Several anthropologists have recently linked diagnoses of the diffuse impact of the Christian religion on the history of their discipline to programmatic calls for a consolidation of the “anthropology of Christianity”. This review article suggests that complaints of long-term neglect of Christianity in the anthropological literature are exaggerated. The contributions of recent decades have reflected general epistemological trends and continued the Anglophone discipline's traditional bias towards the study of missionary encounters and syncretism in the colonies. Mainstream Christianity in its Eurasian homelands remains understudied, especially the many eastern variants, and this distortion vitiates some of the new theoretical agendas. Finally the article questions the utility of delimiting Christianity as a distinct subfield and suggests instead combining a problemfocused approach with a wider comparative range.

There has been much discussion recently of “global civil society”. This concept evidently draws on the more familiar civil society concept as related to national societies. What are the consequences of extending the concept in this way? Is global civil society simply civil society writ large, an extension to the international plane of basically the same kinds of institutions and practices as are found in national societies? Or do we need new tools of description and analysis? This article considers various theories of global civil society, and the extent to which they map onto traditional concepts of civil society. It concludes that global civil society may express the same mixture of strengths and weaknesses as the parent concept of civil society, but with additional features of its own that may – somewhat surprisingly – make it more robust than the earlier concept from which it derives.