anthropologists and the bible.pdf

University of Nebraska Press Chapter Title: Anthropologists and the Bible: The Marett Lecture, April 2012 Chapter Author(s): ADAM KUPER Book Title: Local Knowledge, Global Stage Book Editor(s): REGNA DARNELL, FREDERIC W. GLEACH Published by: University of Nebraska Press. (2016) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1dxg7dv.5 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms University of Nebraska Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Local Knowledge, Global Stage This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms A da m Kup e r 1 Anthropologists and the Bible he Maret Lecture, April 2012 I A young philosophy don, a Jerseyman at Oxford, Robert Ranulph Maret was intrigued by the subject set for the 1893 Green Prize in Moral Philosophy: “he ethics of savage races.” He immersed himself in the literature on primitive religion, won the prize, and was befriended by the only anthropologist at Oxford University, E. B. Tylor. Tylor was the father igure of the new anthropology that had emerged in the 1860s. It was a baggy, ambitious discipline, and Tylor himself wrote about race and technology and language and marriage, but especially about religion, and this became Maret’s main interest too. he irst objective of the anthropology of religion was to characterize the earliest creeds and rites. he anthropologists then explained the advance of humanity from the long dark age of magic and superstition to the sunny uplands of a more spiritual religion; or they showed how metaphysical error gave way to rationality and science. In any case, they took it for granted that religion, technology, and the social order advanced in lockstep through a determined series of stages. At each stage, the beliefs and customs of societies at a similar level of development were essentially the same. So contemporary primitive societies could be treated as stand-ins for past societies at an equivalent stage of development. he notions of the American Indians, perhaps, or, at a higher level, the Tahitians provided living instances of conceptions and beliefs that had once been very widespread. To know one was to know all. Captain Cook had introduced the word taboo from Tahiti. Soon taboos were being discovered all over the place. Other exotic terms were soon taken up—mana, another Polynesian word, 1 This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms totem from the Ojibwa, potlatch from the Kwakiutl of British Columbia, voodoo from West Africa. All were elements of a universal primal religion. So Victorian anthropologists could write about Australian totems and American Indian taboos. hey could even identify totem and taboo in ancient Israel. Such beliefs and practices may once have been universal, but they were surely irrational. How could so many people have believed so many impossible things for so long? Some missionaries saw the hand of the Devil here, but the anthropologists argued that there was something about the ways of thinking of primitive people that led them to make mistakes of perception and logic. Ater all, Darwin had shown that human evolution was paced by the development of the brain. It was widely assumed that the brains of the various races developed at diferent rates. he smaller-brained savages, and indeed the early Israelites, were simply not capable of thinking very clearly. So how did they think? Tylor argued that primitive peoples relied on “analogy or reasoning by resemblance” (1881:338). For Frazer, such “reasoning by resemblance” accounted for the belief in magic. Robertson Smith agreed that for the savage mind there was “no sharp line between the metaphorical and the literal,” and he blamed the “unbounded use of analogy characteristic of pre-scientiic thought” for producing a “confusion between the several orders of natural and supernatural beings” (1894:274). Prescientiic thinkers were particularly likely to get into a muddle when it came to causality. Robertson Smith found that primal religion was characterized by “insouciance, a power of casting of the past and living in the impression of the moment” that “can exist only along with a childish unconsciousness of the inexorable laws that connect the present and the future with the past” (1894:57). Tylor supposed that the very earliest religion arose from a misapprehension. People everywhere have dreams and visions, but primitive people confuse dreams with real experiences. When they dream of the dead they imagine that the dead exist somewhere else, in another state, the state that living people experience in dreams, trances, and fevers. And so “the ancient savage philosophers probably made their irst step by the obvious inference that every man has two things belonging to him, namely, a life and a phantom” (Tylor 1871, 2:12). hey then 2 Adam Kuper This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms generalized this conclusion to embrace the rest of the natural world. Even trees and plants, even the planets, had souls. his was what Tylor termed “animism.” Rituals soon developed, notably sacriices. In primitive animism, oferings were made to the spirits of the dead ater they had appeared in dreams. In what might be called the higher animism, sacriices were also made to “other spiritual beings, genii, fairies, gods.” hese sacriices were gits: “As prayer is a request made to a deity as if he were a man, so sacriice is a git made to the deity as if he were a man” (Tylor 1871, 2:375). Sacriices took the form of burnt oferings, because spirits demanded spiritual food, the souls of animals or plants (Tylor 1866:77). Vestiges of the primitive cult, which Tylor called “survivals,” recurred in the ceremonies of the most advanced religions. In 1899 the young Maret achieved a certain notoriety by challenging Tylor’s thesis that animism was the primeval religion. Maret identiied a preanimistic religion based on the Polynesian belief in mana, which he took to mean a sort of psychic energy and power. Mana was inseparable from taboo. “Altogether, in mana we have what is par excellence the primitive religious idea in its positive aspect, taboo representing its negative side, since whatever has mana is taboo, and whatever is taboo has mana” (Maret 1911). His theory made some converts in Germany and France, most notably Marcel Mauss, who made mana the dynamic force behind both the git and the sacriice. Tylor was already a frail old man when Maret became his friend, and Maret took responsibility for the development of anthropology at the university. He was instrumental in instituting Oxford’s diploma in anthropology in 1908, and he succeeded Tylor as university reader in social anthropology, a position he held for a quarter of a century. When the university created a chair in anthropology in 1936, he held it for a year before the appointment of Radclife-Brown. From 1928 Maret was rector of Exeter College. He also served for many years as treasurer of the University Golf Club. A busy man, then, but, he recalled, “All this time . . . [a]nthropology was becoming . . . a passion with me. . . . Yet I was still atending to the subject with my let hand, while the right tackled the philosophy which ater all I was paid to teach. In fact, I became a scandal to my friends, so that one of them wrote: ‘A man of your talAnthropologists and the Bible 3 This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ents seems rather wasted on the habits of backward races.’ As it was, I divided my atention impartially between the beliefs of the savage and those of the Oxford undergraduate” (Maret 1941:164). II Tylor’s theory of animism was hardly original. It was in the direct line of Enlightenment accounts of the development of rationality. Indeed, it was remarkably similar to the theory that had been advanced by Charles de Brosses (1760) and Auguste Comte (1830–42). But Tylor was also responding to the scandal provoked by two books that challenged traditional understandings of the Bible. he Origin of Species, published in 1859, presented a scientiic alternative to the book of Genesis. he following year Essays and Reviews appeared, seven essays by intellectuals in the Church of England, including Benjamin Jowet, Mark Patison, and Frederick Temple (who was to become archbishop of Canterbury) (Parker 1860). hey downplayed miracles, questioned the story of the Creation, denied the doctrine of eternal punishment, and endorsed German critical scholarship that demonstrated that the Bible was a compilation of sometimes contradictory texts dating from diferent periods. he continental champions of the new biblical criticism, Julius Wellhausen and Abraham Kuenen, further insisted that the Jewish religion had pagan roots. he original religion of Israel was a family cult. In time, the family cult became a tribal and then a national religion. Only with the emergence of great empires in Mesopotamia and Persia, which subjugated Israel, had prophets begun to formulate a universal spiritual religion, foreshadowing Christianity. But pagan elements survived (Wellhausen [1883] 1885). Perhaps the ordinary churchgoer could ignore these challenges. Owen Chadwick remarks that Victorian churches were full of “worshippers who had never heard of Tylor, were indiferent to Darwin, mildly regreted what they heard of Huxley” (1970, 2:35). But the educated public did debate these new ideas, passionately. Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, son of William Wilberforce, provoked a famous public confrontation with Huxley over the descent of man: “Was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he traced his descent from an 4 Adam Kuper This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ape?” (Hesketh 2009:81). he bishop also moved to have Essays and Reviews condemned in the Convocation of Canterbury. However, a new science of religion was emerging, with biblical and comparative wings, that engaged with the ideas of Darwin and Wellhausen. It brought together theologians, linguists, folklorists, archaeologists, and anthropologists (Wheeler-Barclay 2010). he particular project of Tylor and the anthropologists was to discover the origins of religion, origins that could never be completely outgrown, the vestiges of ancient cults haunting even the most advanced religions. And they had fresh evidence at their disposal, for they were able to draw on a stream of reports on primitive religions from all over the world, many of them the work of missionaries. hese sources were themselves shaped by the Bible and by biblical scholarship. Protestant missionaries especially made it a priority to translate the Bible into the local language. his obliged them to identify indigenous notions that were roughly equivalent to god, spirit, sin, sacriice, and holiness. hese concepts, and their ritual representations, were taken to be the essential constituents of a religion. here is in fact no word for “religion” in the Hebrew Bible, but it seemed obvious that ancient Judaism was the prototype of authentic religion. he Bible also gave examples of false religions, which were those of Israel’s idolatrous neighbors. Similar beliefs and practices were abundantly represented in the societies to which the missionaries were called. hey could now be identiied as not only pagan but also primitive. he idols of false religions were totems. heir laws were barbarous taboos and had nothing to do with justice or morality. heir ceremonies, shocking exhibitions of greed and lust, featured ghastly acts of cruelty, including human sacriice. Missionary ethnographers read the reports of their colleagues, which described surprisingly similar pagan religions in distant parts of the world, and they welcomed the guidance of Tylor and Frazer, who pointed out what they should be looking for and explained the hold of superstition.1 So the anthropology of religion was from the irst very largely an anthropology of the Bible, with comparative notes from all over the primitive world. Precisely because it had consequences for Christianity, the anthropology of religion seemed to be very important. Tylor Anthropologists and the Bible 5 This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms was raised as a Quaker, and he believed that rituals always depended on magical thinking. Frazer argued that the comparative method “proves that many religious doctrines and practices are based on primitive conceptions, which most civilized and educated men have long agreed on abandoning as mistakes. From this it is a natural and oten a probable inference that doctrines so based are false, and that practices so based are foolish” (1927:282). Robertson Smith believed on the contrary that he was clearing away the debris of folklore and tribal custom so that the prophetic and historical truths in the Hebrew Bible could be properly appreciated. For their part, missionary ethnographers delighted in discovering in the most primitive communities some faint intimations of more advanced doctrines, crude versions of biblical stories, even traces in the language of the passage of one of the lost tribes of Israel. In the 1920s and 1930s this sort of thing became a specialty of the Vienna school, then a hothouse of Catholic missionary anthropology. III In parallel with these studies of the development of religion, another foundational research program of anthropology addressed the rise of marriage and the family. Was there some connection between religion, morality, and social organization? In 1869 J. F. McLennan provided Tylor’s animism with a social context. McLennan (1865) had himself proposed a model of the earliest societies. hey were marauding nomadic bands, matrilineal and exogamous, practicing marriage by capture. He now argued that these bands had an appropriate religion. Each band believed that it was descended matrilineally from a particular natural species, its totem, which was worshiped as an ancestor god and placated with rituals. Totemism was at once a religion—rather like animism, as McLennan conceded—and a social system. Long ago, totemism had been universal. McLennan identiied traces of a totemic system in Siberia, Peru, Fiji, and even classical India. he Greeks had their natural spirits. Totemism was also the point of departure of later systems of thought. It planted the seeds not only of religion but also of science. When the names of animals were given to constellations of stars, this was a legacy of totemism but also the irst inklings 6 Adam Kuper This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms of astronomy. Beliefs about the descent of human beings from animals gave a faint hint of what would become the theory of evolution. McLennan suggested in passing that the serpent story in Genesis may have had a totemic signiicance, but his theory of totemism was irst systematically applied to the Hebrew Bible by his friend William Robertson Smith, who had been appointed to the chair of Hebrew and Old Testament at the Free Church College at Aberdeen in 1870 (see Black and Chrystal 1912). Robertson Smith accepted Wellhausen’s demonstration that the Bible was a compilation of sources of various dates and that it included both mythological and historical elements. Following Wellhausen again, Robertson Smith aimed to identify the religious beliefs of the most ancient Israelites and to trace their progressive enlightenment. He also adopted Wellhausen’s view that rituals were oten hangovers from more primitive times but given fresh justiications. How were the primitive elements to be identiied? An obvious irst step was to consider the practices and beliefs of Israel’s pagan neighbors. Robertson Smith wrote that some ancient Jewish laws were based on principles “still current among the Arabs of the desert” (1880:340). He himself traveled in the Arabian interior to collect irsthand materials. However, even the Bedouin had progressed beyond the totemic stage, and they had been Muslims for many centuries. he comparative method practiced by McLennan ofered an alternative approach. Early Israel could be understood with reference to beter-documented societies at the same level of development. In 1880 Robertson Smith published an essay titled “Animal Worship and the Animal Tribes among the Arabs and in the Old Testament” in which he argued that ancient Semitic societies were totemic. he evidence was admitedly patchy. Robertson Smith pointed to the queen of Sheba as proof of early matriarchy. Some Arab marriage rituals might be interpreted as survivals of marriage by capture. Taken together with other hints scatered in the literature, Robertson Smith later pronounced, “hese facts appear suicient to prove that Arabia did pass through a stage in which family relations and the marriage law satisied the conditions of the totem system” (1894:88). Anthropologists and the Bible 7 This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Similar bits and pieces of evidence might indicate that the early Arabian religion was also totemic. Tribal groupings were oten named ater animals and sometimes ater the moon and sun. Sun and moon were evidently worshiped as gods, so animals presumably were also once treated as gods. And crucially, it seemed that totemic beliefs survived in ancient Israel, if in an atenuated form. Robertson Smith suggested that the heathen practices against which the Hebrew prophets inveighed were totemic in origin. And the second commandment itself was apparently directed against nature worship. his argument did not go down well with his employers. he General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland issued a swit condemnation: “First, concerning marriage and the marriage laws in Israel, the views expressed are so gross and so ited to pollute the moral sentiments of the community that they cannot be considered except within the closed doors of any court of this Church. Secondly, concerning animal worship in Israel, the views expressed by the Professor are not only contrary to the facts recorded and the statements made in Holy Scripture, but they are gross and sensual—ited to pollute and debase public sentiment” (Black and Chrystal 1912:382). Yet Robertson Smith was not cast into outer darkness. He became coeditor of the famous ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (and was reputed to have read every entry). In 1883 he was appointed reader in Arabic at Cambridge, and in 1889 he became professor. And he elaborated his initial thesis on early Semitic religion and social organization, notably in Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia (1885) and in his masterpiece, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889). Robertson Smith remained wedded to McLennan’s theory of totemism. Primitive people believed that they were physically descended from founding gods. Gods and their worshipers were originally thought of as kin who “make up a single community, and . . . the place of the god in the community is interpreted on the analogy of human relationships.” A more sophisticated doctrine developed in ancient Israel. he divine father was conceived of in spiritual terms. But initially gods and their worshipers were thought of as blood relatives. his was also the origin of morality, for “the indissoluble bond that united men to their god is the same bond of blood-fellowship which in early society is the 8 Adam Kuper This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms one binding link between man and man, and the one sacred principle of moral obligation” (Robertson Smith 1894:53). he totemic gods were associated with shrines or sanctuaries. At certain times, a yet more intimate contact with the gods was required. his was achieved through sacriice, which Robertson Smith termed “the typical form of all complete acts of worship in the antique religions” (1894:214). Sacriice had been, of course, the central rite celebrated in the temple in Jerusalem, as in the temples of ancient Greece and Rome. It remained a vexing problem for Christian theology and for critical scholarship of the Bible. he priestly code represented sacriices as acts of atonement, but Wellhausen insisted that this interpretation was anachronistic. Textual criticism revealed that the code was a postexilic document that superimposed a late priestly theology on earlier ritual practices. Originally, sacriices were not even performed in the temple. hey were associated with what Wellhausen called a natural religion, which was situated within the life of the family. Robertson Smith speculated that sacriice was originally a sort of family meal. “he god and his worshippers are wont to eat and drink together, and by this token their fellowship is declared and sealed.” he most primitive sacriices were therefore not gits, as Tylor had thought, but “essentially acts of communion between the god and his worshippers” (Robertson Smith 1894:243, 271). But what was sacriiced, what was eaten at that communion meal? Robertson Smith declared that the totemic animal itself was the original sacriicial object. Normally, a totem animal could not be killed or eaten. It was “unclean”—taboo. Taboos were primitive anticipations of the idea of the sacred. Robertson Smith pronounced the evidence “unambiguous.” “When an unclean animal is sacriiced it is also a sacred animal.” He concluded that among the Semites “the fundamental idea of sacriices is not that of a sacred tribute, but of communion between the god and his worshippers by joint participation in the living lesh and blood of a sacred victim” (Robertson Smith 1894:345). he argument was clearly leading up to a climax in which something would have to be said about the sacriices of gods themselves in Semitic religions, perhaps in connection with a communion rite. Robertson Smith took the step in this passage: Anthropologists and the Bible 9 This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms hat the God-man dies for His people and that his Death is their life, is an idea which was in some degree foreshadowed by the oldest mystical sacriices. It was foreshadowed, indeed, in a very crude and materialistic form, and without any of those ethical ideas which the Christian doctrine of the Atonement derives from a profound sense of sin and divine justice. And yet the voluntary death of the divine victim, which we have seen to be a conception not foreign to ancient ritual, contained the germ of the deepest thought in the Christian doctrine: the thought that the Redeemer gives Himself for his people. (1889:393) Frazer cited this passage in his obituary essay on Robertson Smith and remarked that it was dropped in the posthumously published second edition of the Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, which had been edited by J. S. Black (1894:800–807). IV Like Robertson Smith, James George Frazer was a Scot and the son of a clergyman. When Robertson Smith arrived at Cambridge to take up his new professorship, he commissioned Frazer to write entries on taboo and totemism for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Frazer’s essay on totemism turned out to be too long for the publishers, but Robertson Smith encouraged him to write a book on the subject. Totemism marked Frazer’s debut as an anthropologist in his own right. Frazer’s most famous book, he Golden Bough, irst published in 1890, followed up Robertson Smith’s speculations about the sacriice of a totemic god. He also drew on the theory of a German folklorist, Wilhelm Mannhardt (1875), who had explained German peasant cults of sacred trees as survivals of ancient fertility rituals. Combining these elements, Frazer constructed an ethnological detective story. It began with the ritual strangling of the “King of the Wood,” the priest of the sanctuary of Nemi, near Rome. his sacred king was the embodiment of a tree-spirit. He not simply was murdered but was sacriiced to ensure the fertility of nature. Clues drawn from a vast range of ethnographic sources showed that primitive people identiied their wellbeing with the fate of natural spirits whose priest-kings were sacriiced 10 Adam Kuper This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms in fertility rituals. “he result, then, of our inquiry is to make it probable that . . . the King of the Wood lived and died as an incarnation of the Supreme Aryan god, whose life was in the mistletoe or Golden Bough” (Frazer 1900, 2:363). Might this not imply that the Gospel accounts of Christ’s cruciixion were further versions of the myth of the sacred king? Frazer wrote in a leter to a friend in 1904 that “the facts of comparative religion appear to me subversive of Christian theology” (Ackerman 2005:236). Frazer then turned his atention to the Hebrew Bible. In 1904 or 1905 the Regius Professor of Hebrew in Cambridge, Robert Hatch Kennet, was persuaded to ofer a private beginner’s class in Hebrew (Ackerman 1987:183–184). It atracted a very select clientele: Jane Harrison, F. M. Cornford, A. B. Cook, and Frazer. Frazer became competent enough to read the Old Testament in Hebrew, and he gradually put together an anthropological commentary on the Bible, just as he had earlier issued a six-volume commentary on Pausanias’s description of Greece. He published the three volumes of his Folk-Lore in the Old Testament in 1918. Frazer’s method was to select a myth or custom in the Bible and to identify parallels in “primitive societies.” So in volume 2, chapter 4, a three-hundred-page essay titled “Jacob’s Marriage,” he analyzed Jacob’s marriages to his cousins, the two daughters of his mother’s brother, Laban, and posed the question whether Jacob was following established customs and whether such customs were to be found in other primitive societies. He was, of course, able to show that these practices were indeed widespread. A chapter on Cain explained that all over the world murderers were marked in order to protect them from ghosts. Similar exercises showed that “primitive peoples” also prayed and sacriiced to their gods and had their myths of creation, loods, and so on. As a modern biographer of Frazer comments, “he implicit purpose of the work . . . [was] to undermine the Bible and religion by insisting on its folkloric stratum, thereby associating it with savagery” (Ackerman 1987:182–183). Émile Durkheim was also inspired by Robertson Smith. In he Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) he adopted Robertson Smith’s thesis that religion was rooted in social arrangements and in particular Anthropologists and the Bible 11 This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms that early religions developed out of family cults (this thesis had been independently proposed for ancient Rome and Greece by Durkheim’s teacher Fustel de Coulanges [1864]). Among the Aboriginal peoples of Australia—apparently the most primitive surviving society—the exogamous kinship group, the clan, was associated with an emblem, the totem, which was the object of taboos and sacriice. It was, Durkheim declared, sacred. For Durkheim, “the sacred was the religious” (Lukes 1973:241), and he praised Robertson Smith for remarking the ambiguity at the core of the notion of the sacred, the biblical qadosh. he ambiguity lies in the fact that the word qadosh may refer to something that is holy in the Christian sense, or it may designate something that is unpropitious and taboo, like a ield sown with a mixed harvest or the q’desha, the temple priestess who is a cult prostitute. he key is that sacred things are set apart from profane beings. “A whole group of rites has the object of realizing this state of separation which is essential. Since their function is to prevent undue mixings and to keep one of the two domains from encroaching upon the other, they are only able to impose abstentions or negative acts” (Durkheim [1912] 1971:299). Maureen Bloom argues that Durkheim was in reality characterizing biblical Judaism and that he was drawing upon his own education in the Hebrew Bible (2007:chap. 7). Ater all, Durkheim was the son of the rabbi of Épinal and had been destined for the rabbinate. So once again, by another route, the Hebrew Bible shaped the anthropology of religion. V he inluence of the great Victorians was prolonged. he second edition of Robinson and Oesterley’s inluential History of Israel, published in 1937, still relied on Wellhausen, Robertson Smith, Tylor, and Frazer. Frazer himself continued to publish on the Hebrew Bible until the 1930s. Freud—another fan of Robertson Smith—produced exercises in speculative anthropology, Totem and Taboo (1913), and Moses and Monotheism (1937), which were, at least in point of method, thoroughly Victorian. Within anthropology a reaction set in against just-so stories of origin, but the comparative method remained in favor. Marcel Mauss (1926), who was the grandson of a rabbi, suggested that the situation of the 12 Adam Kuper This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Hebrew patriarchs was similar to that of pastoralist elites in East Africa, who lorded it over sedentary farmers. Franz Steiner (1954) compared the patriarchal families to Nuer clans and lineages of South Sudan. Occasional atempts were made to rewrite chapters of Folk-Lore in the Old Testament in a functionalist idiom, anthropologists citing observations from their own ieldwork to cast light on mysterious episodes in the Bible. Isaac Schapera (1955), for example, devoted a Frazer lecture (appropriately enough) to the sin of Cain. Starting in the 1950s, biblical scholars began to draw on more recent anthropological theories (see Rogerson 1979, 1989). Some were inluenced by theories of nomadism, though not, surprisingly, by the ideas about nomads in the Islamic world of the fourteenth-century Arab historian and theorist Ibn Khaldun (Fromherz 2010). Functionalist studies of segmentary lineage systems were taken as a model of the social system of the patriarchal age. Some scholars combined the lineage model with models of state formation or with the typology of bands, tribes, and chietaincies developed by Elman Service (1962). Inevitably, perhaps, biblical scholars tended to place too much conidence in their chosen anthropological models. It was readily assumed, for instance, that anthropologists were quite sure what lineages are (and, indeed, that any expert can distinguish minimal from maximal lineages).2 he only issue was to identify the ancient Hebrew terms for these social units. his turned out to be very diicult. Experts could not agree whether the biblical bet av or mispahah should be translated as a “lineage,” or whether the Hebrew words sebet or mateh referred to a “tribe” or a “clan.” As Niels Peter Lemche remarks, “It is clear that the traditional literature of the ot employs a very loose terminology to describe the lower levels of the society, since [Hebrew terms usually rendered as] ‘house’ and ‘father’s house’ are used indiscriminately of the nuclear family, the extended family, and also of the higher kinship group, the lineage.” As for the very general view that the term mishpaha means “clan,” “no scholar has troubled to deine precisely what he meant by the word ‘clan’” (Lemche 1985:260; cf. Vanderhoot 2009). Yet Lemche himself was perhaps too ready to identify “lineages” in biblical times and to conclude that “clan endogamy” was widely practiced (1985:272–274).3 Anthropologists and the Bible 13 This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms VI Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (1990) has proposed a return to the comparative method, and atempts continue to generalize from exotic practices in order to illuminate puzzling biblical stories.4 Old-fashioned ideas about primitive society still cast a long shadow in essays on the Bible. he ghosts of Robertson Smith, Frazer, and Maret might ind some recent exercises in the comparative method rather familiar. But N. H. Snaith (1944) chided biblical scholars for paying more atention to primitive parallels than to textual analysis. Within anthropology there was increasing concern with the meaning of beliefs and practices for the people themselves. Maret had demanded this almost from the irst: “How then are we to be content with an explanation of taboo that does not pretend to render its sense as it has sense for those who both practice it and make it a rallying point for their thought on mystic maters? . . . We ask to understand it, and we are merely bidden to despise it” (1909:97). he post–World War I generation of anthropologists, the irst to spend extensive periods in the ield, insisted that customs had to be studied in action. Only modern ethnographic ieldwork could deliver a properly sympathetic understanding of exotic beliefs. his was also the message of the newly fashionable linguistic philosophy. Witgenstein read he Golden Bough in 1931 and reacted with furious contempt: “Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for these savages will not be so far from any understanding of spiritual maters as an Englishman of the twentieth century. His explanations of the primitive observances are much cruder than the sense of the observances themselves” (1979:8). In Witgenstein’s view, meaning was a mater of context and use. And so they came to agree, the philosophers and the anthropologists, that concepts and practices could be understood only by appreciating their use in the business of everyday life in particular communities. Context was all. Peter Winch’s Idea of a Social Science, published in 1958, identiied the doctrines of the later Witgenstein with the analytical practice of Oxford’s new professor of social anthropology, E. E. Evans-Pritchard. As Mary Douglas put it, summing up what she took to be the position of Evans-Pritchard, “Everyday language and everyday thought set into their social and situational context have to be the subject of inquiry” (1980:26). 14 Adam Kuper This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Evans-Pritchard had read history at Exeter College as an undergraduate, and he recalled Maret as an afable fellow. When he became in his turn professor of social anthropology at Oxford and lectured on theories of primitive religion, he borrowed Maret’s critical characterization of the theories of Tylor and Frazer as “intellectualist.” He also questioned the value of psychological and sociological accounts of religion. he son of an Anglican clergyman, Evans-Pritchard was a recent convert to Catholicism, and he was inclined to believe that all religions contain a kernel of spiritual truth. his now seemed to him to be their most important feature, and he urged that spiritual beliefs should be treated seriously in their own right (Evans-Pritchard 1965). Evans-Pritchard (1963) came to deprecate the comparative method, but he was prepared to reverse the procedure, claiming in the introduction to his Nuer Religion that the religions of the Nuer and Dinka of South Sudan “have features which bring to mind the Hebrews of the Old Testament.” He quoted in support an American Presbyterian working among the Nuer who remarked that “the missionary feels as if he were living in Old Testament times, and in a way this is true.” “When therefore,” Evans-Pritchard concluded, “I sometimes draw comparisons between Nuer and Hebrew conceptions, it is no mere whim but is because I myself ind it helpful, and I think others may do so too, in trying to understand Nuer ideas to note this likeness to something with which we are ourselves familiar without being too intimately involved in it” (1956:vii). African informants who were familiar with the Bible oten made such comparisons themselves (see, e.g., Turner 1967:135). However, Evans-Pritchard clearly intended to suggest that the Nuer had a sort of preknowledge of scriptural truths. In the very last sentences of the monograph, he wrote that the meaning of Nuer rites “depends inally on an awareness of God and that men are dependent on him and must be resigned to his will. At this point the theologian takes over from the anthropologist” (Evans-Pritchard 1956:322). VII According to the practitioners of the comparative method, the essential ingredients of primitive religion were totem and taboo. Its deining ritual was sacriice. In 1950–51 Franz Steiner (1956, 1999)—an émigré Jewish Anthropologists and the Bible 15 This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms mystic, a German poet, a friend of Elias Caneti, a lover of Iris Murdoch, and a lecturer in the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology— gave a course of lectures on taboo, which were edited and published ater his death. His central thesis was that the constructs of the comparative method had been lited from speciic ethnographic contexts. In the process they were stripped of their particularities and lost much of their meaning. When modern ethnographers apply these constructs in their own analyses, the constructs have to be qualiied if they are to be of any use at all. “hey are then redeined, and by this process they become so narrow as to lose all signiicance outside the individual analytical study to which they were tailored.” For example, he suggested, “he broad signiicance which ‘Totemism’ had as a comparative category has evaporated” (Steiner 1999:105). Steiner tagged taboo as “a Protestant discovery,” while the notion that taboos regulated social order and morality was “a Victorian invention,” one that was peculiarly interesting to prudes and snobs (1999:132). But taboo was actually a Polynesian concept, and Steiner proceeded to analyze the speciic meaning of tabu in the context of Polynesian language, thought, and religion. It turned out that tabu was not at all the same thing as the “taboo” of the anthropologists. Steiner then reviewed Robertson Smith’s thesis that the notion of the sacred originated in ideas of taboo. Steiner had an educated knowledge of Hebrew, and he argued (along the same lines as Durkheim) that the Hebrew idea of qadosh could not be translated simply as “taboo,” certainly not in the sense in which the Polynesians used the term tabu. He concluded that neither the Polynesian tabu nor the Hebrew qadosh was a useful cross-cultural category. he only universal was that all societies deine certain acts, words, and situations as pregnant with danger. So much, then, for taboo, and perhaps even for the category of the sacred. Evans-Pritchard gave the Henry Myers lecture in 1954, which he titled “he Meaning of Sacriice among the Nuer.” He remarked that “in Nuer sacriice there are diferent shades of meaning. he patern varies. here are shits of emphasis.” It was diicult, if not impossible, “to present a general interpretation, to put forward a simple formula, to cover all Nuer sacriices” (Evans-Pritchard 1954:30). Many Nuer sacriices regulated social relations and might be amenable to a socio16 Adam Kuper This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms logical analysis. But Evans-Pritchard noted that Father Crazzolara, a Catholic missionary among the Nuer, had distinguished a category of piacular sacriices that were not connected to social events but, much more interesting, were concerned with a universal quest, “the regulation of the individual’s relation with God” (capitalized here, so no mere tribal deity) (Evans-Pritchard 1954:30). So taboo was a Victorian invention. Sacriice was a broad term for a range of ritual practices with unpredictable meanings that were resistant to sociological analysis and to comparison. hat let totemism. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s short book Le totémisme aujourd’hui, published in 1962, deconstructed the concept, concluding that totemism also was not a useful cross-cultural category. Anthropologists should instead investigate the truly universal process by which all societies classify and relate social groups and natural phenomena. In a more extended study published a few months later, La pensée sauvage, Lévi-Strauss demonstrated that arbitrary features of natural objects were given signiicance by their position in a series of binary oppositions. Natural species were classiied with reference to these oppositions. So too were the parts of the society. hey were, then, related to one another. VIII hese exemplary critiques disposed of the classical components of comparative religion, totem, taboo, and sacriice. Yet the change of paradigm was incomplete. A close reader of Steiner and Lévi-Strauss might still be inclined to study the place of taboo and totemic marriage rules in biblical religion, even if these elements were now understood rather diferently. According to Lévi- Strauss, all societies establish parallel classiications of social and natural phenomena by making a series of binary contrasts. hat was totemism, properly understood. And Steiner indicated that every society marks of certain social and natural categories as dangerous. Properly understood, then, taboo was a property of a system of classiication. Edmund Leach and Mary Douglas now proposed structural accounts of biblical taboos on food and marriage. heir projects might have been similar, but Leach and Douglas— like Robertson Smith and Frazer before them—began from very different points of view. Leach was a crusading atheist. His mother had Anthropologists and the Bible 17 This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms hoped that he would be a missionary. Instead he became the president of the Humanist Society. Douglas was a conservative Catholic. Reviewing her Natural Symbols in the New York Review of Books in 1971, Leach wrote: “All her recent work gives the impression that she is no longer much concerned with the atainment of empirical truth; the object of the exercise is to adapt her anthropological learning to the service of Roman Catholic propaganda.” Reviewing Leach and J. Alan Aycock’s Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myths, also in the New York Review of Books, Douglas (1984) claimed that Leach imposed his own meanings on the myths, just like Frazer, and she concluded that the “ingenious argument is extremely interesting and, to readers who are unfamiliar with Old Testament scholarship, quite plausible.” And yet the two anthropologists had much in common, including a tendency to read back into the biblical world their own ideas about European Jews, whom they were inclined to think were too picky about food and unreasonably prejudiced against intermarriage. To be sure, the projection of a particular understanding of the present into the past, even the very distant past, is hardly unusual. But Leach and Douglas also shared more specialized ideas. Priority is diicult to establish— copies of papers circulated in drat before publication—but clearly they were already working on very similar lines in the early 1960s, drawing heavily from Lévi-Strauss. In 1961 Leach published an essay, “Lévi-Strauss in the Garden of Eden” (reprinted in Leach 1969), which lagged his conversion to structuralism and introduced Lévi-Strauss as a beter guide to the Bible than Frazer. Biblical scholars since Wellhausen and Robertson Smith had recognized mythical elements in the Hebrew Bible, the deposits of very ancient traditions, but they struggled to distinguish myths from historical texts. Leach insisted that it was all myth. And although the elements of the texts were no doubt of diverse origin, the editors of the Hebrew Bible had imposed a coherence upon this body of myth. he analyst should accordingly act “on a presumption that the whole of the text as we now have it regardless of the varying historical origins of its component parts may properly be treated as a unity” (Leach and Aycock 1983:89–112; similar pronouncements prefaced a number of Leach’s biblical essays). 18 Adam Kuper This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms In his 1961 essay “Lévi- Strauss in the Garden of Eden,” Leach analyzed the construction of the world and its creatures in the opening chapters of Genesis by way of a series of binary contrasts. In Leviticus 11, “creatures which do not it this exact ordering of the world—for instance water creatures with no ins, animals and birds which eat meat or ish, etc.—are classed as ‘abominations’” (Leach 1969:13). Here and in a paper titled “Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse,” published in 1964, he argued that classiications constructed by a series of binary contrasts will always throw up elements that breach boundaries. hese are tabooed (Leach 1964). And taboos on anomalies reinforce boundaries. Douglas’s Purity and Danger, published in 1966, was directly inspired by Steiner’s lectures. It became famous for her irst atempt at an anthropology of the Bible, a chapter on the abominations of Leviticus. Her analysis was very similar to that of Leach, the argument being that classiicatory anomalies were tabooed. She did not at this stage identify the social context of these taboos, but she soon began to identify various possible functions. “We should see taboos as the performative acts which stop the careless speaker from geting the categories confused. . . . he performance protects boundaries around classiications. . . . On this distinctly Durkheimian approach, impurity and taboo supply back-up for the current system of control” (Douglas 2004:159–162). he most important taboos concern sex and food: “bed and board,” as Douglas put it (Fardon 1999:186). Leach was more interested in the bed side of things, and he treated the biblical stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and Ham, Lot and his daughters, and Abraham and Sarah as a set of structural transformations on the theme of incest and endogamy. Arguing that all societies struggle with similar concerns, he compared these stories to the myth of Oedipus, which Lévi-Strauss had selected for exemplary analysis in the irst presentation of his structural method for the analysis of myth (Leach 1969; Lévi-Strauss 1963:chap. 11). According to Lévi-Strauss, myths grapple with existential issues, generating temporary resolutions of intractable problems. In “he Legitimacy of Solomon,” Leach set out “to demonstrate that the Biblical story of the succession of Solomon to the throne of Israel is a myth which ‘mediates’ a major contradiction” (1969:31). he contradiction Anthropologists and the Bible 19 This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms is between the assertion that God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people and that they should be endogamous, and the reality that the land accommodated a number of diferent populations, with whom Jews—even kings—intermarried, and for good political reasons. Leach argued that central myths in the Hebrew Bible ofered resolutions of this structural contradiction. Douglas came to agree that the ancient Hebrews were obsessed by endogamy. Rereading Leach’s essay, “he Legitimacy of Solomon,” “brought home . . . with a resounding thud something which Old Testament scholarship had been agreed upon for a very long time . . . that the Pentateuch was full of concern for the evils that lowed from marriage with foreigners” (Douglas 1975:208). Commenting on this passage, Richard Fardon remarks, “Tracing a general analogy between animal classiication, food rules and sexual mating required, as she put it, something of a ‘conversion’ to alliance theory in the analysis of kinship” (1999:186). Dating the redaction of the Tanach is still a controversial mater, but Leach (and Douglas ater him) adopted the view, held by some experts, that it had been put together in its inal form shortly ater the return from Babylon in the sixth century bce and the construction of the second temple. Leach and Douglas assumed that the editors imposed a unity on the various texts incorporated into the Hebrew Bible. he editors’ motives were political. Leach accepted the thesis that the editors were following the party line of Ezra and Nehemiah, who led the return from exile and ruled Palestine for their Persian overlords. he texts were edited to support the policies of these satraps: their land grabbing, their xenophobic nationalism, and their insistence on Jewish endogamy. Yet if there was a party line, it was not always consistent. Leach thought that myths were bound to put alternatives into play and that myth makers were never completely in control of their material: “What the myth then ‘says’ is not what the editors consciously intended to say but rather something which lies deeply embedded in Jewish traditional culture as a whole” (1969:53). Douglas took the view that diferent factions had edited particular sections of the Bible. She agreed with Leach that the Persian satraps Ezra and Nehemiah, who had led the exiles back from Babylon, were 20 Adam Kuper This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms concerned with imposing endogamy, which enforced social and political boundaries.5 But a priestly party, responsible for what biblical scholars identify as the P sources in the Bible, were prepared to tolerate exogamy. heir power base was in the temple, and their special privilege was the performance of sacriices. In consequence, the priests were obsessed with the Levitical taboos, the rules of purity and holiness. And so distinct and conlicting political interests could be discerned behind the purity rules, on the one hand, and the rules on intermarriage, on the other. he ark, the tabernacle, and the temple were the most sacred sites of Judaism. Leach (1976:84–93) sketched the outlines of structuralist geography of these sacred places. Douglas argued that the rules regulating behavior in sacred sites provided models for everyday activities. he concern for purity that regulated temple sacriices also informed the food taboos. his was because the body was itself a temple. “To conclude,” she wrote in her inal collection of essays, Jacob’s Tears, “the levitical food prohibitions have plenty to do with the tabernacle. hey frame the analogy between tabernacle and body: what goes for one, goes for the other” (Douglas 2004:172). It was not enough to analyze systems of classiication. One had to connect: food taboos and marriage rules; the laws of kashrut and the laws of sacriice; the body and the temple; the temple and Mount Sinai and the sanctuary. In Leviticus as Literature, published in 1999, she introduced a further structural parallel, that between the form of the book itself—a “ring structure”— and the layout of the temple. Some French literary structuralists also wrote essays on the Bible.6 Yet although he had provided the inspiration, Lévi- Strauss (a grandson of the rabbi of Strasbourg) disapproved of these studies. A year ater the publication of La pensée sauvage, the journal Esprit arranged a discussion between Lévi-Strauss and a group of philosophers led by the Christian existentialist Paul Ricoeur (see Lévi-Strauss 2004). Ricoeur had just made his famous linguistic turn, and he now believed that only a hermeneutic interpretation of signs, symbols, and texts could yield an understanding of the human condition. Lévi-Strauss was, of course, all in favor of a linguistic turn, but his linguistics were very diferent. Ricoeur charged Lévi-Strauss with privileging syntactics over semanAnthropologists and the Bible 21 This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms tics, structure over meaning. He conceded that this might be appropriate in analyzing the ideas of simple societies, which really had very litle to say for themselves. It was not helpful when it came to more complex intellectual systems. Similarly, the play of transformations in the myths of “cold” societies was very diferent from the historical, logically sequential myths of “hot” societies like ancient Greece and Israel. hey had produced great narratives that were vehicles of profound relections about human existence. Could Lévi-Strauss’s method be applied to such myths? Lévi-Strauss responded that myths did not make sense in the way that Ricoeur imagined. hey did not send messages; rather, they commented on one another. Symbols had only a positional signiicance. But Lévi-Strauss rejected the notion that there was a diference in kind between the mythologies of cold and hot societies. Ater all, persuasive structuralist studies of Greek myths were being published. However, the Bible was diferent. he problem with the Bible was, irst, that while it incorporated mythical sources, these had been edited and, Lévi-Strauss said, distorted. Moreover, to understand myths one had to have some basic ethnographic information about the society in which they were current, but the ethnographic information to be gleaned from the Bible had very probably itself been mythologized (cf. Lévi-Strauss 1987). IX Biblical scholars may well share Paul Ricoeur’s reservations about the structuralist approach. Another reasonable complaint is that anthropologists generally lacked the scholarly preparation that their projects required. For instance, J. A. Emerton (1976) exposed Leach’s dubious etymologies and other errors. He also pointed out that Leach’s approach to the Bible was very selective. Leach exaggerated any biblical concern with purity of blood and ignored that fact that intermarriage was denounced for religious rather than for racial or political reasons. he real fear was that men would follow their wives and worship foreign gods. However, Douglas has been treated with more respect than Leach, perhaps in part because she was a believer and he was a crusading atheist. Distinguished scholars of the Hebrew Bible, Jacob 22 Adam Kuper This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Milgrom (2004:passim) and Jacob Neusner (2006:149), have made gracious comments on her work (and see Duhaime 1998; Hendel 2008). In any case, structuralism, broadly deined, remains the prevailing method of anthropological studies of the Bible. Leach was followed by a number of scholars who delivered persuasive readings of biblical myths. For instance, David Pocock (1975) analyzed the structural opposition of North and South in the book of Genesis; Seth Daniel Kunin (1995) covers much the same ground as Leach, but with impressive scholarship; and Édouard Conte (2011a, 2011b) is engaged in the structural analysis of Koranic texts on descent and incest that present further transformations of the myths of the patriarchs and the genealogy of Israel. Other anthropologists, following on from Douglas, have brought out unexpected and suggestive connections—between systems of classiication, rules governing sacriices and food prohibitions, pollution beliefs, restrictions on marriage, the politics of legitimacy, and sacred architecture and landscape. he themes of these studies are, however, rather restricted. Strangely, neither Leach nor Douglas considered the ample evidence of a preference in biblical times for cousin marriage, which had been documented long ago by Frazer (1918, 2:chap. 4). And studies of the Israelite monarchy have been limited to rather old-fashioned exercises in the comparative method. he Gospels have also been relatively neglected. Leach’s (1966) rather old-fashioned comparative essay on virgin birth did not atract atention from biblical scholars. His hint that the Christian Mass is a transformation of the Jewish Passover (Leach 1976:93) was, however, developed by Gillian Feeley-Harnik, who analyzed the Last Supper as a structural transformation of the Passover seder, where “every critical element in the Passover is reversed” (1981:19). he Talmud and the Koran are still litle studied by anthropologists, though Maureen Bloom (2007) has produced a sophisticated anthropological analysis of mysticism and magic in the Talmud, relating Talmudic conceptions to biblical and to Babylonian sources. Biblical scholars may be reassured that these authors do usually know Hebrew and Aramaic, even if they seldom have a mastery of the tools of Bible criticism. For their part, biblical scholars are usually uncritical in their application of anthropological examples and rely too oten Anthropologists and the Bible 23 This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms on dated and discredited anthropological models. here are exceptions—R. R. Wilson’s superb study of biblical genealogies comes to mind. Yet more interdisciplinary collaboration would obviously be a good idea. “While a number of scholars make more or less overt reference to advice or counsel given by anthropology colleagues in the course of their work,” James Martin remarked in 1989, “no publication has appeared over the joint names of an anthropologist and an Old Testament scholar” (1989:103). I believe that the same statement could be repeated now, ater a quarter of a century. But perhaps the deeper problems are conceptual rather than methodological. It could very well be argued that anthropologists have constructed exotic “religions” in the image of their own. “From one point of view,” Cliford Geertz wrote, “the whole history of the comparative study of religion from the time Robertson Smith undertook his investigations into the rites of the ancient Semites . . . can be looked at as but a circuitous, even devious, approach to a rational analysis of our own situation, an evaluation of our own religious traditions while seeming to evaluate only those of exotic others” (1971:22). Although the Hebrew Bible had no word for religion, it bequeathed enduring paradigms of both genuine and false religions, seting the parameters for the classiication of exotic beliefs and rituals. he “high religions” of the East were distressingly polytheist, even inclined to idolatry, but they might be accepted as genuine because they had sacred texts, temples, hymns, and prayers. Pagan cults, however, were equated with the false religion of the Philistines. hey had idols instead of deities, magicians in the place of priests, orgies rather than solemn rituals. A romantic like Andrew Lang (see, e.g., Lang 1887) might prefer pagan sensuality, fairy tales, and nature worship to the Puritan church. But his was a challenge to the orthodox believer, not to the idea of religion itself. In the twentieth century, relativist anthropologists were inclined to treat all religions as equal, but the notion of religion itself was seldom put in question. And so a distinctive realm of study was constituted: the anthropology of religion. It was a sacred space occupied by myths, taboos, idols, and sacriice. Even the most secular and skeptical anthropologists accepted the parameters. hey might argue about whether the 24 Adam Kuper This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms distinctive feature of religion was belief or ritual and what, if anything, distinguished religion from magic, but despite a succession of paradigm changes, the ield—and its subject mater—remained remarkably stable for 150 years. Yet surely its analytical core, the very notion of religion, is ripe for deconstruction. Notes I am grateful to Mark Geller, Richard Fardon, Maureen Bloom, and Richard Kuper for their comments on earlier drats. 1. Some missionary scholars were also aware of the new biblical criticism. he irst Anglican bishop of Zululand, John Colenso, produced sympathetic account of Zulu beliefs and practices, even endorsing polygamy, which, he noted and as the Zulu remarked, had been practiced by the biblical patriarchs. Colenso also published contributions to the new biblical criticism and was duly tried for heresy in Cape Town (Guy 1883). 2. For a critique, see Kuper (2005:chap. 8). 3. For some sophisticated atempts to apply the segmentary lineage model to ancient Israel, see Bendor ([1986] 1996); Frick (1985); Wilson (1977). For a review, see Goldberg (1996). 4. For instance, Pit-Rivers (1977) suggested that enduring themes of Mediterranean culture explained some puzzling biblical episodes. Gilbert Lewis (1987) compared the treatment of lepers in New Guinea and ancient Israel. Meyer Fortes (1959) identiied the biblical igure of Job as the prototype of some West African beliefs. Notwithstanding his clearly stated reservations, Lévi-Strauss (1988) himself published a playful comparison of origin myths of circumcision among the ancient Israelites and the penis-sheath among the Amazonian Bororo. 5. In her treatment of these Persian satraps, Douglas seems to have projected back from an understanding of contemporary Middle Eastern politics. Richard Fardon remarks: “Parallels with the range of political positions occupied in contemporary Israel may be implicit in Douglas’s account, but they are certainly not lost on her” (1999:203). 6. French scholars from various disciplines contributed structuralist analyses of biblical texts. See, for example, Barthes et al. (1971); and Soler (1979). Anthropologists and the Bible 25 This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:16:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms References Ackerman, Robert. 1987. J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —, ed. 2005. Selected Leters of Sir James George Frazer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barthes, R., F. Bovon, F.-J. Leenhardt, R. Martin-Achard, and J. Starobinski. 1971. Analyse structural et exégèse biblique. Neuchâtel: Delachaux et Niestlé. Bendor, S. (1986) 1996. he Social Structure of Ancient Israel. Jerusalem: Eisenbrauns. Black, John, and George Chrystal. 1912. he Life of William Robertson Smith. London: A. and C. Black. Bloom, Maureen. 2007. Jewish Mysticism and Magic: An Anthropological Perspective. London: Routledge. Brosses, Charles de. 1760. Du culte des dieux fétiches ou parallès de l’ancienne religion de l’Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie. Paris. Chadwick, Owen. 1970. he Victorian Church. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Comte, Auguste. 1830–42. Cours de philosophie positive. 6 vols. Paris. Conte, Édouard. 2011a. Adam et consorts: Germanité et iliation de la Genèse au Deluge selon les traditions musulmanes. In L’argument de la iliation. Paris: Editions de las Maison des sciences de l’homme. —. 2011b. Elles seront des soeurs pour nous: Le marriage par permutation au proche-orient. Études rurales 187:157–200. Coulanges, Fustel de. 1864. La cité antique. 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