T.M. Lurhman on the Anthropology of Faith

American anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann's whole career has been about trying to refine the notion of "belief." In her studies of British Wiccans, American evangelicals, and others, she has shown that people's statements about what they "believe" vary dramatically from day to day and situation to situation. What is core to religion, in her view, is experience, and belief is often secondary or even irrelevent to religion.

For as long as it has existed, anthropology has been partly about describing other societies and partly about critiquing the anthropologist's own society. Consider Tacitus using the supposed marital fidelity of German tribesmen to attack the morals of Rome, or Margaret Meade using Samoan practices to question the sexual repression of the early twentieth-century west. In this fascinating essay, Luhrmann asks how that works when it comes to religion. We often see anthropologists praising the child-rearing practices of those they study with the idea that westerners should copy them, but not so much when it comes to religion. Published anthropological studies almost all take a view that might be called methodological atheism, that is, one simply does not get into whether religious beliefs are true or false, or good or bad. 

Yet god is the most radically other of radical otherness. One might think that exploring this otherness might be the greatest challenge any anthropologist could bring to the everyday expectations of the world back home. Why have we not done so?

A group of anthropologists sometimes called "ontological" have indeed done this to some extent:  

The ontological turn might seem to be the place anthropologists have risen to this challenge of confronting radical otherness. The early ontological writings certainly seemed as if they would. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Morten Pederson, and Martin Holbraad wrote fiery texts about the ways that most anthropologists examined the belief commitments of people like those in Amazonia, Cuba, and Siberia. These ontologists argued that most anthropologists treated such beliefs with scorn.

They argued that most anthropological observers presumed that such beliefs must be wrong, or that we needed to provide an account of why people held false understandings—and that view, the ontologists argued, was driven by deep-seated colonialist impulses or a kind of scientific imperialism. The point of the ontological turn was to insist that we should abandon these presumptions and decolonize anthropological thought. Willerslev and Suhr quote Viveiros de Castro: “Anthropologists must allow that ‘visions’ are not beliefs, nor consensual views, but rather worlds seen objectively; not world views, but worlds of vision” (2011: 133).

But these ontological anthropologists have not brought back observations from these local worlds in order to reimagine their own. One strongly doubts that Viveiros de Castro himself believes that women can become jaguars (to borrow the famous example). Neither Martin Holbraad nor Morten Pedersen has argued for an ontological understanding of his own world that seems different from the one he held before setting out to do fieldwork. Instead, in the recent (and admirably clear) summary of their position, they both appear to have pulled back from the claim that these other beliefs are veridical accounts of reality. To the extent that Holbraad and Pedersen (2017) accept these non-European belief commitments (the woman became a jaguar), they simply insist that these beliefs are veridical to others—and that, as James Laidlaw (2012) so articulately points out, leads us not into ontological confrontation but into epistemological relativism, the position that anthropologists have always held.

The anthropologists who are interested in how westerners might be changed by the encounter with others often focus on their own experience in a radically individual way:    

Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr make a different intellectual move. They focus on moments that are intellectually inexplicable from within an anthropologist’s secular worldview, and yet common in the lives of many fieldworkers.

Willerslev and Suhr draw from these moments a disciplinary epistemology of uncertainty and openness. They take the lesson that these events are the way that anthropological insights are made—that it is the shock of such moments that leads people trained into a certain worldview to break open into a different way of seeing. Anthropology grows, they say, with the ability to doubt what one knows, and through doubt, to change what one imagines. “This personal commitment to existential transformation of the self is as essential to the anthropological project as it was to Socrates” (73)

But since Luhrmann's study is focused on experience rather than belief, she sees the question differently:

To my mind, the powerful insight that arises out of the encounter with an alien god—alien to the anthropologist, that is—is that the purpose of life itself can be imagined differently as a result. We secular observers focus on the concept of “god” as a claim to a kind of stuffness— a real immateriality, a nature beyond ordinary nature (a supernature); perhaps, as George Eliot put it, the sound on the other side of silence. We often miss the important social fact that those of faith also take god to be radically other, too, and as a result, are often more committed to moral purpose than to supernatural reality. As an observer of the faithful, I want to point out that the most fundamental observation about faith is not that divine stuff exists, but that moral purpose in the face of uncertainty will change the world as we know it.

Faith is about seeing the world as it is and experiencing it—to some extent—as the world as it should be. Faith is about having trust that the world is good, safe, and beautiful. The blunt fact that these commitments are held in a world that is often brutal and unfair tells us that faith is hard and requires effort. Belief in a just, fair, good world is not some kind of mistake, not a deluded misconception that observers need to explain, but the fundamental point of the faith commitment—regardless of the supernatural nature of the divine. Faith is about holding certain commitments front and center in your understanding of reality even when the empirical facts seem to contradict them. That is why faith takes work and why faith changes the faithful. It is also why the encounter with the radical otherness of divinity should be central to anthropology, because it encourages the anthropologist to imagine how his or her own world and own life could be fundamentally different. . . .

The anthropological problem with god is that we treat the belief in the supernatural stuff as the heart of the matter. It is not. Far more central is the concept of radical otherness and its concomitant commitment that a sense of moral purpose can change the world as it is into the world as it should be whether anything empirical about that world changes at all.

Luhrmann, along with Weston La Barre, changed my own view of religion. I used to be a naive young atheist who always wanted to ask, "how can anyone believe that?" Now I see belief as a secondary phenomenon, something that arises from a commitment to a certain way of living and a strong desire to see meaning in the world, and I no longer wonder how smart people can immerse themeselves in it.

But I also find that I personally can't get away from belief. The problem, for me, with church services and the like is that people are always referencing beliefs that I don't share. Even a phrase like "Jesus said" launches me into questions about what we actually know about Jesus. I have met atheists who love divine music, but at least when it is sung in English I always get caught up in the theology. I am by nature an overthinking intellectual whose musings about divinity always start from facts, like those two trillion galaxies I like to reference. Regardless of what I feel, I can never shove the facts as we know them from the center of my mind long enough to experience the world in any other way.