Suchergebnisse

For Latter‐day Saints, blood is one important idiom of kinship, and ofChristian worship, but not in the ways one might expect. This paper asks how the logic of the resurrected and 'perfected' body inhabits both registers, beginning with the surprisingly 'bloodless'LDSSacrament Service. I then explore the paths by which Latter‐day Saints navigate meanings of blood kinship in tension, especially attribution to the 'Abrahamic lineages'. I argue, in agreement with Armand Mauss, that contemporary Mormonism has largely shed racist readings of 'blood', but suggest that both lineage and cognatic kinship as mystery remain salient through a 'reduplicative logic' which collapses physical inheritance, agency, and revelation. This illuminates both similarities to and differences from conservativeAmerican Protestant positions, including understandings of the life of the unborn foetus and the rights and wrongs of stem cell research.

Recent debates on this topic have been heavily shaped by two paradigms: Asad's deconstructivism and Taylor's Catholic/Hegelian revisionism. This article outlines the arguments of each but frames them within the longer history of arguments that make claims for the reality of secularization and alternate sources for claims that "the secular" is a historically constructed category, including arguments from radical theology and (differently) in the anthropology of India. It is argued that implicit claims for the hierarchical ordering of reality in modernity, in which the political is seen as more real than the religious, continue to create disjunctures in the range of debate that new ethnography has the opportunity to address.

This article critiques the way in which the discipline of anthropology has construed Christianity, arguing that too narrow and ascetic a model of Christianity has become standard and questioning the claims of the 'secular' social sciences to have severed themselves entirely from their Christian theological underpinnings. The article is in conversation with other writers on related themes, including Jonathan Parry on Mauss'sThe gift, Talal Asad, John Millbank, and Marshall Sahlins. Here, however, established anthropological assumptions on topics including transcendence, modernity, asceticism, and genealogy are reconsidered through a fieldwork‐based examination of American Mormonism, a religion which posits relationships between the mortal and the divine that are unique in Christianity. Despite their strong belief in Christ, Mormons have often been labelled as 'not really Christian' by mainstream churches. It is argued here that such theological position‐taking is echoed in the social sciences and that this reveals some of its (that is, our own) unrecognized orthodoxies.