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Finding revelation in anthropology: Alexander Winchell, William Robertson Smith and the heretical imperative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 March 2015

DAVID N. LIVINGSTONE
DAVID N. LIVINGSTONE*
Affiliation:
School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

Anthropological inquiry has often been considered an agent of intellectual secularization. Not least is this so in the sphere of religion, where anthropological accounts have often been taken to represent the triumph of naturalism. This metanarrative, however, fails to recognize that naturalistic explanations could sometimes be espoused for religious purposes and in defence of confessional creeds. This essay examines two late nineteenth-century figures – Alexander Winchell in the United States and William Robertson Smith in Britain – who found in anthropological analysis resources to bolster rather than undermine faith. In both cases these individuals found themselves on the receiving end of ecclesiastical censure and were dismissed from their positions at church-governed institutions. But their motivation was to vindicate divine revelation, in Winchell's case from the physical anthropology of human origins and in Smith's from the cultural anthropology of Semitic ritual.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 435 - 454
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Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2015 

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