Anthropology is famous for its effort to understand a culture other than the anthropologist’s own—its ethnographic methodology in particular aims to see things as others do: “What they call life is a ghost ship. On the ship are many rooms. … An uncountable number. There is always another. This is how they escape the prison of the self. To see the world through the windows of someone else’s room.” Impliedly, we all have a perspective, or a viewpoint from which we see the world; the challenge in the crisis of expertise is to understand why others might disagree about something as seemingly universal and uncontroversial as scientific facts.

The anthropology of religion

Anthropologist Tanya Marie Luhrmann (Stanford University) recently published a study of religious practices—not simply religious beliefs—entitled How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others. Luhrmann emphasizes the “real-making” efforts, including prayer, ritual, and worship, of religious believers. Her ethnographic observations, for example, of charismatic Protestants “suggested that it took these staunch evangelicals [a lot of] effort to keep God present and salient in their lives.” Luhrmann recalls public debates between atheists and Christians, the former convinced that the way Christians “think is simply wrong-headed,” and the latter explaining that “Christianity is not about propositions at all, but rather about truths that are more transcendent, symbolic, and nonliteral”: “ ‘The result,’ [anthropologist Jonathan] Mair comments, ‘is a loud conversation at cross purposes.’ That’s because, he argues, they think about realness differently. The two sides don’t hear each other properly because they live in different ‘cultures of belief.’” Even the atheist, that is, lives in a culture of belief. Both have a sustained, intentional, deliberative commitment: for the Christian, it is a faith in “the idea that there are invisible beings who are involved in human lives in helpful ways”; while for the atheist, it is a firm belief that there are no such beings. And both have a set of values to which they are committed.

In faith communities, Luhrmann also identifies how religious people occupy a “special world defined by special rules. … [T]hey signal their participation by special actions [called] rituals … [and] find their inner lives socialized by others as they accept the rules of the game and remake them as their own.”