Stevens (W), Wagner (R), and clotting (Verran, H).

The man bent over his guitar,

a shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar.

You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied “Things as they are

Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

(Wallace Stevens, 1937)

After returning from Chittagong, I finally re/read Roy Wagner’s work. My friend and colleague Alex King introduced me to Roy and his work some years ago but it is only now, trying to make sense of the many ways in which the lapsi fruit functions as a symbol across a fractured regional imaginary, that I have gone back to read through Roy Wagner more carefully. In The Invention of Culture, now in a second edition with an appreciative forward from Tim Ingold, he meditates wonderingly on the multiple partial and dialogic construals that spread out from the encounter between the locals and an anthropologist: it’s fun to read.

A breakfast table conversation in April two years ago provoked me to haul out Wallace Stevens’ “Man with the Blue Guitar”. At the time I was trying to make sense of the crisis of representation in the 1930s — they had great art (to which the Nazis reacted in the Degenerate Art exhibition), which we may not, though we are confronted with a similar moral and political disaster (with now-inevitable environmental perdition added on for good measure). On our wall is Brecht’s slogan: ‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it’ and that, I think, is where Stevens goes as well though perhaps not under an activist flag.

Yet reading all through Man with the Blue Guitar I read again that here, too, was the record of Stevens’ crisis of faith.

And the beautiful trombones——behold

The approach of him whom none believes

Whom all believe that all believe,

A pagan in a varnished car.

Elsewhere the references to Christian architecture, theology and monks make it clear that Stevens has bundled the problems of Art, Religion (Christian) and the rise of barbarism. He does not come away satisfied. Returning to Roy Wagner, then, at the core of his argument about what really matters in culture, what his ‘we’ cannot escape and should not abandon in order to find a footing in the endless imaginative/reflective re/productions generated at the site of the anthropological encounter, the Christian language bubbles up. He is comparing ‘our’ family and ‘their’ kinship when he settles on the word ‘father’ to consider, and the associations immediately spill into God, Jesuits and so on (pp 38-9 in the 2nd edition of 2016). That’s not to say he’s asserting the truth of the associated narratives, but it’s clear he sees those as core items in ‘our’ symbolic inventory.

This is not, as someone said, my beautiful house. Wagner’s ‘we’ does not resonate or connote. These constant references to a Christian norm and the implicit claims of membership alienate and estrange us. They shove us outside the doors of the Church of anthropology and the ‘we’ of the Civilised West. They suggest yet again that postcolonial anthropology has not yet escaped its shadow, theological anthropology. The revived apologetics for overtly Christian anthropology now ricocheting through the AAA’s journals are even more chilling, as is the casual acceptance of missionary motives on anthropology training courses. If it were just one alternative among many, a tactical position—but it is not. It is the High Ground, the Essence, the expected meaning of normal words for a normal reader.

There is a piece of me that is always puzzled to find inspiring and provocative writers voluntarily dwelling within the barricades of Christianity. Its limitations seem so clear: the pointless solitude (the soul), the essential pessimism (original sin), the estrangement from life (human exceptionalism), the sundered longing for the physical body (bodily resurrection), the ceaseless (if generous) intolerance (evangelism). In Scotland its influence is all-pervasive. What is it that gives some great writers such comfort there? I have many good and genuine (in both senses) Christian friends who will ‘know’ the answer and even try to explain, in the hopes of finding a rescuable soul in the loom of my skepticism, but that’s not the kind of answer I want. I want an answer that should be somewhere in those strains of anthropology of religion that study Christianities, but is still wanting, because those analysts cannot see that what seems normal from inside just isn’t. Rather: how does this particular cultural virus work so well as a clotting agent?