“The Genealogy of Ethical Life,” my essay-length book review of Webb Keane’s Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories, has recently come out in Marginalia.

I don’t have much more to add to the review; my editor at Marginalia was kind enough to give me sufficient space to lay out my argument in full.  (Seriously if you ever have an opportunity to write for them, take it; it was one of the best editorial experiences I’ve had in my life).

The only thing I can do is to underscore three points already present in the review.  The first is that Keane’s book is an important contribution to the field, and when taken alongside Laidlaw’s and Faubion’s recent monographs, it suggests that the “ethical turn” in anthropology has reached an astonishingly high level of maturity in a relatively short time. The second point is that Keane’s book is without a doubt mainline anthropological through and through. There have been some interpretations of the book that misread it as psychological or cognitive anthropology. There is much more to the book than that. Large sections are concerned with Garfinkel and Goffman level microanalysis of interactions, and the last sections take up issues that rise to the level of transnational movements and political economy. It is true that Keane does some novel things with child development, psychology, and cognitive science, finding a clever and ethnographically focused way to take out the determinist sting from these ‘scientific’ accounts. Since this is such an unusual move and needs to be carefully walked through by reviewers, it can create an impression that these psychological, cognitive, and developmental issues are at the heart of the book. They are not; this book is about how ethics anthropologically subsumes different disciplinary accounts pitched at all different scales.

The third point is that to my eyes at least, this book looks like the end of a developmental line. What I mean by this is that while there will certainly be good ethnographic and theoretical work done in the future along these lines laid out by the current anthropology of ethics, the discussion of ethics and morality started by Laidlaw, Faubion and Mahmood over a decade ago may have gone as far as it can. This discussion, even when it tries to go against type, is shot through with a foundational presumption that is deeply humanist. Now, there is nothing wrong with humanism, especially in a discipline that claims to study the human. And for political, intellectual, and aesthetic reasons, there are certain populations which are better ethnographically served by a humanist framework. Finally, all this humanism is the product of previous historical turns that themselves either collapsed under the weight of their difficulties, or that were exhausted – this is not just humanism, but it is also post-counter-humanism, a reaction to a reaction against humanism in anthropology.

But when all you have is a single eye, though, you have terrible parallax vision. What is needed is a second anthropology of ethics that can run parallel to the current conversation. What is needed is not necessarily a cynical anthropology of ethics, but perhaps a pessimistic and inhuman one, with inhuman meaning here not a multi-species approach, but an approach starting off from a position of profound alienation.

I’ve been sparse on posting – mostly because of heavy writing commitments, and work on my book, A Diagram for Fire, which should be coming out with University of California Press early in the next year. And the American election has been praying on my attention as well, as both Charismatic Evangelicals and Mormons (the two groups I study) have reacted to the election in different and surprising ways.

I’ll have more – much more – to say later about both the book, and about the political imagination of Mormons and Charismatic Evangelicals. But I want to mention two essays of mine that came out this summer, both of which touched on the same issue: religious realism.

By realism, I mean here not realism as opposed to idealism, or realism in the sense of realpolitik. Rather, I mean the claim that various things ‘exist’ in the world as distinct phenomena or classes. Realism is usually a position opposed to nominalism, which states that these collectivities are merely conventions of language, and that there is nothing necessarily ‘shared’ by, say, all the creatures that we label as  ‘cats’ or ‘bureaucracy’ or whatever.

Nominalism is the default position in much of anthropology of religion these days. That this is the case is the result of critiques of the concept of religion by Talal Asad, Jonathan Z. Smith, and Tomoko Masuzawa, who rightly argue that previous anthropological definitions of religion were too influenced by Euro-American, and particularly Protestant, understandings of what religion was. This crypto-Protestant influence caused anthropologists to constrict the variety of religious forms that could be recognized, and made some phenomena, like Islam, be seen as ‘bad’ religions because they were inextricably interwoven with phenomena that are classified in the West as ‘politics’ or ‘law.’

But it seems though that we can acknowledge variation in religion without dissolving religion entirely as a category. Both of these essays lay out the argument in more detail, but the TL;DR version is that religions all involve some kind of problem of communicating or engaging with invisible or difficult to discern agents or forces. This communicative problem is resolved in numerous ways, from possession and sacrifice (where an immediacy in communication is seen as more likely), to privileging texts and moral orders (where it appears that communication might be chiefly or only unidirectional). Resolutions would also include transforming oneself into such a supra-human entity or force as well. It might even include positions that elaborate or double down on any claim that communication is impossible, due to distance, ontological or otherwise, or even due to the non-existence of actors of this sort (so an active atheism would be a religion, though not a passive atheism, or a failure to simply address the issue).

This approach has the flavor of Tylor’s definition of religion, I’ll admit, but only the flavor. This is because this communicative problem has no single solution.  Further, the set of possible resolutions of this problem is complexified by the fact that problems never come alone. The problem of communicating with these entities or forces arises as part of an approach to some other problem or problems (will the crops fail this year? Is life meaningless?). And any solution will give rise to knock-on problems (how do I know that the shaman was possessed by the entity she claims, and wasn’t possessed by some other entity, or perhaps was faking it? how do I know how to interpret this text? how to I come to terms with the fact that I shall never talk to God?). And there is nothing that restricts what problems might cause people to turn to this insistent religious problem, or that mandates how the ‘logically subsequent’ problems caused by the communicative problem will be resolved.  It is this set of concrete assemblages, all with different materialities and different social and psychological entailments, which we might imagine to be religion. And this is why I am not a nominalist when it comes to religion. All the manifold forms of religion as concrete actualizations are too varied, and too imbricated with other arrangements and concerns to have any universal definition. But the underlying problem, though, is common to them all, even if it at times gives rise to ‘unmarked’ or porously bordered forms of religion. If we grant problems an ontological status, then despite this undefinable surplus of forms, something underneath insists.

There is one last thing to note. This open arrangement of interlinked problems and pluriform solutions leaves a lot of freedom to religious forms. In fact, as I argue in detail in my upcoming book, there is good reason to think that religion is the most plastic human phenomenon. This makes religion the ultimate kludge: a practice, institution, structure, ethics or aesthetics that can be inserted anywhere, catalyzing and decelerating all sorts of other human belongings…..