“In a gestalt moment,” Larsen reveals in his afterword, “I suddenly realized that the book I was writing was structured as a ring composition” after an outline that “had been proposed and approved years earlier” as though “the spirit of Dame Mary Douglas the seer came upon me and I saw an elegant pattern crystallize before my very eyes” (221).
The ring composition works like this: the “central chapter” on E. E. Evans-Pritchard represents the turning point of the development of social/cultural anthropology in its relationship to the Christian faith. The outer rings consist of two sets of chapters: on the front end, the first two chapters on the irreligious Edward Burnett Tyler and James George Frazer who sought to discredit the Christian faith with respect to anthropology; and on the back end, two chapters on Catholics Mary Douglas and Victor and Edith Turner who, following Evans-Pritchard's lead, reject the earlier anthropological critiques and seek to prove that “Christian anthropologist” is not an oxymoron, that Christian anthropologists can make legitimate scientific contributions to the field without bracketing their faith.
Had I begun my reading of the book with Larsen's afterword, I would have saved myself disappointment on reaching the end and finding that I had already passed the narrative's climax with Evans-Pritchard. My mistake was in letting myself get hooked by Larsen's engaging, almost novelistic style into expecting his narrative to build to a concluding climax. It did not. Instead, it passed the climax with Evans-Pritchard and simply rode it out with Douglas and the Turners—as history would have it. Fair enough. The book is a historical argument, not a novel.
Larsen's thesis is that the early irreligious anthropologists' effort to undermine any possible scientific contribution by Christian believers is itself undermined by the arguments of later Christian and Catholic anthropologists. This in itself injects an element of drama into the narrative. Larsen's further, copious, and judicious injection of primary source materials as well as discussion of personal relationships with those who formed the protagonists—their parents, for example, and their academic mentors—adds considerably more interest. The author's own well-established credentials as a historical theologian and exhaustive knowledge of his subjects enable him to weave into his narrative extensive, concrete, and colorful details, thus engendering a convincing read. This quality makes the book enjoyable for all readers but exceptionally appropriate for beginning students.
One cannot say that Larsen's thesis, just in terms of his argument, brings anything new to the field. But what is new, and an arresting contribution, is Larsen's almost microhistory of the protagonists and their interrelationships. This adds a great deal of humanity and personality to the subjects as well as authority to the author's scholarly argument.
A word on the book's title. Larsen is adept at descrying not only his subjects' character flaws (e.g., Frazer's “constitutional incapability of engaging in open conflict [50], whether with colleagues or his parents) but also the major fallacies of Tylor's and Frazer's assumptions without losing respect for them and their groundbreaking scholarship however flawed. The book's title quotes Frazer's The Golden Bough (vol. 1, 1st ed. [1890], xi), where Frazer identifies “‘the central idea’ of the work as ‘the conception of the slain god’” who dies and rises (40). This phrase designates Frazer's insight that the passion and death of Jesus of Nazareth was nothing more than the acting out of ancient tribal customs of homeopathic cleansing or the resolving of cultural problems by scapegoating. In so underscoring this signal event in Jesus's life (at least for Christians), Frazer seems to imply that his underlying agendum is to disclose Christianity as essentially nothing more than the reenactment of magical customs long ago invented by “savages” and naturally embedded in the human race; in other words Christianity with its ritual accoutrement is merely a more sophisticated form of primitive magic that, having failed, morphed into religion. Later anthropologists such as Evans-Pritchard, Douglas, and the Turners forcefully challenged this reductionism, and set social and cultural anthropology on a scientifically more respectable trajectory.
This, it seems to me, is the primary burden of Larsen's study, though it is a burden lifted by sophisticated wit and graceful prose. Highly recommended to advanced general readers as well as to specialists.
