anthropologies

Yes the posts have been thin, as I foretold. I have been taken with quotidian things having to do with newborns, the normal parental exhaustions, and those vocational commitments that always seem to increase during the times you least need them to, and vanish when one might have more time for them. Such is life postlapsaria, I suppose.

This week we prepare for the coming of friends and family. Brighid Ealisaid is on Saturday to make the transition, speaking as accurately as I know how, from being my daughter to being my sister, and such occasions bring about the best sort of busyness. I think Fr. Tobias' intuition is right. The Holy Faith gets death; the other commitments, in any number of fashions, neglect it. For us, of course, that getting starts with the waters which do not part.

Writing of Fr. Tobias, he has two recent posts which tell of our need to stay true to credulity and his keen recognition that the principalities, leaving the God fight they cannot win, have besieged anthropos. Once again I find here prose which brings together many seasons of thoughts and intellectual struggles.

If years are days in casual memory, as they may as well be, then a fortnight ago I came to a little missionary training bible college in MN, through a couple of odd accidents of prodding from people whose wisdom I trusted. What sealed my intentions to go there was the presence of a man who was to become my mentor, a professor of anthropology who had come out of retirement to teach at the small bible college because he had once been drinking and smoking and cussing and card playing buddies (while in the artic among missionaries, no less) with the founder of said institution, a fact which would have scandalized the founder's holiness-rhetoriced disciples at the institution. My mentor started out an Evangelical missionary, but left that to become an academic. Before his humble time at the bible college, he had been kicked off the faculty of a Baptist college for being too liberal, and then taught at the University of MN, the University of Winnipeg, Brown, and Berkeley. He was considered the greatest living non-native speaker of Inuit, and he was the only "white man" elected to the transnational Inuit council of elders (whose tribes stretch from Siberia to Greenland). After this he and his wife ran a mom and pop restaurant in rural northern WI, in what they thought would be their retirement, before coming to my school. Tom had been a friend of the late James Spradley, whose ethnographic model he taught. In a bible college setting very few students were interested in the academic minutiae of Tom's knowledge of anthropological and linguistic thought. Because of the pragmatic and, generally anti-academic nature of the school the few of us who were interested in such pursuits of the modern academy were given almost unlimited access to the man and spent many, many hours in his presence. To be a disciple of Tom's meant to learn Spradley's ethnographic method, Eugene Nida's linguistic theory, and Thomas Kuhn's parsing of paradigms. It was Tom who introduced me to both William Stringfellow and Walter Wink. Tom was a relatively liberal low church contextual-theology evangelicalish sort who considered one of the five most influential books in his life to be Leo Steinberg's The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion and once gave me a copy of an essay (oh, I wish I still had it) written by an Episcopalian convert to Orthodoxy (years before this sort of thing happened) who argued, among other things, that the water and blood which flowed from Christ's side was a symbol of menstruation and that Christ, a man, died a spiritually androgynous death for all persons, and this from an Orthodox writer who told his readers that he could never have taken communion from a woman priest.


When one is young and learning some academic idiom, one feels important, or at least a part of something important, and this is exciting for most young would be intellectuals. But as time went on during these my years of my überhubris (or so I think it has softened a bit, perhaps not), it became more and more apparent to me that the whole system I had learned was a rather complicated way of cataloging and describing what was usually quite simple, or at least that phenomenon which is conceptually (re-)made, as it were, to be more complicated by way of social science analysis. While at the same time that the analysis alchemized the simple into the complex, I also found that the literary mind my parents had given me could only go so far with a field of study which uses very precise technical terms (used for the primary reason, so clearly is this so, of keeping non-professionals out of the academic literature) to describe what was often vague or varied or nuanced phenomenon which trumped such simple analysis written in complex rhetorical clothes. It is not so much that the phenomenon was complex or mysterious, only that when subjected to the academically crass jargon and the convoluted method it was made rhetorically much more complicated than it ever needed to be - simple things in totalizing complex systems become complex things. Some of Spradely's domain analysis is simply common sense applied to social science method, but it remains social science method, which is in large part committed to deconstructing mystery and beauty in human affairs. Over time, I came to believe that academic anthropology and sociology is, the whole lot of it, based on various forms of determinism, and indeed committed to projecting whichever flavor of determinism it happens to enjoy at the moment upon its vision of human and social affairs. All work in these fields is necessarily politicized and a hot house of Derridian style rhetorical machinations. I would come to the conclusion that the academic study of anthropology is the sordid study of the hatred of man. It is no wonder that virtually all the anthropologists I knew were die hard macro-evolutionists and all, to some degree, Magaret Sanger style eugenicists. If human social orders can be accurately parsed they can be successfully manipulated.


The most dubious aspect of secularist anthropologies is that they present themselves as unbiased with regard to teleology, due to their surface unconcern for man's end. This is the father of social science lies. If we assume that man's end is not notable, or if we are saying that it will be determined through engineered social mechanisms, or even if we regard ourselves as agnostic with regard to man's “end,” then we are saying something quite clear about man and man's telos, even if we are not saying it explicitly, and whether we want to be saying such or not. If man indeed has a telos, then one's vision of man will either cooperate with that telos or attempt to create a counter telos or an anti-telos, which is, of course, an absurd rebellion, for if there is a telos, there is one telos, and for it to be a telos, it must be a settled matter. This is one reason why all art concerns man's telos, whether we intend it to or not, and why all anthropology is, of necessity, an intellectual product of the anthropologist's prior creed. To concern one's self with man is to concern one's self with his end, even if one postures ignorance of such things. The supposed absence of telos is a reach toward an alternative telos – it is the belief in or assumption of the returning of man to the Nothing from whence he came. Furthermore, though the social scientist pleads ignorance of such things and claims that such concerns have nothing to do with the limited, focused scope of his work, he then inevitably places man's religious activities into one of the many theoretical social determinist schemes, an intellectual act which in itself commits the actor to a given teleological framework, again, whether he likes it or not. Indeed, the social scientist may focus on some category of human affairs that has nothing to do with religion – he may do ethnographic research of barber shops – but because his method is applied to human beings, the method applied to a social unit such as a barber shop will be same in kind to the method applied to a social unit such as a church. If we start with the conviction that man is known (even if just better known) through data perceived through a particular method, say domain analysis, we subject man's relationships to things and to other persons to a form of signed categorization which places man conceptually. Thus we have here an alternative cosmology. We must ask what these new signs accomplish. One thing which they accomplish is the destruction of narrative as the means of placing man. I should note here than I am not a proponent of the so-called narrative theologies which came out of mainline Protestantism in recent decades. These seem to be an attempt to restrain the influence of the social sciences on modernist theology, but in fact these narrative theologies remain infected with social science methodology and assumptions. Narrative theology has simply broadened categories and changed domains. Its textcentric approach to narrative ironically draws from forms of modern literary theory latent with social science assumptions. The anthropologists I knew loved to tell an indigenous tale as well. And this was done for calculated effect. The chief concern of narrative theology is to isolate the flattery which is to exist between text and reader. Friends, the biblical texts were not meant to move, inspire, or assimilate you. They were meant to save the universe, you included. That said, the saving of the universe, in its macro and micro (you and me) forms, occurs through the recapitulation of Christ, which is, as it were, the retelling of every story, that of Israel, that of the universe, that of you and me. When we replace the open terms of narrative with the confined and contrived terms of social science analysis, we have lost the terms through which our salvation is known and appropriated. There are no social construct categories for theosis, if we consider it as human activity. There is only the Way, and He as He recapitulates our lives, has a beginning for us, and a middle for us, and a never ending end for us. We are not for some thing. We are not for some socially constructed order. We are not for some misanthropic happenstance of atoms and primal mush and the determined end of such a Nature. We are for the Holy Trinity, and we are for the mediation of the Triune love to all created things. I can call the tree in my backyard tree, but I cannot love it as tree. I can love it only for the unique manifestation of tree that it is. More properly, I can only love it that it is. Therefore I cannot know it as tree in the fullest sense. I know it as the pecan tree in my backyard but the terms pecan and tree are of secondary importance. That I know it as it is a unique instance of God's creation, and touch it, and care for it, and eat of its fruit, and am grateful for it - this is of primary importance. This is the first knowledge. This is what it means to be human in relation to a thing; this is why C.S. Lewis told his students to go on walks, and touch trees. He wanted them to know God's things. Of course, human relations to other human persons require considerably more care and attention. Indeed, they require veneration, that which is due to God's living image. To our many and complex academic terms of the human person and his relations God responds with silence. Do not mistake silence with inactivity. God's silence is the silence of true narrative. His is the silence of the Tomb emptying. When God becomes silent our stories are completed. Humanist anthropologies end with too many words.

As I have written here before, the fundamental question of my life has been "what does it mean to be human?" That question would finally be answered for me, well, at least in its oral form, at a lecture given by Fr. Thomas Hopko some years later than all this. But one has to start to try and find the question somewhere. I somehow, and this is a miracle, managed to come out of my social science indoctrination with the conviction that if the small and the broken of anthropos is not loved, then all of anthropos is hated. It was not that hard for me then when I heard that what God has not assumed has not been healed, well, it was hard to hear it, as it should be, but I had, trough grace, been prepared for it. Perhaps it was through the intuition that the opposite of true humanness must be false. Fr. Tobias says,

It is anthropology, not theology, that you can get killed for even today (just ask the victims of infanticide and geriatricide). Man is to be understood as an individual, and as a spot on the matrices of actuaries. He is to be quantified as a profile of five super-factors of personality and genetic markers. He is to be valued as a resource and an income. He is to become a proper contributor to the growing capital of society. He is to be a consumer, not a craftsman: a user (especially a hyper-user or "addict"), not a maker, definitely not a steward. He is to be seen as a life form on the continuum of non-discrete evolutionary processes that may be tinkered with, modified, and terminated if he becomes too inconvenient to himself, and especially to others.


Much, much can be done in the course of human events if man can be found to not have a soul.


Or, at least, re-defined as soul-less.

Tom would tell me, later in the game, that as a white male, even from appalachia, I stood very little chance of getting tenured anywhere other than an Evangelical Christian college, and that I should thus change disciplines. I wandered about, eventually getting my education in the classics of the West not at an academic institution but at an antiquarian bookstore run by one of the last persons to have gotten the old european education (himself a friend and disciple of Alexander Dru), and who led me through a tutorial of the old sort during the years I worked and lived there (yes, in the upstairs of the store which was in an old church with a Torah scroll in a box at the foot of my makeshift bed, though no longer considered a Torah proper, because it had been touched by goyim). It was at that bookstore that I learned that I had little interest in academic politics and that I really did not care for the mass culture of teenagers and twentysomethings which permeates universities. I realized that what I had loved about spending time with Tom was Tom and books and ideas, and not academia. I have not looked back.

These years later I find myself a coppersmith by trade turned metal shop foreman. Metal is a much more forgiving image than most human beings, though not nearly as forgiving as the saints; it occasionally can provide one with solace. In its non-ferrous forms, those with which I am most accustomed, it is buoyant at the brake with porosity that rests on whims and God's weather. Copper gives more than it receives. At the end, for your best, you will sell a work of dull beauty, not the glitter of gold or silver, but one which is well enough pronounced, and admits more of its pedigree of earth than the precious metals. Alexander the coppersmith did much evil to the Apostle Paul (2 Tim. 4). Hopefully St. Asicus and the other coppersmith saints have done something to redeem the trade. It seems to me a human enough endeavor. Metal, especially soft metal, has its own sadness, revealed even in tears (though the common, more polite term is sweat). In the clanging and oft harsh noise of my shop, surrounded by the on their sleeves vices of those who are mostly underclass, I sometimes question myself. Was this manner of life prudently chosen? Those moments are short. Most of my coworkers are from Memphis ghettos or poor rural communities of the northern delta. They only speak narrative.

Thank God for the crooked paths he makes straight.

*The above picture was taken by a local Memphis photographer at my shop. It is part of a series of photographs, many of which I plan to post here in upcoming months.