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: people in this discipline take the worlds of others and produce slices, images, or maps having some particular representational or expressive relation with what is known and experienced by their interlocutors in the field. Now, anthropology is well known for its periods of self-flagellation when it comes to issues of representation.1 But within the last decade or so, a new (or at least long dormant) anxiety has arisen: from some rather well-respected corners of the field there have been rumblings to the effect that anthropology and ethnography are not the same thing. The argument goes like this. When writing as an ethnographer, you "describe, principally in writing, how the people of some place and time perceive the world and how they act in it"; in contrast to the representative work of ethnography, "anthropology is an inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of human life in the world." The latter is a mode of questioning that is informed before all else by working collaboratively with those "in the field," but is in no way limited to such intellectual cooperation. As such, no matter what seeming or actual resonances there are between these two endeavors, their "aims and objectives are different." Anthropology is an "open ended" inquiry, while ethnography is in essence an end-in-itself (and this is not meant as a slight), rather than a prelude to anthropological thought.2 Ethnography is about a way to be [End Page 464] human, and anthropology is about an at once critical and speculative investigation into the various ways of being human. This meditation on in-house terminological distinctions may seem to be a strange place for this response to start. What does the difference between ethnography and anthropology have to do with A Diagram for Fire? My introductory paragraph may seem even less justifiable given the disciplinary breadth of the set of excellent commentators in this forum (two anthropologists with very different projects and backgrounds, and two commentators who are outside the fold, working in religious studies and history). Yet I would argue that even when approached by those outside anthropology, the contentious nature of the anthropology-ethnography divide remains pertinent in how they take this book in; their responses also point to the inevitable limit of such a divide. This is not about anyone's theoretical sophistication. Rather, as the book is taken in different ways by different readers, it suggests that this book has a dual potential for being construed as an "ethnography" or as "anthropological thought." Invoking the Copernican principle —the idea that chances are that there is nothing particularly special about where the observer is—it seems that the same observation regarding the bearing of a conjoined ethnographic/anthropological nature can presumably be made of most written works in the field of anthropology (though I have reasons for thinking this feature particularly stands out in Diagram). At the same time, no discussion here remains at the level of ethnography or anthropology alone; any discussion of particular moments of life (such as we find in any ethnographic record) inevitably draws in all sorts of reflections on what human life can be (such as we find in anthropological thought). Now, what has been offered up by my interlocutors here are all salutary interventions that better the book either through their charity or the perspicacity of their reading, or through the sharpness of their critique. For example, there is Joseph Williams's generous engagement. It is informed by his training as a historian, and one most clearly focused on Diagram as an ethnography (though again, pointing to the fractal nature of the underlying distinction, the anthropological runs through his comments as well). This lean into the ethnographic makes disciplinary sense. History is not about producing inventories of events, or merely discussing things situated in "the past"; it is the exercise of

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