In the winter quarter of 2016, I taught a graduate seminar at UC Santa Cruz that brought together multispecies anthropology and the anthropology of religion to consider humans as ontologically relational beings. Thanks to scholars like Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway, Santa Cruz had become a place for vibrant conversations about the enmeshment of humans and nonhumans and about the impossibility of thinking nature and culture as distinct domains.
As a scholar of religion, I wanted to put this multispecies scholarship into conversation with an older anthropological tradition equally attuned to the nonhuman, that is, to humans’ relationships with “supernatural” phenomena like God, gods, jinns, demons, angels, witches, and so on. Doing so, I thought, might generate productive ways to think about autonomy and heteronomy, about who and what are presumed to be political actors, and about the complex nature of human subjectivity. Four graduate students in anthropology took the class; I was expecting more given the preponderance of the natureculture paradigm on campus. One of my students, Joe, explained the problem. Joe had described the course to another graduate student in the department, who had been baffled, even disturbed, by the inclusion of gods, jinns, demons, etc. within the realm of the nonhuman. “But those aren’t real,” he had objected.
I was reminded of that moment when reading these intriguing conversations between scholars of science and scholars of religion attempting to muddy the distinction between those two domains. As the graduate student’s reaction underscored, that distinction, because it has to do with what constitutes reality itself, is part of the bedrock of secularity and carries an affective charge, especially in the university, which Susan Harding has called “the citadel of secular modernity.” Building on the exchanges between Webb Keane and Erika Milam and between John Tresch and Tanya Luhrmann, I want to think through anthropology’s ambiguous role in that citadel—the way it both undercuts and upholds the norms and forms of secularity. I also want to ask how secure that citadel still is and whether the call from out there is coming from inside the house.
As an anthropologist, Luhrmann wants to understand how “things, and particularly invisible things, come to feel real to people.” Religiosity, she insists, is not a question of belief, as secular convention would assume, but a matter of experience. And that experience is embodied: the witches, magical practitioners, and Evangelical Christians that Luhrmann has worked with “felt magical power coursing through their veins. They felt the presence of gods and spirits” and “experienced themselves as interacting with them.” If secular reality is one in which humans are “buffered” and think themselves the only agents who can act in and on the world, these people, and so many others like them, underscore reality as a relationship—what John Tresch, following Bruno Latour, calls “an extended social field.”
At the same time, Luhrmann seems careful to distinguish between herself as an anthropologist and the people whom she and other anthropologists study, as is standard in the discipline. Anthropologists (and ethnographically inclined scholars of religion) like to say that we take our interlocutors seriously, but only up to a point. Keane illustrates this with a story of a Christian Evangelical student in his class who is uncomfortable with the assignment to observe a religious ceremony because he worships another God. This student goes on to write about how observing a religious ceremony in a dispassionate and neutral way, as anthropologists are committed to doing when they “take seriously,” does not, in fact, take seriously the impact of that religious ceremony. The student thus exposes what Keane calls the “paradox of anthropology.”
This paradox is built on anthropology’s ambiguous role in the secular citadel. On the one hand, we are committed to being open to and making sense of nonsecular realities; this is close to a Hippocratic Oath, Keane says. On the other, as Harding notes, anthropology, like all academic disciplines, “is grounded on the presumption that there is in fact only one real reality, namely, the natural, physical, material world.” At the end of the day, then, we have to treat those other realities as cultural constructions. To do otherwise would risk our reputations, Harding continues, “because, as modern professional intellectuals, we have sworn an implicit oath to assume only one true reality that underlies them all.”
Have we though?
After all, there is a long, if minor, tradition of anthropologists for whom taking seriously has meant being open, or opened up, in precisely the embodied ways Luhrmann notes for her interlocutors. Writing in the 1930s, E.E. Evans-Pritchard famously sees witchcraft on its path during fieldwork and, although he spends the rest of Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande arguing for witchcraft as a rational philosophy but not an actual reality, he converts to Catholicism a few years later. (Ahmed Al-Shahi writes that his conversion was “regarded as a kind of defection” by his colleagues in the British academy.) During fieldwork in the 1950s with Victor Turner, Edith Turner sees the ihamba tooth of a dead hunter emerge from someone’s back during an extraction ceremony—an “experience as factual as childbirth,” she writes in her 1992 monograph Experiencing Ritual—then goes to the Arctic in the early 1990s to work with the Inupiat and experiences the same strange events as her Inupiat interlocutors (“miracles, rescues, healings by telephone hundreds of miles away, visions of God, and many other manifestations”). A decade later, Harding begins the first chapter of The Book of Jerry Falwell with an account of sitting in her car, at a stop sign, after an especially intense interview with a certain Reverend Melvin Campbell. As she starts into the intersection, she is very nearly smashed by another car that seems to come out of nowhere. “I slammed on the brakes,” writes Harding, “sat stunned for a split second, and asked myself ‘What is God trying to tell me?’” In that moment, she had been “inhabited” by the Holy Spirit that she was investigating.
More recently, Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr write about experiences during fieldwork—dream premonitions for Willerslev, a jinn exorcism for Suhr—that “kicked out” from under them their epistemological and ontological foundations. They argue that sometimes anthropologists are “forced to embrace what otherwise appears to be logically impossible or absurd.” Nicole Fadeke Castor accompanies her interlocutors to a shrine to Aséwele, the Orisha of travelers, to remember, protect, and appease the souls of those who died in the Middle Passage when she is “pushed, literally pushed, by the force of the Spirit, down onto the ground so that my head touched the stone in full prostration.” She takes her monograph as an opportunity to “com[e] out of the spiritual closet,” revealing herself to be both a scholar and practitioner of Ifá/Orisha.
And it is not just anthropologists. Across the academy, scholars are having their certainties kicked out from under them and being opened to nonhumans who exceed secular configurations of the real. In American Cosmic, historian of religion Diana Pasulka, who initially set out to explore how the UFO phenomenon may constitute a new religion, is confronted by the “epistemological shock” induced by her research, “a shock to my fundamental understanding of the world and the universe.” Precisely because she takes seriously the world she studies, she is forced to consider the reality—not just the discursive or social reality, but the really-real reality—of UFOs. Onaje X.O. Woodbine, a scholar of philosophy and religion, comes to see himself and his interlocutor, Ms. Donna Haskins (a medium), not as observer and subject but rather as “creating a world together.” This is a world that “allowed for an alternative experience of temporality, the presence of ancestors and other unseen spirits,” including the life force of Ms. Haskins’ aborted son who, Woodbine realizes, may be “flowing through my veins.” And in another conversation in this project, Sarah Hammerschlag and Taylor Moore (scholars, respectively, of religion and literature and of science and technology) write about the power of “spirit objects,” of being “moved by [their] aura,” of channeling these objects and other otherworldly interlocutors in ways that suspend the human-only agency that is a fundamental tenet of secularity.
What does this say about secularity? If secularism refers to a governing legal and political infrastructure that adjudicates the place of religion in the social, the secular or secularity refers to a broader episteme—a set of ideas, sensibilities, and affective orientations, and accompanying institutions and technologies—that structures what it means to be human in relation to oneself and others. A number of scholars have tracked the way that secularization reorganized the human sensorium, transforming our ways of knowing the world. The sensory conventions of secularity continue to discipline our bodies, “placing rules on what may legitimately be sensed,” as Abou Farman puts it. This is Charles Taylor’s famous “buffered” self, in contrast to the “porous” selves of pre-modern and pre-secular worlds.
My approach to the secular has long focused on the normative and transformative force of its institutions and sensibilities. But in recent years I have come to question how totalizing that force has been—even in Euro-America and even amongst secular moderns. In my book-in-progress, I join others who propose a messier understanding of the secular, one that focuses not just on systematization but also on the “excess of systems,” in John Lardas Modern’s terms. I think of the secular as played in both major and minor keys. This framework takes some liberties with music theory, but it captures how a normative paradigm contains dissonances composed of some of the same notes. I am also trying to emphasize the affective register of norms and dissonances. In Western music, major and minor describe an interval, chord, scale, or key; major keys are the norm around which an aesthetic convention is built, connoting consonance, seamlessness, and harmony, while minor keys serve as the counterpoint, resting on an “unresolved” note. As much as I recognize the force of secularity as a set of infrastructures and norms—the academy is, after all, its representative par excellence—I am also interested in the moments, spaces, and sensibilities within it that nonetheless exceed its terms.
I don’t think this means, in Latour’s terms, that We Have Never Been Secular. Rather, it seems to suggest sensory capacities—a certain porousness—running like undercurrents beneath secularity’s loud claims to rationality and interwoven across secularity’s stark distinctions between science and religion, natural and supernatural, reality and cultural construction (or, earlier, superstition). And not just amongst the kinds of nonsecular communities that anthropologists tend to study, but amongst secular moderns themselves, indeed, within secularity’s citadel: the university.
What, then, does this say about the university at this moment in time? Does the paradox of anthropology still constrain us? It seems that more and more of us are willing to go there, way out there, beyond the “but only up-to-a” point of taking seriously. I’m thinking not only of the work I cited earlier, but also of Lata Mani’s Myriad Intimacies; Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias;Ahmad Green-Hayes’s Underworld Work; Tulasi Srinivas’s The Cow in the Elevator; Alan Klima’s Ethnography #9; Kim TallBear’s thinking about life and not-life in more-than-secular ways; Hussein Agrama’s work on the uncanny science of UFOs; the “Out there” Immanent Frame forum on Black metaphysical religion cocurated by Matthew Harris and J.T. Roane; another collection from “out there,” this one on science and technology and cocurated by Gabriela Soto Laveaga and Pablo F. Gómez; and my own reflections about supernatureculture. And I don’t know that we are risking our reputations as scholars. That some of the colleagues I cite are early-career suggests otherwise.
Weirdly, even as its wheels are coming off, this is an exciting time to be in the academy. Or maybe because the wheels are coming off, many of us feel less beholden to the secular citadel’s conventions, less enamored of its sheen, more likely to get out and wander, and even fly.