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Christian Difference. A Review Essay

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 June 2017

Matt Tomlinson
Matt Tomlinson*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University
*
[email protected]
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Extract

The discipline called the “anthropology of Christianity” began to gain traction in the early to mid-2000s when interested scholars focused on Christianity as an object of collaborative and comparative cross-cultural analysis. Along with several landmark works of Joel Robbins, one foundational text is Fenella Cannell's edited volume The Anthropology of Christianity, published in 2006. In her introductory essay, Cannell poses a pointed question for the volume and the discipline itself: “What difference does Christianity make?” Bracketing the question of whether “difference” can or should be defined (Green 2014), several anthropologists have taken inspiration from Cannell, including Naomi Haynes (2014) in the concluding essay to a recent special issue of Current Anthropology, and myself and Debra McDougall (2013) in an edited volume on Christian politics in Oceania. Difference, as the criterion by which continuity and transformation are evaluated, is arguably the key concept for an effective anthropological engagement with Christianity.

Type
Review Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , July 2017 , pp. 743 - 753
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2017 

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References

REFERENCES

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