on living in the south-eastern corner of The West

Christmas is coming; which, in Australia, means summer holidays, sunscreen, bushfires, and barbeques. My husband’s work Christmas Party is in a few days time and it marks the beginning of a party season that will keep going until mid-January when people start having to head back to work after Christmas and New Year. If you are reading this from the North Atlantic you have good reason to be jealous.

Sun hats and deck chairs: Christmas 2012

I have also been communicating with some colleagues in the UK about visiting next year and the mismatch of summer holidays and semester schedules makes things a little bit awkward.

And then I excitedly opened up a book recommended by someone I trust and read this:

“Indeed, the place we most often call the West is best called the North Atlantic — not only for the sake of geographical precision but also because such usage frees us to emphasize that “the West” is always a fiction, an exercise in global legitimation”
Michel-Rolph Trouillot Global Transformations (2003), p1

These little moments create a friction.

I think Trouillot is right to point out that ‘the West’ is a fiction. And to his credit, he does say that the North Atlantic is what we ‘most often’ mean when we use the term. But these little moments shape those of us who live a little bit more to the the south and east of Trouillot’s North Atlantic West. They are a gentle reminder of the tension in Australia (and New Zealand, and other places besides) between the centrality of the ‘fiction’ of the West to our identity and the simultaneous physical, seasonal, and calendrical distance we experience from the rest of the West.

We are set apart.

Openness and reward

This week at field-work-church*, God spoke to me. I have been cautious about the claim that an anthropologist should (and especially cautious about the claim that they do) make themselves open to being ‘converted’ to the way of life or beliefs of the people they work with. But there are moments in which I feel more malleable than others. This week was one of those moments.

The pastor was preaching from Genesis 15; Abram is starting to doubt God’s capacity to come through on his promise to make him a blessing and a great nation. Abram is afraid. When the preacher threw out the rhetorical question “What are you afraid of?” I knew the answer straight away – a looming PhD annual review, 20 thousand words and the feeling like it’s all slipping through my fingers. But God’s words to Abram rung true:

After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, saying, “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward.”

I heard that promise for myself: “I am your exceedingly great reward“.  I realised that even though I might not change up my church membership to join one of the churches or denominations I have been working with, God does speak to me through them. And it is God who is my exceedingly great reward and not academic acclaim; the great privilege of working with Christians from other traditions and being pushed to think about God in new ways is its own reward with or without the piece of paper I hope to get at the end of it all.

As a postscript, I feel like this process of letting/hearing/acknowledging God speak to me in a way that makes sense through my own theological lens makes me a bad anthropologist. And I don’t know what to do with that yet…

*My husband, son and I are members of a different local church, but I have been attending this church for about 6 months doing part-time fieldwork.

The creative self

Does creativity come from within the self? Do you own it? Or does it come to you? Is it external?

Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat Pray Love fame) suggests in this talk that the modern, Western notion of the self-contained artist has led to a great suffering among creative people. She calls for a reinstatement of the ancient Greek idea of the ‘daemon’ or Roman idea of the ‘genius’ which provided explanations of creativity as something external to the self. I don’t think you have to be on-board with her spirituality to find her suggestion intriguing. It’s an entertaining reflection on the way we think in the West about the self and creativity.

On Identity

What makes me me? This question could be asked by a two year old. But it’s really hard to answer! I’ve been pushed to think about it a little more deeply as I tutor a course in ethnic nationalism.

In the West, we tend to think of individuals as self-contained. That is, they are contained within a unique body, they have a unique mind, they are independent and free. But not everybody thinks that way.

Richard Handler (1994) suggests the idea of individual ‘identity’ is a peculiarly modern and Western notion and that it’s not really a very useful cross-cultural concept. He points to Whorf’s description of the Hopi from the south western United States, who “consider that human thought acts routinely as a force in the outer world” rather than being somehow contained within the brain of a physically contained human body (ibid p31). And he draws our attention to Clifford Geertz’s description of repetitious naming practices in Bali that “mute the…details of personal biography” pointing instead to the continuousness of the unchanging cosmos (ibid p33).

I’m pretty happy to have the idea of the self-contained individual shaken up a bit. It makes me think about the way the Bible talks about Christian’s being ‘in Christ’ or the church being ‘the body of Christ’:

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling-place for God.
Ephesians 2:19-22

Handler, R (1994) ‘Is “Identity” a Useful Cross-Cultural Concept?’, in J. Gillis (ed.) Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, Princeton University Press, Princeton.

On being an anthropological subject

Reflections on “The Christianity of Anthropology” by Fenella Cannell, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 11 (2), 335-356, 2005.

“This article critiques the way in which the discipline of anthropology has construed Christianity, arguing that too narrow and ascetic a model of Christianity has become standard…” (p335)

So begins Cannell’s article (based on her Malinowski Memorial Lecture) in which she seeks to explore how Mormonism presents an alternative model of Christianity in which the physical and the spiritual are closely related and interdependent, and in which kinship plays an important role in eternity.

I’m totally on board with the project she proposes in the quote above and find her reflections on Mormonism really fascinating. This is really stimulating research. However, I reckon there’s a lot more to be done than simply broadening the scope of reflection to more marginal denominations.

You see, the way she describes how mainstream anthropology understands Christianity is totally at odds with what I thought was my very orthodox, mainstream Christian upbringing. For example, according to Cannell, anthropologists represent Christianity and Christian theology in some of the following ways:

“Christianity…insists on the opposition between this world and the next world – the material and the spiritual…” (p338)

“the idea of the withdrawal of God from the world” (p340)

“Where Christianity was theorised, I found the approach tended to stress its ascetic components above all else and to assume that it would be premised on an antagonism between body and spirit” (p340)

“…Parry…failed to foreground the inevitable ambivalence towards the body which this doctrine [the resurrection] establishes in Christianity. The Christian body cannot be all bad, even for ascetics for it will be returned to us in heaven, although in fixed and incorruptible form” (p342)

“The undoubtedly powerful ascetic current in Christianity has generally been accompanied by an attitude to ordinary family life and kinship which regards it as, at most, a kind of second best to spiritual life” (p342)

So, while Cannell doesn’t think this is necessarily a true representation of Christian thought, she thinks other anthropologists do. I’m sure there are some Christians for whom it is true, but it’s missing out on a massive chunk of quite orthodox believers who are deeply concerned with this world and what happens in it because they believe God is still intimately involved in it and cares for it deeply.

I need to get a handle on this field of work for myself!

h/t to Tracey for sending me this article (and a bunch of others I haven’t read yet!). Thanks!

Beyond ethnicity

Reflections on Beyond the ethnic lens: Locality, globality and born again incorporation by Nina Glick-Schiller, Ayse Caglar and Thaddeus C. Guldbrandsen, American Ethnologist, volume 33, number 4, November 2006.

Nina Glick-Schiller is a bit of a guru in my little piece of the academic world. She’s done a lot of very good research around transnationalism (basically relationships and communities that extend across national boundaries).

I liked the way this article started. Glick-Schiller et al. set out to do away with what they call the ‘ethnic lens’ of lots of research on migration:

Research on migrant settlement has focussed on bounded ethnic populations with a shared identity and mode of incorporation.

Whereas they set out to do something a little bit different:

The central concern of this article is to develop a conceptual framework for the study of migration, settlement, and transborder connection that is not dependent on the ethnic group as either the unit of analysis or sole object of study. In its place, we suggest an ethnographic approach to locality

I like this. I can see how easy it is for each of us – but especially researchers – to reinforce social categories by assuming they already exist and framing our conversation/research around predefined groups. So, I’ve started wondering if it would be more productive to work with churches that bill themselves as ‘multicultural’ or ‘international’. Or just to pick a diverse suburb/locality in Melbourne and do my best to work with all the churches in that area.

Although the research contains clear indications that many worshippers emphasize a community in Christ without an ethnic suffix, scholars persist in categorizing the worshippers by their ethnicity.

Despite the fact that my experience in Australia has been that ethnicity and congregational life can be pretty deeply entwined, I want to work hard not to enter the field with assumptions about people’s ethnic or national identity.

Transforming Melbourne

I spend most of my time reading at the moment. But, when I get bored, or my eyes get sore, I’ve been playing with statistics and searching online for churches in Melbourne which advertise themselves as international, overseas, or by a specific ethnic identity. Along the way I have discovered Transforming Melbourne. All I know about them is what’s on their website, so you know as much about them as I do now. But what I’ve found really helpful is their church search function. There are three basic search criteria you can use to narrow your search:

• geographical location (either by city, postcode or municipality);
• denomination; and
• ethnicity.

I am intrigued that ‘ethnicity’ is a search option. I hope it means that I’ve picked up on something particularly worth looking into in the Australian church scene!