J Bialecki
Biographic Data
| ID | 32159 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Bialecki |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Bialecki |
| SIGNATURE | BIALECKI J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California San Diego |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4239-9817 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 598 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The Mormon Archive's First Ten Thousand Years: Infrastructure, Materiality, Ontology, and Resurrection in Religious Transhumanism
One of the chief debates in the academic study of transhumanism is whether or not this emergent movement that advocates for the technological overcoming of the limits of humanity should be considered religious in nature. This question stems from the fact that, while the vast majority of transhumanists explicitly reject established religion, elements of transhumanism seem strikingly similar to Christian eschatology. This article explores this ques…
The logic of the fetish in the present
Building on Pietz's speculation about the construction of a "history of the fetish' that might be related to, yet stand apart from the fetish as a historical construct, this paper asks if there might be novel yet unmarked contemporary fetish-formations. Taking the later chapters of Pietz's volume, which focuses on capital and techno-political infrastructures, this essay suggests that non-fungible tokens, or "NFTs," might be thought of as failed f…
A School of Thought in Christian Anthropology: A discussion on ontology, religion, and the limits of secularity
In what follows, Jon Bialecki, an anthropologist of Christianity, and Eloise Meneses, a Christian anthropologist, discuss the matter of ontological differences between anthropologists and how these might be crossed effectively to further the work of the discipline. An analogy is made to computers that must communicate with one another across incompatible operating systems. The discussion begins with a proposal from Eloise that involves entertaini…
Sexbots Playing the Imitation Game
Anthropologists generally reject philosophical issue-based scenarios such as trolley problems, viewing them as thin and decontextualized in comparison to ethnographic engagement. This article argues, though, that philosophical scenarios and ethnography share a structural homology in that they are both attempts to articulate not only a range of solutions but also the nature of the underlying problem that generates them. It investigates the implica…
Book forum on Joel Robbins’ Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life
Strange Aeons: Transhumanism, H.P. Lovecraft, and the affective index of posthuman dread
New technologies open up the possibility of rapid social change the likes of which has not been seen since the appearance of anatomically modern humans: humanity being either substituted by or transformed into a new post‐human species. Such an unprecedented change is difficult to concretely imagine in advance of its occurrence because it would unfold in a heretofore unheralded manner, and due to the speed with which it might happen, the only real…
A managerial apocalypse: Mormon Missionaries, eschatological anxieties, and covid-19
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had over 50,000 missionaries in the field. The global organizational challenge created by this dispersal was made worse because the organs of Church governance were located the State of Utah. This situation was exacerbated by an uptick in the always latent yet also constiutiave apocalyptic anxieties central to the faith. Drawing on interviews with Mormon Missionari…
Kolob Runs on Domo: Mormon Secrets and Transhumanist Code
Mormon religiosity is deeply marked both by a culture of secrecy and also by a culture that obliquely indexes secret religious material as a means of communication. This secrecy, though, can at times be an engine of disbelief, a process which has been exacerbated by the internet. Because of high levels of social integration in the community, Mormon disbelief can have high social costs. Some Mormons, however, have retained a 'testimony' by using t…
Wild Thought: A New Translation of La Pensée sauvage
Beyond the Human Horizon
Amid a moment of crisis, how might the anthropology of religion shift its focus from ethics to politics? This 2021 Rappaport Lecture, delivered at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Meeting on 15 May 2021, begins by highlighting three ways in which our field has taken on politics in recent years: by troubling the distinction between ethics and politics, by thinking religion together with pressing political issues, and by …
The Social Life of Scriptures: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Biblicism
What do Christians do with the Bible? How do theyùindividually and collectivelyùinteract with the sacred texts? Why does this engagement shift so drastically among and between social, historical, religious, and institutional contexts? Such questions are addressed in a most enlightening, engaging, and original way in The Social Life of Scriptures. Contributors offer a collection of closely analyzed and carefully conducted ethnographic and historic…
Future-Day Saints: Abrahamic Astronomy, Anthropological Futures, and Speculative Religion
In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there is an intense interest in creating "speculative fiction", including speculative fiction about outer space. This article ties this interest to a broader tradition of "speculative religion" by discussing the Mormon Transhumanist Association. An interest in outer space is linked to nineteenth and twentieth-century speculation by Mormon intellectuals and Church leaders regarding "Abrahamic Ast…
Muscular Christianity and Spiritual Abuse
Conditions and Possibilities
Conditions and Possibilities Jon Bialecki Jon Bialecki, Vineyard Movement, charismatic, Pentecostalism, Gilles Deleuze, Holy Spirit, necromancy, exorcism Recently, anthropology has been thinking about, well, anthropology; specifically, the discipline has been ruminating on whether ethnography and anthropology are the same. Producing ethnography may seem to outsiders, and perhaps to most anthropologists as well, to be what anthropology does: peopl…
Deleuze
This entry takes on two subjects. First, it addresses the influence that anthropology had on the work of the mid-twentieth century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and second, the influence that Gilles Deleuze’s work has subsequently exerted on anthropology. In Deleuze’s encounter with anthropology, he ended up seeing anthropological structuralism as a limit to thought. However, he saw Anglo-American anthropology, and some later French anthropo…
Christianity
The relationship between Christianity and anthropology is complex. At one level, Christianity has deeply affected anthropology, both through the wider intellectual tradition from which anthropology developed and through the religious practices and imaginations of particular leading historical figures. At the same time, there has been animus both toward Christian anthropologists and toward the study of avowedly Christian populations qua Christians…
Character as gift and erasure
For Southern Californian members of the Vineyard network of charismatic churches, character is a gift of God, traits bequested on them that are equal in dignity and importance to the classical divine gifts such as tongues, prophecy, healing or casting out demons. The chief difference is that these more classical gifts are not about gaining or valuing character traits, but about submission to God, and therefore are as much moments of character's e…
Introduction to special section 2: Anthropology and character
The authors thank The Ladislav Holy Memorial Trust for sponsoring the original Anthropology of Character conference, held at the University of St Andrews in 2016
Introduction to special section 1: Anthropology and character
This introductory essay seeks to reintroduce character to anthropological inquiry. Although it has long been out of favour due to its historical associations with accounts that attempt to describe national or ethnic character, we argue that a return of the under‐theorised concept may be in order. The essay invites socio‐cultural anthropologists to describe the diverse contexts in which character is recognised or enacted, out‐there‐in‐the‐world, a…
The Highpoint Church Standing Ovation
Judgment and critique, anthropology and religion
This article attempts to chart the various cross-cutting forms of critique that might surface in an ethnographic investigation of modes of religiosity. It stresses that if ethnography is to be an actual encounter, then it is important to at once understand that critique itself is not limited to merely one form of expression; nor should there be preconceptions as to what subjects are capable of voicing critique. At the same time though, it is equa…
Diagram for Fire: Miracles and Variation in an American Charismatic Movement
What is the work that miracles do in American Charismatic Evangelicalism? How are miracles something that are at once unanticipated, and yet worked for? Finally, what do miracles tell us about Christianity, and even about the category of religion? A Diagram for Fire engages with those questions through an detailed ethnographic study of the Vineyard, a Southern-California originated American Evangelical movement known for believing that biblical-s…
Assemblages: (Pre)Political, Ethical and Ontological Perspectives
Assemblages: (Pre)Political, Ethical and Ontological Perspectives Razvan Amironesei (bio) and Jon Bialecki1 (bio) Our work offers a new answer to a growing theoretical and practical demand within diverse domains of investigation by redefining the concept of political action. It grounds and elucidates some of the manifestations of a distinctive mode of the political. Its regulative idea is that of the assemblage. The overall aim of this volume is …
The Tragic Political Assemblage: Implications of Contemporary Anthropological Debates on Hierarchy, Heterarchy, and Ontology as Political Challenges
The Tragic Political Assemblage: Implications of Contemporary Anthropological Debates on Hierarchy, Heterarchy, and Ontology as Political Challenges Jon Bialecki (bio) A project conceiving of political assemblages as anything larger than just an object of intellectual history will have to face a question—what is the potential scope and entailments of the idea of political assemblages outside of the very specific late twentieth-century milieu that…
Eschatology, Ethics, and Ēthnos: Ressentiment and Christian Nationalism in the Anthropology of Christianity
Christian nationalism, a long-running and arguably increasingly influential political force, appears to consist mainly of an open set of affectively charged but cognitively underdetermined concepts and images that are capable of being constituted in a number of widely divergent forms. Despite this potential variety, the various instantiations of Christian nationalisms documented by the anthropology of Christianity tend to have similar features, e…
The Anthropology of Christianity
This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical "repressed" of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself…
The Anthropology of Christianity
This article surveys the literature that constitutes the newly emergent anthropology of Christianity. Arguing that the development of this sub-discipline was impeded until recently by anthropology's theoretical framing and empirical interests, this article explains that demographic and world-historical forces have made it such that anthropology has had to recently come to terms with Christianity as an ethnographic object. In doing so, anthropolog…
Does God Exist in Methodological Atheism? On Tanya Lurhmann's When God Talks Back and Bruno Latour
In the anthropology of Christianity, and more broadly in the anthropology of religion, methodological atheism has foreclosed ethnographic description of God as a social actor. This prohibition is the product of certain ontological presumptions regarding agency, an absence of autonomy of human creations, and a truncated conception of what can be said to exist. Reading Tanya Luhrmann's recent ethnography, When God Talks Back: Understanding the Amer…
Virtual Christianity in an age of nominalist anthropology
This article claims that the collective object of an anthropology of Christianity should be Christianity as a virtual object, in the sense used by Gilles Deleuze: a field of multiplicitous potential with effects on the formation of the actual. This position is necessitated by the recurrent inability/refusal/demurral of the anthropology of Christianity to define what its exact object is. This inability/refusal/demurral is a symptom that can be tra…
What is an individual: The view from Christianity
The introduction to this special section of Hau focuses on the tensions between individualism and dividualism as modes of personhood; while this essay approaches this foundational anthropological question through recent debates in the anthropology of Christianity, its larger concern is to reopen the question of in/dividualism in order to see whether we can imagine different relations between these two forms of being. As part of this discussion, t…
No Caller ID for the Soul: Demonization, Charisms, and the Unstable Subject of Protestant Language Ideology
The ethnography of Christianity has only one area where a sort of Khunian "normal science" has been achieved: Christian Language practices has been agreed on as a topic of vital and sustained ethnographic interest, and is usually understood analytically as being shaped by a referentially oriented, individuating "Christian [or, at times, Protestant] Language Ideology." Relying on a review of the ethnographic literature regarding Christian Language…
Disjuncture, Continental philosophy's new "political Paul," and the question of progressive Christianity in a Southern California Third Wave church
Drawing on recent anthropological debates on temporality, hope, and the relationship between Christian eschatology and political action, I use Alain Badiou's reading of St. Paul's epistles to trace out the internal logic of a left-leaning Southern California church in the Vineyard, a strongly charismatic Christian denomination. I argue that members of this church see progressive politics as a function of the incomplete eschatological event of Jes…
Between stewardship and sacrifice: Agency and economy in a Southern California Charismatic church
Despite a growing interest in the anthropology of Christianity, the economic practices of the North American-inspired stream of theologically conservative Evangelical and Pentecostal/Charismatic Christians have received comparatively little attention. Analysing economic practices and forms of musical worship in a middle-class, mixed-ethnicity Charismatic 'Vineyard' church located in Southern California, this article argues that apparently contrad…
Introduction: Beyond Logos: Extensions of the Language Ideology Paradigm in the Study of Global Christianity(-ies)
As the careful reader may intuit from looking at the title situated above, this special section of Anthropological Quarterly is entitled Beyond Logos: Extensions of the Language Ideology Paradigm the Study of Global Christianity(-ies). This title is inelegant enough that it perhaps warrants an explanation. Why entitle it Beyond Logos? What is meant by why is something that we should wish to go beyond, and what does this going beyond have to do wi…
Beyond the Human Horizon
Amid a moment of crisis, how might the anthropology of religion shift its focus from ethics to politics? This 2021 Rappaport Lecture, delivered at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Meeting on 15 May 2021, begins by highlighting three ways in which our field has taken on politics in recent years: by troubling the distinction between ethics and politics, by thinking religion together with pressing political issues, and by …
After the Denominozoic: Evolution, Differentiation, Denominationalism
In this paper I argue that sociological denomination theory, despite its success in describing historic denomination cycles, has limits to its contemporary use and does not match the ethnographic description of the variety of ways in which denominationalism is expressed in anthropological ethnographies of Christianity. The cause of this mismatch is placed at the feet of unilinear models of denominational evolution. In its place, a differential mo…
Diagramming the Will: Ethics and Prayer, Text, and Politics
Framing prayer as an ethical exercise that operates on a recalcitrant will, this essay examines both this practice in the Vineyard, an American Neocharismatic church, and texts written by Vineyard pastors for the purposes of instructing believers in how to engage in prayer. It argues that the same abstract play of forces can be identified in both these areas. But that does not mean the two areas are identical. While prayer as a practice is marked…
Angels and Grass: Church, Revival, and the Neo-Pauline Turn
This essay takes note of the fact that Alain Badiou published both Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism and Deleuze: The Clamor of Being in the same year and of the resulting controversy that has emerged from Badiou's (and his followers') critique of the propriety and efficaciousness of Gilles Deleuze-inspired forms of political praxis and subjectivity. In a move to adjudicate between the competing claims that arose from this debate, this e…
Eschatology, Ethics, and Ēthnos: Ressentiment and Christian Nationalism in the Anthropology of Christianity
Christian nationalism, a long-running and arguably increasingly influential political force, appears to consist mainly of an open set of affectively charged but cognitively underdetermined concepts and images that are capable of being constituted in a number of widely divergent forms. Despite this potential variety, the various instantiations of Christian nationalisms documented by the anthropology of Christianity tend to have similar features, e…
Muscular Christianity and Spiritual Abuse
Judgment and critique, anthropology and religion
This article attempts to chart the various cross-cutting forms of critique that might surface in an ethnographic investigation of modes of religiosity. It stresses that if ethnography is to be an actual encounter, then it is important to at once understand that critique itself is not limited to merely one form of expression; nor should there be preconceptions as to what subjects are capable of voicing critique. At the same time though, it is equa…
Faith in Anthropology: A Symposium on Timothy Larsen’s The Slain God
Kolob Runs on Domo: Mormon Secrets and Transhumanist Code
Mormon religiosity is deeply marked both by a culture of secrecy and also by a culture that obliquely indexes secret religious material as a means of communication. This secrecy, though, can at times be an engine of disbelief, a process which has been exacerbated by the internet. Because of high levels of social integration in the community, Mormon disbelief can have high social costs. Some Mormons, however, have retained a 'testimony' by using t…
Future-Day Saints: Abrahamic Astronomy, Anthropological Futures, and Speculative Religion
In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there is an intense interest in creating "speculative fiction", including speculative fiction about outer space. This article ties this interest to a broader tradition of "speculative religion" by discussing the Mormon Transhumanist Association. An interest in outer space is linked to nineteenth and twentieth-century speculation by Mormon intellectuals and Church leaders regarding "Abrahamic Ast…
Sexbots Playing the Imitation Game
Anthropologists generally reject philosophical issue-based scenarios such as trolley problems, viewing them as thin and decontextualized in comparison to ethnographic engagement. This article argues, though, that philosophical scenarios and ethnography share a structural homology in that they are both attempts to articulate not only a range of solutions but also the nature of the underlying problem that generates them. It investigates the implica…
Wild Thought: A New Translation of La Pensée sauvage
Assemblages: (Pre)Political, Ethical and Ontological Perspectives
Assemblages: (Pre)Political, Ethical and Ontological Perspectives Razvan Amironesei (bio) and Jon Bialecki1 (bio) Our work offers a new answer to a growing theoretical and practical demand within diverse domains of investigation by redefining the concept of political action. It grounds and elucidates some of the manifestations of a distinctive mode of the political. Its regulative idea is that of the assemblage. The overall aim of this volume is …
The problem with critique, and critique as a problem
The Anthropology of Christianity
This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical "repressed" of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself…
Imaginative horizons: An essay in literary-philosophical anthropology - Vincent Crapanzano
The Anthropology of Christianity
This article surveys the literature that constitutes the newly emergent anthropology of Christianity. Arguing that the development of this sub-discipline was impeded until recently by anthropology's theoretical framing and empirical interests, this article explains that demographic and world-historical forces have made it such that anthropology has had to recently come to terms with Christianity as an ethnographic object. In doing so, anthropolog…
Between stewardship and sacrifice: Agency and economy in a Southern California Charismatic church
Despite a growing interest in the anthropology of Christianity, the economic practices of the North American-inspired stream of theologically conservative Evangelical and Pentecostal/Charismatic Christians have received comparatively little attention. Analysing economic practices and forms of musical worship in a middle-class, mixed-ethnicity Charismatic 'Vineyard' church located in Southern California, this article argues that apparently contrad…
Disjuncture, Continental philosophy's new "political Paul," and the question of progressive Christianity in a Southern California Third Wave church
Drawing on recent anthropological debates on temporality, hope, and the relationship between Christian eschatology and political action, I use Alain Badiou's reading of St. Paul's epistles to trace out the internal logic of a left-leaning Southern California church in the Vineyard, a strongly charismatic Christian denomination. I argue that members of this church see progressive politics as a function of the incomplete eschatological event of Jes…
Angels and Grass: Church, Revival, and the Neo-Pauline Turn
This essay takes note of the fact that Alain Badiou published both Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism and Deleuze: The Clamor of Being in the same year and of the resulting controversy that has emerged from Badiou's (and his followers') critique of the propriety and efficaciousness of Gilles Deleuze-inspired forms of political praxis and subjectivity. In a move to adjudicate between the competing claims that arose from this debate, this e…
No Caller ID for the Soul: Demonization, Charisms, and the Unstable Subject of Protestant Language Ideology
The ethnography of Christianity has only one area where a sort of Khunian "normal science" has been achieved: Christian Language practices has been agreed on as a topic of vital and sustained ethnographic interest, and is usually understood analytically as being shaped by a referentially oriented, individuating "Christian [or, at times, Protestant] Language Ideology." Relying on a review of the ethnographic literature regarding Christian Language…
Introduction: Beyond Logos: Extensions of the Language Ideology Paradigm in the Study of Global Christianity(-ies)
As the careful reader may intuit from looking at the title situated above, this special section of Anthropological Quarterly is entitled Beyond Logos: Extensions of the Language Ideology Paradigm the Study of Global Christianity(-ies). This title is inelegant enough that it perhaps warrants an explanation. Why entitle it Beyond Logos? What is meant by why is something that we should wish to go beyond, and what does this going beyond have to do wi…
Virtual Christianity in an age of nominalist anthropology
This article claims that the collective object of an anthropology of Christianity should be Christianity as a virtual object, in the sense used by Gilles Deleuze: a field of multiplicitous potential with effects on the formation of the actual. This position is necessitated by the recurrent inability/refusal/demurral of the anthropology of Christianity to define what its exact object is. This inability/refusal/demurral is a symptom that can be tra…
Does God Exist in Methodological Atheism? On Tanya Lurhmann's When God Talks Back and Bruno Latour
In the anthropology of Christianity, and more broadly in the anthropology of religion, methodological atheism has foreclosed ethnographic description of God as a social actor. This prohibition is the product of certain ontological presumptions regarding agency, an absence of autonomy of human creations, and a truncated conception of what can be said to exist. Reading Tanya Luhrmann's recent ethnography, When God Talks Back: Understanding the Amer…
After the Denominozoic: Evolution, Differentiation, Denominationalism
In this paper I argue that sociological denomination theory, despite its success in describing historic denomination cycles, has limits to its contemporary use and does not match the ethnographic description of the variety of ways in which denominationalism is expressed in anthropological ethnographies of Christianity. The cause of this mismatch is placed at the feet of unilinear models of denominational evolution. In its place, a differential mo…
The Third Wave and the Third World
While a great deal of social science literature has examined the explosion of pentecostal and charismatic Christianity in the Global South as well as conservative and anti-modern forms of resurgent Christianity in the United States, little work has been done to investigate the causal effects of the former on the latter. Drawing from existing literature, interviews, and archives, this article contributes to filling that gap by arguing that in the …
What is an individual: The view from Christianity
The introduction to this special section of Hau focuses on the tensions between individualism and dividualism as modes of personhood; while this essay approaches this foundational anthropological question through recent debates in the anthropology of Christianity, its larger concern is to reopen the question of in/dividualism in order to see whether we can imagine different relations between these two forms of being. As part of this discussion, t…
The problem with critique, and critique as a problem
Apostolic Networks in the Third Wave of the Spirit
This essay discusses the relationship between the Vineyard and the various other apostolic networks. By comparing the Vineyard with C. Peter Wagner and the New Apostolic Revival, I contend that the chief difference between these two movements lies in a Vineyard interest in pedagogy over a New Apostolic Revival interest in governance, and in the Vineyard’s use of the figure of John Wimber as an exemplar for practice rather than as a figure of auth…
Apocalyptic Diversity, Demonic Anthropology, and the Evangelical Ēthnos: Modes of Imagining Difference among American Charismatic Evangelicals
How do American Charismatic Evangelicals imagine human difference? Ethnographic fieldwork with the Vineyard, a Southern California originated but now nation‐wide Charismatic Evangelical movement, suggests that for many lay American Charismatic Evangelicals, difference is conceptualized in three different modes, involving potentialities, relations, and boundedness. Much like a grammar shapes communication without imposing a single meaning, these f…
Faith in Anthropology: A Symposium on Timothy Larsen’s The Slain God
Anna Strhan, Aliens & Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals
Diagramming the Will: Ethics and Prayer, Text, and Politics
Framing prayer as an ethical exercise that operates on a recalcitrant will, this essay examines both this practice in the Vineyard, an American Neocharismatic church, and texts written by Vineyard pastors for the purposes of instructing believers in how to engage in prayer. It argues that the same abstract play of forces can be identified in both these areas. But that does not mean the two areas are identical. While prayer as a practice is marked…
Diagram for Fire: Miracles and Variation in an American Charismatic Movement
What is the work that miracles do in American Charismatic Evangelicalism? How are miracles something that are at once unanticipated, and yet worked for? Finally, what do miracles tell us about Christianity, and even about the category of religion? A Diagram for Fire engages with those questions through an detailed ethnographic study of the Vineyard, a Southern-California originated American Evangelical movement known for believing that biblical-s…
Assemblages: (Pre)Political, Ethical and Ontological Perspectives
Assemblages: (Pre)Political, Ethical and Ontological Perspectives Razvan Amironesei (bio) and Jon Bialecki1 (bio) Our work offers a new answer to a growing theoretical and practical demand within diverse domains of investigation by redefining the concept of political action. It grounds and elucidates some of the manifestations of a distinctive mode of the political. Its regulative idea is that of the assemblage. The overall aim of this volume is …
The Tragic Political Assemblage: Implications of Contemporary Anthropological Debates on Hierarchy, Heterarchy, and Ontology as Political Challenges
The Tragic Political Assemblage: Implications of Contemporary Anthropological Debates on Hierarchy, Heterarchy, and Ontology as Political Challenges Jon Bialecki (bio) A project conceiving of political assemblages as anything larger than just an object of intellectual history will have to face a question—what is the potential scope and entailments of the idea of political assemblages outside of the very specific late twentieth-century milieu that…
Eschatology, Ethics, and Ēthnos: Ressentiment and Christian Nationalism in the Anthropology of Christianity
Christian nationalism, a long-running and arguably increasingly influential political force, appears to consist mainly of an open set of affectively charged but cognitively underdetermined concepts and images that are capable of being constituted in a number of widely divergent forms. Despite this potential variety, the various instantiations of Christian nationalisms documented by the anthropology of Christianity tend to have similar features, e…
Deleuze
This entry takes on two subjects. First, it addresses the influence that anthropology had on the work of the mid-twentieth century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and second, the influence that Gilles Deleuze’s work has subsequently exerted on anthropology. In Deleuze’s encounter with anthropology, he ended up seeing anthropological structuralism as a limit to thought. However, he saw Anglo-American anthropology, and some later French anthropo…
Christianity
The relationship between Christianity and anthropology is complex. At one level, Christianity has deeply affected anthropology, both through the wider intellectual tradition from which anthropology developed and through the religious practices and imaginations of particular leading historical figures. At the same time, there has been animus both toward Christian anthropologists and toward the study of avowedly Christian populations qua Christians…
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