to anthropologists of Christianity who have already worked on problems, with the most widely recognized probably being the problem set of presence and immediacy (think Webb Keane, Matthew Engelke again). What the anthropology of Christianity has not yet done, Bialecki suggests, is:
“to ask how each of these problems sketches out various continuums of potential … In short, because we have thought of Christianity in a nominalist way, rather than as a real, though virtual, object, we have not charted what we might call the mutagenic capacity in its diagram, the way in which Christianity may be many things – an *unlimited number* of things – but not *everything* or *anything*” (p. 312-13, orig. emph.)
In sum, Bialecki suggests that the goal of the anthropology of Christianity should be not just to chart variations “within and between Christianities,” but “to see various Christianities as in some way products of a single differentiating field” (p. 314-15).

That gives the gist of "virtual Christianity," but still begs the question – is it really a good analytical tool? Is it good to think with?

To my mind there are two major advantages to this working model of Christianity as a virtual idea. Let me illustrate by comparing it to another working model, namely that of Christianity as a set of bundles, which is the one that I have been using for the past years. (I have also explored Christianity as third space – drawing on Homi Bhabha – but will leave that model to one side for this blog post. For a discussion, see p. 120-25 of Mission Station Christianity.) 

First, “bundles Christianity.” In his 1978 article "Buddhism and the definition of religion," Martin Southwold suggested that “religion” should not be thought of as a “monothetic class” in which each member possesses the same bundle of attributes. Rather, he saw religion as a “polythetic class” in which each member possesses a bundle of some of the attributes of the whole. Therefore, he pointed out, “[s]ince different members of the class may possess different selections from the bundle of attributes, there is no guarantee that any one of these attributes is common to all the members” (Southwold, 1978:369). In terms of Christianity, this allows us to think of Christianity as a “class” with an associated “bundle” of attributes (let’s say, for example, Bible, Trinity, worship, prayer, holy communion, church, baptism, etc, etc). Each variant of Christianity is a “member” of the class, but each member only takes up some of the available attributes in their “bundle” – thus resulting in a range of quite different bundles.

Bundles Christianity vs. virtual Christianity (1): The virtual is more productive


The model of virtual Christianity, as opposed to bundles Christianity, gives us a more sophisticated way of thinking about the range of possibilities in Christianity. Bundles Christianity leads us to imagine a fairly static set of attributes, without room for those potential attributes that have not yet been actualized. The virtual, on the other hand, allows us to think easily of problematics that may follow different trajectories and be actualized in innumerable ways – indeed, various problem axes may themselves tilt and change as they fuse with other axes and resonate with the actual. The virtual, then, avoids any fixed essentialism, while also avoiding complete arbitrariness. It provides a sense of arcs of potential or possibility.

Take the Bible, for instance. From the perspective of bundles Christianity, the Bible might be thought of as an attribute of Christianity that is picked up by most Christian communities (in different ways), and rejected (in different ways) by a very small minority. This might lead to comparative analysis on e.g. how different communities read the Bible differently. From the perspective of virtual Christianity, however, we would be pushed to think through this issue more carefully. The virtual might lead us to ask, for example, what kind of problem(s) the Bible solves – let’s say, for some, the problem of intimacy with the divine, and for others the problem of who counts as Christian – and why other Christianities have not solved these problems in this way. Or the Bible might be thought of as triggering problems, such as the problem of materiality, or the problem of reconciling tradition and personal inclination, community and individual. The myriad other ways that the Bible has presented solutions and problems may hover in the background, presenting possibilities that, for some reason or other, have not been taken up in a given community, and this too leads to further questions. This is a very crude sketch, but points to one advantage of the model of a virtual Christianity (as compared to bundles Christianity), namely its productivity: its ability to open up avenues of analytical questioning.
 
Bundles Christianity vs. virtual Christianity (2): The virtual is more insistent

I think it is fair to say that virtual Christianity is a model that is concerned with what Christianity does. The model gives pieces of Christian material “energies or directionality,” Christianity gains greater autonomy in the analysis, and Christian problems may even “insist” on a response, even if the nature of the response is not determinable in advance (Bialecki, p. 305, 310, 312). When working with the model of virtual Christianity as compared to bundles Christianity – to put it colloquially – Christianity has more "oomph." For example, instead of thinking of the Bible as, let’s say, a focal point for religious exercise that, in the bigger picture, will probably be trumped by the hard-nosed reality of neoliberalism, we start to see the Bible as a problematic that brings its own trajectories to the table – trajectories that cannot simply be swept away.

Any reservations?

At a technical level, Bialecki presents the virtual as the field of problems, and the actual as the arena for solutions. However, it seems more precise to me to cast both domains as encompassing problems and solutions. Sometimes problems need to find solutions, and sometimes solutions need to find problems – in order to be integrated into life.

At a big-picture level, I wonder whether it is necessary to describe the virtual as “having an autonomy from the actual” (Bialecki, p. 311). For Deleuze, if I have understood the argument correctly, the virtual in some sense also functions on its own, independently of human life. But I find it difficult, within an anthropological framework, to picture how ideas about potential Christian actions might exist without being imagined, remembered, read, archived, inferred, invented, thought, acted, embodied, etc., by human beings. To state it simply, I do not think virtual Christianity floats freely, i.e. I do not think it exists in and of itself, but I think it is a good analytical tool that helps us to think about Christianity as it actually exists. I suppose in this sense I am a “nominalist” (i.e. a particularist, skeptical of universals). However, to my mind, this does not prevent me from seeing different Christianities as connected in some way, as part of a category.

Finally, I would hesitate to agree with the suggestion that identifying the Christian virtual is “the collective object of the anthropology of Christianity” (p. 295). I am not sure whether it is desirable to attempt to get all anthropologists of Christianity to work towards the same goal, based on the same theory – quite apart from the practical consideration that this would, realistically, be impossible!

So, in sum?

In sum, Bialecki’s article both provokes thought and presents many elements that are good to think with. I for one will be trying out his theory. 
 

[Update: Don't miss Jon Bialecki's response below]
 
Jon Bialecki link
11/6/2013 11:38:07 pm

First of all, I want to thank you for the attention, both explanatory and critical, that you gave to my essay; I think that this is something that does not occur nearly enough either in anthropology writ large, or even in the somewhat more cosy (but increasingly more anonymous) anthropology of Christianity. This site is doing something positive, and I base this not on any narcissistic attachment to my own work, but on the equal degree of care that you gave Brian Howell’s Repugnant Other essay (which is a really good essay).

Along with the exposition of my argument, you note a few concerns. I’m going to take them up in a laundry list manner, not in the necessary order of importance, but in the sequence in which you bring them up. The length and density of the response here is all out of proportion as well, but I thought that since this is the only way I know how to respond, it was better to do what I could, however malshapen, than do nothing at all.

The first is the issue of whether this theory either implies or engenders moral relativism. The first observation is that for some this would not necessarily be a negative thing - though I recognise that this is not a point that is widely shared. My response would be that if there is an insistence on an holding onto a ethical or moral stance that is in harmony with a virtual framing, there are ways of pulling this off. But it would be an ethic of immanent fidelity, and not any sort of universal or categorical one in the sense of legislating any code or any totalisation in advance. So, no legalism here, it seems.

The next implicit question is whether there can be a Christian ethic of this sort that works with this framing? I think there can be. Daniel Colucciello Barber, in his book On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity, has laid out an argument that there is both a Christian politics and Christian ethic of immanent fidelity to the Jubilee announcement made in Luke 4:16-21; for Barber this is a performative declaration, and adherence to it as an ethos is a responsible means through which to create a Christianity that engages in a creative yet faithful manner to whatever situation it is occurring in. I’ve written about what Barber’s book means for the anthropology of Christianity as a political project, but I think that here is some heft to this other ethical dimension of his argument as well. This isn’t the only imaginable immanent Christian ethic of course - Deleuze had a great deal of respect for Kierkegaard, who he saw as a Christian thinker who was not under the lure of transcendence, and thus avoided replicating the pyramid model of Christianity you identify in your essay. And I certainly think that, leaving behind “philosophical” Christianities for “Actually Existing” Christianities, there are plenty of cases of individuals and communities that have what looks like an imminent ethic. Of course, I don’t have a dog in this fight (as I say in another paper of mine, I consider myself an atheist, though what i mean by that is slightly different than how the term is commonly used today). But this is a serious question.

The next issue is whether my description of anthropology as currently in the throws of nominalism is true. I think you’re right that you don’t have to assume a starting point of disciplinary nominalism in order to see value in my argument, but I really do believe that nominalism is the guiding presumption of our time. Think for instance of the “bundle” model you contrast with my account - isn’t that competing framing nominalist to the core? What is a world religion than is merely a gathering of disparate things, that have shared traits due to contingent processes yet no commonality, if not nominalism? In an odd way, the problem is not whether or not anthropology is nominalist, but rather where is it nominalist; for instance there are some anthropologically-prized concepts that could afford to be pluralised, most particularly neoliberalism, but that’s a different discussion.

You note that I don’t provide a model for what this looks like - you’re right. All I can say is “Watch This Space.” I’m hoping that some material that is either in production or under review will serve as exemplars, but I also want to observe that you can see something like this process, unmarked, in a lot of existing ethnography by other people. In addition to the Keane and Engelke that you reference in your post, there are also other ethnographers who are thinking through a plurality or a becoming of Christian forms. Omri Elisha’s work, for instance, about a painful and tentative mutation in evangelical social engagement is a great example, even if he forgoes theorisation for a respectable anthropological empiricism (as opposed to a transcendental empiricism that I like to see myself engaging in - but that’s another di

Jon Bialecki link
11/7/2013 03:17:52 am

Apologies - my screed was cut short by the automatic word cap! Starting off where I left off ....

Omri Elisha’s work, for instance, about a painful and tentative mutation in evangelical social engagement is a great example, even if he forgoes theorisation for a respectable anthropological empiricism (as opposed to a transcendental empiricism that I like to see myself engaging in - but that’s another discussion altogether). And I would say the same about James Bielo’s work - particularly the book length pieces. To go outside of the United States, you can see something similar in Liana Chua’s recent ethnography (though in her case it comes out in a somewhat less that charitable reading, and in some ways an incorrect one as well, of the Anthropology of Christianity literature, but that’s a different issue).

I also want to take up the way you frame the problem/solution binary. At one level - particularly the level of description and praxis, you’re absolutely right when you present “both domains as encompassing problems and solutions.” And it is true, virtualities arise from actualisations in the same way that actualisation arise from virtualities. I think, though, that it is important to keep in mind the mathematical analogy, in which “solutions” come after “problems” only in the embodied time of arithmetic labor; at another level, though, the solution and the problem both mirror each other, and exist simultaneously, in mathematics. This may seem to be a perverse insistence on a certain relation between problem and solution, and arguably it isn’t one that even Deleuze himself always endorsed, but considering the unconscious, automatic nature of so much of the play between the virtual and the actual, to disaggregate them too much is an error. Also, I think in a weird way it undermines your desire to create an equivalence between the two modes, as it papers over the way that actualities are in continuous movement as well as are virtualities, the way that a ball flying in an arc in the air (the actual) has a continuously moving tangent as an expression (the virtual), one that traces in advance the path of the ball. Of course, with human beings, the variables rise to levels of far greater complexity, involving scenarios that are at the least ‘non-linear’ - hence the openness of the virtual, which is just a way of discussing the underdetermined nature of life that is arguably the core of a certain kind of human freedom.

This also brings us to the discussion of the virtual’s autonomy from the real, a claim about which you have some understandable suspicions. I would say that it’s important too acknowledge that yes, it is impossible to deny that “Christian actions might exist without being imagined, remembered, read, archived, inferred, invented, thought, acted, embodied, etc., by human beings.” But it is also true that all these activities, and the humans who engage in them, are also expressions of asubjective forces, and that the mental activities you reference are the result of continuing affective intensities, and the degrees of plasticity in what those affective intensities encounter. You could produce a full and complete narrative by attending to a causal, humanist account of your Christian actors, how they imagine, remember, read, archive infer, invent, and this is something that is a requirement of good ethnography (though perhaps not the only requirement). But you could also produce a full account predicated on these asubjective forces as well - hence, the autonomy of these two frames.

Finally, you rightfully say that you question whether “it is desirable to attempt to get all anthropologists of Christianity to work towards the same goal, based on the same theory.” I wouldn’t want that either. That doesn’t mean that I’m disowning my comments, but rather that I think that a lot of ethnography of Christian populations, or Christian concerns, isn’t an anthropology of Christianity. That isn’t an insult. I’m not saying that this non-anthropology-of-christianity-anthropology-of-christianity isn’t good anthropology or ethnography, or that it shouldn’t be discussed in spaces dedicated to the anthropology of Christianity. Note gonna kick anything off of Anthrocybib (if I can sneak in a plug). But these pieces aren’t reflections on what Christianity is, at least from a social science perspective - they are discussions of other problematics, the arc of which just happens to transverse a Christian field. When Christianity itself in the abstract is discussed, and when it is discussed anthropologically, as opposed to ethnographically, an approach that doesn’t at least take seriously the concerns I put forward in my essay, if not the actual theoretical ‘solutions,’ will end up doing violence to the wealth of expressions

Jon Bialecki link
11/7/2013 03:20:02 am

(Finishing up from the automatic cut-off again ... )

When Christianity itself in the abstract is discussed, and when it is discussed anthropologically, as opposed to ethnographically, an approach that doesn’t at least take seriously the concerns I put forward in my essay, if not the actual theoretical ‘solutions,’ will end up doing violence to the wealth of expressions of Christianity that has been document by anthropologist. To get back to the Pyramid folk-model you mention in your post, we should recall that pyramids are tombs, and that we have to avoid both the temptation to vivisect Christianity into individual constituent slivers, or place it in an analytic sarcophagus and bury it alive.

And on that upbeat imagine, I’m going to close. This has been a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to reading your book, and also to seeing what new discussions you create through this blog.

Ingie Hovland
11/8/2013 09:06:17 am

Jon, thanks so much for taking the time to reply – even more food for thought. I will not respond to the individual points here, but I have read them all carefully and will continue to mull them over. You will be happy to know that your response has countered my three reservations, and while I am not 100% on board with those particular points yet, I think I understand more clearly now what you are aiming at. I am definitely at least 37% less skeptical of those points than I was before.

This exchange has reminded me again of just how valuable it is to think aloud about someone’s work and then to encounter their response, as opposed to forming opinions about someone’s work (and writing and publishing those opinions) without encountering any clarifications or helpful resistance. I look forward to seeing the model in action in your future work!

kinship
11/18/2013 04:10:34 am

1. I think you both are overthinking this.
2. if you think secular teachings can analyze Christianity then you are going to be off the mark.
3. We already know what Christianity is. It is defined in the Bible and only God gets to define it.

Daniel
11/18/2013 05:25:43 am

Obviously you misunderstand social sciences kinship. Using cultural anthropology to understand Christianity is NOT demeaning to the faith in anyway.

I for one have thoroughly enjoyed this discussion and thank James Mcgrath for pointing this website out. Fascinating topics....

Thanks for letting me be here
Dan
(social researcher by trade, sociologist and theologian by training)


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