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Critique of Anthropology
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pursuit of the sacred

Jean-Paul Baldacchino
University of Malta, Malta

Abstract
The religious beliefs and experiences of others have long been grist to the anthropo-
logical mill. In much anthropological scholarship however there is a resolute silence on
the anthropologists’ own relationship to the domain of the ‘spirit’. Recent scholarship
in the anthropology of religion has been highly critical of the Christian underpinnings of
much of what is ostensibly secular anthropology (as in the works of Evans-Pritchard,
Mary Douglas and Victor Turner among others). The commitment to a religious belief,
if not simply a religious upbringing, was seen to be a ‘polluting’ influence to the proper
study of the religion of others in their own terms. In turn scholars adopting a genea-
logical approach have shown how the very discipline of a secular anthropology of
religion is itself the product of a highly Christian intellectual legacy. In his later years,
anthropologist, friend and mentor Joel Kahn turned his attention precisely to the study
of the pursuit of the sacred in a secular age. Starting from what he describes as his own
‘ontological crisis’ as a secular American Jew Kahn looks to the Western encounter
with Asian religion to set out the domain of what he calls ‘gnostic scholarship’ that
looks to the religion of others not as a cultural artefact but as, ultimately, a source of
radical subjective displacement. In the spirit and memory of Joel Kahn this paper
discusses the anthropological encounter with the sacred not as an object of knowledge
about ‘cultures’ but as a source of gnosis. Expanding on the implications of Joel’s work
for an anthropology of religion this work draws upon the author’s fieldwork among
Catholic devotees of Padre Pio to propose a form of embodied surrender as a pre-
requisite for an intersubjective engagement with the ontologically other worlds of
our informants.

Corresponding author:
Jean-Paul Baldacchino, University of Malta, C/O Mediterranean Institute, Msida MSD 2080, Malta.
Email: [email protected]
2 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

Keywords
Joel Kahn, religion, ontological turn, embodiment, theology, mysticism, anthropology

In 2010 I was researching the belief in miracles among Maltese Catholics

(Baldacchino, 2011) as part of a broader project on religion undertaken with Joel
Kahn and a number of other colleagues and friends based in Australia. As part of
that project I interviewed a senior cleric involved in the Vatican’s proceedings for the
canonisation of saints. A busy man, he invited me to speak with him as he was
disrobing after officiating at a mass. He was, I could tell, somewhat wary. After
patiently listening to a summary of my project, he raised one eyebrow and with a
sideways glance scoffed as he was folding his spellizza (surplice): ‘Anthropologists,
what would you want from miracles anyway? Aren’t you all atheists?’
I was taken aback. Flattered that this esteemed priest – and future archbishop of
Malta – was familiar with our humble discipline, I was also shocked at the ‘rep-
utation’ that anthropologists had gained for themselves. At least in terms of public
opinion it seems that not much has changed since Evans-Pritchard noted in 1959
that ‘The majority of anthropologists are indifferent, if not hostile, to religion’
(1962: 45). If the public perception among our informants (or at least some of
them) is that anthropologists are downright hostile to alternative ontological
claims about reality, the situation is not necessarily any better within scholarly
circles. There is still a sense of ‘secrecy’ that governs the religious convictions
and experiences of anthropologists. The matter of anthropologists’ own personal
beliefs is a ‘touchy subject’ (Stewart, 2001: 326). Anthropologists who profess their
own religious conviction face ‘scepticism and animosity from various colleagues’
(Merz and Merz, 2017: 80). Universities are reportedly ‘hostile’ to students and
academics who inhabit different ontological life-worlds that depart from the
strict naturalism that underlies much of modern secular academia (Glass-Coffin,
2010: 206).
Given its secularist history anthropologists have tended to bracket out from
their enquiry their own beliefs, adopting a form of ‘methodological agnosticism’.
Conceived of a secular endeavour the default anthropological response to the
seemingly ‘magical’ and ‘religious’ worlds of others has been to adopt, as Joel
Kahn notes, a pretence of ‘having no position’, ironically a ‘typical [position]
whenever liberal intellectuals, including anthropologists, encounter those whose
ontological construals they do not share’ (2016: 5). The corollary of this form of
methodological agnosticism has been the dominance of an interpretative approach
to religion that considers it in immanent terms. Anthropologists have analysed
religion in terms that sidestep the supernatural or religious claims and accounts of
our informants, in the main considering them to be ‘offshoots of various social
dynamic structures, power relations, hierarchy and so on’ (Willerslev and Suhr,
Baldacchino 3

2018: 66). Religious phenomena become interpreted in terms of biological, psy-

chological and/or social constructions, an approach that Joel labels ‘radical con-
textualism/constructivism’ (Joel, 2016: 3). Over the recent years there has been a
growing dissatisfaction with this approach to religious subjects, and various schol-
ars have adopted alternative approaches, some of which have been informed by
their own ‘religious’ positions.
In the wake of the so-called ‘ontological turn’ in the discipline various anthro-
pologists have experimented with new ways of encountering the other. The other in
this case does not simply refer to ‘cultural’ others but also the ‘not-self’ including
the ‘other beings’ that animate differing ontologies. These scholars have sought
both to engage in the ontological worlds of our informants as well as incorporating
and drawing upon the anthropologists’ own faith (see for example Glass-Coffin,
2010; Merz and Merz, 2017; Willerslev and Suhr, 2018). Such works enjoin us to be
willing to be displaced by the spirit worlds of their informants. Some of this work
picks up and develops hitherto ‘subterranean trends’ in the discipline that have
called for anthropologists to take ‘the final leap’ and go native in the fullest way
possible (Turner, 1993).
With such scholars I share the conviction that anthropology – especially the
anthropology of religion – requires the openness to be displaced to the very core of
one’s ontological foundations, that is a willingness to move outside the perceptions
of our selves produced through our secular understanding. Such engaged scholar-
ship means that we cannot sidestep the ontological claims of our subjects. Inspired
by Charles Taylor’s (2007) phenomenological take on secularity I believe, and I
think Joel did too, that reflexive phenomenology provides a preliminary ground
for developing an engagement with other ontologies.
The focus of this paper will be to address two important challenges to this
approach: (1) If anthropology is to occupy a hermeneutic domain engaging with
cosmologies in their own terms, what distinguishes the task of the anthropologist
from that of the theologian? (2) Is this sort of phenomenologically oriented
response open only to those who are already ‘primed’ to encounter the sacred?
I attempt to answer these questions in dialogue with the last works of my dear
friend and mentor Joel Kahn.

Ontology in anthropology: Theology or science?

The ‘classical’ approach to the beliefs of others in anthropology has been to rec-
ognise the reality of the beliefs of their informants, while contriving to ignore or
discredit their ontological claims. This approach can be illustrated by Evans-
Pritchard’s classic study of witchcraft among the Azande:

The physiological condition which is said to be the seat of witchcraft, and which I
believe to be nothing more than food passing through the small intestine, is an objec-
tive condition, but the qualities they attribute to it and the rest of their beliefs about it
4 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

are mystical. Witches, as Azande conceive of them cannot exist. (Evans-Pritchard,

1937: 63)

Evans-Pritchard developed an interpretation of Azande witchcraft on the basis of a

fundamental demarcation between objective ‘real’ conditions and other conditions
that are ‘mystical’ in nature. Mystical in this sense is used in a somewhat derog-
atory fashion to imply ‘unreal’. Over the recent years within anthropology there
have been a number of scholars that have proposed viewing the worlds of others
not as a perspective to be explained or accounted for in the terms of social science
wherein phenomena appear as a singular object amenable to multiple interpreta-
tions, but rather as different worlds entirely. Ontological relativism replaces ‘the
multiplicity of cultural “worldviews” with a more substantive multiplicity of
“actual worlds”’ (Mitchell, 2015: 16). Scholars of the ontological turn understand
difference beyond cultural terms: indeed, ‘for the new ontologists, difference con-
jures up multiple realities’ (Joel, 2016: 123). This often leads to an opposition
between a ‘Western’ Cartesian dualism and a non-Western relational non-
dualism that is often, paradoxically, described with reference to ‘a wealth of
Western philosophies, writers and artists, and even scientists’ (Scott, 2013: 861).
Willerslev and Suhr, however, have pointed out that these ontologists have ‘largely
been hostile to notions such as belief or faith, which are conceived of as a Western,
monotheistic, hegemonic concepts that have no place in the study of other ontol-
ogies’ (2018: 66). As Luhrmann’s (2012) own research with evangelical Christians
attests, quotidian encounters with the ‘other-worldly’ can be found closer ‘at home’
than we would think. The ontological approach, while not exactly a unified
‘school’, has been subject to a number of criticisms with some arguing that instead
of accounting for multiple realities it has built a ‘meta-ontology’ (Argyrou, 2017;
Heywood, 2012) and indeed downplaying the ability of people to move between
multiple ontological realities which might at first blush seem contradictory
(Houston, personal communication).
In light of my own previous work with Joel I find that I share in the aspirations
– if not always the approach – of these scholars however I cannot help but wonder
if, in taking up the religious claims of others in their own terms, we may end up
producing an alternate form of theology? There certainly has been a greater inter-
est in drawing upon theology in order to re-conceptualise our study of religion.
Stemming in part from the growth of the new anthropology of Christianity, the-
ology (particularly Christian theology) has been used as a source of inspiration to
re-conceptualise the anthropological study of religion.
Joel Robbins (2006: 285) outlines three ways in which anthropology might
engage with theology. Firstly anthropology can study the role of theology in the
formation of its ideas. Secondly, it can consider Christian theology as an elite
discourse that helps us to understand the particular Christian society that
produced it, i.e. as a source of ethnographic data. Robbins however focuses his
attention on a third approach, engaging with the theological approach to otherness
as a form of valid knowledge in its own right that can cause anthropologists to
Baldacchino 5

revise the ontological premises of their own enquiry. Drawing upon John
Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory (1990) Robbins contrasts the Christian
‘ontology of peace’ based on charity and reconciliation with a ‘social ontology’
of power and violence that underlies much social theoretical knowledge (2006:
291). Robbins interprets theology here as a provocation to recuperate ‘the reality
and force of otherness we no longer find in ourselves’ (2006: 293). Theology in this
sense is a form of ‘native philosophy’ that can be drawn upon to re-address the
anthropological endeavour. Robbins however is wary of crossing the Rubicon of
theological thought. At a certain point in his discussion of the applications and
implications of Milbank’s argument he decides to stop short:

I cannot go further without adopting some of the more explicitly Christian aspects of
Milbank’s language and starting to talk theologically myself – about God’s charity,
Christ’s death, the nature of agape etc. – and this is not something I want to do or am
capable of doing. (Robbins, 2006: 291, my emphasis)

For Robbins (2013) although anthropology and theology exist in a tense relation-
ship, each should endeavour to ‘keep the relationship awkward’ as he recently had
the opportunity to re-iterate. When anthropology borrows too heavily from theo-
logical discourse one replaces social theory with theology while limiting anthro-
pology’s role to the practice of ethnography (Robbins, 2014: 99).
Others coming from a religiously committed position have gone further in
developing an explicitly theological approach. Meneses et al. (2014) propose an
‘epistemology of witness’. They seek to develop a ‘theological anthropology’ advo-
cating the need for an ‘ethic of love’ that can counter the human propensity for evil
(Meneses et al., 2014: 86–88). In the illustration of their method to the study of
violence they argue that one needs to locate the problem of human violence in the
human heart – and in this anthropologists can learn a lot from theology – in so
doing anthropologists can ‘identify more exactly the means by which violence is
encoded in human institutions, and second, demanding that institutions measure
up to an ethic of love would more effectively promote and protect marginalized
people’ (Meneses et al., 2014: 88). Love, good and evil are not normally concepts
which are found in the theoretical lexicon of anthropologists but are an example of
the sort of disciplinary entanglement that Meneses et al. (2014) propose. Willerslev
and Suhr draw upon Kierkegaard’s theological concept of a ‘leap of faith’ ‘as a
way to address these experiences that we feel are difficult to conceptualize with the
vocabulary of our own discipline’ (2018: 68). They argue that anthropology is itself
‘a theology of sorts’ (2018: 65) in so far as its ultimate foundation might not be
reason but ‘faith’. Faith in their conception becomes a pre-requisite to knowledge
rather than its limiting factor. They propose a ‘methodological faith’ wherein
‘anthropologists are obliged not to take apparently absurd religious experiences
at face value’ (2018: 65–66).
While Merz and Merz do not draw upon Christian theology they argue that
theology can assist anthropology in addressing the ‘discipline’s religious gaps’
6 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

(2017: 81). Fountain has advocated an active engagement with theology in a post-
secular anthropology, an ‘un-repression of theology, the active embrace of an
anthro-theology’ as ‘a key site for future theoretical, methodological and episte-
mological research within the discipline’ (2013: 322). One may forgive the cleric
mentioned in the introduction for not being privy to these latest trends within
anthropology, given that the public image of anthropologists is still entrenched
in stereotypes inherited from its early days (Shore, 1996). In part, we could con-
sider the recent trend to equate anthropology with theology as yet another chapter
in the discipline’s tortuous identity crisis in the wake of poststructuralism, and yet
anthropology has a history of part-defining itself through identification with other
disciplines.1 It is anthropology’s malleability and capacity for reconfiguration that
gives it its own character built from a long history of reflexive self-interrogation.
The engagement with theology as an aspect of the broader ontological ‘turn’
within anthropology might, to a certain extent, be considered as a natural devel-
opment for ontological anthropology. Michael Scott has argued that in fact ‘much
of the anthropology of ontology may be said to be religious’ (2013: 865). While not
making reference to theology as such, Viveiros de Castro (2004) and Martin
Holbraad (2008) compare their own epistemological approaches to the religious
practices of their informants (Scott, 2013: 865). Joel tries to connect this move
towards forms of scholarship open to multi-ontological worlds with shifts and
counter-currents in western modernity itself: ‘If the recent representations of onto-
logically other worlds are in fact outgrowths of our own, where in our world do
they come from?’ (Kahn, 2016: 127). Joel is uncomfortable with identifying this
turn to ontology as a return to the religious however because the

demonstrable constructedness of religious scripture; the failure of most, if not all

religions to accommodate the radical pluralism that defines our times; the incompat-
ibility of particular religiosities and science; the patriarchal tendencies of organized
religion; and the links between religious authority, community, and violence (Kripal,
2006: 4) all make the religious uneasy bedfellows for those of a (multi)ontological
persuasion. (Kahn, 2016: 128)

If social theory is, as Millbank argues, the product of an ontology of conflict and
violence then it would seem that for Joel this also effectively captures the realities
of institutional religion. Building on the work of Kripal (2004), Joel advocates
instead for a form of ‘gnostic diplomacy’. Academics are well poised to take on
the mantle of the gnostics of the past but this entails moving beyond both theology
and rationalism. Gnosis presents a ‘third way’ between faith and reason. From the
Western side this involves adopting a deeper and more open approach to the
West’s own ‘cultural memory’:

The gnostic does not believe tenets or discover truths, like an orthodox religionist, on
the one hand, or like the rationalist, on the other hand. The gnostic knows, and among
Baldacchino 7

other things he or she knows is that the knowledge that he or she possesses cannot be
reconciled with the claims of any past, present or future religion. (Kripal, 2004: 515)

In this regards gnosis does not simply entail recognition of multiple ontologies but
indeed implies its own epistemology, one that is ‘beyond belief’ (Kripal, 2004: 515).
Kripal refers to ‘academic Gnosticism’ as a form of ‘diplomacy that explores the
hermeneutic and counter-cultural resources of opposed traditions [that] may have
ironic consequences’ (2004: 514). Gnostic diplomacy can thus act to address the
problems of religious violence and enmity. Joel locates the new ‘ontologists’ within
a ‘Gnostic’ stream which he defines as ‘an intention-impulse to seek an opening
into “unseen” and “impossible worlds”, to encounter and understand sacred or
non-ordinary realities from within, or even at one with them’ (Kahn, 2016: 129).
Applying this perspective to anthropology Joel proposes a direct engagement with
the other worlds of our informants which would entail a ‘shifting of horizons’ to
engender novel possibilities.
Starting from a Christian position, Merz and Merz (2017) formulate the anthro-
pological goal as that of ‘occupying the ontological penumbra’. The ‘penumbra’
refers to the bringing of ‘seemingly incommensurable dichotomies, such as spirit
and matter, together in a locus characterized by its inherent ambiguity’ (Merz and
Merz, 2017: 88). From an anthropological perspective this approach, like Joel’s
gnostic diplomacy, involves jettisoning the traditional ‘methodological agnosti-
cism’ that has characterised the discipline of anthropology, a method that for an
increasing number of scholars is no longer acceptable (Fountain, 2013: 322; Glass-
Coffin, 2010: 215; Kahn, 2016: 4–6). In their own way these various propositions
are all attempts to reject the ‘constraints of secularism’ (Stewart, 2001: 327) that
has ‘animated’ our epistemologies. At the very least these different approaches
advocate that the anthropologist should seek to go beyond ‘toleration’ and ‘under-
standing’ in addressing the religious worlds of others. This means not only being
open to the idea that we can indeed learn something from the studies of committed
believers, anthropologists or otherwise (Stewart, 2001: 328), but also being open to
subjective reformation. Scholars should ‘occupy the ontological penumbra with
our whole being’ (Merz and Merz, 2017: 2), replacing anthropological detachment
with engagement and embracing ‘the understanding that comes through surren-
dering to the unknown’ (Glass-Coffin, 2010: 215). Willerslev and Suhr describe
such encounters as ‘disruptive moments of faith’ that go beyond the ‘rational
undercurrent’ that underlies much of the anthropology of ontology (2018: 72).
Faith, as they see it, is born out of a state of existential uncertainty:

Faith is not about the certainty or the elimination of doubt, instead faith is the
exercise of holding these oppositions in tension: not by resolving them into a rational
synthesis, but by maintaining their incompatibility. ‘Letting go’ in faith involves
embracing these tensions, which is what constitutes the absurdity or the paradox.
(Willerslev and Suhr, 2018: 74)
8 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

Within anthropology there has been a long-standing division between those who
have focused on belief systems (religion) as opposed to their associated practices
(ritual). In part the ontologists’ suspicion of theological discourses can be con-
nected to the ways in which anthropologists have historically privileged the sys-
temic analysis of categories of beliefs over practices. Mitchell argues that focusing
on the doctrines or categories of religion has skewed our understanding of reli-
gions: ‘A focus on performance takes us away from the search for a categorical
logic, or “truth”. And towards an understanding of the experiential, or existential,
grounds of religiosity’ (Mitchell, 2015: 29).
Whether or not religion or indeed theology is compatible with such a multi-
ontological position partly depends on the sort of understanding of religion that
one adopts (Hage, 2014; Kahn, 2016: 128). Drawing from the work of the Jewish
philosopher and Hasidic scholar Martin Buber, Scott contrasts a scientific with a
religious approach on the basis of a different relationship to ‘wonder’. While a
religious approach seeks to maintain an open-ended approach to wonder, science
and philosophy largely endeavour to ‘displace wonder with fixed and well-ordered
knowledge’ (Scott, 2013: 861). Scott considers the work of the ‘new ontologists’ as
more at home in the domain of religion in this regards. Theology, I believe can
serve to instil and sustain this wonder.
In my own work I have tried to look at the phenomenology of visions, apply-
ing both a Catholic theological understanding and a psychoanalytic/psychiatric
perspective and arguing that they are not as irreconcilable as one would think
(Baldacchino, 2016). Drawing upon ‘native theologies’ in order to engage and
correct our own secularist ontological biases has been a main task of the new
ontologists with a marked emphasis on animistic, shamanic and pagan ontolo-
gies. It remains however much more contentious when scholars adopt their own
religious perspectives, which might not necessarily be those of their informants,
as a vehicle for deciphering the ethnographic encounter. Leaving aside for a
moment the argument that our very understandings of ‘religion’ as an anthro-
pological category are themselves the result of a Christian legacy, using one’s
own religious perspective as a means of understanding the other remains a
particularly challenging stance. In his response to Willerslev and Suhr (2018),
Simon Coleman rightly asks ‘Whose Christianity do we choose? Just the one that
fits most closely with our vision of what anthropology should be?’ (2014: 89).
Indeed such an approach leaves the anthropologist open to the sort of critique
that ontologists raise against secular naturalism more broadly i.e. that it is
beholden to Western modes of thinking. This approach becomes particularly
problematic when our theological discourses do not arise from or are not
shared with the worlds of our informants.
However there have been some interesting precursors to the sort of
theologically inspired approaches to anthropology that preceded the new anthro-
pology of Christianity. If the Evans-Pritchard of Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic
provides a clear formulation of an anthropological naturalism, the Evans-
Pritchard of Nuer Religion (1956) provides a pioneering attempt at a sort of
Baldacchino 9

theological-anthropology. Following his conversion to Catholicism in 1944 in

Benghazi, Evans-Pritchard’s own attitude seemed to have taken a marked
shift. For Evans-Pritchard the supernatural became a vindication of the natural
world, as ‘there cannot be a stronger assertion of natural law than belief in
miracles’ (1962: 169). According to Mary Douglas his Nuer Religion relied heavi-
ly on Christian theology in order to explain the religious beliefs of the Nuer:

To treat alien theology as theology, Evans-Pritchard had to take theological scholar-

ship seriously. He refreshed his knowledge of Greek philosophy, returned to the
divinity books of his parsonage home, re-read the Bible, consulted Hebrew scholars
and generally ransacked the resources of his own culture to the best of his own ability.
(Douglas, 1980: 89)

Evan-Pritchard’s controversial classic ended up applying Christian theological

knowledge to build a Nuer theology. The attempt to use one’s own theological
understanding to interpret the beliefs of others was met with a familiar form of the
‘ethnocentrism’ critique. As his own devout student – and life-long Catholic –
Mary Douglas notes, Evans-Pritchard’s exegesis of Nuer theology distorts the
nature of Nuer Religion in so far as he ‘strait-jackets Nuer ideas by his
own pre-formed judgement’ (1980: 87). Evans-Pritchard himself seems to suggest,
however, that it is precisely the anthropologist’s belief that enables him or her to
better comprehend the religious worlds of others, giving the anthropologist ‘a
privileged understanding’ (Engelke, 2002: 6). Within the current stream of ‘post-
secular anthropology’ others have similarly maintained that ‘personal spiritual or
religious interests are particularly suited for such an endeavour’ (Merz and Merz,
2017: 14).
Anthropologists proposing an anthropology of religion premised on ‘faith’,
‘gnostic diplomacy’ and the ‘ontological penumbra’ are drawing from different
cultural resources, seeking to reconcile and transcend the dualities of a worldview
characterised by the rigid demarcation of the secular and the religious, reason and
belief by reaching towards a ‘third way’. Here what is being asked from the anthro-
pologist is not simply their adoption of a different theoretical repertoire but rather
their embarking upon a process of self-transformation wherein one’s own funda-
mental existential positionality is challenged.

From an anthropology of religion to a mystic anthropology

In his response to Meneses et al. (2014), Simon Coleman (2014) raised an
important point. Does the anthropology of religion necessitate a particular
‘religious disposition’? ‘What should I do as an ethnographer who does not
see himself as theologically aligned (at least in any conscious way)?’ (Coleman,
2014: 98). I would imagine that this would resonate with a great many ‘secular’
anthropologists.
10 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

For Joel theology as a product of institutional religion could never adequately

account for multi-ontological realities:

I cannot accept that religious scripture is anything other than immanently

produced or that organized religion can ever really accommodate itself to
situations of ‘ontological pluralism’, or the (occasional) incompatibility between
religious and scientific reasoning, or the patriarchal practices in which most
religious authorities seem to engage, or the fact that religious communalism
seems to be inevitably associated with conflict and violence. (Kahn, 2016: x,
my emphasis)

Institutionally conditioned religious expressions are far too enmeshed in imma-

nent realities. By contrast, mysticism and mystical expressions of faith seem to
be a more open route to explore the spiritual world. It is no accident that
mystic spirituality is often at odds or at least on the fringes of institutional
religion. In the history of Christianity mystic spirituality has tended to exist in
an ambivalent relationship with institutional religion – somewhere between co-
optation, control and outright persecution. In the words of Spanish existential-
ist Miguel de Unamuno: ‘Catholicism oscillates between mysticism, which is the
inward experience of the living God in Christ, an intransmittable experience . . .
and the rationalism which it fights against’ (Unamuno, 1921: 77). This is not
solely a feature of Catholicism however, as similar tensions seems to animate
Islam. Urban Sufi mysticism acts as an alternative to orthodox Islamic legalism
(Ahmed, 2016: 58; Gellner, 1981: 115). Mysticism is therefore often contrasted
to the institutional dimensions of religion: ‘Mysticism may then be said to be
the intuitive, inward, imaginative, poetic, and therefore personal and highly
subjective, element in religion in contrast to the formal, external, conventional,
institutional, dogmatic, ritual and liturgical side to it’ (Evans-Pritchard, 1962:
101). For the secular but ontologically pluralistically inclined anthropologist it
forms a particularly attractive field of enquiry not least because it offers an
‘intensely personal’ (Evans-Pritchard, 1962: 103) manner of accessing another
world and is thus compatible with modern forms of selfhood. Mysticism is built
on a model of spiritual life that can be identified in a variety of religious
traditions without being necessarily bound by any of them – a ‘perennial phi-
losophy’ (Evans-Pritchard, 1970: 103; Huxley, 2009 [1944]) that we cannot ade-
quately understand if we focus on differences in religious doctrines (Underhill,
1930: 96). At the margins of institutional religions (if not in its wastelands),
mysticism offers ‘a way out’ of the ontology of power and conflict that for
many is hopelessly bound to institutionalised models of faith. Last but not least
it is a form of spirituality that goes beyond any immanent texts and indeed is
defined precisely by the limitations of Logos. As the theologian Karl Rahner
observes, even within Catholicism ‘there is no generally received theology of
mysticism’ (1982: 56).
Baldacchino 11

Joel described himself as an ‘erstwhile posterboy for modern secular selfhood’

(Joel, 2011: 78), declaring that for most of his life he believed:

only in immanence and nothing transcendent, that the world is not an enchanted one,
and that things do not happen for reasons beyond nature, that time is unidirectional
and the short span of my existence is finite, and that my body occupies a place in
empty and potentially infinite space in the same way as do all other material objects.
(Joel, 2011: 78)

This ‘naturalistic sensibility’ caused him to ‘squirm’ when meeting both those who
professed religious faith at home and religious people amongst his Muslim Malay
informants (Joel, 2011: 78). And yet later Joel found himself drawn towards the
mystical ontologies of others. In his Asia, Modernity, and the Pursuit of the Sacred
(2016), Joel brings together the experience of Sufis in South-East Asia with the
countercultural ‘Eastern turn’ in Western thought and culture (Kahn, 2016: 21). In
selecting Western ‘gnostic diplomats’ (Herman Hesse, Alexandra David-Néel,
René Guénon and especially the Austrian physicist Erwin Schr€ odinger) as case
studies, Joel was looking for models – templates if you will – of gnostic diplomacy.
He was also hoping to develop his own form of spirituality that would be com-
patible with his own modern secular selfhood. Joel was refreshingly honest about
the fact that his own turn to the study of religion was not born out of purely
intellectual interests. Studying religion – after a lifetime of dealing with Marxism,
modernity and multiculturalism – came at

a time of personal existential or ontic crisis, a crisis that seemed to arise directly from
my own sense of isolated, autonomous being [. . .], ‘thrown’ into a meaningless uni-
verse for what seems an alarmingly brief moment in the infinite flow of abstract time.
(Kahn, 2016: x)

Joel was not simply trying to discover the other in his/her own right but was
himself seeking to develop and encounter new horizons of belief and experience.
He likens the impulse driving his research into Sufi mysticism as the result of
something similar to Schr€ odinger’s ‘metaphysical urge’ (Kahn, 2016: 137).
I believe that ‘mysticism’ forms a particularly attractive avenue for those schol-
ars experiencing this ‘metaphysical urge’ but who may also be imbued with a
suspicion towards institutionalised faith, while also feeling dissatisfied with the
rationalism that characterises secular academia. This scholarly search for mystical
transcendence has a long history in academia. William James ‘remained unshaken’
in his belief that there exists an alternate modes of consciousness that he could
access with his experiments with nitrous oxide (James, 1917: 388). But is it the case
that such worlds are open to all? In spite of the problematic legacy of Carlos
Castaneda, anthropologists continue to feel genuine anguish and torment when
they are unable to encounter the world in the spiritual terms of their informants.
Glass-Coffin recounts her frustration and envy at the ones who were able to
12 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

‘cross-over’, ‘let go’ and ‘lose themselves’ when entering a ‘shamanic state of con-
sciousness’ (2010: 208). She was only able to experience her own ‘personal awak-
ening’ after more than 18 years of fieldwork with shamans while, ironically,
working in sub-urban Florida rather than in Peru (Glass-Coffin, 2010: 209). Not
everyone however is necessarily attuned to such mystical otherness. For example,
writing to his friend and mystic Romain Rolland Freud confesses that he is unable
to access the ‘oceanic feeling’ that stems from mystical encounters: ‘How remote
from the other worlds in which you move! To me mysticism is just as closed a book
as music. [. . .] And yet, it is easier for you than for us to read the human soul!’
(Freud, 1929: 389).
While Freud himself was convinced of the neurotic roots of religious experi-
ence it would be unfair to argue that Freud dismissed all religious experiences
out of hand as necessarily the product of neurosis (Rubenstein, 1967: 41). Freud
greatly admired the French scholar of religion, and mystic, Romain Rolland. He
sent to Rolland a copy of his The Future of an Illusion (Freud, 1927). In the
exchange of letters that followed Rolland makes the point that Freud’s book left
out of its analysis the nature of mystical experience, the ‘oceanic feeling’ of
oneness that is the ‘true subterranean source of religious energy’ (cit. in
Maharaj, 2017: 474). Almost a year and a half later Freud remained perturbed
by this ‘oceanic feeling’. In his Civilisation and its Discontents (Freud, 1930)
Freud locates the oceanic feeling in primitive childhood experience. The ‘oceanic
feeling’ for Freud is an

Intimate union of the ego with the surrounding world, felt as an absolute certainty of
satisfaction, security, as well as the loss of ourselves to what surrounds and contains
us, and that goes back to the experience of the infant who has not yet established
borders between the ego and the maternal body. (Kristeva, 2006: 7)

Kristeva draws from Freud’s work in order to understand this ‘need to believe’
without reducing religion to either neurosis or illusion. She connects this oceanic
feeling of mysticism with a primordial ‘need to believe’: ‘The need to believe – with
the power of its dazzling certainty, its sensory joy, and the dispossession of oneself-
might perhaps commemorate this archaic experience and its pleasures and risks’
(Kristeva, 2006: 8). One must be wary of reading into Freud a facile hostility to
religious ontologies. The differences between Freudian thought and mysticism
might not be so radical. Bakan made the controversial argument that the contri-
butions of Freud should be understood as a ‘contemporary contribution to the
history of Jewish mysticism’ (2004: 25). The religious influence and undertones in
Freud’s work have been drawn out elsewhere (Küng, 1979) and need not be
rehearsed in this paper. Perhaps it is not surprising that the most sustained anthro-
pological critique of psychoanalysis resorts to comparing psychoanalysis to a reli-
gion with Freud providing the unconscious with a language, a ritual and a church
(see Gellner, 2003).
Baldacchino 13

Surprised by kneeling
Joel opens his last book by recounting the ‘acute discomfort’ experienced by Lévi-
Strauss who, while conducting fieldwork in Burma, had to stand in an ‘embar-
rassed silence’ (Kahn, 2016: 1) observing his informant ‘bowing down to idols’
(Lévi-Strauss, 1965: 394). Joel argues that such moments serve to remind us of the
fundamental ‘gulf’ dividing the ontological worlds of our informants from our
own. For Clifford Lévi-Strauss’ unwillingness to bow marks a line of ‘discretion’.
This discretion is an authentic ‘mental bow’ of respect towards Bhuddism but it is
also, as Clifford reminds us, a visible sign of professional separation marking out
the anthropologist from the native (1997: 75).
Why may such encounters be ‘embarrassing’ and ‘unsettling’ for anthropolo-
gists? Crossing the line between ‘physical and hermeneutic acts of connection’
(Clifford, 1997: 76) in such instances also entails, I suspect, crossing an ontological
boundary. While we might often engage in discussions about the beliefs of our
informants and recognise ways in which the claims of our informants can indeed be
considered ‘true’, at some level there is a marked reticence about such embodied
engagement. To be fair anthropologists working on embodiment have made
apprenticeship a central tenant of their practice (see Wacquant, 2006). There is
still however a marked reticence when we are enjoined in an embodied manner to
participate in the ontologically other worlds of our informants. It must be said that
oftentimes this dilemma is a problem that exists for us as anthropologists and not
so much for the people we study. I recently had a PhD student who was working
with gay Catholics and when participating in a mass held specifically for her gay
informants she didn’t partake of the Eucharist. She was afraid it would be ‘disre-
spectful’ or somehow ‘dishonest’ given her own secular outlook. When her inform-
ants asked her why she did not partake her reasons were brushed aside and she was
told that she should have taken communion anyway (Deguara, 2018).
Why does the secular anthropologist find herself/himself challenged and unset-
tled by such forms of participation? I suspect that there is a basic conviction that
participation might somehow be misconstrued as assent to the ontological prem-
ises of our informants. If the outward physical expressions are a form of commu-
nicative action, kneeling and bowing in particular seems to suggest that ‘I am a
suppliant’ in relation to a divine other.
I grew up Catholic. My own world-view was built out of an intensely religious
social-cultural fabric in which the boundaries between the secular and the religious
domain were not immediately discernable. I could not say that I have ever been
able to experience a ‘religious feeling’ remotely similar to the ‘oceanic feeling’ of
mystical communion whether with the Divine or with Being itself. Growing up on
an adolescent diet of Nietzsche, Marx and Camus (respectively), I was gradually
‘weaned off’ the faith. As an extension of my work with Joel I decided to compare
the devotion to St George Preca with that to Padre Pio, another popular
Mediterranean Catholic male mystic saint. I visited and spent a few weeks at the
shrine of the Saint at San Giovanni Rotondo in the south of Italy, one of the
14 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

country’s most visited pilgrimage sites, with an estimated 2.5 million visitors a year
(Margry, 2002:100). I did my fieldwork in winter – low season for pilgrims – and
seeking to ‘connect’ with the Saint as much as with the believers I visited the Saint’s
tomb every morning. The following paragraph is from my fieldnotes:

The crypt where he is buried is shrouded in a reverential and sombre silence.

The centre of attention is the large block of polished granite that contains the remains
of Padre Pio protected by a heavy metal gate all around. There are kneelers in front of
the body of the saint where the devout can pray. Dim lighting helps me focus my own
consciousness seeking to become attuned to ‘the sacred’. I somehow feel I should
kneel in front of the body of the saint. I am struck by how odd kneeling feels.
I couldn’t recall the last time I knelt in front of anybody or anything. I try to focus
my thoughts towards the body of the saint and engage in ‘prayer’ recalling my long
forgotten religious habitus. I thought I should try to let the saint speak to me but the
saint remains dumb. I couldn’t help but think to myself, ‘Would I feel any different if
the coffin was actually empty? Am I speaking to a lump of stone? Does it matter?’
Engrained in an ethic of suspicion I found myself doubting some of the most
mundane things. And yet there is something unsettling in that awkward silence and
a certain sense of intimacy conjured by the saint’s enigmatic body. I stand up
and look around. The whole setting suddenly seems ‘alien’ and I feel somewhat
embarrassed.

In the crypt I believe I was engaging in an intense dialogue between myself and the
saint even though he remained resolutely mute. In this regard perhaps my conver-
sation was more of a monologue than a dialogue – were it not for the fact that it
required my confrontation with the saint’s coffin. Focusing my thoughts, my atten-
tion, my being and my own bodily hexis to that silent coffin I entered a state that
was not something I experienced since my distant childhood. Perhaps I failed to
find God in San Giovanni Rotondo but I felt I encountered a different sort of
relation that unsettled the mundane, a form of intense contemplative relation
that removed me from my own immediate surroundings and altered my own per-
ception of them.
Kneeling and other forms of prostration seem to be intimately connected to
forms of engagement with the sacred even among mystics. Forms of encounter
with the sacred seem to ‘impel’ prostration. The following is an extract from
Malwida von Meysenbug describing her own encounter with that ‘oceanic feeling’.
A friend of Friedrich Nietzsche and Romain Rolland, William James quotes her
memoir at length in his investigations of mystical experiences:

I was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over me, liberating and
reconciling; and now again, as once before in distant days in the Alps of Dauphine,
I was impelled to kneel down, this time before the illimitable ocean, symbol of the
Infinite. I felt that I prayed as I had never prayed before, and knew now what prayer
really is: to return from the solitude of individuation into the consciousness of unity
Baldacchino 15

with all that is, to kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one imper-
ishable. (James, 1917: 386)

Kneeling, and prostration more generally, is an embodied form of surrender and

submission that is remarkably challenging for the archetype modern subject.
Kneeling is a gesture that dramatically subverts the triumph of the naturalist
modern secular subject. One can contrast the mystic attitude to the modernist in
this very corporeal opposition – kneeling/standing. For Le Corbusier,2 for exam-
ple, the sea does not impel him to kneel in front of the infinite but on the contrary
it is the assertion of the triumphant pact between man and nature. The following is
an excerpt from Le Corbusier’s La Poeme de l’Angle Droit:

But I am standing straight!

Since you are erect
You are also fit for action.
Erect on the terrestrial plain
Of things knowable you
Sign a pact of solidarity
With nature: this is the right angle
Vertical facing the sea
There you are on your feet. (2012 [1955]: A3)

A mystical encounter is ultimately an intimate experience grounded in our embod-

ied selves. St. Augustine, steeped as he is in his own version of dualism, expressed
a degree of puzzlement when considering the ritual expressions in prayer.
For Augustine bodily performance acts so as to ‘enhance and intensify the
proper religious attitudes’ (Matthews, 1980: 339). As Matthews observes however
Augustine is still not happy with his solution. ‘And he should be puzzled. For, as
Augustine conceives it, the intensification of a religious attitude or feeling by the
performance of a ritualistic act is a case of movements of the body having the effect
of moving the soul’ (Matthews, 1980: 340), and for Augustine this could not be
since the body is inferior to the soul. I have to say that prior to that moment with
Padre Pio I would have shared in Augustine’s view. One must have the right
religious attitude in the first place otherwise one’s gestures are meaningless, or
worse become ‘disrespectful’ to our informants, as indeed my student feared.
For Matthews Augustine’s is a ‘specious puzzle’

because it is not the mere motions of the body that have such an effect; what has, or
may have, such an effect is (among other things) the sincere and understanding per-
formance of ritual – the dramatic rehearsal of the tenets of one’s faith, including the
story of salvation. (1980: 352)

In some ways I believe that Matthews and Augustine might be selling short the inti-
mate relation between the body and the sacred. In 1890, William James, this time
16 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

talking about the emotions, proposed the so-called ‘Self-Perception theory’ of the
emotions. Simply put proponents of this theory argue that ‘if people act emotionally
they will feel the corresponding emotion’ (Laird and Apostoleris, 1996: 289). In other
words we don’t cry because we feel sad but we feel sad because we cry. It is interesting
to note that nowhere in James’ Varieties of Religion Experience (1917) does he refer his
readers to his earlier theorising on the emotions. This is especially peculiar since James
himself noted how in studying religion the personal testimonies left him ‘literally
bathed in sentiment’ (Myers, 1985: 469). For James the primary experience of religion
comes from its emotional foundation. As he says, ‘I do believe that feeling is the
deeper source of religion, and that philosophical or theological formulas are second-
ary products, like translations of a text into another tongue’ (cit. in Myers, 1985: 475).
Neither Matthews nor Augustine seem to contemplate a similar proposition. Can a
ritual act actually serve to instil rather than merely enhance a religious attitude? In
other words rather than kneeling being the result of being overcome by mystical
experience could kneeling also actually lead one to the emotional state that is at the
core of the oceanic feeling? For me it certainly opened up an unfamiliar form of
experience and encounter that forced me to engage in a way to which I was unaccus-
tomed to and indeed which I had actively refused to take seriously. A method for the
secularised-but-ontologically-open anthropologist might be to adopt the Jamesian
position, and rather than assume that the ‘oceanic feeling’ is premised on the first
principle of assent to belief systems, to adopt the various practices of bodily surrender
that are associated with these other worlds that might indeed be able to engender
mystical encounters. That might in and of itself open up novel experiences of the self.

Conclusion
As we near the end of our lives we are faced, more than ever before, with the need to
reconcile our academic pursuits with our own ontic condition. It was only towards
the end of his life (1970) that Evans-Pritchard seemed to have developed a growing
interest in mysticism leading Larson in fact to describe Evans-Pritchard as ‘an
anthropologist who also happened to be a mystic’ (Larsen, 2014: 111). Gananath
Obeyesekere’s The Awakened Ones (2012) could be considered, like Joel’s (2016) last
book, as the last testament of a ‘gnostic diplomat’. The Awakened Ones constitutes a
significant departure from Obeyesekere’s earlier works. As he feels he is approaching
the end of his life Obeyesekere engages in a deep and honest way in a phenomeno-
logical study of visionary and mystical experiences. He ‘confesses’ that he is ‘naı̈ve
enough to believe in the validity of some of the sensory gifts that visionaries possess’
(Obeyesekere, 2012: 17). Even though ‘unfortunately’ he was ‘not blessed with the
profound visions of the informants’ (Obeyesekere, 2012: 17), he discusses his own
eerie encounter with a vision of vultures.
Joel’s Asia, Modernity and the Pursuit of the Sacred was born out of his own
‘personal (ontic/existential) reasons for pursuing the sacred’ (Kahn, 2016: xi). His
‘metaphysical urge’ developed as he approached retirement and was facing his own
mortality and health concerns. The mystic’s way seems to become more relevant as
Baldacchino 17

one is confronted by one’s own mortality. It is no accident however that the anthro-
pologist could approach such questions only once their career is behind them. At
that stage in one’s life there is a certain freedom from the worldly concerns of
‘career’ that can enable a more ‘open’ encounter with the mystical. Not everyone
however is overtaken by this ‘metaphysical urge’. In his last written work the phi-
losopher Richard Rorty (2007) recounts a conversation with his cousin, a Baptist
minister, and his eldest son. Rorty was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer.
His cousin asked him whether he found his thoughts turning to religious topics.
Rorty replied in the negative. When his son asked him whether anything he read and
wrote in philosophy had any bearing Rorty also replied in the negative. ‘“Hasn’t
anything you’ve read been of any use?” my son persisted. "Yes", I found myself
blurting out, "poetry"’ (Rorty, 2007). For Rorty (2007) it is not that poetry provides
privileged access to a form of truth that could not be found in philosophy or verse,
but rather it is because he would have ‘lived more fully’ if he had been able to ‘rattle
off more old chestnuts – just as I would have if I had made more close friends’. For
some the ‘full life’ is not connected to a ‘need to believe’ and indeed we have to
recognise that for some their ears remain closed to such calls. I believe, however,
even though we as anthropologists might not assent to the ontological premises of
our informants, at the very least we need, humbly speaking, to kneel more often.
While I would not say that I was ever able to have the sort of experience of Malwida
von Meysenburg – or indeed of Glass-Coffin, Jeffrey Kripal and some of the other
ontologically inclined scholars – I believe that in that moment of kneeling I was able
to experience a ‘different’ relation that could not be conceived outside its peculiar
embodied articulation. I do not know to this day if Joel was ever able to encounter
these alternate worlds or remained like Evans-Pritchard, Obeyesekere and myself at
the fringes of this world simply looking in, a gnostic diplomat without setting foot in
these foreign lands. But perhaps Rorty’s own conception of poetry is not too dis-
similar from the mystic’s own path but simply constitutes a secular approach to the
same ‘ontological penumbra’. The anthropologist Michael Jackson in his own reflec-
tions on Rorty’s piece cited earlier notes:

I take Rorty to be saying something more than that poetry and friendship provide
pleasure. He is saying that they carry us across the threshold of the self into richer and
stranger regions than any we have known alone. Philosophy needs the language of
poetry to enter the penumbral – that force field around us, partly lit, partly in shadow,
that shapes who we are yet defies our attempts to fully control or comprehend it.
(Jackson, 2010)

The papers in this volume are a testament not only to Joel’s own intellectual
contribution to the discipline but to the ways in which through his own self-
effacing kindness and humility he was able to forge some enduring friendships
which I hope – like Rorty’s poems – might have provided him some comfort.
It remains, unfortunately, my greatest regret that I was not able to see Joel
again as he neared the end.
18 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

ORCID iD
Jean-Paul Baldacchino https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7673-5001

Notes
1. Evans-Pritchard (1962) was already arguing that anthropology should be conceived of as
closest to history rather than the natural sciences.
2. Le Corbusier however developed his own form of gnostic occultism (see Baldacchino, 2018).

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Author Biography
Jean-Paul Baldacchino is a Senior Lecturer and currently the Head of the
Department of Anthropology at the University of Malta. He is an Anthropologist
Baldacchino 21

and a Psychoanalyst in training in the Lacanian tradition and Member of

the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis. He is currently the Director of the
University’s Mediterranean Institute and Fellow of the Australian Anthropology
Society. He has conducted fieldwork, researched and published on various topics on
the Mediterranean, Australia and East Asia including religion, psychoanalysis, pop-
ular culture, ethnicity, embodiment, modernity and the emotions.