Paper short abstract:

Jews, Christians and Muslims locate themselves within communities of faith, the imagined identity of which can decisively influence experiences of self. How might anthropologists approach selfhood differently through attentiveness to the discourses which produce and describe these communities?

Paper long abstract:

Recent ethnographic accounts of Christian contexts, especially those of Eastern and "Oriental" traditions, call into question Dumont's famous claim that Christian selfhood is "the individual in relation to God". On the contrary, Christians frequently experience themselves firstly as belonging within the ecclesia, or "church", described in the New Testament as "the Body of Christ" and, drawing on a Hebrew Biblical image, "the Holy Nation". This paper argues, following theologian John Milbank, that this self-location of Christian lives within the church has been occluded by social anthropologists' assumption of a secular social within which all lives are imagined to reside. This naturalized social, as a context within which the church can be located alongside other (social) phenomena such as the nation or clan, would therefore make it harder to discern alternative ecclesiological narrations and experiences of self. But if the sociological is irrevocably secular, then the ecclesiological is surely inescapably Christian. This reframing of Christian selfhood, however, seems to draw the study of Christian selfhood closer to the study of Muslim and Jewish selfhood, in which the individual in relation to God is less likely to be assumed. How can post-secular anthropology be enhanced by attending to Christian, Muslim and Jewish selfhood within a called, redeemed or chosen people, and how might an ecclesiological anthropology differ from or harmonise with anthropologies which begin with the 'ummah or Jewish conceptions of the Holy Nation?