The Idea of an Anthropology of Christian

on Talal AsadTHE IDEA OF AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF

CHR IST IAN ITY

Gil AnidjarColumbia University, USA

................The writings of Talal Asad offer a consistent and singular reflection on the

anthropological function of concepts. In a variety of manners, the use and

mention of a concept identifies the practice of a collective speaker before it

testifies to a designated object, real or imagined. The Christian baggage of the

concept of ‘religion’, indeed, the Christianity of the subject of religion, however,

is at once affirmed and denied by Talal Asad. Is Christianity a religion? Does the

concept of religion teach us something about Christianity? This essay attends to

Asad’s body of work and seeks to show that the idea of an anthropology of

Christianity !much more than an anthropology of religion (which Asad shows to

be a reductive endeavour), and different from an anthropology of Islam !remains both urgent and elusive.

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I have this sense that claiming something as modern is a kind of closure.

Talal Asad, ‘The Trouble of Thinking’

The concept of religion is a polemical concept. Its relation to power is notmerely derivative but inherent and dynamic, the product of unequal andconflicting forces at work within and around it. The concept of religion is an

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asymmetriesof power

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essential, asymmetric and contradictory moment in a series of acts,enactments and motions that constitute an object ! religion ! carving itout of the world within which it operates. In however limited a way,therefore, the concept of religion constitutes that world. Through itsiterations and reiterations, it takes the world apart: it makes the world,and simultaneously divides it, transforms it, redistributes it. This has little todo with the origins of the concept or with its particular history, whetherearly or late. In its scholarly usages as well as in its popular currency (andperhaps especially there), the concept of religion is performative (illocu-tionary and perlocutionary).1 Each time it is used or invoked, it enablesunderstanding, provides orientation, allocates meaning; it gathers, defines,sustains and even dictates dispositions, practices and modes of behaviour.Along with its contemporaries ! race and culture ! and in a mannercomparable to them, the concept of religion is of a ‘compulsive nature’.2 Itcompels by partaking of a total structure that distributes, divides andcombines elements or regions of being across space and time, history andgeography. It functions along a continuum in such a manner that ‘it isalways a question of the arrangement and rearrangement of the sameideological elements which constitutes the unity of [an] object’, concurring topersuade and compel (and govern) with regard to its existence (Asad 1975:258). Like race (and later, ethnicity), and unavoidably part of the samedynamic apparatus, religion is ‘a political category’, less a neutral explana-tion than an intervention ! positive or negative !within a field of power that‘serves either to define a total normative structure in equilibrium, or todissolve the concept of a total structure altogether and replace it byothers’ (259).

Since the beginning of his published career, Talal Asad, from whomI summarily derive the preceding argument and to whom the followingpages are devoted, has singularly sought to contend with such categoriesand concepts (or, in another, increasingly frequent rendition, ‘ideas’) asmodes of agency, ‘structures of possible actions’ and material articulationsof power ! as polemical devices.3 Asad has done so by locating themwithin larger and unexpected coordinates, revealing the ‘total structures’they partake of, generate, or conceal. In the following instance, Asaddescribes in illuminating terms some of the functions and operations !some of the polemical dimensions ! of the concept of ‘ethnicity’ and thespace of its reach.

‘Ethnicity’ itself proposes a certain autonomous subject: the ordered ethnic group,

or individuals interacting in terms of ethnic categories ! i.e. those who collectively

share, or who individually manipulate and respond to, given norms, customs,

symbols, etc. Ethnic subjects, whether combining or competing with each other, act

in accordance with shared rules (symbolic, moral, prudential) of the ‘power game’

1 Deploying thenotion of a‘locutionary act’, J.L. Austin (1962: 99,101) distinguishedillocutionary acts(‘performance of anact in sayingsomething asopposed toperformance of anact of sayingsomething’) fromperlocutionary acts(whereby ‘sayingsomething will often,or even normally,produce certainconsequential effectsupon the feelings,thoughts, or actionsof the audience, or ofthe speaker, or ofother persons’); andsee Talal Asad,Genealogies ofReligion (1993: 128);henceforthabbreviated as GR.

2 On the ‘compulsivenature’ of socialconcepts (whichexceeds thephilological matter ofwhether a termexisted in other daysor ages), see GR(176); on the linkbetween race andreligion, see Anidjar(2007). Asadjuxtaposes the termsin a subtitle (‘‘‘OtherRaces’’, ‘‘OtherReligions’’: Ex-colonial LabourComes to Britain’ inGR 253), but religionis not explicitlymentioned in thissection. Only race is.

3 The phrase‘structures ofpossible actions’appears in GR 15.

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which thus constitutes the identifiable social order. So not only does ethnicity

propose autonomous subjects, it also postulates the authority of a shared order as

the ultimate form of social reality. It is through this postulate that ‘ethnicity’ lends

itself to an ideological enterprise, when it is used to assert an unmediated social

unity where in reality there is merely a moment in the development of contra-

dictory forces ! i.e. when something that is merely the momentary, one-sided

expression of social repression is projected as a real, complete whole defined and

integrated by an immanent authority. (Asad 1975: 275)

It is easy to see how,with some adjustments, Asadwould later come to proposea similar view of the concept of ‘religion’, considering the kind of subject it toopresupposes; interrogating its role in the notion and the authority of ‘a sharedorder as the ultimate form of social reality’; and identifying the concept ofreligion as ‘a moment in the development of contradictory forces’ working intandemwith ‘themomentary, one sided expression of social repression’. In thisessay, I attempt to take the measure of this view and to follow some of theconditions that sustain it, the trajectories it presupposes and traces; to engageAsad’s work from the larger conceptual perspective he himself articulates, inmy view steadily, across years of otherwise evolving positions and reflections. Iwill then explore the ways in which Asad participates in identifying ‘ananthropology of Christianity’, why it might be so, and with what implica-tions.4 At the same time, the impossibility of such an anthropology, explicitlyand implicitly inscribed in Asad’s prose, will have to guide its evaluation ! if anon-exhaustive one, of course. To borrow from one of Asad’s own formula-tions in a proximate context, the issue goes beyond being for or againstthe attempt to generalize about Christianity. It is rather set ‘against themannerin which the generalization is undertaken. Anyone working on the anthro-pology of [Christianity] will be aware that there is considerable diversity in thebeliefs and practices of [Christians]. The first problem is therefore one oforganizing this diversity in terms of an adequate concept.’5

Grammar of a Concept

Toward that first problem, then, let us acknowledge for the moment that theconcept of religion has been gaining popularity within the scholarlydiscourse of anthropology and of other disciplines, in political discussionsas well as in public culture.6 Following Asad, I have just begun to argue thatthe concept of religion is a polemical concept. This is also to say that it is acomparative concept, extending across a ‘hierarchical differential ofpower’.7 It is so not only because it has been deployed across vast anddiverse areas, thereby sustaining and promoting a comparative effort,whether implicit or explicit. It is also because, like all such concepts, theconcept of religion is internally structured according to strict divisions, and itfunctions, as it were inherently, by way of these divisions. It enacts them and

4 Fenella Cannellwrites of Asad’s roletoward what shecalls ‘theanthropology ofChristianity’ (2006:4). In what follows Imean to explore theground for her claimin Asad’s work.

5 Asad, The Idea ofan Anthropology ofIslam (1986: 5);henceforthabbreviated as IAI.

6 A recent collectionof essays (de Vries2008) appears toadvocate that we goso far as to move‘beyond’ the conceptof religion.

7 This expression,which precedes butalso announcesAsad’s reading ofFoucault, appears inthe conclusion to hisfirst book, TheKababish Arabs(1970: 235);henceforthabbreviated as KA.One could argue thatthe phrase also

THE IDEA OF AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF CHRISTIANITY 369........................Gil Anidjar


embodies them by isolating, within a larger field, a particular sphere fromanother (indeed, each ‘sphere’ is defined and buttressed by it). Suchmechanisms are at work, of course, in a variety of instances, within awide array of concepts, and they can be followed in scrupulous detailthrough most of Asad’s writings. In The Kababish Arabs, for example, Asadengages the mechanism through the conceptual distinction made betweenmoney and power, between economy and politics, in the discourse offunctional anthropology. In this particular case, he explains,

the distinction between economic and political allocations (as closely intercon-

nected aspects of social action and not as different kinds of activity) is that the

former is concerned with maximizing utility and the latter with maximizing power.

Both require a minimal acceptance of ‘the rules of the game’, though not all those

involved in the game are in a position to come forward as active players. (KA 231)

In the field of ‘social action’, therefore, there are no neutral distinctionsbetween kinds of activities, nor are there predefined boundaries for theseactivities and their understanding. Instead, the very distinctions produce andreproduce the inequality of access to these activities and their shiftingdomains. Conceptual divisions openly or covertly reinforce ‘the hierarchicaldifferential of power’ (KA 235).8

In his later work, Asad widens the scope of his inquiry and builds upon thetechnical or scholarly use of concepts, moving beyond the confines ofintellectual and academic discourse.9 In fact, what Asad advocates as ‘ananthropological perspective’ involves precisely the adoption of a broadercomparative view, in which one tries to see a particular concept (or aparticular event) ‘as the articulation of a number of organizing categoriestypical of a particular (in this case political) culture’.10 More than a matter ofmere perspective is at stake, however. Anthropology, so the argument goes,concerns itself with the comparative understanding of concepts as polemicalinterventions, as acts and operations, parts of an orientation, of a way ofbeing.11 Another way to say this is to recall that concepts, for Asad, arealways part of an ‘economy’ ! a political economy and an economy of signs !within a wider field of divisions and distributions. Concepts inevitably play apart ‘in a particular, active, social life where psychological ‘‘inside’’ andbehavioral ‘‘outside’’ are equally (though in different ways) signified bylinguistic and non-linguistic behaviour that is publicly accessible.’12 Con-cepts, in other words, have (and they sustain) a grammar, in Wittgenstein’ssense.13 This is how, for example, in On Suicide Bombing ! the publishedversion of the 2006 Wellek lectures he gave at the University of California,Irvine ! Asad looks at the concept of ‘terrorism’ (hardly a random example,of course, or a random concept, and one that will accompany, perhapssilently govern, our entire discussion). There, he considers the grammar of

8 In this and inmany other ways,Asad announces andparallels the politicalanthropology ofPierre Clastres, mostparticularly inClastres (1974); seealso Clastres (1999).

9 Asad’scontribution toAnthropology andthe ColonialEncounter isexemplary as a studyof the scholarlyoperations of theconcept of ‘politicaldomination’ (seeAsad 1973).

belongs to a widerconcern withhegemony, colonialand imperial power,but I would arguethat Asad’s interestin the polemical, andcomparative,dimension ofconcepts warrantsmy emphasis on thelatter as a generalmechanism of theformer. David Scottand CharlesHirschkind (2006: 5)also underscore thefact that, for Asad,‘anthropology is bestthought of as thecomparative study ofconcepts across spaceand time’; andconsider theinspiration Asadfinds in FranzSteiner’s work, mostrelevantly, to mymind, Steiner’sconcern with thebroad significance ofcomparativecategories (Steiner1956).

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this concept, conducting ‘an examination of what the discourse of terror !and the perpetration of terror ! does in the world of power’ (26). He showshow the concept (and its derivatives, opposite and apposite) is articulated;how it functions comparatively within a larger conceptual and social field,within a particular political culture, and beyond. Indeed, terrorism is arevealing instance of the comparative dimension of concepts because it is, asit were, internally distinguished from war. What Asad is after, therefore, isthe specific matter of a difference between the two. ‘How is the differencebetween terrorism and war defined in contemporary public discourse?’ (15).What he will go on to show is that the difference operates within theconcept. The concept of terrorism ! but beyond it, I think, any concept, ifdifferently so at different times ! must therefore be seen as suffused andtraversed by the distinctions and dispositions within which it operates. Inthis sense, a concept is an embodiment, a capacity and an act of power.Concepts are performative, but depending on their currency, they are also, asit were, inflicted. It is to that extent as well that a concept ! and today theconcept of religion in particular ! is polemical.

How are the internal divisions, the inscriptions of power, inscribed in theconcept of religion? And what is the nature (changing or not) of this power?Insisting, in a Foucauldian fashion, that, in some contexts at least, ‘power isconstructive, not repressive’, Asad argues against those who claim that‘hegemonic power necessarily suppresses difference in favour of unity’ orthat ‘power always abhors ambiguity’ (GR 17). One should recognizeinstead that in order to ‘secure its unity ! to make its own history ! dominantpower has worked best through differentiating and classifying practices’(17). Regardless of its success or failure, then, the kind of power thatdemands our attention here (‘dominant power’) functions by producingasymmetric divisions (and Asad’s concern with asymmetry and withinequalities is nothing if not consistent). First among unequals in thisdifferential field, then, the power he writes about is to be conceived as afigure of unity, not because it is not differentially constituted, nor because itoccludes difference, but rather because of its peculiarity as that which‘constructs and redefines itself as a project’. This construction and redefini-tion involves more than ‘an accumulative narrative’ about the past. It is also‘the continuous calculation’ of its own future, the projection of an integralunity. This power, in other words, ‘must be understood as a teleology’ whichmay succeed or fail in actually producing internal unity but managesnonetheless to constitute ‘a singular collective identity [that] defines itself interms of a unique historicity in contrast to all others, a historicity that shiftsfrom place to place . . . until it embraces the world’ (18!19). But the West(for it is ‘the West’ that Asad is describing here) does ‘include within itself itspast as an organic continuity’ (18). For this and other reasons, it is notmerely one manifestation of a general pattern open to universalization, nor

11 I borrow theselast expressions fromTUFS (501); onemight recall thehistory of sciencehere, and particularyLudwik Fleck’sformulation ofconcepts as bound to‘the prevailingthought style’ of aperiod, and to its‘operative socio-cogitative forces’(Fleck 1979: 2, 23).

10 Asad, ‘Trying toUnderstand FrenchSecularism’(henceforthabbreviated as TUFS)in de Vries andSullivan (2006: 497);and consider anearlier andproximateformulation, on the‘theoretical choiceand treatment ofwhat socialanthropologyobjectified’, to theeffect that ‘any objectwhich issubordinated andmanipulated is partlythe product of apower relationship,and to ignore thisfact is tomiscomprehend thenature of that object’(Asad 1973: 7!18).‘Religion’, needlessto say, is at once‘concept andpractice’ as well as ‘amodern historicalobject’ in GR (1!2,and see 167 as well).



one collective identity among others. On the contrary, part of the asymmetryto which we must attend is that the West is comparatively singular. It isdefined by the particular project around which it has articulated itself,making itself ! rightly or wrongly ! into the agent, the maker of its ownhistory. ‘Indeed, in a crucial sense it is that project . . . that articulates ourconcept of human beings making history’ (18). This particular conscious-ness, this concept of agency, is a defining feature of the West but notnecessarily because its effects (the history it has made or, simply, that it hasbeen) correspond to its intentions. Rather, the concepts and practices ! thestructures of possible actions ! thereby deployed have participated increating an overarching division that intersects with others, functioningthrough them, and that always separates the West from the rest. In oneparticular rendering, ‘the West defines itself, in opposition to all non-westerncultures, by its modern historicity’, that is, by its ‘novel conception ofhistoricity’ (18).

It is a well-known truism by now that this ‘contrastive sense of themodern’ fashioned the West as the unique and privileged site of ‘progress’. Itrelegated not only non-Europeans to the exotic (or doomed) regions of thepremodern, produced flawed standards of measurement (that is, it estab-lished measurement as the standard), but also recast Europe’s own past (andnote that this past remains its own past) into a lesser and less valued versionof itself (GR 20). The West, in other words, inflicted its asymmetric divisionsupon itself as well. ‘Accelerating forward into an open future’, the West, as(self-conceived) agent, made (and makes ! or thinks it makes) history by wayof the concept of agency, one in which ‘the agent must create the future’,remake itself, ‘and help others to do so, where the criteria of successfulremaking are seen to be universal’ (19), if not always actual. The unity of theWest is the (teleological) result of a series of self-dividing concepts andpractices. Asserting the continuity of its own history, the West produced aconcept of history that divided it from its past, making itself distinct from,well, itself as another. In its conception of itself, the West is not (and nolonger) what it was. It is only what it has become. More precisely,‘accelerating forward into an open future’, the West is only what it willbecome. That is why, as Asad underscores, ‘it must be understood as ateleology’ (17).

Here as elsewhere, difference is everywhere, of course. But ‘instead ofbeginning with the axiom that difference is always subordinate to sameness’,that sameness is constituted through or by way of difference, sometimes tothe point that difference eradicates identity (‘the West doesn’t exist’). Asadasks ‘what are the arguments for saying that this difference . . . is relevanthere?’ (2006b: 519). It is indeed a specific set of differences and distinctions(and among them the difference ‘religion’ makes) that enables the West toclaim ! to self-proclaim ! its own uniqueness, adjudicating on the value of

13 I would alsopoint to the relevanceof Paul de Man here,whose discussion ofthe relation betweengrammar andrhetoric seems to mequite pertinent toAsad’s owndeployment of thenotion of grammar(see de Man 1979:esp. 3!19). Althoughhe has read de Man,Asad more readilyrefers toWittgenstein; see, forexample, RMC (133,139), and Asad,Formations of theSecular (henceforthabbreviated as FS)(25).

12 Asad, ‘Reading aModern Classic: W.C. Smith’s ‘‘TheMeaning and End ofReligion’’’(henceforthabbreviated as RMC)in de Vries andWeber (2001: 139).

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‘others’ by way of internal categories. That is not to say that this is all that isinvolved in the distinctiveness of the West. Rather, the West’s uniqueness,which prominently includes a self-proclamation as well as a self-definition, is‘part of an orientation, of a way of being’. And comparison, as a conceptual,cross-cultural and historical practice, is an essential moment in thisorientation, as Mary Douglas recognizes, one that ultimately makes‘difference’ itself the difference that counts. Everything is as if a particulardifference were conceived as difference itself, as the difference that matters ingoverning the distinction between the West and the rest.14 Others may referhere to ‘metaphysics’ (without being accused of ‘Occidentalism’), but such apeculiar orientation is at work in different regions or fields, operating in andthrough concepts and practices (such as history, modernity, comparativestudies, within diverse disciplines and discursive fields and, of course, withinpopular culture, but also economy, law, technology and, let us not forget,weapons of mass destruction), which can be studied and read ! if notnecessarily interpreted ! as divided because they are practices of internal andexternal divisions, because they activate or reiterate a ‘hierarchical differ-ential of power’. And so too ‘religion’ ! the very concept.

Asad begins by identifying the way in which the concept of religion makesan object ‘analytically identifiable’, distinct from ‘politics, law, and science’among other things or realms. Religion may not have an essence, we canconcede, but the concept does ‘invite us to define religion (like any essence)as a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon’ (GR 28). It also ‘invitesus to separate it conceptually from the domain of power’ (GR 29) and fromother domains as well. Now, to argue over the definition of religion ! to bedivided over it ! is obviously one way of buttressing the concept, althoughthat is probably not the most important reinforcement the concept needs toproduce a wide array of effects. But the scholar (or the public, for thatmatter) is hardly alone. And religion is not simply of his own making. In fact,when it comes to adjudicating on the question of religion (its being rule orbelief, practice or doctrine, early or late, western or non-western, and soforth), the scholar is hardly confronted with ‘an arbitrary collection ofelements and processes that’ he (or we, or they) ‘happen to call ‘‘religion’’’.Rather, ‘the entire phenomenon is to be seen in large measure in the contextof Christian attempts to achieve a coherence of doctrines and practices, rulesand regulations’ (GR 29). Religion, in other words, is the result of a traditionand of a name, which Christianity gave itself, part of a style of thought,which it elaborated over centuries in order to achieve some degree of unity !much like ‘the West’ was described as doing earlier. It is not so much that theconcept makes the object, but rather that the concept is part of the object !here ‘Christianity’ or ‘religion’ ! and participates in determining its potentialboundaries. Rules and law; governed, recurrent or ritualized behaviour;faith, beliefs and opinions; cosmology and anthropology; the division of

14 Asad quotes fromMary Douglas’sPurity and Danger:‘The right basis forcomparison is toinsist on the unity ofhuman experienceand at the same timeto insist on itsvariety, on thedifferences that makecomparison worthwhile. The only wayto do this is torecognize the natureof historical progressand the nature ofprimitive and ofmodern society.Progress meansdifferentiation. Thusprimitive meansundifferentiated;modern meansdifferentiated.Advance intechnology involvesdifferentiation inevery sphere, intechniques andmaterials, inproductive andpolitical roles . . .Differentiation inthought patterns goesalong withdifferentiated socialconditions’ (quotedin GR 22n21). Itshould be clear thatAsad advocates theuse of moredifferentiatedconcepts, that wouldnot reinscribe granddistinctions (past/present, primitive/modern, etc.), butprecisely interrogatetheir verydistribution acrossthe hierarchicaldifferential of power,that is, externallyand internally, and



being into distinct or indistinct regions, and any number of other concepts,practices and things ! all these may or may not exist universally. But theirgathering (or exclusion) under a particular concept (such as ‘religion’ ! evenif there are others) is an essential intervention, one that incidentally has notoccurred universally and that also changed over the course of the centuries.And ‘yes, of course one should try to talk about disparate things in relationto one another, but what exactly is the purpose of constructing a serieswhose items can all too easily be recognized by cultivated westerners asinstances of the phenomenon’ of religion (GR 53n34)? This question alreadysignals toward the reasons why it is necessary to recall that religion is apolemical concept. The concept partakes of an identification and of adivision ! it enacts and embodies a division that, internal to itself andexternal as well in its effects, produces at once difference and identity:between religion and non-religion, between a religious world and a non-religious one, between humankind and itself, if from a particular perspective(itself a divided one, of course). Like the concept of race (and strikingly moreresilient), and like its suggested successors (‘culture’ or, more recently,‘political theology’ or ‘the theologico-political’, quickly and deftly universa-lized), the concept of religion does not therefore define an originary divisionof the world (between ‘the white race’ and the other ‘races’, or between thesacred and the profane, religion and politics), it rather produces an ensembleof distinctions that, with varying degrees of force and effectivity, divide andreshuffle the larger field of knowledge and power (‘life’, or ‘being’, or ‘theworld’ or whatever) into ‘analytically identifiable’ entities that are notnecessarily translatable ! but that can be inflicted and enforced. One knows,for instance, the difficulties that were created by requests for ‘religious’identification on census forms in colonial regimes, or the effect of recastingcomplex and changing systems of laws into ‘religious’ customs. Whereas thedivision between, say, sacred and profane may define !where pertinent ! theentire field of experience (in which the profane is constituted by and out ofthe sacred), religion is instead distinguished after a different fashion from thesecular as a distinct sphere (from which the secular is then deemedindependent and autonomous). Although one division may translateanother, it does not cover, nor does it divide and distribute, the same fieldof experience. Hence, and for a long time, ‘religion’ functioned the way‘history’ came to function: there were those who had it, and those who didnot (today, ‘democracy’ may come to mind as a pertinent parallel). Therewere those who had religion ! these were the Christians, in case you werewondering ! and those who did not (GR 20n15, 40n24). Sometimes, ofcourse, a gesture of magnanimous universality went so far as to grant somethe privilege (of religion, of culture, of citizenship, and so forth), or at leastto debate the matter by importing and extending ! indeed, inflicting ! theconceptual apparatus in which religion is inscribed.

indeed, questioningthe very boundarybetween inside andoutside.

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It is also well known, however (and Asad reminds those of us who mayhave forgotten), that the word ‘religion’ itself has a contested and changinghistory. Discussions remain largely open regarding the meaning (or mean-ings) of the original Latin word religio and its field of application. In Asad’srendering, the term and its cognates are shown to have expandedquantitatively, moving from a restricted reference to the community of‘those living in monastic communities’, later to include an internaldistinction of the community, its institutions and practices, between religiousand secular (GR 39n22). Other narratives can and have been offered forthese changes, but it is clear that the term functioned within Europeanlanguages across the transformations and appropriations of Latin ! problemsof translation (what Asad calls ‘cultural translation’ across the ‘inequality oflanguages’: GR 171!99) have been and remain massive, and they involved‘internal’ translations as well. There is no doubt that with the conquest of theAmericas, and in the aftermath of the Reformation, the term wasdisseminated in an exponential manner ! some will say that the changewas quantitative, others qualitative ! until there emerged, in the seventeenthcentury, philosophically established as well as popular conceptions of‘natural religion’ (GR 40). Whatever narrative is adopted, the dominantunderstanding of religion, in which, as Asad shows, Clifford Geertzfamously participates, has, at any rate, ‘a specific Christian history. Frombeing a concrete set of practical rules attached to specific processes of powerand knowledge, religion has come to be abstracted and universalized’ (GR42).

And yet, this last sentence testifies to the magnitude of the problem oneencounters in attempting to engage the grammar of a concept while beinginscribed within its history; the difficulty one may have, in other words, inextirpating oneself from the concept of religion, or minimally in refrainingfrom reproducing or occluding its inherent tensions, divisions and usages.This is true no matter what definition one embraces (assuming, of course,that it is a matter of mere choice, an assumption that Asad is significantlyreluctant to make, when he declines the demand that he offer a newdefinition of religion: GR 54). One may further recognize this difficultywhen considering the remark made by Asad in the early publication I havealready mentioned. There, Asad himself was commenting on the use ofconcepts within the social sciences, arguing against ‘the holding of a numberof ideas’, which I suggest he might still find objectionable today. Andparticularly so in this context.

It seems to me that ‘the problem of the definition of social phenomena’ as

envisaged by Dr Gough involves the holding of a number of ideas which appear to

support each other but are in fact expressions of the mistaken view that the social

world consists of a number of free-floating basic entities called institutions which



exist prior to and are independent of any conceptual apparatus that we bring to

bear on their study. It is in the light of this view that the following ideas, either

stated explicitly or implied in Dr Gough’s article, seem so self-evident: that the

collection of social facts and their labelling precede comparison or explanation or

both, that a definition is a classificatory device and not an aim of research, that the

wider the definition the better, and that cross-cultural survey involves a

comparison of similar objects. (Asad 1960)

In other words, historians (and anthropologists), beware. Certainly, thingsmay appear less severe with ‘religion’ (as opposed to ‘marriage’ and othersuch institutions which is what Dr Gough was writing about). But note thatin the sentence I quoted earlier (‘religion has come to be abstracted anduniversalized’), ‘religion’ emerges as the subject that existed, as it were,before, and independently of, its conceptualization (a conceptualization thatwas not explicitly elaborated throughout the periods discussed, and not onlyfrom scholars and theologians who did or did not use the term in anyimmediately translatable sense, but also from the general, popular discourse,of which we know admittedly little). In fact, everything is as if, havingundergone a transformation, ‘religion’ ! for again it would be religion thatremains the subject of the transformation; still analytically identifiable, stillthe same, if transformed ‘religion’ ! had come to be abstracted anduniversalized. Rather than indicating the novelty of a changed configura-tion, the concept of religion, internally divided, thus functions acrosshistorical and linguistic divides, as if its usage had been continuous; as ifits referent, in whole or in part, went unchanged; as if it remained identicalenough with itself to continue being used (and retrospectively so). Moreimportantly, although the evidence supporting its analytical identification,nay, the very use of the term, in other historical periods and other non-cognate languages may be fraught with difficulty, the concept remains notonly valid but useful ! better yet, it remains universal. So it is assumed, inspite of Asad’s demonstrations, that there was ‘religion’ in the Middle Ages(or for that matter, in Ancient Greece and in pre-colonial America), andthere is ‘religion’ now, albeit transformed, reduced, privatized and what not.One may of course argue that the concept (not just the word) remains useful,even necessary, precisely because of this internal division; because theconcept of religion is internally diversified; because its essential (rather thanessentializing) nature has now been historicized, placed under interrogation;and because it has been shown as always divided against itself. Indeed, theconcept of religion has no doubt gained additional currency thanks to itsnon-essentializing nature. Again though, by Asad’s rigorous account, whatwas transformed was not religion. Rather, religion ! the concept (in the fullsense of that term we have been exploring) ! emerged out of a differentconfiguration, one in which being was hardly distributed between the

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religious and the secular. Significant or not, this distributive change is notindependent of its conceptualization, historical or other. That is why thequestion must be recurrently asked: ‘How does power create religion?’ (GR45). And the answer is that it does so minimally by making the term‘religion’ a compulsive concept.

From Genealogies of Religion and in other publications since, the termremains hitherto unavoidable. For example, while otherwise insisting on ‘theconstruction of religion as a new historical object’ (207), Asad writes of theperiod preceding this construction, namely, the Middle Ages, and in it of ‘thereligious history of penance’ (97), of the questionable ‘retreat from religiousforces’ (122) and of ‘religious discourses’ (125) across a variety of contextsas well as of the ‘connections between religious ideology and political power’(135). Asad describes ‘the overall aim of [the] monastic project’ as intending‘not to repress secular experiences of freedom but to form religious desiresout of them’ (165) and expands on how ‘the constitution of the modern staterequired the forcible redefinition of religion as belief’ (205). In anotherinstance, Asad refers to the ‘authorizing process by which ‘‘religion’’ isdefined’ (note the scare quotes around the term), and immediately goes on todetail the manner in which ‘authorizing discourses . . . systematicallyredefined religious spaces . . . In the Middle Ages, such discourses rangedover an enormous domain, defining and creating religion’ (37). It is not justthat the scare quotes have dropped. The question is whether the medievalspaces here discussed can be said to have been ‘religious’ in a sense thatwould not require extensive commentaries on the inadequacy or possiblemisunderstandings of the term. Furthermore, the very notion of ‘anenormous domain’ ! which after all could only be called ‘religious’ by wayof a massive anachronism ! belies the division that is otherwise operative,implicitly or explicitly, in the concept of religion that Asad uniquely traces.For Asad amply makes clear, once again, that medieval concerns opposed theChristian to the ‘pagan’ (and to a few others, of course) ! the Christian andnot the ‘religious’ (39n22). The Christian Fathers and the medieval churchwere less concerned with ‘religion’, if at all; they were rather ‘forming andreforming Christian dispositions’ (131), rarely ‘religious’ ones.15 Theysought, in other words, to make good Christians ! well, at least that iswhat they claimed. Later on, and in a similar manner, it was not an abstract‘theology’ which tended to obscure ‘the occurrence of events (utterances,practices, dispositions) and the authorizing processes that give those eventsmeaning and embody that meaning in concrete institutions’ (43). It wasrather Christian theology, an important moment in the singularity ofChristianity in its evolutions. And it was again Christianity, rather than‘religion’, which had undergone ‘a wider change in the modern landscape ofpower and knowledge. That change included a new kind of state, a new kindof science, and a new kind of legal and moral subject’ (43) ! well, at least

15 The word religiowas used by Latinand Christianwriters, of course,but any Saussureanminded (not tomention historicallyminded) readerwould have to askabout the translationnecessary to equate,or even compare,words and concepts,across space or time,within distinctlanguages, systems ofmeaning, and indeed,grammar. At thesame time, thehierarchicaldifferential of powercannot be abstracted(or rather, it can, butthe questionbecomes: for whatpurpose? And withwhat effects?).Interestingly enough,when it comes toreligion, continuitytrumps the otherwisemassive assertion ofa historical break as‘modernity’.



that is again what is claimed. Everything, at any rate, is as if by invoking theconcept of religion in multiple ways, by recasting it across space and time,16

one was remapping and rearticulating ! perhaps even obscuring ! thedivisions that constitute it and of which it partakes, most extensively,perhaps, in relation to the concept of ‘the secular’.17 Everything is as ifreligion were, once again, a translation ! of Christianity and in Christianity.Can this translation be avoided? Should it be? What purposes, essential ornot, does it serve in spite of its paucity? This articulates one of the reasonswhy it is undoubtedly the case that the concept of religion remains apolemical concept. There are other reasons.

Let me recall, with Asad, that the polemical nature of the concept ofreligion has little to do with the fact that it finds its roots and origins inChristian history. Indeed, although history (and historical difference, as wehave seen) has much to do with it, as does Christianity, the concept ofreligion is polemical as it were independently of its sources. At any rate, thematter exceeds historical and chronological precedence, as it exceeds adefinitional approach (as if a ‘proper’ definition could resolve the difficultiesinvolved in the deployment and dissemination of such a concept). Nor is itinevitably the case that the concept of religion has political implications thatare necessarily or morally objectionable (although it should be pointed outthat this particularly strenuous opposition to ‘moralizing’ criticism would bean important thread ! the operations and vicissitudes of a concept ofmorality ! to follow in Asad’s work. I regret not being able to do so here).Recall, rather, that ‘it is not the abstract logical status of concepts that isrelevant here, but the way in which a specific political (or religious) discoursethat employs them seems to mobilize or direct the behaviour of people withingiven situations’ (GR 185). But we have also seen that concepts are notsimply to be seen as tools that would enable one to grasp, or act upon, theworld as if from some exterior position. Concepts are polemical. This meansthat they are not merely causes or means for action, they are themselveskinds of action.18 They are ‘structures of possible actions’ (which is why theycan provide opportunities to criticize the fact that ‘one doesn’t ask howcapabilities produce modes of significant being and how capabilities arethemselves shaped and created. In other words, because one sees power fromthis old external point of view . . . one fails to see it as the development of acertain potentiality’).19 They neither precede nor simply follow the structureof ‘things’, as if endowed with a lesser level of existence or facticity. Rather,they are themselves relationships of power. In and within them, as it were,power must be thought ‘not simply as an external force but as an internalrelationship’ (TT 271).

Somewhat cursorily, I tried earlier to show that the notion of ‘modernity’(which sustains the identification of ‘the West’) ! the historical breakwhereby historical difference itself became, is claimed to have become,

16 See, for example,GR (212, 214!15),where the Arabicword dın isrepeatedly translatedas ‘religion’ withoutadditionalcommentary exceptfor a postponedremark that the wordis, in fact, ‘invariablytranslated as religion’(219); later fiqh,‘usually translated asjurisprudence’, willbe offered as anequivalent for‘knowledge of theprinciples by whichreligion regulates life’(226).

17 See FS 36n41,where the issue oftranslation fromArabic is brought upagain.

18 I borrow thisformulation from FS69.

19 Asad, ‘TheTrouble of Thinking:An Interview withTalal Asad’(henceforthabbreviated as TT) inScott and Hirschkind(2006: 273); theinterview wasconducted by DavidScott.

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determining ! is part of the way ‘the modern’ is polemically distinguishedfrom ‘the religious’, among others. I learned this from Asad himself, ofcourse. For through the polemical dimension of that distinction whichtraverses and constitutes it ! in the enduring present, and not simply at somedistant point of origin ! the concept of religion functions ever morepersistently. Indeed, in order to present modernity (or ‘the West’) as aconstitutive object of our comparative inquiry, our anthropology, one shouldhighlight, if paradoxically, the concealing role played by the concept ofreligion, which seems to identify and govern no more than a limited(shrinking or expanding) realm, from which modernity would be unques-tionably divided. Hence, much as ‘liberal thought separates the idea ofviolence from the idea of politics’ (OSB 3), it associates religion andviolence. Liberal thought deploys the concept of religion in order torepresent and enact, indeed, enforce a complex apparatus that distinguishesmodernity from religion, and politics from violence. In order to engage thisparticular problem in more detail, I now want to argue that among the mostcompelling demonstrations of the polemical dimension of the concept ofreligion found in Asad’s work, there is his book, On Suicide Bombing.There, Asad ostensibly seeks to answer the question of ‘why is the term‘‘terrorism’’ so prominent today when talking about certain kinds ofcontemporary violence?’ (OSB 8). The association of religion with violencewill confirm that modernity is a constitutive moment in the operations of theconcept of religion as a polemical concept. It should also bring us one stepcloser to the idea of an anthropology of Christianity.

In On Suicide Bombing Asad underscores the fact that, since 9/11 at least,religion (and not only ‘terrorism’) became ‘prominent’. It became

a favourite explanation for what had happened, and the stream of articles and

television programmes grew, claiming to lay bare the Islamic roots of terrorism.

The religious ideology behind terrorism that virtually everyone would come to hear

about was jihad, described by university professors and journalists as the Islamic

concept of holy war against the infidel. (OSB 9)

Underlying this description and indirectly governing Asad’s inquiry is thequestion: ‘Why is this the case? Why has religion become a favouriteexplanation in the West?’ We have seen this resurgence of the concept ofreligion to be at work in a number of instances by now, but it is worthrecalling that here too ‘the discourse of terrorism is dependent on aconstructed object (not an imaginary object) about which information canbe collected’ (OSB 27). This object, Asad mentions a few times, is not onlygrasped by way of the concept of terrorism, or by the use of (or search after)‘motives’. Terrorism ! and most prominently, of course, suicide bombing !‘is also ascribed to Islamic discourse because of [the individual’s] recorded



proclamation before the operation, which typically uses a religiousvocabulary ! thus the highly ritualized proclamation is taken to correspondto his real motives’ (OSB 42; emphasis added). Now, the invocation ofreligion, ‘religious ideology’ or ‘religious vocabulary’, is essential here.Minimally, it is a part of ! it dominates ! what qualifies as ‘a favouriteexplanation’, which ‘virtually everyone would come to hear about’. It ishardly innocent, as Asad points out, or coincidental. Rather, it correspondsto a number of explanatory schemes, multiple deployments of the concept ofreligion, which is thereby seized and traversed by its association withterrorism. It is woven into the long history of Orientalism and its dynamicmutations, of which religion is an essential moment.20 So it is, for instance,that scholars like us often invoke ‘the religious concept of sacrifice and gift’as a way of explaining suicide operations (OSB 42). Looking for motives, inthis case, clearly ‘allows us to speak of the religious’ (OSB 43). Indeed, atthis point, it must be noted that Asad does not oppose the use of the term‘religion’ or ‘religious’. He merely expresses the wish for some precision inthe use of the concept. ‘If one is to talk about religious subjectivities, onemust work through the concepts the people concerned actually use’ (OSB44). Subsequently, however, Asad takes a sterner distance from thisparticular stance when he commends alternative approaches that do not‘begin by trying to explain [suicide bombing as] a religious act’ (OSB 46). Heeven expresses a (perhaps underserved) measure of disapproval over the factthat one critic ‘draws on the religious idea of sacrifice’ (OSB 48), an idea thatis not, he insists, indigenous to the Islamic tradition (OSB 49, 51).

(Let me open a parenthesis to elaborate on this last point. I write thatAsad’s disapproval is ‘perhaps undeserved’ because it is not entirely clear tome why he is dissatisfied with May Jayyusi’s line of argumentation. Why say,for example, that Jayyusi ‘concedes too much to current fashions inexplaining suicide operations as a perverse form of national politics’ (OSB50)? And why ‘perverse’? Jayyusi, it seems to me, cogently argues that therevival of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza is part of a ‘rearticulation ofIslam as a political project’.21 She describes a call for justice (haq) and afashioning of subjectivity by means of ‘what can only be called Islamic‘technologies of the self’ through prayer, fasting and study circles’ (10),considering as well the rhetoric (address, form and content) of the testamentsleft behind and the poetry it occasioned. She produces, in other words, agrammar of ‘Islamic activism’ in Palestine, looking at ‘the part it plays in aparticular active, social [and political] life where psychological ‘‘inside’’ andbehavioural ‘‘outside’’ are equally (though in different ways) signified bylinguistic and non-linguistic behaviour that is publicly accessible’ (RMC139). Jayyusi performs, in other words, the beginnings of an ‘anthropologyof Islam’. Indeed, in her account of a certain ‘orthodoxy’, she would agreewith Asad that ‘orthodoxy is not a mere body of opinion but a distinctive

20 Beginning withhis contribution toAnthropology andthe ColonialEncounter, andthrough a number ofpublications, Asadhas conducted aconstant andsubstantial debatewith Orientalism inits many disciplinaryguises, a debatewhich is echoed hereas well (see Asad1973, as well as therejoinder to ClementDodd (Asad 1980);and all the way toGR, of course). For arelated discussion ofEdward Said and thequestion of religion,in terms indebted toAsad, see Anidjar(2006: 52!77).

21 I quote fromwhat I believe is thesame typescript usedby Asad, which waskindly shared withme by Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (MayJayyusi, ‘Subjectivityand Public Witness:An Analysis ofIslamic Militance inPalestine’,unpublishedtypescript, 9).

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relationship ! a relationship of power’. And with Asad, she would insist ! shedoes, I think, insist ! on something like the following.

Wherever Muslims have the power to regulate, uphold, require or adjust correct

practices, and to condemn, exclude, undermine or replace incorrect ones, there is

the domain of orthodoxy. The way these powers are exercised, the conditions that

make them possible (social, political, economic, etc.), and the resistances they

encounter (from Muslims and non-Muslims) are equally the concern of an

anthropology of Islam, regardless of whether its direct object of research is in

the city or in the countryside, in the present or in the past. Argument and conflict

over the form and significance of practices are therefore a natural part of any

Islamic tradition (IAI 15!16).

Additionally, by considering the total structure, the differential regimewithin which suicide bombing becomes operative, Jayyusi skillfully ques-tions the division between religion and politics, which Roxanne Euben, forinstance, seems to leave untouched (‘It is neither the religious beliefs nor themilitary techniques of the mujahidin that finally interest Euben but thestimulus their political action afford for a reflection’:OSB 58). Nor is it clearthat Jayyusi was ever concerned with ‘religious beliefs’, if there are any tospeak of or to recognize. It is as if Asad reproaches Jayyusi with invoking‘religion’ where religion does not apply, as if she too was inflicting theconcept of religion. It is true of course that what Asad himself is mainly afterin On Suicide Bombing is a conceptual redistribution of the distinctionbetween politics and violence, not between politics and religion. But Asadhas already explained to us that ‘violence’ covertly functions as anabbreviation of ‘religious violence’ throughout, that is, as a substitute for‘religion’.22 I will return to some of these issues below, but for now, I closemy parentheses.

The concept of religion (and its cognates) does not feature many moretimes in On Suicide Bombing, although I do not think that it would beforcing the text to argue that it still governs much of the discussion,qualitatively (if not quantitatively), and even if covertly. I have already madereference to the role it plays in representations of violence in this context. Butone has to note again that Asad’s argument is explicitly directed at all thosewho would deploy the concept of religion in order to inscribe or reinscribe ahierarchy of differences, a hierarchy, if truth be told, of intolerabledifferences (whether between civilizations or between temporal belongings,violence vs. non-violence, modern vs. premodern, and so forth). Indeed,‘when social difference is seen as backwardness and backwardness as asource of danger to civilized society, self-defence calls for a project ofreordering the world in which the rules of civilized warfare cannot beallowed to stand in the way’ (62). In the current context, what Asad calls

22 ‘Religion haslong been seen as asource of violence,and (for ideologicalreasons) [why only‘ideological’?] Islamhas been representedin the modern Westas peculiarly so(undisciplined,arbitrary, singularlyoppressive)’ (FS 9).



‘social difference’ is in fact repeatedly articulated, as he demonstrates,through ‘religious difference’ (which is also the difference that violencemakes). Religious difference ! the internal and external divisions of theconcept of religion at its most polemical ! carries a heavy share of the weightfor the politics of human rights as well as the argument for the spread ofdemocracy (or ‘civilization’), the abolition of suffering and the otherwiselaudable pursuit of an end to violence everywhere.23

But one of the most striking ways in which Asad demonstrates thesovereignty of the concept of religion (as well as its polemical dimension) iswhen, in a signature move, he spectacularly turns the tables on those whodeploy it.24 Recall that those who invoke religion within an explanatoryframe do so, first of all, because this is what ‘virtually everyone wouldcome to hear about’. Religion, that is, is the reigning word of the day, theorder of the day ! at least in some extended and hegemonic, if also localand peculiar, perspective. As for those who use the term in a morescholarly or scientific manner, Asad shows, they draw too often and toounreflectively on western (i.e. Christian) traditions and modes of under-standing, which should be more carefully considered. This is where,approaching his conclusion, Asad makes his intervention, which revealsthe polemical force of the concept of religion as it is deployed in thecurrent configuration. For, once again, ‘it is not the abstract logical statusof concepts that is relevant here, but the way in which a specific political(or religious) discourse that employs them seems to mobilize or direct thebehaviour of people within given situations’ (GR 185). That is why,strategically deflecting the weight of the attack (for it is an attack they areconducting, and carpet bombing is following), Asad points out that thosewho invoke the concept of religion to account for the acts of others arethemselves, in fact, partaking of religion:

In this book, I have tried to think about the reasons that make this image [of the

suicide bomber] so compelling. I have come to the conclusion that some of these

reasons are religious, but not religious in the sense that western commentators take

this to mean . . .When I refer here to religious reasons, I have in mind the complex

genealogy that connects contemporary sensibilities about organized collective

killing and the value of humanity with the Christian culture of death and love, a

genealogy that I think needs to be properly explored. (OSB 95)

By ‘religious reasons’ Asad seems to mean Christian ones, going so far asinvoking in this context the very same, charged expression ! ‘culture ofdeath’ ! that is so often launched at Islam, that is, in discussions of that‘religion’ that Islam would be. ‘Religious’ here functions therefore as acipher for comparative analysis of Christianity and Islam (the object of thequasi-totality of Asad’s work, of course). More specifically here, Asad is

23 See, for example,‘Redeeming the‘‘Human’’ ThroughHuman Rights’ in FS127!58.

24 Asad hadannounced thisreversal from theoutset, asking ‘how isthe image of thesuicide bomber,bringing death tohimself and others,addressed byChristians and post-Christians?’ (OSB 1),as well as in theassertion that ‘it isnot sensible, in myview, to talk aboutthe overriding needfor reform in so-called Islamiccivilization withoutat the same timereappraising theattitudes,institutions, andpolicies in westerncountries’ (14).Another brilliantinstance of suchreversal (‘a goodcritique is always aninternal critique’:GR189) can be found inAsad’s treatment ofthe ‘Rushdie affair’in GR (239!306).Finally, one shouldconsider the strikingreversal that occurson the coverphotograph of OnSuicide Bombing.But who was it, Asadseems to ask, thathad turned heavenand earth upsidedown? Who was itthat brought downthe heavens ontoearth?

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arguing that the emotional and hermeneutical energies that have beeninvested in terrorism in general, and in the image of the suicide bomber inparticular, find their origins in Christianity and in its peculiar, andenduring, relation to death. In this context, then, religion (‘religiousreasons’) would name Christianity. It is not the first time we encounterthis substitution, of course, nor is it the first time that it marks atranslation and/or a historical passage. Once again, at any rate, Christian-ity is religion and religion is Christianity. Is this, in fact, the case? Is thisthe claim Asad makes?

It is not. Nor perhaps could it be. Asad immediately clarifies: ‘The modernsecularworld retains a contradictory viewof life and death, although that viewis not a simple replay of the Christian paradox. The genealogy I have referredto is not a line of patriarchal descent (A begat B who begat C); it is a shiftingpattern of convergence and dispersal of contingent elements’ (OSB 95). Whatis striking about this formulation is not only that it recalls Asad’s earlierdescription of the operations of concepts, namely, that they function so that ‘itis always a question of the arrangement and rearrangement of the sameideological elements which constitutes the unity of [an] object’ (1975: 258).No, what is striking, I think, is the following accumulation of not so marginaldetails and the conclusion to which it leads. First, Asad invokes the peculiarlyEuropean endeavour that consisted, among other things, in singularlypromoting ‘the ideology of a unified Christendom at war with a unified Islam’(9). Second, he recalls that the West (which does define itself as the rightful iftroubled inheritor of that same and different, unified and unifying Christen-dom, and of the Christian tradition) has extended itself ‘largely through theactivities of financial institutions internal to today’s western democracy’ (14).He then points out that it was ‘European Christians’ who perpetrated thegenocide against the Jews ! a justified, but highly contested, designation (24).Later, he goes on to argue that for critics ‘to take suicide bombing as sacrifice isto load it with a significance that is derived from a Christian and post-Christian tradition’ (51). Fifth, he elaborates at some length on the claim thatthe horror experienced in the West at suicide bombing may have someconnection with ‘the Judeo-Christian tradition’ (65), and particularly with theCrucifixion (68, 73) ! ‘the most famous suicide in Judeo-Christian history’, asAsad calls it (84), and perhaps themost compelling representation of ‘the truthof violence’ (86). Finally, he argues that this singular suicide incidentallyinscribed persistent notions of sacrifice into the heart of modern liberalism(whereby the death of the self ! and, preferably, of the other ! provides themeans andmodel for redemption, a notion at work in the argument that ‘somehumans have to be treated violently in order that humanity can be redeemed’(63). Indeed, ‘in Christian civilization [sic!], the gift of life for humanity ispossible only through a suicidal death; redemption is dependent on cruelty orat least on the sin of disregarding human life’:OSB 86). Now, having said and



done all this, Asad strikingly reiterates what he had asserted at the beginning ofOn Suicide Bombing, namely, that ‘I do not mean . . . that today’s modernworld is, as many hold, simply an unfolding of Christianity’ (4).25 I quoteagain the later formulation, which turns out to serve at once as premise andconclusion: ‘Themodern secular world retains a contradictory view of life anddeath, although that view is not a simple replay of Christian paradox. Thegenealogy is not a line of patriarchal descent’ (95). Like the West and itsmultifarious faces, Christianity must certainly not be conceived of as a simpleand unified entity. Through its transformations, it is neither simply anunfolding, nor a simple replay of its past. Nonetheless, this does suggest ! orrather, it adds to the argument ! that an understanding of Christianity hassomething dowith genealogies, none of which have to follow a straight ‘line ofpatriarchal descent’.

We seem to be repeatedly brought back to the question: What isChristianity? Neither a simple unfolding, nor a line of descent, Christianityis at once much more, and in a way much less, than what the name‘Christianity’ now evokes, the way in which it functions. Such was alwaysthe case, as Asad shows so well. This internal division ! of name and thing,and more ! no doubt prevents Christianity, in its effective history, frombecoming the explicit object or concept it otherwise seems to deserve. Willthere be ! can there be ! an anthropology of Christianity? And would itenable further reflections on the concept of religion? Is Christianity areligion? Has it ever been? Is the West Christian? Is that what ‘many hold’,as Asad suggests (‘I do not mean by this that today’s modern world is, asmany hold, simply an unfolding of Christianity’: OSB 4)? Asad makes clearthat if Christianity names that which remains, if at all, ‘religious’ in the West,if Christianity is still a religion, it is not so ‘in the sense that westerncommentators take this to mean’ (95). But what is it that they mean? Andwhy? After all, when they speak about religion ! and they do speak of it, Godbless them ! in the context that Asad describes, and when they activate andproject Christian conceptions, however derivative these might be, they seemto do so dominantly in order to refer to other religions. In a manner notunsimilar to ‘the idea of a war on terror’, which has been ‘uniquelydeveloped and expressed in a particular place’, the concept of religion theyinflict is theirs to be deployed, politically, geopolitically. These scholars,journalists and commentators invoke, in other words, a polemical concept.They do so secularly, of course. After all, we live, as they themselvesrepeatedly claim, in a ‘modern secular world’, no longer in a religious one,God forbid, and certainly not a Christian one (no globalatinization, notnow!). Even the Pope, Benedict XVI, recently said so (something which didnot prevent ! indeed, something which may have enabled ! his joining forceswith secularized ‘civilization’ on the subject of Islamic ‘unreason’; despe-rately looking for ‘moderate Muslims’). Still, even on the mode of

25 Elsewhere aswell, Asad wants to‘caution thatliberalism’s secularmyth should not beconfused with theredemptive myth ofChristianity, despitea resemblancebetween them’ (FS26, and see also 61!2). Have weaccounted for theconfusion, then? Orfor the resemblance?And who is at risk ifsuch caution is notexercised?

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denegation, there appear to linger Christian modes of understanding,sensibilities or practices, however transformed, and even a Christian conceptof religion.

So then, when did Christianity (or at least the ‘particular place’ from which‘the stream of articles and television programmes grew’, from which‘university professors and journalists’ might otherwise be seen as speaking)become ! alternatively, when did it stop being ! a religion? Or: when did itbecomemerely a religion?When did theWest start (or stop) having a religion,a religious ideology, religious laws and authorities, religious beliefs, opinionsand practices? And when did religion start (or stop) being modern? When didthe West, when did modernity, become something else entirely than what iscalled ‘religion’? Recalling the difficulty of thinking the historical subject, thehistorical substrate of the transformations of which we partake, it shouldnonetheless be possible to ask otherwise, even if paradoxically: when didChristianity start (or stop) being Christianity? When did it begin (or stop)being ‘itself’? Did it ever? Asad has addressed these questions and given us themeans to pursue more elaborate answers for them. He has explained not onlywhen (much more than a simple historical question, of course: cf. GR 2!3),but also touched on why, for what purposes and with what effects conceptualapparatuses were put in place, that articulate these and other transformations.He has interrogated the ‘hierarchical differential of power’ which thesequestions (and more pertinently, their answers) uphold, the divisions theyestablish and sustain. He has mapped, in other words, ‘the idea of a historicalspace in which violence circulates’ (OSB 15).26 The concept of religion is apolemical concept that constitutes and frames violence and the space of itscirculation. That space, marked by the transformation or advent of religion, isalso sustained by its evasive persistence (and persistent evasiveness), as wehave seen. Can the same be said about Christianity? Indeed, what Asad alertsus to is the fact that in most discussions of Christianity, everything is as if, likereligion, Christianity were only a restricted part, a reduced and marginaldivision, of a much larger space (even if considered within the limits of that‘particular place’) from which we ourselves are separated.27 As a religion(which the West would no longer be nor have, being at the forefront of ‘amodern secular world’), Christianity would be only one, small and wellcontained, element or set of elements found within a much larger genealogy(the latter emphatically not a list of biblical begats), one that ‘needs to beproperly explored’. Whether in this restricted sense or in a larger one,Christianity is somehow distant, marginal and even under-explored. Chris-tianity is like religion ‘itself’, yet it often goes unmentioned, concealed underthe universal term ‘religion’. As the place from which we speak, it is like theHoly Land, perhaps, which also goes unmentioned inOn Suicide Bombing.28

Like ‘religion’, as a religion, Christianity is the name of that fromwhichwe aredistant, separated, absent.

26 Note anotherreference in OSB tothe ‘space ofviolence’, uponwhich, Asad says, ‘allconstitutional statesrest’. He continues:‘In a liberaldemocracy, allcitizens and thegovernment thatrepresent them arebound together bymutual obligations,and the actions of theduly electedgovernment are theactions of all itscitizens . . . Theremay be criticism byparticular citizens ofthe government’sactions . . . but untilthese are concededconstitutionally bythe government, allcitizens remainbound to the space ofviolence that itsrepresentativegovernment inhabits’(OSB 29). Oneunderstands why,like the West and likethe modern state,Christianity couldcontain ‘many facesat home’, whilepresenting a unifiedfront abroad.

27 One may bereminded of thesimilar logicoperating in thedistinction between‘social life’ and‘documents’ in thehistory ofanthropologicalfieldwork. As Asadconvincingly writes,there ‘‘‘documents’’are not regarded aspart of social lifeitself but as



But then, implicit in all that we have seen, it could also be argued thatChristianity is a concept. Or is it not? Minimally, it is structured ! itfunctions ! like a concept that arranges and rearranges elements, if a smallerand more limited amount of elements (‘a shifting pattern of convergence anddispersal of contingent elements’: OSB 95) that emerge and withdraw frompertinence. A restricted Christianity, as it were. And still, have we not seenthat the scholar is hardly confronted with ‘an arbitrary collection of elementsand processes that’ he happens to call ! or rather not call ! ‘religion’ or, forthat matter, Christianity (GR 29)? Have we not argued instead that ‘theentire phenomenon’ has ‘to be seen in large measure in the context ofChristian attempts to achieve a coherence of doctrines and practices, rulesand regulations’ (29)? Is it not the case, then, that ‘Christianity’ has itselfbecome ‘a political category’, a polemical concept, that ‘serves either todefine a total normative structure in equilibrium, or to dissolve the conceptof a total structure altogether and replace it by others’ (Asad 1975: 259)?How did it come to be so? What role did its restriction, indeed, its occlusion,play toward the efficacy of this and other concepts? And what are the‘others’ that replaced it? These are called by other names, names like ‘theWest’, perhaps, or ‘modernity’. And there are other others, of course, thatdefine a new (or allegedly new) total normative structure. There is even‘religion’. Be that as it may, it may very well be the case that we desperatelyneed an anthropology of Christianity.

F rom Rest r i c ted to Genera l Chr i s t i an i ty :Anthropo logy Without Reserve

Although the West contains many faces at home it presents a single face abroad.

Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular

It is undoubtedly true that ‘in various epochs and societies, the domains oflife are variously articulated, and each of them articulates endeavours thatare appropriate to it. How these articulations are constructed and policed,and what happens when they are changed (forcibly or otherwise), are allquestions for anthropological inquiry’ (GR 167). What we have come toconfront, however, by way of the grammar of the concept of religion, is thatChristianity has yet to be recognized as a concept and to become the explicitobject of such anthropological inquiry. The editor and contributors to arecent collection aptly titled The Anthropology of Christianity ! a gesture ofindubitable and conscious novelty ! rightly tell us as much, and they creditTalal Asad, if not only him, for having moved ‘the topic of Christianity’ to a‘more central place again on the disciplinary agenda’ (Cannell 2006: 4).29

(unreliable) evidenceof it ! not as elementsthat enable orprevent or subvertsocial events, only as(incomplete) tracesthat record them’(GR 8n6). Asad’ssurprising point,made later on and asit were in passing(while arguing aboutthe importance ofscience and itscombined operationswith technology),corresponds quiteprecisely to hisdescription here: ‘mypoint is that scienceand technologytogether are basic tothe structure ofmodern lives,individual andcollective, and thatreligion, in any butthe most vacuoussense, is not’ (GR49n33).

28 At this point, onemay consider that theextraordinaryphenomenology ofhorror conducted byAsad in OSB wouldhave to account forthe response to andinvestment in allsuicide bombings (‘Iturn now specificallyto the dissolution ofthe human body andthe horror thisgenerates’ [OSB 76],unless one explainedwhy no suchresponse has beenregistered or publiclyexpressed at the

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They are right, of course.30 Asad’s crucial anthropological forays intomedieval Christianity and beyond did lay the groundwork for an anthro-pology of Christianity, and his reflections on modernity are very much wherethis anthropology takes place.31 And although one must admit that this isnot how Asad himself conceptualizes his work, the acknowledgement isimportant. In Formations of the Secular, for example, Asad called for‘an anthropology of secularism’, to be distinguished from an anthropologyof religion (this last, perhaps pleonastic expression ! an anthropologyof religion ! Asad has not, I think, actively deployed) and suggests,from the title onward (‘Christianity, Islam, Modernity’) that it beconceptually articulated within, or on the side of, an anthropology ofChristianity. Finally, in a contribution to a proximate question, Asad wrotethe following:

If it is true (as I argue) that Europe includes a complex history and a shifting

geography ! that it articulates and intersects with the times and spaces of other

communities, states, civilizations ! what can an anthropology of Europe be? I am

not sure whether a satisfactory answer can be given to this question. But the advice

that it is enough to do ethnographic fieldwork in geographical Europe surely will

not do. Some idea of Europe must be presupposed here. I would go further: I am

certain that no anthropology whatever can do entirely without the idea of Europe

and of the acts that perform its civilization. (Asad 1997: 721)

Asad has never presented himself explicitly as an anthropologist ofChristianity, but one may argue that everything in his work functions as ifhe did. This seems to remain the case even if when pressed on the question ofwhether Christianity could serve for him as ‘the name of an encompassingepistemic space’, one that would give him a privileged, critical vantage point,his answer tended toward the negative (TT 283!4). For Asad never fails toprovide us with crucial pointers toward an anthropology of Christianity atthe same time that he signals toward the essential reasons that prevent theformulation of such a project ! to repeat: the concept of religion is apolemical concept at work in a hierarchical field of power which hasgathered elements not to be arbitrarily undone, as if by fiat. He underscoresthe difficulties involved in what such a project might otherwise look like.It is therefore crucial for Asad to express his scepticism of ‘anynotion that the West is the flowering or playing out of a kind of Christiandestiny’ (282). The teleological understanding he had described earlierimplies that one recognize the active orientation making up the westerntradition retrospectively as well as, rushing ahead to the future, prospec-tively.32 This is, in fact, part of what Asad elaborates upon when hespeaks of the contingency of shifting elements and of the centrality of a‘tradition’.

Tamil Tigers [whoinitiated the practiceof suicide bombing inits current form]).And if horror is not auniversal emotion(Bataille washorrified, of course,but ‘one needs tolook at the faces ofthe onlookers and ofthe executer in thepicture: they do notseem to expresshorror’ [OSB 82]), if,as Asad shows, thesite of the responsehas something to dowith Christianity (orat least with theCrucifixion), shouldnot the very site ofthe Crucifixion, thespecific investment inthis site, beconsidered as well?Might one beforgiven thesuggestion that aChristian investmentin Jerusalem and inits surrounding bearssome connection toAsad’s ‘deliberate’focus on the UnitedStates and Israel intheir relation tosuicide bombing(OSB 2)? It ispuzzling to note thatthis connection isneither mentionednor thematized in thebook.

29 My cursorytreatment of thisimportant anthologyis in no way areflection of itsworth in my eyes. Ido consider it asignificantbreakthrough and arich contribution to



The most extensive argument on the concept of ‘tradition’ that Asad hasoffered is found in the lecture from which I have borrowed my title: The Ideaof an Anthropology of Islam. Now, it would be incorrect to assume that onecan simply transpose, indeed, translate, the concept of tradition from one(religious?) realm to another, say, from Islam to Christianity. The firstreason to refrain from doing so, one which we have just seen, is that Asadhimself has never recommended that as an explicit option. I have just arguedin fact that he has given us more than one indication that this is not what heis consciously engaged in. Yet, to the extent that Asad’s lecture (and the bulkof his other work) does contain numerous pointers toward an anthropologyof Christianity, or at least toward its possibility (or impossibility), it might behelpful to read it with our questions in mind.

We begin, then, with an apparently simple fact. A religion ! whatever elseit might be ! is also made up of its followers (‘After all, religion consists notonly of particular ideas, attitudes, and practices, but of followers’: FS 194).This does not mean that ‘Islam is simply what Muslims everywhere say it is’(IAI 2), nor that Christianity is what Christians say it is (perhaps especiallyso, since many say that it is not!). When it comes to Christianity (whether ornot it is a religion), it does mean that we must consider

the long history since Constantine, in which Christian emperors and kings,

lay princes and ecclesiastical administrators, Church reformers and colonial

missionaries, have all sought by using power in varying ways to create or maintain

the social conditions in which men and women might live Christian lives. (IAI 3)

The history of these men and women is, of course, the history of Christianity.What it includes and what it excludes (‘Liberation Theology’ and ‘the MoralMajority’ are two examples which Asad brings up as plausible contenders)may or may not ‘belong to the essence of Christianity’. But it would bedifficult for an anthropologist to ignore the limits of this history and all itsdimensions. It should be difficult for him to ignore what has beenunderstood as ‘Christian practice and discourse throughout history’ as wellas what has not (IAI 3). One of these practices and discourses, at any rate,and one intimately connected with unequal distributions of power andknowledge, has to do with a distinctive feature of ‘Roman Christians’, ofthese men and women living in the West. Asad points out, by way ofcontrast, that ‘Christian communities living among Muslims in the MiddleEast were not noted for their scholarly curiosity about Europe . . . andMuslim travellers often visited and wrote about African and Asian societies’,if not about Europe (IAI 4). What is however curious, and indeed,distinctive, he writes, is rather the reasons ‘why Roman Christians wereinterested in the beliefs and practices of others’ (IAI 4). In order to explorethese reasons, it will not do to reify or essentialize either Islam or

31 ‘It is sometimesforgotten’, Asadpoints out in afootnote relevant to

the very issues I amtrying to engage (ormore precisely, that Isee Asad asengaging). Thevolume should alsobe considered alongwith Serge Margel(2005), a momentouswork thatscrupulously attendsto the conceptualmechanism at workin distinguishingbetween ‘religion’and ‘superstition’ aswell as its scholarlyinheritors in thestudy of ‘religions’(‘in Christian lands’,as the book title hasit, marking animportantcontinuity).

30 One shouldhowever note that, atthe explicit level, thechapters ofGenealogies ofReligion are notpresented as ananthropology ofChristianity. Theyare rather ‘intendedas a contribution to ahistoricalanthropology thattakes the culturalhegemony of theWest as its object ofinquiry. Moreprecisely, theyexplore ways inwhich westernconcepts andpractices of religiondefine forms ofhistory making’ (GR24).

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Christianity. ‘One ought instead to be looking for the institutionalconditions for the production of various social knowledges’, since ‘formsof interest in the production of knowledge are intrinsic to various structuresof power, and they differ not according to the essential character of Islam orChristianity, but according to historically changing systems of discipline’(IAI 5). It may be easy to grant this point, without however agreeing with theimplicit claim that the specific, if varied, ‘structures of power’ and the‘historically changing systems of discipline’, because contingently related toit, have nothing to do with Christianity (or, if this can be shown to be thecase, with Islam). To paraphrase Asad again, as I have done earlier, ‘theargument here is not against the attempt to generalize about [Christianity],but against the manner in which that generalization is undertaken’ (IAI 5).There are historically specific structures of power, particular orderings ofdistinction that separate between the church and the king, and there arealso specific ‘systems of discipline’ which, within western Christendom,cannot be thought of as external to Christianity, even and perhaps becausethey are distinct from those embraced by Christians in West Asia andelsewhere. Indeed, in order to understand the nature of their relation toChristianity (in its historical transmutations, not in some alleged essence),Asad suggests, they must be conceptualized as belonging to the history ofChristianity.

Christianity, in other words, cannot be conceived merely as a number oflocal churches or as a collection of (converging or contradictory) doctrines,as simply a matter of belief, a few lingering practices (with poor or growingrecords of church attendance) or of restricted instances of power (‘theChurch’) and disciplines that would have been deployed in order ‘to create ormaintain the social conditions in which men and women might live Christianlives’ (IAI 3). It must also be taken to refer to these men and women we havementioned, as well as to the lives they lived as good (or bad) Christians incomplex negotiations with (a restricted) Christianity, even if ! not aparticularly weak matter ! by way of denegation or opposition. Christianity,in other words, is the name we could use to designate the differentialdistribution of political and institutional power, the definition andenforcement of doctrines and practices, the structures of possible andimpossible actions ! possibilities of action and of conceptions, of beliefand of non-belief ! that were sustained, transformed or excluded by it ! butby what, precisely? A culture? A civilization? A society? A political regime?An economic one? A series of each of these? Clearly, ‘there is a considerablediversity in the beliefs and practices’ of all Christians. And ‘the first problemis therefore one of organizing this diversity in terms of an adequate concept’(IAI 5). None of the abstract terms I have just suggested (culture, civilization,and so forth) will do, if only because each will immediately be seized by itshistorical and already operative universal and universalizing meanings.

this matter, ‘that inthe world outsideEurope, evangelicalChristianity oftenplayed a centralpolitical role in thenineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. . . Missions werealso extremelyimportant in themodernization ofsecondary and highereducation in theMiddle East. LocalChristian minorities,educated andsometimes convertedby Europeanmissionaries, notonly played a notablepart in popularizingwestern ideas ofhistory, archeology,politics and so on,but their role inadapting westernnationalist ideologiesto local conditionswas alsooutstanding’ (GR207n13). From theperspective of thereceiver, the Westpresents a single face,Asad says elsewhere.Is this the face ofreligion (notmentioned as suchhere)? The face ofChristianity?

32 I wonder whetherAsad does notnaturalize theteleological relationto the future hedescribes asbelonging to the‘Christian modern’(as Webb Keanebeautifully calls it),when he writes inOSB that ‘inscribedin the body is an



Christianity (which includes western Christendom but is not exhausted by it,as the expression ‘history of Christianity’ indicates) seems a much likeliercandidate as the adequate concept we are looking for in order to account forthe prominence of ‘religion’, in order to produce an anthropology of what isotherwise called ‘the West’ or ‘modernity’. And though the word (andconcept) of ‘Christianity’ runs the risk of including (or rendering invisible)those Christians that had little to do with the particular Christianity Asadlingers with, it might be agreed nonetheless that it is a more contained, a lesscolonizing, concept than ‘religion’.

Let us admit that ‘Christianity’ is not a consensual term. It is important torecall that Asad himself emits a number of valid objections to it, if mostlyimplicitly. I would venture that, for him, Christianity is and is not a conceptin the sense I have tried to follow and elaborate. Minimally, it has notcongealed fully as a concept. Among the reasons we have considered for thisis that Asad takes historical difference (‘modernity’) to supersede (ratherthan to inscribe and perform) the difference Christianity makes. For him atany rate, it is not Christianity that enacted and produced an internal divisionthrough the concept of ‘progress’ and of ‘modernity’ (even though we know,for instance, that ‘the idea of ‘progressive evolution’ ! biological as well associal ! responded to Christian sensibilities in the latter part of thenineteenth century’: GR 20). It is not Christianity that has brought aboutand performed (continuing to perform) the distinction between ‘religion’ andpolitics, ‘religion’ and law, ‘religion’ and science (GR 27!54). Christianity,for Asad, is neither subject nor concept, not the ‘essential midwife of ourmodern secular world’, nor perhaps that very world itself, whether before orthrough its transformations (OSB 10). But is ‘the West’? Is ‘the West’ aconcept in the sense we have been exploring? Is it a subject? Is ‘Europe’? Is‘modernity’? And if so, for whom? Who, after all, are the players in thisnaming game? Recall that ‘devising narratives about the expressions andexpressive intentions of dramatic players is not the only option available toanthropologists. Social life can also be written or talked about by usinganalytic concepts. Not using such concepts simply means failing to askparticular questions, and misconstruing historical structures’ (OSB 9;emphasis added). Whose ‘expressive intention’ was it, after all, to devisenarratives of rupture (one could say, of conversion) and declare itself nolonger what it was? The midwife? The baby? Or the bathwater? It is as ifChristianity was the only player for whom there would be only one option,namely, to devise its own narrative of how it became not who or what italready was, but no longer and never again what it had been (‘pre-liberalChristianity’: OSB 88). But what if Christianity were what it has, in fact,become? And so one could propose with Asad ! as if it were simply hiscontribution, rather than something that emerges from the necessaryconditions he contemplates and analyses, from the questions that must be

image of the futurethat is nothing morethan a continuousunbinding oremptying’ 83). Doesthis refer to everybody? Does it notrecall instead thekenosis of God inJesus Christ?

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asked ! the concept of Christianity, without which, there can be noanthropology of Christianity.33 It is a polemical concept, of course, notthe name of an unchanging essence (it may be worth recalling, as Asad oftendoes, that concepts are neither definitions, nor reifications, although theycan play such roles as well, obviously). It is no less polemical, no lessessential than ‘Islam’ (and, one would perhaps think, no more so either),although it does function and operate within a very distinct ‘hierarchicaldifferential of power’.

And now to what may still appear as the key question: is Christianity areligion? The answer is undeniably yes, of course. But today this is hardly awell-pondered answer. Christianity is rather the essentialized result of ahistory that has only begun to be interrogated ! first and foremost by TalalAsad. Indeed, when it comes to Christianity and religion (or Christianity andanthropology ! but this is perhaps different), the matter is dependent on farmore than ‘the way in which religion itself is defined’. Indeed, ‘anyonefamiliar with what is called the sociology of religion will know of thedifficulties involved in producing a conception of religion that is adequate forcross-cultural purposes. This is an important point because one’s conceptionof religion determines the kinds of questions one thinks are askable and worthasking’ (IAI 12). Interestingly, this is precisely the moment when one wouldhave expected to see Asad perform another of his powerfully typical andtropicalmoves (the kind of spectacular turning of tables I pointed out earlier).‘Perhaps’, he had written earlier, ‘our question is best approached by turningit around’ (IAI 4). Following his lead, what this would mean here is that weshould look again at the site from which the concept is deployed ! after thefashion of ‘anthropology at home’.34 Back to the Holy Land, or, as SergeMargel has it, ‘en terre de chretiente’. After all, the reason why the concept ofreligion has to be ‘cross-cultural’ is because it emerges from a specific area, bythe hands of specific agents. It is itself the result of cultural translations !discourses and practices ! that have been well documented and reflectedupon, and prominently so by Asad himself.

Once we turn the lens, as Asad enjoins us to, what becomes of ourquestion? What question (or questions) are we now able to ask? I proposethe following, provisional formulation: what does the concept of religion dofor Christianity? In other words, what is gained (or lost) ! and for whom ! byembracing the conception that Christianity is (or is not) a religion? In theperspective thereby opened, Asad would importantly not agree that ‘it isnecessary to reach some provisional working definition of the termChristianity itself’ (Cannell 2006: 5). That is because, again, definitionsare not required for concepts to become operative. Indeed, for my part,I would suggest that we follow Asad in not asking what Christianity is(definition), nor what it means (interpretation).35 Perhaps we should onlyask what Christianity ! or its concept ! does. We can certainly concede that

33 I do not mean tosuggest that there canbe such ananthropology, nor toignore the possibilitythat anthropology isa ‘Christian science’(after the manner ofpsychoanalysis as a‘Jewish science’).Were this the case,the expression‘anthropology ofChristianity’ mightsimply be redundant,indeed, pleonastic.And perhaps it is. Bethat as it may, myattention to thisproblem washeightened by Asadhimself, of course, aswell as by themeticulous study ofthe concept of‘superstition’ offeredby Serge Margel(2005). As Imentioned above,Margel magisteriallyshows howconstitutively linkedsuperstition is to theconcept of ‘religion’within the Christiantradition and so allthe way to themodern study ofreligion. Interestinglyenough, and as histitle indicates,Margel does notexplicitly propose theconcept of‘Christianity’ as theobject of his inquiry,although, as withAsad, the argumentcould be made thathe does nothing else.

34 On‘anthropology athome’, elaborationand critique, seePanourgia (1995).



Christianity is ‘neither a distinctive social structure nor a heterogeneous

collection of beliefs, artifacts, customs and morals’ (IAI 14). We do not

know what Christianity is, except to say that it has not reached its full

potential as an adequate concept, at least as Asad deploys such concepts. But

consider what we have seen, namely, that without a concept of Christianity,

and therefore without an anthropology of Christianity, no answer to the

question of religion (and whether Christianity is one; for what purpose; with

what effects), no account of the concept of religion, could ever be

forthcoming. Let me recall what Asad himself had said about ‘an anthro-

pology of Europe’, which is worth quoting again:

What can an anthropology of Europe be? I am not sure whether a satisfactory

answer can be given to this question. But the advice that it is enough to do

ethnographic fieldwork in geographical Europe surely will not do. Some idea of

Europe must be presupposed here. I would go further: I am certain that no

anthropology whatever can do entirely without the idea of Europe and of the acts

that perform its civilization. (Asad 1997: 721)

According to these essential, and profoundly ambitious, guidelines, anthro-

pology has not even begun. For an anthropology worthy of that name to

occur, Asad seems to suggest, what we need is less a definition of

Christianity, than an ‘idea’ of it. What we need, in other words, is a concept

of Christianity and of ‘the acts that perform its civilization’ ! its religion (in

the most expansive, and specifically local, sense of the term). Like ‘Europe’,

the concept of Christianity will have to be a polemical concept. That is

because qua concept, it is a relationship of power. It is a structure of possible

actions, the enactment of essential divisions and their distribution across a

hierarchical differential of power. It is a distinctive style of action (for ‘a bad

conscience’, Asad wryly points out about Europe, ‘is no bar to further

immoral action, it merely gives such action a distinctive style’ ! and what is

Europe’s religion if not its bad conscience? What is America’s?) (TT 230). It

is the power of discipline and the structure of sovereignty (which divides and

distributes pain and suffering, fear and terror, and the wearing of shoes at

airport terminals) as well as the operations that distinguish the church from

the state, violence from politics (terrorism from war), politics from

capitalism (and both from ‘religion’), East from West, missionaries from

human rights workers, and the spread of democracy from the civilizing

mission. As I said, Christianity is a polemical concept. And although it is a

concept that has yet to be fully elaborated ! questions yet to be asked ! I

would venture that its most promising, indeed, its most powerful formula-

tion is found in the writings of Talal Asad.

35 Anotherincarnation of thisessay was meant toborrow another title(from Susan Sontagthis time), namely,‘againstinterpretation’. Onecould in fact followthe thread ofopposition tohermeneuticsthroughout Asad’swork. See, forexample, OSB (31,41, 81) and TT (257,269, 272).

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Documents

The Idea of an Anthropology of Christian