"The Anthropology of Christianity" 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 as a rational, empirically-based enterprise quite different from theology. The theology it repudiated was, for the most part, Christian.Cannell asserts that anthropological theory carries within it ideas profoundly shaped by this rejection. Because of this, anthropology has been less successful in considering Christianity as an ethnographic object than it has in considering other religions. This collection is designed to advance a more subtle and less self-limiting anthropological study of Christianity. The contributors examine the contours of Christianity among groups including Catholics in India, the Philippines, and Bolivia as well as Seventh Day Adventists in Madagascar; the Swedish branch of Word of Life, a charismatic church based in the United States; and other Protestants in Amazonia, Melanesia, and Indonesia.Highlighting the wide variation in what it means to be Christian, the contributors reveal vastly different understandings and valuations of conversion, orthodoxy, the published scriptures, the inspired word, ritual, gifts, and the concept of heaven. In the process they bring to light how local Christian practices and beliefs are affected by encounters with colonialism and modernity, by the opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism, and by the proximity of other religions and belief systems. Together the contributors show that it not sufficient for anthropologists to assume that they know in advance what the Christian experience is; each local variation must be encountered on its own terms.

Fenella Cannell is Lecturer in Anthropology at the London School of Economics. She is the author of Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines.