I’m not going to pretend to know much about primitive culture in a discussion with an anthropology professor. I’ll look forward to your book and the perspective it provides.

But it’s also true (and here’s the anthropologist in me) that hunter-gatherers, outside the environments degraded by industrialism, generally had access to clean water. For much of human history, most water was fairly clean. Moreover, these societies have/had little political coercion or control. No chiefs, war lords, kings, or police. With the advent of agriculture, urbanization, and other technological advances came simultaneous blessings and curses.

I would suggest that the growth of technology in the Greco-Roman, or Northern European cultures cannot be causally traced to Christianity, certainly not as a singular cause and perhaps not even as a primary one. Jared Diamond’s _Gun, Germs and Steel_ does a nice job of illustrating the various cultural, ecological, and historical factors that converged for key advances at various moments to shape the direction of history.

I don’t want to sound like a anti-Western critic; there is much to laud in the Enlightenment/post-Enlightenment cultures of the West. I very much enjoy the system that allows me to type on my laptop while chatting with smart people who-knows-where on earth. But I know these things do not please God, nor probably displease Him, in and of themselves. He is pleased by the state of my heart, which I know is often corrupted by the ease of my life, and the inequality with which I too easily become comfortable.

I see God as a God who wants to bless people, and I’m fine making the value statement that it’s better to have access to clean drinking water, than to lack it. I feel the same way about representative forms of government. Whether modern Repubulican-Democracy is the best of all forms is debatable, but it is a form that enables much greater human freedom than say, despotism. It enables people to live relatively without fear of injury, etc. Private property is the same. Possessing it, in some form, allows people to have their own lives, apart from the control of a dictator, mafia boss, or chief, or someone else who has the ability to force things upon them. I again connect this with the heart of a God who does not force things upon us, but allows us a free choice.

I used the term “civilization” above interchangeably between specific civilizations, and more generally as an umbrella for the pattern of organized life before Christ as distinct from after Christ.

I don’t say all of this because my intention is to be a Western Imperialist. I think the Gospel is a seed which has to be planted into the soil of each culture on its own terms, and will bear fruit in that context over time. In fact, as Philip Jenkins has demonstrated, it was planted into the soils of many cultures of the ancient world, it was just that most of those were wiped out or marginalized by the contours of history. At the same time, I see some of the things which are thought of as Western distinctives as originating directly with the Gospel message. As we move away from the Gospel, we can expect, and do in fact see, those distinctives eroding.

Regarding your question about revelation: I would argue that revelation flows from God, not from “civilization” or any other social form. God did much of His work among the relatively “primitive” people of ancient Israel. While Israel did have a concept of private property, they were also commended to counteract the forces of inequality through the practice of Jubilee, a practice fairly incompatible with the capitalism of the contemporary global economy. What scripture reveals is that God uses a variety of economic, political, kinship, and social forms to accomplish His purposes. While He clearly gives moral structure to the practice of these things, there is nothing in scripture to suggest that “civilization” is inherently more in line with God’s will than less complex forms of social organization.

I look forward to your upcoming text. CA is a discipline where a Christian Text could provide a lot of insight.

I think that the recent film “The Enemy God” about the Yanomamo demonstrates some of the problems inherent with CA, however. As I’m sure you know this group was also a highly studied and vaunted icon of researching native cultures, in which the native cultures are usually romanticized.

The tell all story from a shaman representing a part of the tribe that converted to Christianity undermines such romantic views, however. In some sense, our bias in such investigations is against our (Western, ‘civilized’) selves, rather than for ourselves as it is assumed to be.

The question of the flow of “revelation” is a very fundamental one, as well. Should we consider revelation to flow from primitive societies because they are undisturbed, or should we consider it to flow from “civilization” because the Gospel has fundamentally been impacting it and changing it for 2000 years? This has bearing on things like private property, fundamental to the wealthy nations of the world, and rarely held in any primitive society.

More importantly, our methodology – participant observation and ethnography – is qualitative, but not anecdotal; it involves the systematic gathering of data through personal and in depth interaction with a population over long periods of time. The everyday quality of the data provides insight that surveys, focus groups, interviews, and other more detached/formal forms of social research cannot. Most cultural anthropologists do little with statistics or data sets, but this is a strengths of the discipline. We gather knowledge through our mastery of language, cultural context, the development of social relationships, and personal insight. For those predisposed to privilege modernist rationality and scientism as superior forms of knowledge, this might seem flaky, but the reason anthropology is growing today is for the explanatory power ethnographic approaches provide in the face of complex globalizing, dynamic, multicultural worlds.

In December, Jenell Williams Paris and I will be releasing an introductory text book on cultural anthropology with Baker Academic. This is the first introductory anthropology book for Christians in more than 20 years. I hope you and your readers will find it helpful in exploring cultural anthropology for all the positive reasons you’ve given above.

Regards,
Brian Howell
Assoc. Prof. of Anthropology
Wheaton College (IL)