Christianity

Abstract

The relationship between Christianity and anthropology is complex. At one level, Christianity has deeply affected anthropology, both through the wider intellectual tradition from which anthropology developed and through the religious practices and imaginations of particular leading historical figures. At the same time, there has been animus both toward Christian anthropologists and toward the study of avowedly Christian populations qua Christians. Anxiety over this reluctance to focus on Christian populations has led some anthropologists to establish a self‐consciously comparative “anthropology of Christianity”; the resulting conversation has made contributions to anthropological debates about temporality, language use, economy and exchange, and personhood. While scholars working in this area have tended to focus on Pentecostalisms outside Euro‐America, and on politically conservative activist religion in Euro‐America, increasingly other forms of Christianity, such as Catholicism and Orthodoxy, are receiving attention as part of an “anthropology of Christianity” as well.