Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

This special issue of the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology entitled ‘Always Something Extra’: Ethnographies of Grace is guest edited by Michael Edwards and Méadhbh McIvor.

This introduction calls for an ‘anthropology of grace’, arguing that an ethnographically informed theory of grace will offer valuable interpretive tools not only to scholars of religion but also to anthropologists of law, economics, and power. Focusing on four interlinked dimensions of grace—its Christianity, sociality, temporality, and potentiality—we highlight the relevance of this concept to local and global politics, particularly in encounters across difference. Building on analyses of what has been called ‘the Christianity of anthropology’, we suggest not only that Euro-Christian scholarship is indebted to the idea of grace but that its explicit invocation can propel emerging debates on time, sociality, and progressive politics. An interrogation of this theo-political concept reveals submerged conceptual assumptions and sheds new light on anthropology's decades-old investment in reciprocity (and its discontents).

Why is hierarchy often surrounded by ambivalence? This article contributes to current debates about the goods and the ills of social hierarchy by drawing attention to the double-edged role of grace in hierarchical relations. Taking the Aari of southern Ethiopia as my example, I show how a conception of seniors as founts of grace entails a social life marked both by intense love and frequent conflict. Conversion to Christianity flattens social hierarchies by relocating the source of grace from seniors to God. As humility replaces seniors’ demands to be honoured for dispensing grace, social life becomes less conflictual but also less engaging and affectionate. This shows that different conceptions of grace entail different forms of sociality and that grace can help explain the ambivalence of hierarchy.

What does a consideration of the place of grace in the therapeutic relationship have to add to our understanding of the healing process? This article explores the experience of bereavement and healing in the aftermath of loss among members of a Catholic Charismatic community in Rwanda. Considering cases in which divine healing is experienced as either having succeeded or having failed, I argue that the healing process involves acts of sacrifice and gifting, taking place between the mourner, God, and social others, and that the central sacrificial gesture constituting this process is the sacrifice of the self as lived prior to loss. I suggest that in order to understand gifting and sacrifice's therapeutic potential, we must read them as acts anchored in grace or gratuity.

What does it take to experience grace? I argue that for followers of the Chinese Christian reformers Watchman Nee and Witness Lee, in China, Taiwan, and the United States, grace is experienced as an intended gift with a missing motivating intention. For a group in which God's intentions are rigorously mapped out, experiencing God's grace is thus no simple feat. In particular, I show how the experience of grace occurs in moments of apparent wrongdoing when reward is least comprehensible. As this wrongdoing becomes institutionalised as an ideal mode of grace, however, it paradoxically becomes less grace-ful in practice. Therefore, grace here is an inherently transgressive, destabilising, contradictory phenomenon. Extrapolating beyond Nee and Lee's followers, I suggest that at a time of gratitudinous secularism, of givenness without a Giver, blessedness without a Blesser, grace is more abundant than ever. But that with this grace comes gratitude, an emotion often resistant to social change.

Based on ethnographic research conducted in a number of Orthodox parishes in Bucharest, this article discusses different conceptions of har among Bucharest Orthodox believers, practitioners, and clerics. Har stands for ‘grace’, ‘charisma’ or ‘gift’ depending on the context. An ethnographically grounded analysis of this emic concept, I argue, is essential for two main reasons. First, understanding grace through gratuity allows us to grasp diverse forms of religious change, such as committed church attendance and the detachment from communal religious life, in contemporary Romania. Second, seeing through the looking glass of Orthodox practice allows for unexplored insights into the workings of charismatic authority. The article ends with a seeming paradox: grace is ‘something extra’, an addition which is best grasped apophatically, that is, through subtraction.

Through ethnography of recent peaceful dissent by Catholic and Protestant activists, life histories, and a reading of a postcolonial archive of contextually grounded liberation theology, I explore the theopolitics of grace that fuels the habits and habitus of Sri Lanka's ecumenical left. Pluralistic and indigenised forms of Christianity emerged in the era of decolonisation and nationalisation and were emboldened by Vatican II. Distinguishing ecumenical Christian pluralism from evangelical Christian expansion in the region, this article historicises Cold War religiosity, drawing out ‘bi-polar’ contrasts of politically left and right forms of Christian grace. In doing so, I situate religious pluralism within the convulsive era of class and ethnic-based insurrections in Sri Lanka. Analysing the ‘catholicity’, civic nationalism, and post-nationalist self-conceptions held by Sri Lanka's Christian left, I argue that the ‘something extra’ of grace can be fruitfully understood as the cultural accretions and theo-political formations that accrue through localised emplacements of global Christianity.

Since the seventeenth century, prophets have reappeared periodically among the Wa and Lahu ethnic groups of mainland Southeast Asia. Exceptionally talented, these men built on the syncretic cults of runaway soldiers, secretive Buddhist sects, and Christian missionaries and became leaders of millenarian movements. Typically, in the Wa language, such leaders are said to be very strong and blessed, or full of grace (bwan). The prophets might be understood as reincarnations of mythical ‘men of prowess’ or as the representatives of the peripheral situation. However, both interpretations fundamentally misread the semantics of grace in Wa and neighbouring languages: a kind of cunning and strength that is so radical that it cannot be measured or mediated. Grace, here, is neither a ‘mediative concept’ (as Pitt-Rivers suggested), nor is it the consequence of Christian conversion. Instead, grace is the incommensurability that emerges at the margin of a world that is being measured.

On one hand, the excess marked by grace is unquantifiable, challenging the order of the world and opening to the new. On the other hand, grace and its promise are used by the powers that be to naturalise themselves and manage dissent. Black American discourse around racism illustrates this tension, with elected leaders like Barack Obama using grace in the service of power, social movement leaders suspicious of performances tied to grace, and scholars navigating our instinct to be critical and our instinct to use critique as its own form of grace. Meditating on these questions opens lines of inquiry where theology and anthropology connect, including around the aesthetics of grace, the morality of grace, the relationship between trauma and grace, and the authorship of grace.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian and Philip Mirowski, Nine Lives of Neoliberalism. London: Verso, pp. 368. 2020

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism. London: Verso, pp. 288. 2019.

James Carrier (ed.) After the Crisis: Anthropological Thought, Neoliberalism and the Aftermath. London: Routledge, pp. 212. 2016.