Anthropology, Christian faith and individual identity provide three intersecting themes as Larsen's prior historical interests in doubt, deconversion and reconversion focus on how ‘theories of anthropology have been interpreted as undermining or even discrediting the claims of Christianity, as well as, conversely, how anthropological insights have been perceived to be compatible with or even reinforce Christian faith’ (p. 1). The brief introduction on ‘Anthropology, history, and doubt’ leads into accounts of six anthropologists, viz., E. B. Tylor, J. G. Frazer, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Mary Douglas and the husband and wife team of Victor and Edith Turner, conducting us from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, and concluding with an afterword on ‘The ever-recurring drama’.

E. B. Tylor (1832–1917), the ‘father’ of the emergent discipline of anthropology, is young, rich, delicate in health and a Quaker. While travelling, a serendipitous meeting with another Friend, one pursuing archaeology in Mexico, fosters intellectual passions that break new ground and lead to his 1871 Primitive religion and to Oxford's first post in anthropology in 1884. Tylor and his wife resign as Quakers in 1864. Despite being ‘hampered by ignorance of the chronology of Tylor's spiritual autobiography’, his Quaker wife's diary being ‘devoid of comments on their inner lives’, Larsen concludes that scepticism had encroached and Tylor ‘lost his faith’, finding no ‘way to think anthropologically and as a Christian at the same time’, though he will display a lifelong anti-Catholicism involving ‘a Quaker critique of … priest ridden … Catholicism … little better than the pagan religion of the Aztecs’ (pp.17–20). Influenced by Compte, the evolution-embedded Tylor develops ideas of animism, with dreams and imagined spirit entities of primitive peoples engendering notions of deities: all far removed from scientific experimental methods. Nevertheless, and this is important for Larsen, Tylor received ‘a spectacularly Anglican funeral’ (p. 36).

James Frazer (1854–1941), of Golden bough fame, is ‘a tough nut to crack’, given that ‘a steady portion of his words and actions served as deliberate misdirection’, perhaps the ‘fruit of a capacious propensity for self-deception’ (p. 37). Frazer's praise for Tylor, for example, ‘concealed more repugnant responses’ (p. 39): ‘perhaps his left hand did not always know what his right hand was doing’ (p. 57). Frazer's evolutionist scheme of magic, science and religion, built upon extensive comparative material, favoured ‘the conception of the slain god’ (p. 40) and when coupled with religion, itself ‘inherently drawn to violence’, inclined ‘the religious frame of mind toward human sacrifice’ (p. 72). Just as Quaker familiarities informed parts of Tylor, with his ‘survivals’ reflecting their quaint habits, so ‘Judaeo-Christian traditions are everywhere and nowhere in The Golden Bough’ (p. 46). Frazer's parents held ‘pious habits’ in ‘the free Church of Scotland’ but he is ‘unable to acknowledge to his parents that he had shed a Christian identity’ (pp. 52–3). Here Larsen aligns Frazer with Edmund Gosse, of Father and son fame, with its strange intimacy and distance prompted by the father's sect-like piety (p. 54). With similar parental piety in mind, Larsen's contagious story-telling pinpoints Frazer's ambivalent hostility towards religion in an invitation to teach comparative religion at Manchester's Methodist Didsbury College. After much deliberation his ‘naked personal revulsion’ for Christianity led him to refuse. Perhaps Frazer feared that his mighty endeavours in anthropology would leave the rising generation of ordinands ‘largely untroubled by this material’ and that they would ‘still go on to be faithful ministers of the gospel’ (pp. 78–9).

E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–73) –‘a towering presence in the discipline’, son of an Anglican cleric, and ‘quite confident of his own awareness of God’ that becomes more explicit with age – is described through a shift in Larsen's tone matched by a poem that he unearthed written a week before Evans-Pritchard's conversion to Catholicism (pp. 82, 100, 118). Referring to the suicide of Evans-Pritchard's wife and to experiences during military service Larsen thinks that ‘the guilt, the whisky, and the faith all seem to have blended together’, in his conversion (p. 119).

Mary Douglas (1921–2007), cradle Catholic and convent-educated, was advised against education at the LSE as ‘a dangerous place for one's faith’ (p. 124). So Oxford it was, where she experienced ‘a brief period of crisis leading to a maturing and deepening of religious conviction – to continuity not discontinuity’ (p. 126). Her work on ritual purity, grid-group theory, her form of anti-secularisation, and account of relativism as ‘a good servant but bad master’ (p. 143) are treated well with her later anthropology of biblical texts consituting ‘a final, grand intellectual passion’ (pp. 143, 159). All her books contained Christian examples; she could weep when going to confession; and was ‘both fully a Christian and fully an anthropologist’ (p. 173).

Victor Turner (1920–83), a boy who experienced ‘a vision of the Shekinah glory of Almighty God’ when an Anglican priest and mentor died, was introduced to acting by his mother, which perhaps engendered his later interest in ritual as performance. One day in 1957 Victor and his wife Edith, back in the USA from studying the Ndembu in Africa, both ‘felt a hand’ direct them down an alley into a Catholic Church. ‘When the words of consecration were pronounced over the cup, Edie shivered with the realisation that she had found the Holy Grail’ (p. 184). They became Catholics. ‘We obeyed all the commandments. We threw away the condoms’ (p. 186). Larsen gives good accounts of these ‘Christian believers’ and their anthropological ideas of ritual drama, pilgrimage, liminality and communitas, and shows links with theological ideas whenever apposite (p. 195).

Edith (b. 1921) had a missionary clergyman-doctor as a father and after Victor's death in the USA mounted a funeral echoing Nbembu rites, the tribe that they had studied extensively together and which ‘changed them’ (p. 183). She then returned to African fieldwork. During one shamanic healing of a Ndembu woman, ‘I saw with my own eyes a giant thing emerging out of the flesh of her back’, leading Edith to co-coin the notion of ‘actuality’, arguing that spirits are real, they exist and are not ‘merely a metaphorical reference to a spiritual reality’ (p. 205). Is it Larsen's own religious boundaries, or a sensitivity to wider anthropology as a discipline, that prompts his cautionary reminder of the hallucinogenic materials used in that ceremony? Still, here is a woman reported as telling that Victor once raised ‘a man from the dead’ by laying on of hands, albeit an event that they and the witnesses never placed on record. (p. 175).

Larsen's afterword tells of his own ‘stunning revelation’ that his book was formed ‘as a ring composition’ whose central chapter showed Evans-Pritchard as ‘the Oxford don who became a sign of hope that one could be both a Christian and a pre-eminent anthropologist’ (p. 221), a comforting sign read by Douglas and the Turners. An outer ring matches Tylor as a Christian who lost his faith and dismissed spirits as much as the Turners were agnostics who found faith and spirits. Similarly, Frazer, with his ‘malevolent subtext’, matches Douglas's ‘benign interpretation’ in popularising anthropology and fostering their own life views. Larsen's ring-cycle opposes any ‘linear progression’ from ‘religious errors towards secular truths’ in an intellectual world where ‘Christian thought continues to invite and repel anthropologists, not least through the ‘ever-recurring drama of the divine death and resurrection’ (pp. 222–7).

This well-written and finely researched book exemplifies that quandary associated with the genre that seeks to substantiate religion by aligning it with famous adherents and contrasting it with defectors. While such validation is understandable in the everyday life-world when ‘ideas’ are approached as ‘embodied’ within individuals, it becomes epistemologically suspicious when considering the abstract ‘ideas’ of a discipline as such. Still, methodological issues are much discussed in anthropology where hagiographies easily surround ‘schools’ developed by pupils–become-professors. Certainly, the anthropology of religion can intensify the issue of bias and value-neutrality in relation to personal life, faith-commitments and academic discourse when degrees of affinity between anthropologist and groups studied are acknowledged in terms of armchair versus fieldwork scholarship, of Marxist, feminist, colonial and post-colonial perspectives, and in terms of a scholar's gender. Issues of reflexivity also embrace the explicit significance of autobiography in anthropology where complexity of identity is seldom as evident as when individuals sympathise with and even embody elements of groups and places studied while also seeking an appropriate profile within their academic community. Some degree of ‘going native’, of the halo effect of being influenced by attractive features of a people, or even some element evident in the Stockholm Syndrome of positive attachment to ‘kidnappers’, is likely for individuals developing relationships outside their ‘own’ group for any period of time. Something analogous may also befall some scholars in the arts and humanities who develop an affinity with ‘their’ historical individual or period. The archive can become its own ‘field’ much as the consulting room may reinforce analysts’ commitment to their brand of therapy. Certainly, this book should be widely discussed in a variety of circles concerned with anthropology, religious studies, theology and the history of religion.