Christianity, the most intently *missionary of the great world religions, has influenced the social and cultural lives of many of the peoples anthropologists have studied, from its European heartland and the Americas to the mission territories of Asia, Africa, Oceania and mission outposts ‘at home’. This evangelical spread has provided the dominant focus for anthropological reflection on Christianity over the years. Often cast in an historical mode, anthropological studies of Christianity have explored the complex ways in which global and local religious institutions and *great and little traditions have been mutually constructed, contested and transformed. In the process they have raised questions about the social bases of religiosity, the dynamics of religious change and the character of transnational institutions and cultural forms.
It must also be said that as a powerful historical force in Europe and the United States, Christianity helped shape the intellectual world that gave birth to anthropology itself. For example, the notion of ‘progress’ which grounded the evolutionary framework used by nineteenth and early twentieth-century anthropologists resulted from Enlightenment attempts to generalize and universalize the Judeo-Christian conception of time as the medium of sacred history (Fabian 1983:1–35). Likewise, the meanings of such basic concepts of social and cultural analysis as *person, *religion, *ritual, *sacrifice, *symbol and *belief have been inflected by their specific Christian histories in ways that still are not fully explored (Asad 1993).
Christianity’s role in the development of modern society has, of course, provided a fertile ground of analysis and reflection in classic (and contemporary) social theory (Parsons 1968). However, except for †Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ([1904–05] 1958), which has proved a continuing source of inspiration to anthropologists reflecting on the social consequences of religious belief, general or comparative studies of Christianity have had relatively little impact on the development of anthropological thought. Indeed, until the 1970s the anthropological literature on Christianity was quite thin, with a few notable exceptions including community studies that explored the social and cultural significance of Christianity in contemporary Europe, Latin America and the United States, and †ethnohistorical studies of *syncretism in Catholic *Central America. Since then, however, a wider range of anthropological work on Christianity has appeared.
Like other world religions, Christianity proclaims a transcendent truth of universal relevance, which must be communicated in settings that are historically particular, geographically local and culturally diverse. Anthropologists have found this a productive field for social and symbolic analysis, taking into consideration even the ways in which Jesus Christ and his followers transformed local Jewish imagery to convey their message. The eucharist or last supper, a central Christian sacrament representing Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection resembles its closest model, the Jewish passover, ‘but every critical element in the passover is reversed…. The passover is a feast that celebrates kinship and nationhood. Jesus’s sacrifice symbolizes the death of family and polity. His new covenant includes all humanity’ (Feeley-Harnik 1981:19).
The social inclusiveness of early Christianity was soon accompanied by the development of Christianity’s characteristic concern with doctrinal orthodoxy and the Church, its guarantor across time and space. Historians have explored the social grounding of important elements of orthodoxy, such as the rise of the cult of the saints in the turbulent world of late antiquity (Brown 1981) and Saint Anselm’s theory of salvation, which reflected medieval notions of compensation and kinship (Bossy 1985). However, ethnographic studies suggest that even in Europe relations between the local and the orthodox have been multiple and complex (Christian 1989). Indeed, as Jane Schneider and Shirley Lindenbaum report in an issue of American Ethnologist devoted to Christianity, a central problem for anthropological analysis has been ‘how in Christianity as in Islam or Buddhism, the powerful thrust of orthodoxy interacts with, and is changed by, local religious belief and action’ (1987:2).
Tensions between the orthodox and the local have most often been explored by anthropologists in non-Western societies where Christianity has been introduced in *colonial situations. In many of these regions, conversion to Christianity and Christianization—‘the reformulation of social relations, cultural meanings, and personal experience in terms of putatively Christian ideals’—continue to accompany the incorporation of people into the broader social order of the West (Hefner 1993:3). As Hefner notes, however, anthropological research indicates that Christianity ‘has demonstrated a remarkable ability to take on different cultural shadings in local settings’ (p. 5). Although missionaries have attempted to keep local expressions within the compass of orthodoxy, Christianity has often been reinterpreted to express local preoccupations and to address political, economic and social concerns (Smith 1994; Comaroff 1985).
Within established Christianity, orthodoxy has historically and often tragically battled its opponents while being subject in turn to moments and movements of revival, renewal and reformation. †Victor Turner and Edith Turner have proposed that Christian *pilgrimage be understood as a ‘mode of †liminality for the laity,’ which intensifies pilgrims’ attachment to their religion by offering temporary liberation from the structural constraints of everyday social life (1978:4). Elsewhere, the search for religious intensity and purification has led to the formation of denominations and sects which have fashioned identities in opposition to other Christian groups and/or the modernizing, secularizing world. However, the recent return of Christian †fundamentalism to the public arena in the United States underlines the instability of the boundaries between fundamentalist and modern (Harding 1994), and illustrates as well the continuing capacity of people acting in the name of Christianity to challenge powerfully a status quo.
Asad, T. (1993) Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Bossy, J. (1985) Christianity in the West: 1400–1700, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Brown, P. (1981) The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, London: SCM
Christian, W.A. (1989) Person and God in a Spanish Valley, Princeton: Princeton University Press
Comaroff, Jean (1985) Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia University Press
Feeley-Harnik, G. (1981) The Lord’s Table: Eucharist and Passover in Early Christianity, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
Harding, S. (1994) ‘The Born-Again Telescandals,’ in N.Dirks, G.Eley and S.Ortner (eds) Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Hefner, R.W. (ed.) (1993) Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation, Berkeley: University of California Press
Parsons, T. (1968) ‘Christianity’, in D.Sills (ed.) International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, New York: The Macmillan Company
Schneider, J. and S.Lindenbaum (eds) (1987) ‘Frontiers of Christian Evangelism’, American Ethnologist (special issue) 14 (1)
Smith, M.F. (1994) Hard Times on Kairiru Island: Poverty, Development, and Morality in a Papua New Guinea Village, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press
Turner, Victor and Edith Turner (1978) Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives, New York: Columbia University Press
Weber, M. ([1904–05] 1958) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons
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