Although cut short by his early death in 1977 at the age of just 53, Cornelius Ernst’s life has profoundly shaped the intellectual world of the Dominican English Province, leaving behind possible trajectories or seeds of thought.Footnote 1 Some of the seeds have found life in the work of Fergus Kerr and his attention to language and transcendence. More broadly, English Dominican theology has been able to integrate what Cornelius referred to as the tradition of the human heart: novels, art, music, and tragedy,Footnote 2 and in this regard I think particularly of Fergus Kerr and Timothy Radcliffe. While many of Cornelius’s best essays were published posthumously in the volume Multiple Echo,Footnote 3 there remain many seeds to cultivate. This is in part because of Cornelius’ prodigious reading habits; as one reviewer of Multiple Echo put it: ‘He seems to have read and thought about an astonishing number of books and articles; on most occasions (though not always) one is struck by the high degree of his critical assimilation of a daunting acreage of print’.Footnote 4 It is also because each of his works seems to have gone through multiple revisions, and ideas from one essay appear in others, adding to the sense of an echo or a spiral in his thought where he comes around again and again to the same questions, each time offering more precise answers.
One area that is marked by some sustained engagement is the field of social anthropology. Cornelius clearly had a deep respect and admiration for the work of Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, noted for his work on the Nuer and the Azande, and Chair of Social Anthropology and Fellow of All Souls at Oxford from 1946 until his retirement in 1970. There is one example from the work of Evans-Pritchard that Cornelius returns to on a number of occasions, the enigma around predication of kwoth – the God-term of Nuer religion – analysed in the chapter ‘The Problem of Symbols’ in Evans-Pritchard’s 1956 monograph, Nuer Religion.Footnote 5 Although there is no record of their correspondence, Evans-Pritchard clearly had something of a collaborative role in Cornelius’s work, with one incomplete manuscript entitled Anthropological Studies of Theologies annotated with the handwritten note ‘E-P Uncorrected’.Footnote 6 Cornelius produced an article, which was in part a highly favourable review of Nuer Religion, in Blackfriars, noting the ways in which a study of ‘primitive religion’ could expand the reach of Catholic experience.
The Catholic’s possession of the fullness of truth in faith does not exclude the possibility of his entering more fully into an understanding of that truth. It is not that the content of non-Christian religion is likely to add anything to his understanding of God. But ‘God’ is not a piece of shorthand for a list of attributes. It is in the act of recreating a lived and shared experience of God in a non-Christian religion that a Catholic can enlarge his personal understanding of God, and primarily by practising that sort of criticism of his own symbols for God and divine things which prevents them from becoming a system of idols.Footnote 7
Again in this article Cornelius focuses in on the question of predication amongst the Nuer, going further than he does in later work citing Evans-Pritchard, showing the way in which the less ‘theological’ religion of the Nuer can teach us to see afresh the radical quality of St Thomas’ Five Ways. Cornelius writes as follows:
…our religion has tended to become exclusively supernatural at the expense of the natural (and hence inevitably of the supernatural too). But God is the one source of all that is in heaven and earth; and we cannot even appreciate the significance of the revealed truth of the elevation of Christ’s humanity, about which St Paul tells us in the Epistles of the Captivity, except in terms of this ultimate unity at the source of all created things, whether natural or supernatural.Footnote 8
Cornelius concludes hopefully that ‘[s]tudies of this kind will have to play their part in any theological revival which we may be fortunate enough to see’.Footnote 9
Anthropology has, indeed, played something of a part in the shifting currents of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century theology. The long held distrust of theology by anthropology has thawed of late,Footnote 10 especially as anthropology has become more keenly aware of the ways in which its discipline is wrapped up with theological questions.Footnote 11 Moreover, as theology has shifted to a more anthropological focus, anthropology has moved in a different direction and is concerned with ontological questions. In this sense, we may say that anthropology and theology hold a similar kind of focus on the human creature, but obscured by a parallax vision created by two different starting points.
Cornelius’s engagement with anthropology was cut short by his early death, and so any suppositions about how he would have reacted to changing trends within anthropology are highly speculative. Indeed, given his age it is unlikely, although not impossible, that he would have lived to see the anthropological interest in ontology over the last 20–30 years. So what seeds from Cornelius’ engagement might offer us an approach to a shared vision with anthropology?
In what follows, I hope to offer a tentative answer to this question, outlining Cornelius’ understanding of anthropology as a preface to theology. Having spent a little time scrutinising Cornelius’ engagement with Evans-Pritchard and Godfrey Lienhardt, another Oxford-based anthropologist of Nilotic communities, I will go on to suggest a fuller account of anthropology as a preface to theology, cultivating some of the seeds of Cornelius’ thought with some help from contemporary anthropology.
1. Anthropology: A preface to theology
Although Cornelius makes reference to anthropology a number of times across his works, he published almost nothing that dealt exclusively with the discipline of anthropology. One exception to this is a short piece written for The Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, a small journal publishing work by graduate students and those who speak at departmental research seminars.Footnote 12 The aims of the journal as much as the tone of the writing suggest the interlocutive character of Cornelius’ engagement with anthropology, most likely in the setting of a research seminar. Indeed, the title itself – ‘A Preface to Theology’ – is highly suggestive of the close collaboration between Evans-Pritchard and Ernst in their vision of a shared endeavour. Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer Religion ends ‘[a]t this point the theologian takes over from the anthropologist’,Footnote 13 suggesting an agreement that anthropology forms at least part of a propaedeutic to theology.
After some initial discussions of the ambiguities of theology – the relationship between philosophical theology and Christian theology, and the difficulties of articulating what is meant by ‘theology’ by different Christian traditions – Cornelius concludes his introduction by outlining his hope that the kinds of reflection that engagement with anthropology necessarily requires of theology will, in itself, help us to understand the deficiencies of particular traditions so as to better articulate a synthesised Christian tradition.Footnote 14
The main body of the article begins with a reference to a conversation between Claude Lévi-Strauss and Paul Ricœur published in the French review, Esprit. The conversation took place in 1963, a year that marked a distinct change in Ricœur’s views on structuralism. For having praised its developments at Rome in January 1963,Footnote 15 by June of the same year, Ricœur had turned against structuralist method and, along with a number of other philosophers suspicious of structuralism, engaged Claude Lévi-Strauss in a long and rather fractious debate regarding Lévi-Strauss’s then-recently published and highly popular book, La Pensée Sauvage or ‘Wild Thought’.Footnote 16 The aim of that work, which followed on from his previous book, Le Totémisme aujourdhui, was to argue that so called ‘wild thought’ is not found exclusively amongst those societies that we label as primitive but rather speaks of the kind of thought common to all human creatures. Lévi-Strauss also continues his critique of the concept of totemism, which he had begun in Le Totémisme aujourdhui, arguing that so called ‘totemic societies’ differ little in terms of their structuring principles from those organised by caste systems. All of this suggests that what is essential to the organisation of society is not the mystical relationship of human creatures to animals, avatars, or demi-gods, which seems to be the organising principle of totemism, but rather the structures of the mind that find their outward expression in these totemic systems. In other words, it is not the mystical relationship that is important; rather, the mystical relationship makes clear the structures by which the mind differentiates between people and things, and between different kinds of people. The totemic system is simply a visible manifestation of mental structures, structures that are ultimately universal.
It is this focus on structure that is problematic for Ricœur. Surely when seeking an understanding of culture, and especially of myth, which offers such a richness in content, there is a need for a reflection on the semantic over the syntax of structure. Lévi-Strauss responds in a paragraph cited by Cornelius:
In your article you claim that La pensée sauvage makes a choice for syntax against semantics; as far as I am concerned there is no such choice. There is no such choice because the phonological revolution that you have invoked on several occasions consists of the discovery that meaning (sens) is always the result of a combination of elements which are not themselves significant. Consequently, what you are looking for… is a meaning of meaning (un sens du sens), a meaning behind meaning: whereas in my perspective meaning is never the primary phenomenon: meaning is always reducible. In other words, behind all meaning there is a non-meaning (non-sens), while the reverse is not the case. As far as I am concerned, significance (signification) is always phenomenal.Footnote 17
This distinction becomes axiomatic for Cornelius, and like the reference to kwoth in Nuer religious language, this disagreement between Lévi-Strauss and Ricœur helps Cornelius to elucidate his understanding of meaning as praxis.Footnote 18 In ‘Preface to Theology’, as in other works, Cornelius critically engages with the ways in which structure seems to have become the paradigm of meaning: DNA as a structuring code that determines behaviour; language that structures and seems to constrain thought; and all of this compounded in our own day by advances in technology. But here he focuses in on Chomsky’s concept of competence – the ability of a native speaker to generate and understand an infinite number of sentences – which undergirds his distinction between deep structure and surface structure in language. Cornelius sees the appeal of this, as he also has some sympathy with Ricœur’s concept of the meaning of meaning, albeit feeling that his articulation of the concept is too romantic.Footnote 19
As in his ‘A Theological Critique of Experience’ published in Multiple Echo, Cornelius offers the audience of anthropologists an account of his third alternative which is the result neither of a structured combination of non-meaningful elements (pace Lévi-Strauss), nor the coronation in some absolute beginning of a total meaning in which all other meanings participate (pace Ricœur), ‘…but primarily a non-formal, non-structured “competence”, which is the “generating” source of both structure and symbol, and which remains irreducibly “mysterious”. On this view, the “meaning of meaning” is a competence: the ability, capacity, power, actively to mean, the quick of human spontaneity’.Footnote 20 Here, I think we have not just a reiteration of Cornelius’s ontology of meaning but, when taken together with Cornelius’s warm reception of the insights of anthropology, also a suggested roadmap for anthropology as a preface to theology. Anthropology then becomes the propaedeutic where the human creature’s power ‘actively to mean’ is studied in all of its specificity.
2. Evans Pritchard and Godfrey Lienhardt
Anthropology’s relationship to theology has been complex, both on the level of theory – of the differentiation of an anthropological ambit independent of the theological – but also on the personal level. A number of anthropologists have not just been raised in the Catholic faith, retaining that ambiguous relationship to the Catholic faith that is common among the (semi-)lapsed, but many have converted to the Catholic faith. In Lienhardt and Evans-Pritchard we have an example of both of these, with Lienhardt having been raised a Catholic and mostly lapsed, and Evans-Pritchard converting during the Second World War on his third attempt at seeking instruction.Footnote 21 Godfrey Lienhardt, part of a sibling team of anthropologists with his brother, the Arabist, Peter Lienhardt, shared with his convert colleague, Evans-Pritchard, an interest in the Nilotic peoples of South Sudan. Evans-Pritchard is best known for his work among the Nuer and Azande and Lienhatrdt’s own research focused on the Dinka. Both the Nuer and the Dinka share a common agro-pastoralist existence, with their way of life oriented around their cattle. So these two anthropologists share a faith, with all of the ambiguities their relationship to Catholicism brought, and a common interest in same cultural area.
There has been much debate over whether we can speak of an Oxford school of anthropology during the 1950s and 1960s and whether it was influenced by Evans-Pritchard’s faith. The claim is made by Adam Kuper in his Anthropology and Anthropologists, arguing that Evans-Pritchard’s appointment as Professor of Anthropology in succession to Alfred Radcliffe-Brown marked a shift towards a more humanist and historical perspective.Footnote 22 Such claims are contested by Godfrey Lienhardt who, in his reflection on the life of Evans-Pritchard, dismisses this view, stating clearly that no such school existed for ‘[e]ach of us went his own way without the slightest sense of over-arching orthodoxy, and we were possibly teaching according to quite contradictory principles’.Footnote 23 Although the idea of an Oxford school is challenged by Lienhardt, he does agree with Kuper that Evans-Pritchard cut a more conciliatory tone with the wider university than did his predecessor Radcliffe-Brown.Footnote 24
The question of Catholicism is a much more complex one and, while Kuper suggests a much clearer power of Evans-Pritchard’s faith over the faculty, such a power is denied by Lienhardt directly.Footnote 25 Indeed, Evans-Pritchard himself professes that many were surprised at his Catholicism, and he accuses himself of being a bad Catholic.Footnote 26 We could hardly call the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology a faculty with an especially Catholic culture, but nor can we label it as a faculty hostile to Catholicism. The environment of the Institute was not a place where converts were made, but there were a number of Catholics, and indeed a number of clergy and missionaries from different denominations who undertook studies there.
But while the character and environment was not one of heady Catholicism, there was still the question of personal conviction and relationship. Towards the end of his life, Evans-Pritchard gave a lecture to students under the title Some Reflections on Mysticism, which he described as disclosing something of his inner life, even if such a disclosure was not apparent to his audience.Footnote 27 It is certainly clear from reading Evans-Pritchard’s scholarship that he was not attempting a work of theology, making frequent references to Malinowski and Durkheim, and very few to theology. Still, while his focus was anthropological not theological, he is attuned to theological concepts and so there is the question regarding the mutual intellectual exchange between Cornelius the theologian and Evans-Pritchard the anthropologist.Footnote 28
Writing to an Australian priest undertaking graduate studies on the question of the Catholic character of Oxford anthropology, Lienhardt says that he was a friend of Cornelius long before Cornelius became a Catholic, presumably during their time together at Cambridge where Lienhardt completed his studies in anthropology under Evans-Pritchard after their service in World War II, and while Cornelius was studying before entering the Order of Preachers.Footnote 29 In his remembrance of Evans-Pritchard, Lienhardt conveys his indirect contact with Wittgenstein, perhaps the link here is Cornelius, given the impression that Wittgenstein’s teaching had on him, or their shared admiration for the literary critic, F. R. Leavis.Footnote 30 The connections are hard to trace, but certainly a close relationship between the Ernst, Lienhardt, and Evans-Pritchard had developed, both professional and friendly, once all three had landed in Oxford. We can cobble something of the relationship together with Cornelius addressing the departmental seminar and joining a circle of anthropologists for discussion in a north Oxford pub, with Evans-Pritchard and Lienhardt both contributing to Blackfriars, and Evans-Pritchard giving talks and lectures for the Dominicans.Footnote 31
On paper, the relationship between Evans-Pritchard and Cornelius seems much closer, and so perhaps more significant, but I would argue that it is the thought of Godfrey Lienhardt that shares more of an outlook with Cornelius. In part, this is because of Evans-Pritchard’s much more straightforward approach to ethnography. Recalling the experience of a tutorial with Evans-Pritchard in Cambridge, Lienhardt says that one of his essays, which had verged into some of the more fashionable philosophical questions, was met with limited interest from his supervisor, Evans-Pritchard, who had gently reminded the young Lienhardt of ‘…the joy and excitement of extroversion to the ethnographic facts, and the danger, as he said, of “losing oneself in the minutiae of philosophic bunkum”’.Footnote 32 The relationship between Cornelius and Lienhardt was close enough that Cornelius held on to the papers Lienhardt shared with him, for in the Ernst papers held at the English Dominican archive at Douai Abbey there are two manuscripts on anthropological approaches to religion neither of which are by Cornelius himself, but I would argue are by Lienhardt.Footnote 33 One manuscript entitled Anthropological Studies of Theologies is incomplete and annotated E-P Uncorrected. This text closely corresponds to a set of lectures given by Godfrey Lienhardt in the Michaelmas Term of 1951 under the title Some Approaches to Primitive Religion,Footnote 34 and an article entitled Religion and Culture, a review of the published version of Christopher Dawson’s 1947 Gifford Lectures.Footnote 35 Another text, entitled, Religion, deals with similar themes to the incomplete manuscript, namely, with questions of scepticism in ‘primitive religion’, the ambiguities of human experience and knowledge, and the methodological problem of representing or translating one culture in terms of another, all of which are important themes for Lienhardt.Footnote 36
What is at the heart of this shared outlook? We can begin by looking at Lienhart’s published work, and in particular his book on Dinka religious practices, Divinity and Experience. Lienhardt’s work differs in important ways from his contemporaries; not just Evans-Pritchard but a whole range of contemporaries in the anthropology of religion. Rather than the Durkheimian inspired focus on social function (following Bronisław Malinowski) or structure (following Radcliffe-Brown, and in a more nuanced way Evans-Pritchard), Lienhardt takes a phenomenological approach that seeks to reconstruct the way in which Dinka religion is experienced in a single world of human experience.Footnote 37 This approach seems to be the flowering of a concern that had been germinating for some time and shows a real difference of approach between Lienhardt and Evans-Pritchard. Evans-Pritchard’s approach was rather more classical, so, for example, in his study of Azande discourse around witchcraft, Evans-Pritchard refuses to countenance the possible existence of witches, and denies the causal power of those who claim to be witches. The collapse of a granary is simply caused by some natural means – the failure of some wood, and perhaps its weakening by termites – which is then projected onto the witch. By contrast, Lienhardt’s approach is much more agnostic or sceptical. In part, this is the result of the beliefs of the Dinka themselves who say that no foreigner can have an experience of Deng, Garang, or any other Powers, which, for Lienhardt, means that there is no real way of telling whether or not these Powers exist. Evans-Pritchard’s approach evacuates Azande representations of any causal power, suggesting that they are an explanation projected onto a reality. This approach has a long lineage in anthropology, with the argument that magical and religious practices can be characterised as first, and largely unsuccessful stabs at empirical science, Lienhardt’s agnosticism opens up a much richer account of experience. In this respect, Lienhardt makes a real advance in anthropological theory, one that anticipates a much more contemporary approach seeking to take informants’ views seriously, and see where they lead us. This is at the heart of anthropological approaches to ontology, which I will outline below.
If I am correct that the unpublished texts in the Ernst papers are indeed by Lienhardt, it suggests that this methodological agnosticism was a long time in the making. Indeed the lectures to which the papers bear such a similarity were written at the time Lienhardt was a graduate student, firmly within the tradition of structural functionalism and writing a doctorate entitled The Dinka of the Southern Sudan: Religion and Social Structure. In both of the unpublished manuscript texts, Lienhardt is concerned to trace the development of anthropological engagement with religion, arguing that many of these approaches have simply imported ideas and concepts from theology, and understood other religions through this particular lens. So, for example, the likes of Sir James Frazer and Sir Edward Tylor, who saw animist belief as the most basic of religions, were importing understandings of the spiritual and the soul from theology. The text goes as far as to say that their intuition regarding the primitive quality of animism had more to do with theology than it did with evidence of the behaviour of people ignorant of Christian revelation. The Durkheimian school of functionalism does not escape either, for they simply replaced a transcendent God with a transcendent deified society. Supplementing these unpublished manuscripts with Lienhardt’s 1949 Blackfriars article, we can also add the functionalism of Malinowski and his school of thought, which is seen to offer a flat vision of religion as an integrating force, telling us more about our assumptions of religion than actual beliefs. In these situations ‘…there is always a tendency to attempt, not only to show a consistency between certain features of a religion, and of the society of which it forms a part, but to digress into the language of psychology in order to explain the religious beliefs and practices themselves’.Footnote 38
The argument developed in the first incomplete manuscript, and in the 1949 Blackfriars article, is made much for forcefully in the second manuscript entitled simply Religion. Here Lienhardt outlines three ways that religions are understood: the theological, psychological, and sociological or philosophical. The first approach, the theological, closely corresponds to the critique he makes of Frazer and Tylor in the first incomplete manuscript but adds an assessment of movements within contemporary theology – he cites Max Müller – that seek to understand the religious concepts of ‘primitive society’ within the framework of revealed religion. Rather than an earlier tradition, which sees the worship of other gods as the worship of demons, contemporary theology had begun to see ‘primitive religion’ as a step on the way towards revealed religion. Turning to the psychological and philosophical or sociological interpretations, these tend to abstract religious practice from context, either by reducing them to Jamesian notions of religious sentiment or by asking how they affect certain functions of social or psychological integration.
Lienhardt clearly wishes to move beyond this, and in particular to avoid what he feels to be the undue influence of theological, psychological, or sociological categories and the attempt for us to translate ‘primitive religion’ into our own terms. In this regard, he stands against Evans-Pritchard, who does seem to be engaged in this work of translation. For Lienhardt, this is a flawed methodology because by translating the Azande term Mbori into ‘supreme being’ there is already an imposition of terms that the Azande would not recognise. Lienhardt’s own methodology is more fully worked out in Divinity and Experience, where he will adopt a sceptical agnosticism to allow Dinka concepts to speak for themselves.
So much for the critique of other positions; what does Lienhardt positively suggest? The unpublished manuscript entitled Religion ends with the conclusion that all religions, no matter what their stated beliefs, are concerned with what is true. Using the example of a diviner brought in to cure someone of sickness, the prayer the diviner prays is simply a statement of what will happen, with the implication of the prayer being that the words of the diviner must be true and create the situation that they enunciate. The true cause of the illness has been diagnosed, the diviner speaks truth as he prays, the sacrifice is made in the light of this representation of the truth. Even the most apparently trivial and arbitrary aspects of religion contain within them a conviction and a meaning. Lienhardt offers us a sense of the universal quality of religion, which is the attempt to reach the truth despite human weakness and ignorance, to create a meaningful world which has a degree of certainty. This is why people of other cultures cannot accept the assumptions upon which our notions of the truth are based, whether that be the reason for a particular sickness, or something of a more fundamental order, such as an entire understanding of cause and effect. This is also why we cannot accept the assumptions of other cultures, because we see them as based upon error.
This might make human existence feel like nothing more than a puzzle where we are always moving in a state of anxiety, trying to solve the problem of existence. Lienhardt says that this is not the case. He ends his paper by arguing that people of other cultures
…sense that human life is lived within circumscribing conditions which they can discover but cannot alter; their religions are in part theories of what those conditions, moral and physical, really are, and means of adapting themselves as best as they can to them. And if, from our point of view, their theories of the conditions are false and misleading, they share with us a concern for the truth of them.Footnote 39
This moves us beyond the ideas of Tylor and Frazer that ‘primitive religion’ is really a first stab at science, or Durkheim’s idea that religion is really the deification of society and the imposition of a collective conscience through the experience of effervescence in ritual. But it retains the intimation that all religions have some truth in that they are the fruit of what Cornelius would refer to as the human creature’s engagement with the praxis of meaning. A process that Cornelius likens to gardening, the means by which a world is cultivated through social and individual, historical and natural, mythical and metaphysical aspects, awaiting the genetic moment of the meaning of meaning in Christ.
By way of conclusion to this section we can say that while Ahmed Al-Shahi, writing as Lienhardt’s literary executor, is keen to put the matter of the Catholicism of Oxford anthropology to rest,Footnote 40 and in the case of the faculty this is certainly right, we cannot perhaps say quite the same for Cornelius’ reception of anthropology. If there was no Catholic anthropology at Oxford, there was an anthropologically informed Catholic theologian in Cornelius Ernst, and two anthropologists informed by Catholic theology, even if in a rather ambiguous way. Evans-Pritchard was certainly influential on Cornelius’ thought, and Cornelius cites his work number of times and reviews it favourably, but I feel it is Lienhardt, Cornelius’ contemporary at Cambridge, who had a more substantial effect on Cornelius’ approach to anthropological questions, the interpretation of other cultures, and the possibilities of anthropology as a preface to theology.
3. Anthropology between structure and hermeneutics
Before moving on to establish what shoots might grow from the seeds Cornelius planted, it is worth giving a brief account of the trajectory of anthropology in the period after the 1960s in order to show how we might be able to bring anthropology into fruitful dialogue with theology and establish anthropology as a preface to theology.
Given what has already been said about Cornelius’ prodigious skill of critically engaging and synthesising across different disciplines, it is perhaps not surprising that Cornelius’ choice of article from Esprit turned out to be especially prescient for the development of the discipline of anthropology in the years after Lévi-Strauss’ exposition of his structuralist method. While the ideas of structuralism ruled supreme for some time, the discipline collapsed into a kind of confusion. For some time, anthropology had struggled to account for change and historical processes, and this was especially true of the structural functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown and even to an extent of the more historically sensitive functionalism of Evans-Pritchard. Lévi-Strauss’ focus on the synchronic over the diachronic led to similar weaknesses in what superficially seems a strong theoretical edifice.
The concern with the theoretical place of historical change was voiced at the same time that a number of other critical questions were being raised. American anthropology – which understood itself as cultural anthropology as opposed to the European social anthropology – had long focused on thick ethnographic description through the influence of Clifford Geertz. This set American anthropology on a trajectory where ethnographic works were much more a literary project than had been imagined in Europe. But as ethnography became a work of cultural translation and, to a lesser extent, a project where anthropologists themselves engaged in authorial self-discovery and expression, questions of representation, observer bias, cultural reification, and the absence of the voices of women and the ethnographic subjects themselves, all came to the fore. This, combined with the necessary critical questions regarding the place of anthropology within the power dynamics of colonialism and oppression, led to a long period of reflexive therapy in the 1980s and 1990s. Anthropology in the period after the critical works of Clifford and Marcus, especially in their edited work Writing Culture, led anthropology to the ever more specific field site, and for some time the grand theories that were crafted by anthropologists as tools to guide their project – theories such as structuralism and functionalism – were considered to be a thing of the past.
All of this served to make anthropology distrustful of abstraction and grand narrative, pushing the discipline more and more into the study of the specific. While anthropologists had in past times written monographs on particular cultural groups, their manners and customs, patterns of marriage and kinship, economic organisation, and religious practices, now a concern to give a tentative account of a particular situation, usually with an attention to advocacy for marginalised voices or the disenfranchised, and a critical attention to observer bias in method led to an ever narrower focus. One anthropologist notes that
…in the last couple of years juried articles have appeared in prestigious American anthropological journals on the gourmandization of hummus in Israel, the biopolitics of the US war on fat, pyramid schemes in post-socialist Albania, spatiality in Brazilian hip-hop and community radio, the occupy movement in Žižek’s hometown, and new uses of the honeybee. We have also learned from studies of faith and authority in a Jordanian high school, deception and intimacy in Greek psychiatry, campus sustainable food projects, the response of religious women to the 2006 Lebanese war, local brands of pig farming in North Carolina, and postsocialist migration and slow coffee in north-west Chicago.Footnote 41
Now we might argue that this is offering some kind of approach to the study of the human creature’s ability, in Cornelius’ terms, to actively mean in all of its specificity and offering an account of the competence the human creature has to cultivate meaning. But just as abstraction was a hindrance to the adequate translation of religious terms as outlined in the texts above, so also is the specificity of contemporary ethnography. The movement towards anthropology as translation of specificity – whether that be of the culture (whatever that is taken to mean by the author), or of the anthropologist themself – has meant that, rather ironically, translation becomes impossible.
4. Anthropology of ontology: The world to which man belongs
Some anthropologists found a path out of an entrenched postmodern hermeneutics through cognitive anthropology – broadly, a marriage of the ideas of structuralism with psychology, cognitive sciences, and evolutionary biology. These anthropologists are, in some ways, the more direct heirs of the complex legacy of Lévi-Strauss, with a focus on cognitive structures as the model and pattern of culture. However, others found a different path through a focus on ontological questions.
Throughout its history, anthropology has charted a course between the Scylla and Charybdis of universalism and relativism, structuralism and hermeneutics, and the movement towards an anthropology of ontology seems in many ways an extreme form of relativism; a movement within anthropology that does not just relativise the cultural, but which now draws into question the universal validity of all things. As a movement, the ontological turn within anthropology has never been well defined, and its leading figures form a diverse group in both their methodological presuppositions and their interests and ethnographic locales. However, one thing that does mark all of the approaches is their commitment to the reflexive turn within anthropology and a critical examination of the concepts and tools of the discipline. So although it is rooted in critical and reflexive questions that caused anthropologists to qualify the meaning of their findings out of existence, by going further beyond questions of representation, and questioning some of the more fundamental principles of anthropology, this broad movement has, I would argue, become a key place for anthropological and theological engagement and a way of speaking of anthropology as a preface to theology.Footnote 42
Some approaches within the anthropological turn go quite far, relativizing the very concepts of reality and personhood. But other approaches do have some traction, and we can find a faint anticipation of these ideas in Lienhatrdt’s concerns about the translation of terms across cultures. So, for example Annette Weiner’s feminist reevaluation of Marcel Mauss’ Essai sur le don led her to question the objectivity of the gift. Given the argument Mauss advances, that gifts (taonga) are charged with the spirit (hau) of the giver, can we really assume they are objects rather than subject, or something in between? Even describing the taonga as gifts obscures what we really mean.Footnote 43
But the ontological turn allows us to go a little further, particularly with a large constituency of anthropologists who question the very realm on which anthropology claims its authority: that of culture. While Godfrey Lienhardt’s concern for cultural or social translation was pushing the theoretical question of representation forward, he is still working with the idea of culture as an abstraction from, or interpretation of, the natural. In this sense, the effort or work of culture is seen as standing outside of the natural environment and as a kind of worldview of concepts and institutions that alter the way in which the natural is perceived and yet using the natural as its building blocks. However, the movement towards ontological questions in anthropology seeks to undermine this idea abstraction vision of culture, arguing this is an especially western, post-Enlightenment worldview. Indeed, if there is one thing that unites the rather ragbag movement of the ontological turn in anthropology, it is this question of culture’s relation to nature. Part of the initial impetus was the study of scientific discourse by philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists working in the emerging field of Actor Network Theory in the 1990s. In this regard the work of Bruno Latour is especially influential and seen most clearly in his 1993 work, We Have Never Been Modern, which traces what he calls the Constitution of the modern worldview. This Constitution is based on the abstraction of the cultural from the natural, while all the time the abstraction hides the creation of hybrid networks of actors across the cultural and the natural. Writing early on in the movement to prevent climate change, Latour uses environment degradation as an example of a network which brings together the economic, political, social, cultural, and natural in a way that defies the neat boundaries placed upon it by Cartesian, Enlightenment abstraction, making the problem intractable.Footnote 44
As mentioned above, some approaches within the ontological turn are problematic, but others offer avenues towards a dialogue with philosophy – broadly defined – and theology. Such is the case with the work of Tim Ingold who, in an autobiographical intellectual history, speaks of his movement away from science towards anthropology and within the anthropological discipline to a particular way of understanding the place of the human creature within its environment. At heart Ingold wants to undermine the view of the ‘…human being as one-part organism and one-part person’, which, he argues, ‘…was not even an approximation to the truth’.Footnote 45 Ingold’s concern is as much with a science that abstracts the human creature from its environment as it is with an anthropology guilty of cultural abstraction. A total view, Ingold argues, is only provided by a focus on the environment. While nature is about conceiving ourselves outside of an environment, becoming a background, a backdrop to the works of history, the environment places the creature into nature, not above or outside of it.
Ingold shares with Cornelius an aversion to structure as the overarching principle explaining human action. Writing on the question of genetic determinism, Ingold writes in a similar vein to Cornelius:
But if the underlying architecture of the organism were thus pre-specified, then its life history could be nothing more than the realisation or ‘writing out’ of a programme of construction, under given environmental conditions. Life, in short, would be purely consequential, an effect of the injection of prior form into material substance. I take a different view. Organic life, as I envisage it, is active rather than reactive, the creative unfolding of an entire field of relations within which beings emerge and take on the particular forms they do, each in relation to the others. Life, in this view, is not the realisation of pre-specified forms but the very process wherein forms are generated and held in place. Every being, as it is caught up in the process and carries it forward, arises as a singular centre of awareness and agency: an enfoldment, at some particular nexus within it, of the generative potential that is life itself.Footnote 46
Rather, Ingold argues, the human creature exists in an environment that reveals itself step by step. Here the example of his father is poignantly offered, with Ingold recounting his experience of coming to understand the environment by being walked through it by his father, in a way similar to the Walbiri in the Australian outback but more generally like many initiates and neophytes the world over. This experience of being inducted into knowledge of the world is essential for Ingold:
The idea of showing is an important one. To show something to somebody is to cause it to be seen or otherwise experienced – whether by touch, taste, smell or hearing – by that other person. It is, as it were, to lift a veil off some aspect or component of the environment so that it can be apprehended directly. In that way, truths that are inherent in the world are, bit by bit, revealed or disclosed to the novice.Footnote 47
The dwelling perspective offers a different way of being in the world to one that focuses on abstraction. The person is in the world; the world reveals itself to us not as a puzzle to be cracked, but as a series of enhancements, developments, and adaptations. Of absolute importance here is the fact that we cannot abstract culture from nature, with Ingold arguing that the most fundamental form of life should not be considered the discrete organism but rather the form of life most lived in a network or matrix: the fungus. Strange as it may seem, for Ingold, the basic principle of life is mycelial. Here we can see something of a vision shared by Cornelius, for whom life is the creation of meaning, and not in some kind of purely mental construction, but as a life lived in the world.Footnote 48 The whole process by which one dwells in the world makes the construction of a meaningful environment, not by the extraction of a culture from the objectivity of nature, but by allowing what Heidegger called the ‘availableness’ (Zuhandenheit) of various networks of objects, persons, and locations within an environment to afford particular modes of dwelling. Affordance is a key word here, particularly in the sense of James Gibson’s understanding of the reality of an environment. A tree offers an affordance of climbing or shelter, a cave affords shelter or storage, and in a more negative key, a cliff edge affords the danger of falling.Footnote 49 All of these make an environment not just readable but liveable where the human creature is as much engaged in the process of creating and forging reality as any other part or actor in the environment.
5. Anthropology of ontology as a preface to theology
In his Theology of Grace, Cornelius describes the way in which grace turns the world to which human beings belong into the world that belongs to human beings.Footnote 50 He says much the same of the Resurrection in Multiple Echo.Footnote 51 This language used to describe these supernatural realities is attractive, but anthropology, acting as a preface to theology, can help us get a much better grasp of the world to which human beings belong: the way in which the human creature by dwelling in an environment through the praxis of meaning comes to belong. In this final section, and by way of a conclusion, I would like to suggest what such an approach can offer to our fundamental theology, and by doing so offer a clearer vision of nature which might, in turn, improve our understanding of the power of grace perfecting the natural.
It might be objected that there is some danger in encouraging a dialogue between theology and an anthropology that is not just culturally relativist, but which has extended relativism to reality itself. Such objections are well founded, and it is important for me to be clear that we have to exercise caution in accepting the theoretical framework of a good number of anthropologists engaged in the ontological turn in anthropology. Moreover, we have to be cautious in accepting the metaphysical worldview of indigenous communities as an accurate picture of the world.Footnote 52 Here, we might see the limitations of the ontological turn, for committed as we are to an objective reality which does not accept a kind of natural relativism, we have to posit a reality to nature which implies some form of abstraction of culture from nature. Still by accepting the kinds of moderate approaches exemplified by Tim Ingold and other anthropologists working in a vaguely Heideggerian and phenomenological key, we can have a fruitful dialogue that does not commit us to relativism. The idea of networked affordances which characterise the ‘at handedness’ of objects within the environment is not failsafe, but does offer us a sense in which the environment cannot be characterised as a carte blanche freedom. The creation has an intelligibility that does not admit of complete plasticity. Despite the protestations of anthropologists committed to relativism – in either its cultural or more radical ontological form – it is not the case that anything goes; rather I suggest that the affordances of the created order aid the human creature in building an environment, and thereby come to know something of the Creator. Our current abstraction of culture and reification of nature is a relatively recent development, and for much of our history, the dwelling perspective, where the cultural and natural intertwined, was simply our way of coming to understand and make the world around us.
This helps us to see a little more clearly how anthropology can be a preface to theology, and help theology in articulating a solid and realistic theology of revelation that allows the creation to reveal itself in what Cornelius calls the praxis of meaning. Through a dwelling perspective, we can hold fast to the reality of the world around us, eschewing some of the extreme ontological relativism of some anthropologists, and yet, through a focus on affordances, see that ‘[r]eality is at once found and made’.Footnote 53 Such an approach offers us a way of speaking attractively of the natural revelation and, by leaning on our shared human nature, explains why human creatures ask such similar questions across cultures: What kind of things exist? How do we account for continuity in a world marked by change? Why are human creatures different from other creatures? The answers to these questions are informed by affordances, some of which are universal, others of which vary depending upon geographical location and which help all cultures to come to some knowledge of that which all people call God.
Moving beyond questions of revelation, an avoidance of dividing human life between an abstracted cultural and a reified natural can change how we conceive of the perfection of the natural through grace. With a much more organic view of the natural and cultural, our vision of grace is broadened to show the way that grace organically elevates our dwelling in the world. Such an approach helps us to articulate how grace not only divinises, but also makes us more truly and authentically human; how grace makes us live for heaven but with feet firmly rooted in our lived environment. This marks the process by which, in Cornelius’ words, the world to which human beings belong becomes the world that belongs to human beings. This should not be read as a relationship of dominance, but the process by which the technē of the praxis of meaning gives way to the poiesis of grace. Through grace the dwelling perspective of anthropology is replaced the poetic dwelling of the genetic moment.Footnote 54
The approach that I have outlined has its dangers, but I would argue that it best follows something of the trajectory marked out by the seeds of Cornelius’ thought on anthropology as a preface to theology. It also does not try to translate the terms of other cultures into our own, for common with the ontological turn within anthropology, it wants to take the categories of other cultures seriously and take them on their own terms. This satisfies the argument advanced by Godfrey Lienhardt that, in the first part of this essay, I have argued was so important to Cornelius’ own thought. We are not committed to accepting alien and problematic metaphysical and physical ideas, and a judicious caution is always required when seeking to baptise portions of a philosophical system. Considerable progress has been made in the rapprochement between anthropology and theology, fruitful dialogue is possible, and I hope that this essay has helped to cultivate some of those seeds found in the work of Cornelius Ernst.
