The Idea of An Anthropology of Christian

on Talal Asad
Downloaded By: [Anidjar, Gil] At: 16:18 16 November 2009
THE IDEA OF AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF

CHRISTIANITY
Gil Anidjar
Columbia University, USA
................The writings of Talal Asad offer a consistent and singular reflection on the
asymmetries
of power
Christianity
concepts and
their
anthropological
function
religion
................
anthropological function of concepts. In a variety of manners, the use and

mention of a concept identifies the practice of a collective speaker before it
testifies to a designated object, real or imagined. The Christian baggage of the
concept of religion, indeed, the Christianity of the subject of religion, however,
is at once affirmed and denied by Talal Asad. Is Christianity a religion? Does the
concept of religion teach us something about Christianity? This essay attends to
Asads body of work and seeks to show that the idea of an anthropology of
Christianity ! much more than an anthropology of religion (which Asad shows to
be a reductive endeavour), and different from an anthropology of Islam !
remains both urgent and elusive.
I have this sense that claiming something as modern is a kind of closure.

Talal Asad, The Trouble of Thinking
The concept of religion is a polemical concept. Its relation to power is not

merely derivative but inherent and dynamic, the product of unequal and
conflicting forces at work within and around it. The concept of religion is an
......................................................................................
interventions Vol. 11(3) 367!393 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)
Copyright # 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13698010903255718
i n t e r v e n t i o n s ! 11 :3
.........................
1 Deploying the
notion of a
locutionary act, J.
L. Austin (1962: 99,
101) distinguished
illocutionary acts
(performance of an
act in saying
something as
opposed to
performance of an
act of saying
something) from
perlocutionary acts
(whereby saying
something will often,
or even normally,
produce certain
consequential effects
upon the feelings,
thoughts, or actions
of the audience, or of
the speaker, or of
other persons); and
see Talal Asad,
Genealogies of
Religion (1993: 128);
henceforth
abbreviated as GR.
2 On the compulsive
nature of social
concepts (which
exceeds the
philological matter of
whether a term
existed in other days
or ages), see GR
(176); on the link
between race and
religion, see Anidjar
(2007). Asad
juxtaposes the terms
in a subtitle (Other
Races, Other
Religions: Excolonial Labour
Comes to Britain in
GR 253), but religion
is not explicitly
mentioned in this
section. Only race is.
3 The phrase
structures of
possible actions
appears in GR 15.
368
essential, asymmetric and contradictory moment in a series of acts,

enactments and motions that constitute an object ! religion ! carving it
out of the world within which it operates. In however limited a way,
therefore, the concept of religion constitutes that world. Through its
iterations and reiterations, it takes the world apart: it makes the world,
and simultaneously divides it, transforms it, redistributes it. This has little to
do with the origins of the concept or with its particular history, whether
early or late. In its scholarly usages as well as in its popular currency (and
perhaps especially there), the concept of religion is performative (illocutionary and perlocutionary).1 Each time it is used or invoked, it enables
understanding, provides orientation, allocates meaning; it gathers, defines,
sustains and even dictates dispositions, practices and modes of behaviour.
Along with its contemporaries ! race and culture ! and in a manner
comparable to them, the concept of religion is of a compulsive nature.2 It
compels by partaking of a total structure that distributes, divides and
combines elements or regions of being across space and time, history and
geography. It functions along a continuum in such a manner that it is
always a question of the arrangement and rearrangement of the same
ideological elements which constitutes the unity of [an] object, concurring to
persuade and compel (and govern) with regard to its existence (Asad 1975:
258). Like race (and later, ethnicity), and unavoidably part of the same
dynamic apparatus, religion is a political category, less a neutral explanation than an intervention ! positive or negative ! within a field of power that
serves either to define a total normative structure in equilibrium, or to
dissolve the concept of a total structure altogether and replace it by
others (259).
Since the beginning of his published career, Talal Asad, from whom
I summarily derive the preceding argument and to whom the following
pages are devoted, has singularly sought to contend with such categories
and concepts (or, in another, increasingly frequent rendition, ideas) as
modes of agency, structures of possible actions and material articulations
of power ! as polemical devices.3 Asad has done so by locating them
within larger and unexpected coordinates, revealing the total structures
they partake of, generate, or conceal. In the following instance, Asad
describes in illuminating terms some of the functions and operations !
some of the polemical dimensions ! of the concept of ethnicity and the
space of its reach.
Ethnicity itself proposes a certain autonomous subject: the ordered ethnic group,
or individuals interacting in terms of ethnic categories ! i.e. those who collectively
share, or who individually manipulate and respond to, given norms, customs,
symbols, etc. Ethnic subjects, whether combining or competing with each other, act
in accordance with shared rules (symbolic, moral, prudential) of the power game
TH E IDEA OF AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF CHRISTIANITY
Gil Anidjar
369
........................
which thus constitutes the identifiable social order. So not only does ethnicity
propose autonomous subjects, it also postulates the authority of a shared order as
the ultimate form of social reality. It is through this postulate that ethnicity lends
itself to an ideological enterprise, when it is used to assert an unmediated social
unity where in reality there is merely a moment in the development of contradictory forces ! i.e. when something that is merely the momentary, one-sided
expression of social repression is projected as a real, complete whole defined and
integrated by an immanent authority. (Asad 1975: 275)
4 Fenella Cannell
writes of Asads role
toward what she
calls the
anthropology of
Christianity (2006:
4). In what follows I
mean to explore the
ground for her claim
in Asads work.
5 Asad, The Idea of
an Anthropology of
Islam (1986: 5);
henceforth
abbreviated as IAI.
6 A recent collection
of essays (de Vries
2008) appears to
advocate that we go
so far as to move
beyond the concept
of religion.
It is easy to see how, with some adjustments, Asad would later come to propose
a similar view of the concept of religion, considering the kind of subject it too
presupposes; interrogating its role in the notion and the authority of a shared
order as the ultimate form of social reality; and identifying the concept of
religion as a moment in the development of contradictory forces working in
tandem with the momentary, one sided expression of social repression. In this
essay, I attempt to take the measure of this view and to follow some of the
conditions that sustain it, the trajectories it presupposes and traces; to engage
Asads work from the larger conceptual perspective he himself articulates, in
my view steadily, across years of otherwise evolving positions and reflections. I
will then explore the ways in which Asad participates in identifying an
anthropology of Christianity, why it might be so, and with what implications.4 At the same time, the impossibility of such an anthropology, explicitly
and implicitly inscribed in Asads prose, will have to guide its evaluation ! if a
non-exhaustive one, of course. To borrow from one of Asads own formulations in a proximate context, the issue goes beyond being for or against
the attempt to generalize about Christianity. It is rather set against the manner
in which the generalization is undertaken. Anyone working on the anthropology of [Christianity] will be aware that there is considerable diversity in the
beliefs and practices of [Christians]. The first problem is therefore one of
organizing this diversity in terms of an adequate concept.5
Grammar of a Concept
7 This expression,
which precedes but
also announces
Asads reading of
Foucault, appears in
the conclusion to his
first book, The
Kababish Arabs
(1970: 235);
henceforth
abbreviated as KA.
One could argue that
the phrase also
Toward that first problem, then, let us acknowledge for the moment that the
concept of religion has been gaining popularity within the scholarly
discourse of anthropology and of other disciplines, in political discussions
as well as in public culture.6 Following Asad, I have just begun to argue that
the concept of religion is a polemical concept. This is also to say that it is a
comparative concept, extending across a hierarchical differential of
power.7 It is so not only because it has been deployed across vast and
diverse areas, thereby sustaining and promoting a comparative effort,
whether implicit or explicit. It is also because, like all such concepts, the
concept of religion is internally structured according to strict divisions, and it
functions, as it were inherently, by way of these divisions. It enacts them and
i n t e r v e n t i o n s ! 11 :3
.........................
belongs to a wider
concern with
hegemony, colonial
and imperial power,
but I would argue
that Asads interest
in the polemical, and
comparative,
dimension of
concepts warrants
my emphasis on the
latter as a general
mechanism of the
former. David Scott
and Charles
Hirschkind (2006: 5)
also underscore the
fact that, for Asad,
anthropology is best
thought of as the
comparative study of
concepts across space
and time; and
consider the
inspiration Asad
finds in Franz
Steiners work, most
relevantly, to my
mind, Steiners
concern with the
broad significance of
comparative
categories (Steiner
1956).
8 In this and in
many other ways,
Asad announces and
parallels the political
anthropology of
Pierre Clastres, most
particularly in
Clastres (1974); see
also Clastres (1999).
9 Asads
contribution to
Anthropology and
the Colonial
Encounter is
exemplary as a study
of the scholarly
operations of the
concept of political
domination (see
Asad 1973).
370
embodies them by isolating, within a larger field, a particular sphere from

another (indeed, each sphere is defined and buttressed by it). Such
mechanisms are at work, of course, in a variety of instances, within a
wide array of concepts, and they can be followed in scrupulous detail
through most of Asads writings. In The Kababish Arabs, for example, Asad
engages the mechanism through the conceptual distinction made between
money and power, between economy and politics, in the discourse of
functional anthropology. In this particular case, he explains,
the distinction between economic and political allocations (as closely interconnected aspects of social action and not as different kinds of activity) is that the
former is concerned with maximizing utility and the latter with maximizing power.
Both require a minimal acceptance of the rules of the game, though not all those
involved in the game are in a position to come forward as active players. (KA 231)
In the field of social action, therefore, there are no neutral distinctions

between kinds of activities, nor are there predefined boundaries for these
activities and their understanding. Instead, the very distinctions produce and
reproduce the inequality of access to these activities and their shifting
domains. Conceptual divisions openly or covertly reinforce the hierarchical
differential of power (KA 235).8
In his later work, Asad widens the scope of his inquiry and builds upon the
technical or scholarly use of concepts, moving beyond the confines of
intellectual and academic discourse.9 In fact, what Asad advocates as an
anthropological perspective involves precisely the adoption of a broader
comparative view, in which one tries to see a particular concept (or a
particular event) as the articulation of a number of organizing categories
typical of a particular (in this case political) culture.10 More than a matter of
mere perspective is at stake, however. Anthropology, so the argument goes,
concerns itself with the comparative understanding of concepts as polemical
interventions, as acts and operations, parts of an orientation, of a way of
being.11 Another way to say this is to recall that concepts, for Asad, are
always part of an economy ! a political economy and an economy of signs !
within a wider field of divisions and distributions. Concepts inevitably play a
part in a particular, active, social life where psychological inside and
behavioral outside are equally (though in different ways) signified by
linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour that is publicly accessible.12 Concepts, in other words, have (and they sustain) a grammar, in Wittgensteins
sense.13 This is how, for example, in On Suicide Bombing ! the published
version of the 2006 Wellek lectures he gave at the University of California,
Irvine ! Asad looks at the concept of terrorism (hardly a random example,
of course, or a random concept, and one that will accompany, perhaps
silently govern, our entire discussion). There, he considers the grammar of
Gil Anidjar
10 Asad, Trying to
Understand French
Secularism
(henceforth
abbreviated as TUFS)
in de Vries and
Sullivan (2006: 497);
and consider an
earlier and
proximate
formulation, on the
theoretical choice
and treatment of
what social
anthropology
objectified, to the
effect that any object
which is
subordinated and
manipulated is partly
the product of a
power relationship,
and to ignore this
fact is to
miscomprehend the
nature of that object
(Asad 1973: 7!18).
Religion, needless
to say, is at once
concept and
practice as well as a
modern historical
object in GR (1!2,
and see 167 as well).
11 I borrow these
last expressions from
TUFS (501); one
might recall the
history of science
here, and particulary
Ludwik Flecks
formulation of
concepts as bound to
the prevailing
thought style of a
period, and to its
operative sociocogitative forces
(Fleck 1979: 2, 23).
371
........................
this concept, conducting an examination of what the discourse of terror !

and the perpetration of terror ! does in the world of power (26). He shows
how the concept (and its derivatives, opposite and apposite) is articulated;
how it functions comparatively within a larger conceptual and social field,
within a particular political culture, and beyond. Indeed, terrorism is a
revealing instance of the comparative dimension of concepts because it is, as
it were, internally distinguished from war. What Asad is after, therefore, is
the specific matter of a difference between the two. How is the difference
between terrorism and war defined in contemporary public discourse? (15).
What he will go on to show is that the difference operates within the
concept. The concept of terrorism ! but beyond it, I think, any concept, if
differently so at different times ! must therefore be seen as suffused and
traversed by the distinctions and dispositions within which it operates. In
this sense, a concept is an embodiment, a capacity and an act of power.
Concepts are performative, but depending on their currency, they are also, as
it were, inflicted. It is to that extent as well that a concept ! and today the
concept of religion in particular ! is polemical.
How are the internal divisions, the inscriptions of power, inscribed in the
concept of religion? And what is the nature (changing or not) of this power?
Insisting, in a Foucauldian fashion, that, in some contexts at least, power is
constructive, not repressive, Asad argues against those who claim that
hegemonic power necessarily suppresses difference in favour of unity or
that power always abhors ambiguity (GR 17). One should recognize
instead that in order to secure its unity ! to make its own history ! dominant
power has worked best through differentiating and classifying practices
(17). Regardless of its success or failure, then, the kind of power that
demands our attention here (dominant power) functions by producing
asymmetric divisions (and Asads concern with asymmetry and with
inequalities is nothing if not consistent). First among unequals in this
differential field, then, the power he writes about is to be conceived as a
figure of unity, not because it is not differentially constituted, nor because it
occludes difference, but rather because of its peculiarity as that which
constructs and redefines itself as a project. This construction and redefinition involves more than an accumulative narrative about the past. It is also
the continuous calculation of its own future, the projection of an integral
unity. This power, in other words, must be understood as a teleology which
may succeed or fail in actually producing internal unity but manages
nonetheless to constitute a singular collective identity [that] defines itself in
terms of a unique historicity in contrast to all others, a historicity that shifts
from place to place . . . until it embraces the world (18!19). But the West
(for it is the West that Asad is describing here) does include within itself its
past as an organic continuity (18). For this and other reasons, it is not
merely one manifestation of a general pattern open to universalization, nor
i n t e r v e n t i o n s ! 11 :3
.........................
12 Asad, Reading a
Modern Classic: W.
C. Smiths The
Meaning and End of
Religion
(henceforth
abbreviated as RMC)
in de Vries and
Weber (2001: 139).
13 I would also
point to the relevance
of Paul de Man here,
whose discussion of
the relation between
grammar and
rhetoric seems to me
quite pertinent to
Asads own
deployment of the
notion of grammar
(see de Man 1979:
esp. 3!19). Although
he has read de Man,
Asad more readily
refers to
Wittgenstein; see, for
example, RMC (133,
139), and Asad,
Formations of the
Secular (henceforth
abbreviated as FS)
(25).
372
one collective identity among others. On the contrary, part of the asymmetry
to which we must attend is that the West is comparatively singular. It is
defined by the particular project around which it has articulated itself,
making itself ! rightly or wrongly ! into the agent, the maker of its own
history. Indeed, in a crucial sense it is that project . . . that articulates our
concept of human beings making history (18). This particular consciousness, this concept of agency, is a defining feature of the West but not
necessarily because its effects (the history it has made or, simply, that it has
been) correspond to its intentions. Rather, the concepts and practices ! the
structures of possible actions ! thereby deployed have participated in
creating an overarching division that intersects with others, functioning
through them, and that always separates the West from the rest. In one
particular rendering, the West defines itself, in opposition to all non-western
cultures, by its modern historicity, that is, by its novel conception of
historicity (18).
It is a well-known truism by now that this contrastive sense of the
modern fashioned the West as the unique and privileged site of progress. It
relegated not only non-Europeans to the exotic (or doomed) regions of the
premodern, produced flawed standards of measurement (that is, it established measurement as the standard), but also recast Europes own past (and
note that this past remains its own past) into a lesser and less valued version
of itself (GR 20). The West, in other words, inflicted its asymmetric divisions
upon itself as well. Accelerating forward into an open future, the West, as
(self-conceived) agent, made (and makes ! or thinks it makes) history by way
of the concept of agency, one in which the agent must create the future,
remake itself, and help others to do so, where the criteria of successful
remaking are seen to be universal (19), if not always actual. The unity of the
West is the (teleological) result of a series of self-dividing concepts and
practices. Asserting the continuity of its own history, the West produced a
concept of history that divided it from its past, making itself distinct from,
well, itself as another. In its conception of itself, the West is not (and no
longer) what it was. It is only what it has become. More precisely,
accelerating forward into an open future, the West is only what it will
become. That is why, as Asad underscores, it must be understood as a
teleology (17).
Here as elsewhere, difference is everywhere, of course. But instead of
beginning with the axiom that difference is always subordinate to sameness,
that sameness is constituted through or by way of difference, sometimes to
the point that difference eradicates identity (the West doesnt exist). Asad
asks what are the arguments for saying that this difference . . . is relevant
here? (2006b: 519). It is indeed a specific set of differences and distinctions
(and among them the difference religion makes) that enables the West to
claim ! to self-proclaim ! its own uniqueness, adjudicating on the value of
Gil Anidjar
14 Asad quotes from

Mary Douglass
Purity and Danger:
The right basis for
comparison is to
insist on the unity of
human experience
and at the same time
to insist on its
variety, on the
differences that make
comparison worth
while. The only way
to do this is to
recognize the nature
of historical progress
and the nature of
primitive and of
modern society.
Progress means
differentiation. Thus
primitive means
undifferentiated;
modern means
differentiated.
Advance in
technology involves
differentiation in
every sphere, in
techniques and
materials, in
productive and
political roles . . .
Differentiation in
thought patterns goes
along with
differentiated social
conditions (quoted
in GR 22n21). It
should be clear that
Asad advocates the
use of more
differentiated
concepts, that would
not reinscribe grand
distinctions (past/
present, primitive/
modern, etc.), but
precisely interrogate
their very
distribution across
the hierarchical
differential of power,
that is, externally
and internally, and
373
........................
others by way of internal categories. That is not to say that this is all that is
involved in the distinctiveness of the West. Rather, the Wests uniqueness,
which prominently includes a self-proclamation as well as a self-definition, is
part of an orientation, of a way of being. And comparison, as a conceptual,
cross-cultural and historical practice, is an essential moment in this
orientation, as Mary Douglas recognizes, one that ultimately makes
difference itself the difference that counts. Everything is as if a particular
difference were conceived as difference itself, as the difference that matters in
governing the distinction between the West and the rest.14 Others may refer
here to metaphysics (without being accused of Occidentalism), but such a
peculiar orientation is at work in different regions or fields, operating in and
through concepts and practices (such as history, modernity, comparative
studies, within diverse disciplines and discursive fields and, of course, within
popular culture, but also economy, law, technology and, let us not forget,
weapons of mass destruction), which can be studied and read ! if not
necessarily interpreted ! as divided because they are practices of internal and
external divisions, because they activate or reiterate a hierarchical differential of power. And so too religion ! the very concept.
Asad begins by identifying the way in which the concept of religion makes
an object analytically identifiable, distinct from politics, law, and science
among other things or realms. Religion may not have an essence, we can
concede, but the concept does invite us to define religion (like any essence)
as a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon (GR 28). It also invites
us to separate it conceptually from the domain of power (GR 29) and from
other domains as well. Now, to argue over the definition of religion ! to be
divided over it ! is obviously one way of buttressing the concept, although
that is probably not the most important reinforcement the concept needs to
produce a wide array of effects. But the scholar (or the public, for that
matter) is hardly alone. And religion is not simply of his own making. In fact,
when it comes to adjudicating on the question of religion (its being rule or
belief, practice or doctrine, early or late, western or non-western, and so
forth), the scholar is hardly confronted with an arbitrary collection of
elements and processes that he (or we, or they) happen to call religion.
Rather, the entire phenomenon is to be seen in large measure in the context
of Christian attempts to achieve a coherence of doctrines and practices, rules
and regulations (GR 29). Religion, in other words, is the result of a tradition
and of a name, which Christianity gave itself, part of a style of thought,
which it elaborated over centuries in order to achieve some degree of unity !
much like the West was described as doing earlier. It is not so much that the
concept makes the object, but rather that the concept is part of the object !
here Christianity or religion ! and participates in determining its potential
boundaries. Rules and law; governed, recurrent or ritualized behaviour;
faith, beliefs and opinions; cosmology and anthropology; the division of
i n t e r v e n t i o n s ! 11 :3
.........................
indeed, questioning
the very boundary
between inside and
outside.
374
being into distinct or indistinct regions, and any number of other concepts,
practices and things ! all these may or may not exist universally. But their
gathering (or exclusion) under a particular concept (such as religion ! even
if there are others) is an essential intervention, one that incidentally has not
occurred universally and that also changed over the course of the centuries.
And yes, of course one should try to talk about disparate things in relation
to one another, but what exactly is the purpose of constructing a series
whose items can all too easily be recognized by cultivated westerners as
instances of the phenomenon of religion (GR 53n34)? This question already
signals toward the reasons why it is necessary to recall that religion is a
polemical concept. The concept partakes of an identification and of a
division ! it enacts and embodies a division that, internal to itself and
external as well in its effects, produces at once difference and identity:
between religion and non-religion, between a religious world and a nonreligious one, between humankind and itself, if from a particular perspective
(itself a divided one, of course). Like the concept of race (and strikingly more
resilient), and like its suggested successors (culture or, more recently,
political theology or the theologico-political, quickly and deftly universalized), the concept of religion does not therefore define an originary division
of the world (between the white race and the other races, or between the
sacred and the profane, religion and politics), it rather produces an ensemble
of distinctions that, with varying degrees of force and effectivity, divide and
reshuffle the larger field of knowledge and power (life, or being, or the
world or whatever) into analytically identifiable entities that are not
necessarily translatable ! but that can be inflicted and enforced. One knows,
for instance, the difficulties that were created by requests for religious
identification on census forms in colonial regimes, or the effect of recasting
complex and changing systems of laws into religious customs. Whereas the
division between, say, sacred and profane may define ! where pertinent ! the
entire field of experience (in which the profane is constituted by and out of
the sacred), religion is instead distinguished after a different fashion from the
secular as a distinct sphere (from which the secular is then deemed
independent and autonomous). Although one division may translate
another, it does not cover, nor does it divide and distribute, the same field
of experience. Hence, and for a long time, religion functioned the way
history came to function: there were those who had it, and those who did
not (today, democracy may come to mind as a pertinent parallel). There
were those who had religion ! these were the Christians, in case you were
wondering ! and those who did not (GR 20n15, 40n24). Sometimes, of
course, a gesture of magnanimous universality went so far as to grant some
the privilege (of religion, of culture, of citizenship, and so forth), or at least
to debate the matter by importing and extending ! indeed, inflicting ! the
conceptual apparatus in which religion is inscribed.
Gil Anidjar
375
........................
It is also well known, however (and Asad reminds those of us who may
have forgotten), that the word religion itself has a contested and changing
history. Discussions remain largely open regarding the meaning (or meanings) of the original Latin word religio and its field of application. In Asads
rendering, the term and its cognates are shown to have expanded
quantitatively, moving from a restricted reference to the community of
those living in monastic communities, later to include an internal
distinction of the community, its institutions and practices, between religious
and secular (GR 39n22). Other narratives can and have been offered for
these changes, but it is clear that the term functioned within European
languages across the transformations and appropriations of Latin ! problems
of translation (what Asad calls cultural translation across the inequality of
languages: GR 171!99) have been and remain massive, and they involved
internal translations as well. There is no doubt that with the conquest of the
Americas, and in the aftermath of the Reformation, the term was
disseminated in an exponential manner ! some will say that the change
was quantitative, others qualitative ! until there emerged, in the seventeenth
century, philosophically established as well as popular conceptions of
natural religion (GR 40). Whatever narrative is adopted, the dominant
understanding of religion, in which, as Asad shows, Clifford Geertz
famously participates, has, at any rate, a specific Christian history. From
being a concrete set of practical rules attached to specific processes of power
and knowledge, religion has come to be abstracted and universalized (GR
42).
And yet, this last sentence testifies to the magnitude of the problem one
encounters in attempting to engage the grammar of a concept while being
inscribed within its history; the difficulty one may have, in other words, in
extirpating oneself from the concept of religion, or minimally in refraining
from reproducing or occluding its inherent tensions, divisions and usages.
This is true no matter what definition one embraces (assuming, of course,
that it is a matter of mere choice, an assumption that Asad is significantly
reluctant to make, when he declines the demand that he offer a new
definition of religion: GR 54). One may further recognize this difficulty
when considering the remark made by Asad in the early publication I have
already mentioned. There, Asad himself was commenting on the use of
concepts within the social sciences, arguing against the holding of a number
of ideas, which I suggest he might still find objectionable today. And
particularly so in this context.
It seems to me that the problem of the definition of social phenomena as
envisaged by Dr Gough involves the holding of a number of ideas which appear to
support each other but are in fact expressions of the mistaken view that the social
world consists of a number of free-floating basic entities called institutions which
i n t e r v e n t i o n s ! 11 :3
.........................
376
exist prior to and are independent of any conceptual apparatus that we bring to
bear on their study. It is in the light of this view that the following ideas, either
stated explicitly or implied in Dr Goughs article, seem so self-evident: that the
collection of social facts and their labelling precede comparison or explanation or
both, that a definition is a classificatory device and not an aim of research, that the
wider the definition the better, and that cross-cultural survey involves a
comparison of similar objects. (Asad 1960)
In other words, historians (and anthropologists), beware. Certainly, things

may appear less severe with religion (as opposed to marriage and other
such institutions which is what Dr Gough was writing about). But note that
in the sentence I quoted earlier (religion has come to be abstracted and
universalized), religion emerges as the subject that existed, as it were,
before, and independently of, its conceptualization (a conceptualization that
was not explicitly elaborated throughout the periods discussed, and not only
from scholars and theologians who did or did not use the term in any
immediately translatable sense, but also from the general, popular discourse,
of which we know admittedly little). In fact, everything is as if, having
undergone a transformation, religion ! for again it would be religion that
remains the subject of the transformation; still analytically identifiable, still
the same, if transformed religion ! had come to be abstracted and
universalized. Rather than indicating the novelty of a changed configuration, the concept of religion, internally divided, thus functions across
historical and linguistic divides, as if its usage had been continuous; as if
its referent, in whole or in part, went unchanged; as if it remained identical
enough with itself to continue being used (and retrospectively so). More
importantly, although the evidence supporting its analytical identification,
nay, the very use of the term, in other historical periods and other noncognate languages may be fraught with difficulty, the concept remains not
only valid but useful ! better yet, it remains universal. So it is assumed, in
spite of Asads demonstrations, that there was religion in the Middle Ages
(or for that matter, in Ancient Greece and in pre-colonial America), and
there is religion now, albeit transformed, reduced, privatized and what not.
One may of course argue that the concept (not just the word) remains useful,
even necessary, precisely because of this internal division; because the
concept of religion is internally diversified; because its essential (rather than
essentializing) nature has now been historicized, placed under interrogation;
and because it has been shown as always divided against itself. Indeed, the
concept of religion has no doubt gained additional currency thanks to its
non-essentializing nature. Again though, by Asads rigorous account, what
was transformed was not religion. Rather, religion ! the concept (in the full
sense of that term we have been exploring) ! emerged out of a different
configuration, one in which being was hardly distributed between the
Gil Anidjar
15 The word religio

was used by Latin
and Christian
writers, of course,
but any Saussurean
minded (not to
mention historically
minded) reader
would have to ask
about the translation
necessary to equate,
or even compare,
words and concepts,
across space or time,
within distinct
languages, systems of
meaning, and indeed,
grammar. At the
same time, the
hierarchical
differential of power
cannot be abstracted
(or rather, it can, but
the question
becomes: for what
purpose? And with
what effects?).
Interestingly enough,
when it comes to
religion, continuity
trumps the otherwise
massive assertion of
a historical break as
modernity.
377
........................
religious and the secular. Significant or not, this distributive change is not
independent of its conceptualization, historical or other. That is why the
question must be recurrently asked: How does power create religion? (GR
45). And the answer is that it does so minimally by making the term
religion a compulsive concept.
From Genealogies of Religion and in other publications since, the term
remains hitherto unavoidable. For example, while otherwise insisting on the
construction of religion as a new historical object (207), Asad writes of the
period preceding this construction, namely, the Middle Ages, and in it of the
religious history of penance (97), of the questionable retreat from religious
forces (122) and of religious discourses (125) across a variety of contexts
as well as of the connections between religious ideology and political power
(135). Asad describes the overall aim of [the] monastic project as intending
not to repress secular experiences of freedom but to form religious desires
out of them (165) and expands on how the constitution of the modern state
required the forcible redefinition of religion as belief (205). In another
instance, Asad refers to the authorizing process by which religion is
defined (note the scare quotes around the term), and immediately goes on to
detail the manner in which authorizing discourses . . . systematically
redefined religious spaces . . . In the Middle Ages, such discourses ranged
over an enormous domain, defining and creating religion (37). It is not just
that the scare quotes have dropped. The question is whether the medieval
spaces here discussed can be said to have been religious in a sense that
would not require extensive commentaries on the inadequacy or possible
misunderstandings of the term. Furthermore, the very notion of an
enormous domain ! which after all could only be called religious by way
of a massive anachronism ! belies the division that is otherwise operative,
implicitly or explicitly, in the concept of religion that Asad uniquely traces.
For Asad amply makes clear, once again, that medieval concerns opposed the
Christian to the pagan (and to a few others, of course) ! the Christian and
not the religious (39n22). The Christian Fathers and the medieval church
were less concerned with religion, if at all; they were rather forming and
reforming Christian dispositions (131), rarely religious ones.15 They
sought, in other words, to make good Christians ! well, at least that is
what they claimed. Later on, and in a similar manner, it was not an abstract
theology which tended to obscure the occurrence of events (utterances,
practices, dispositions) and the authorizing processes that give those events
meaning and embody that meaning in concrete institutions (43). It was
rather Christian theology, an important moment in the singularity of
Christianity in its evolutions. And it was again Christianity, rather than
religion, which had undergone a wider change in the modern landscape of
power and knowledge. That change included a new kind of state, a new kind
of science, and a new kind of legal and moral subject (43) ! well, at least
i n t e r v e n t i o n s ! 11 :3
.........................
16 See, for example,
GR (212, 214!15),
where the Arabic
word dn is
repeatedly translated
as religion without
additional
commentary except
for a postponed
remark that the word
is, in fact, invariably
translated as religion
(219); later fiqh,
usually translated as
jurisprudence, will
be offered as an
equivalent for
knowledge of the
principles by which
religion regulates life
(226).
17 See FS 36n41,
where the issue of
translation from
Arabic is brought up
again.
18 I borrow this
formulation from FS
69.
19 Asad, The
Trouble of Thinking:
An Interview with
Talal Asad
(henceforth
abbreviated as TT) in
Scott and Hirschkind
(2006: 273); the
interview was
conducted by David
Scott.
378
that is again what is claimed. Everything, at any rate, is as if by invoking the

concept of religion in multiple ways, by recasting it across space and time,16
one was remapping and rearticulating ! perhaps even obscuring ! the
divisions that constitute it and of which it partakes, most extensively,
perhaps, in relation to the concept of the secular.17 Everything is as if
religion were, once again, a translation ! of Christianity and in Christianity.
Can this translation be avoided? Should it be? What purposes, essential or
not, does it serve in spite of its paucity? This articulates one of the reasons
why it is undoubtedly the case that the concept of religion remains a
polemical concept. There are other reasons.
Let me recall, with Asad, that the polemical nature of the concept of
religion has little to do with the fact that it finds its roots and origins in
Christian history. Indeed, although history (and historical difference, as we
have seen) has much to do with it, as does Christianity, the concept of
religion is polemical as it were independently of its sources. At any rate, the
matter exceeds historical and chronological precedence, as it exceeds a
definitional approach (as if a proper definition could resolve the difficulties
involved in the deployment and dissemination of such a concept). Nor is it
inevitably the case that the concept of religion has political implications that
are necessarily or morally objectionable (although it should be pointed out
that this particularly strenuous opposition to moralizing criticism would be
an important thread ! the operations and vicissitudes of a concept of
morality ! to follow in Asads work. I regret not being able to do so here).
Recall, rather, that it is not the abstract logical status of concepts that is
relevant here, but the way in which a specific political (or religious) discourse
that employs them seems to mobilize or direct the behaviour of people within
given situations (GR 185). But we have also seen that concepts are not
simply to be seen as tools that would enable one to grasp, or act upon, the
world as if from some exterior position. Concepts are polemical. This means
that they are not merely causes or means for action, they are themselves
kinds of action.18 They are structures of possible actions (which is why they
can provide opportunities to criticize the fact that one doesnt ask how
capabilities produce modes of significant being and how capabilities are
themselves shaped and created. In other words, because one sees power from
this old external point of view . . . one fails to see it as the development of a
certain potentiality).19 They neither precede nor simply follow the structure
of things, as if endowed with a lesser level of existence or facticity. Rather,
they are themselves relationships of power. In and within them, as it were,
power must be thought not simply as an external force but as an internal
relationship (TT 271).
Somewhat cursorily, I tried earlier to show that the notion of modernity
(which sustains the identification of the West) ! the historical break
whereby historical difference itself became, is claimed to have become,
Gil Anidjar
379
........................
determining ! is part of the way the modern is polemically distinguished

from the religious, among others. I learned this from Asad himself, of
course. For through the polemical dimension of that distinction which
traverses and constitutes it ! in the enduring present, and not simply at some
distant point of origin ! the concept of religion functions ever more
persistently. Indeed, in order to present modernity (or the West) as a
constitutive object of our comparative inquiry, our anthropology, one should
highlight, if paradoxically, the concealing role played by the concept of
religion, which seems to identify and govern no more than a limited
(shrinking or expanding) realm, from which modernity would be unquestionably divided. Hence, much as liberal thought separates the idea of
violence from the idea of politics (OSB 3), it associates religion and
violence. Liberal thought deploys the concept of religion in order to
represent and enact, indeed, enforce a complex apparatus that distinguishes
modernity from religion, and politics from violence. In order to engage this
particular problem in more detail, I now want to argue that among the most
compelling demonstrations of the polemical dimension of the concept of
religion found in Asads work, there is his book, On Suicide Bombing.
There, Asad ostensibly seeks to answer the question of why is the term
terrorism so prominent today when talking about certain kinds of
contemporary violence? (OSB 8). The association of religion with violence
will confirm that modernity is a constitutive moment in the operations of the
concept of religion as a polemical concept. It should also bring us one step
closer to the idea of an anthropology of Christianity.
In On Suicide Bombing Asad underscores the fact that, since 9/11 at least,
religion (and not only terrorism) became prominent. It became
a favourite explanation for what had happened, and the stream of articles and
television programmes grew, claiming to lay bare the Islamic roots of terrorism.
The religious ideology behind terrorism that virtually everyone would come to hear
about was jihad, described by university professors and journalists as the Islamic
concept of holy war against the infidel. (OSB 9)
Underlying this description and indirectly governing Asads inquiry is the

question: Why is this the case? Why has religion become a favourite
explanation in the West? We have seen this resurgence of the concept of
religion to be at work in a number of instances by now, but it is worth
recalling that here too the discourse of terrorism is dependent on a
constructed object (not an imaginary object) about which information can
be collected (OSB 27). This object, Asad mentions a few times, is not only
grasped by way of the concept of terrorism, or by the use of (or search after)
motives. Terrorism ! and most prominently, of course, suicide bombing !
is also ascribed to Islamic discourse because of [the individuals] recorded
i n t e r v e n t i o n s ! 11 :3
.........................
20 Beginning with
his contribution to
Anthropology and
the Colonial
Encounter, and
through a number of
publications, Asad
has conducted a
constant and
substantial debate
with Orientalism in
its many disciplinary
guises, a debate
which is echoed here
as well (see Asad
1973, as well as the
rejoinder to Clement
Dodd (Asad 1980);
and all the way to
GR, of course). For a
related discussion of
Edward Said and the
question of religion,
in terms indebted to
Asad, see Anidjar
(2006: 52!77).
21 I quote from
what I believe is the
same typescript used
by Asad, which was
kindly shared with
me by Amnon RazKrakotzkin (May
Jayyusi, Subjectivity
and Public Witness:
An Analysis of
Islamic Militance in
Palestine,
unpublished
typescript, 9).
380
proclamation before the operation, which typically uses a religious

vocabulary ! thus the highly ritualized proclamation is taken to correspond
to his real motives (OSB 42; emphasis added). Now, the invocation of
religion, religious ideology or religious vocabulary, is essential here.
Minimally, it is a part of ! it dominates ! what qualifies as a favourite
explanation, which virtually everyone would come to hear about. It is
hardly innocent, as Asad points out, or coincidental. Rather, it corresponds
to a number of explanatory schemes, multiple deployments of the concept of
religion, which is thereby seized and traversed by its association with
terrorism. It is woven into the long history of Orientalism and its dynamic
mutations, of which religion is an essential moment.20 So it is, for instance,
that scholars like us often invoke the religious concept of sacrifice and gift
as a way of explaining suicide operations (OSB 42). Looking for motives, in
this case, clearly allows us to speak of the religious (OSB 43). Indeed, at
this point, it must be noted that Asad does not oppose the use of the term
religion or religious. He merely expresses the wish for some precision in
the use of the concept. If one is to talk about religious subjectivities, one
must work through the concepts the people concerned actually use (OSB
44). Subsequently, however, Asad takes a sterner distance from this
particular stance when he commends alternative approaches that do not
begin by trying to explain [suicide bombing as] a religious act (OSB 46). He
even expresses a (perhaps underserved) measure of disapproval over the fact
that one critic draws on the religious idea of sacrifice (OSB 48), an idea that
is not, he insists, indigenous to the Islamic tradition (OSB 49, 51).
(Let me open a parenthesis to elaborate on this last point. I write that
Asads disapproval is perhaps undeserved because it is not entirely clear to
me why he is dissatisfied with May Jayyusis line of argumentation. Why say,
for example, that Jayyusi concedes too much to current fashions in
explaining suicide operations as a perverse form of national politics (OSB
50)? And why perverse? Jayyusi, it seems to me, cogently argues that the
revival of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza is part of a rearticulation of
Islam as a political project.21 She describes a call for justice (haq) and a
fashioning of subjectivity by means of what can only be called Islamic
technologies of the self through prayer, fasting and study circles (10),
considering as well the rhetoric (address, form and content) of the testaments
left behind and the poetry it occasioned. She produces, in other words, a
grammar of Islamic activism in Palestine, looking at the part it plays in a
particular active, social [and political] life where psychological inside and
behavioural outside are equally (though in different ways) signified by
linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour that is publicly accessible (RMC
139). Jayyusi performs, in other words, the beginnings of an anthropology
of Islam. Indeed, in her account of a certain orthodoxy, she would agree
with Asad that orthodoxy is not a mere body of opinion but a distinctive
Gil Anidjar
381
........................
relationship ! a relationship of power. And with Asad, she would insist ! she
does, I think, insist ! on something like the following.
Wherever Muslims have the power to regulate, uphold, require or adjust correct
practices, and to condemn, exclude, undermine or replace incorrect ones, there is
the domain of orthodoxy. The way these powers are exercised, the conditions that
make them possible (social, political, economic, etc.), and the resistances they
encounter (from Muslims and non-Muslims) are equally the concern of an
anthropology of Islam, regardless of whether its direct object of research is in
the city or in the countryside, in the present or in the past. Argument and conflict
over the form and significance of practices are therefore a natural part of any
Islamic tradition (IAI 15!16).
22 Religion has
long been seen as a
source of violence,
and (for ideological
reasons) [why only
ideological?] Islam
has been represented
in the modern West
as peculiarly so
(undisciplined,
arbitrary, singularly
oppressive) (FS 9).
Additionally, by considering the total structure, the differential regime

within which suicide bombing becomes operative, Jayyusi skillfully questions the division between religion and politics, which Roxanne Euben, for
instance, seems to leave untouched (It is neither the religious beliefs nor the
military techniques of the mujahidin that finally interest Euben but the
stimulus their political action afford for a reflection: OSB 58). Nor is it clear
that Jayyusi was ever concerned with religious beliefs, if there are any to
speak of or to recognize. It is as if Asad reproaches Jayyusi with invoking
religion where religion does not apply, as if she too was inflicting the
concept of religion. It is true of course that what Asad himself is mainly after
in On Suicide Bombing is a conceptual redistribution of the distinction
between politics and violence, not between politics and religion. But Asad
has already explained to us that violence covertly functions as an
abbreviation of religious violence throughout, that is, as a substitute for
religion.22 I will return to some of these issues below, but for now, I close
my parentheses.
The concept of religion (and its cognates) does not feature many more
times in On Suicide Bombing, although I do not think that it would be
forcing the text to argue that it still governs much of the discussion,
qualitatively (if not quantitatively), and even if covertly. I have already made
reference to the role it plays in representations of violence in this context. But
one has to note again that Asads argument is explicitly directed at all those
who would deploy the concept of religion in order to inscribe or reinscribe a
hierarchy of differences, a hierarchy, if truth be told, of intolerable
differences (whether between civilizations or between temporal belongings,
violence vs. non-violence, modern vs. premodern, and so forth). Indeed,
when social difference is seen as backwardness and backwardness as a
source of danger to civilized society, self-defence calls for a project of
reordering the world in which the rules of civilized warfare cannot be
allowed to stand in the way (62). In the current context, what Asad calls
i n t e r v e n t i o n s ! 11 :3
.........................
23 See, for example,

Redeeming the
Human Through
Human Rights in FS
127!58.
24 Asad had
announced this
reversal from the
outset, asking how is
the image of the
suicide bomber,
bringing death to
himself and others,
addressed by
Christians and postChristians? (OSB 1),
as well as in the
assertion that it is
not sensible, in my
view, to talk about
the overriding need
for reform in socalled Islamic
civilization without
at the same time
reappraising the
attitudes,
institutions, and
policies in western
countries (14).
Another brilliant
instance of such
reversal (a good
critique is always an
internal critique: GR
189) can be found in
Asads treatment of
the Rushdie affair
in GR (239!306).
Finally, one should
consider the striking
reversal that occurs
on the cover
photograph of On
Suicide Bombing.
But who was it, Asad
seems to ask, that
had turned heaven
and earth upside
down? Who was it
that brought down
the heavens onto
earth?
382
social difference is in fact repeatedly articulated, as he demonstrates,

through religious difference (which is also the difference that violence
makes). Religious difference ! the internal and external divisions of the
concept of religion at its most polemical ! carries a heavy share of the weight
for the politics of human rights as well as the argument for the spread of
democracy (or civilization), the abolition of suffering and the otherwise
laudable pursuit of an end to violence everywhere.23
But one of the most striking ways in which Asad demonstrates the
sovereignty of the concept of religion (as well as its polemical dimension) is
when, in a signature move, he spectacularly turns the tables on those who
deploy it.24 Recall that those who invoke religion within an explanatory
frame do so, first of all, because this is what virtually everyone would
come to hear about. Religion, that is, is the reigning word of the day, the
order of the day ! at least in some extended and hegemonic, if also local
and peculiar, perspective. As for those who use the term in a more
scholarly or scientific manner, Asad shows, they draw too often and too
unreflectively on western (i.e. Christian) traditions and modes of understanding, which should be more carefully considered. This is where,
approaching his conclusion, Asad makes his intervention, which reveals
the polemical force of the concept of religion as it is deployed in the
current configuration. For, once again, it is not the abstract logical status
of concepts that is relevant here, but the way in which a specific political
(or religious) discourse that employs them seems to mobilize or direct the
behaviour of people within given situations (GR 185). That is why,
strategically deflecting the weight of the attack (for it is an attack they are
conducting, and carpet bombing is following), Asad points out that those
who invoke the concept of religion to account for the acts of others are
themselves, in fact, partaking of religion:
In this book, I have tried to think about the reasons that make this image [of the
suicide bomber] so compelling. I have come to the conclusion that some of these
reasons are religious, but not religious in the sense that western commentators take
this to mean . . . When I refer here to religious reasons, I have in mind the complex
genealogy that connects contemporary sensibilities about organized collective
killing and the value of humanity with the Christian culture of death and love, a
genealogy that I think needs to be properly explored. (OSB 95)
By religious reasons Asad seems to mean Christian ones, going so far as

invoking in this context the very same, charged expression ! culture of
death ! that is so often launched at Islam, that is, in discussions of that
religion that Islam would be. Religious here functions therefore as a
cipher for comparative analysis of Christianity and Islam (the object of the
quasi-totality of Asads work, of course). More specifically here, Asad is
Gil Anidjar
383
........................
arguing that the emotional and hermeneutical energies that have been
invested in terrorism in general, and in the image of the suicide bomber in
particular, find their origins in Christianity and in its peculiar, and
enduring, relation to death. In this context, then, religion (religious
reasons) would name Christianity. It is not the first time we encounter
this substitution, of course, nor is it the first time that it marks a
translation and/or a historical passage. Once again, at any rate, Christianity is religion and religion is Christianity. Is this, in fact, the case? Is this
the claim Asad makes?
It is not. Nor perhaps could it be. Asad immediately clarifies: The modern
secular world retains a contradictory view of life and death, although that view
is not a simple replay of the Christian paradox. The genealogy I have referred
to is not a line of patriarchal descent (A begat B who begat C); it is a shifting
pattern of convergence and dispersal of contingent elements (OSB 95). What
is striking about this formulation is not only that it recalls Asads earlier
description of the operations of concepts, namely, that they function so that it
is always a question of the arrangement and rearrangement of the same
ideological elements which constitutes the unity of [an] object (1975: 258).
No, what is striking, I think, is the following accumulation of not so marginal
details and the conclusion to which it leads. First, Asad invokes the peculiarly
European endeavour that consisted, among other things, in singularly
promoting the ideology of a unified Christendom at war with a unified Islam
(9). Second, he recalls that the West (which does define itself as the rightful if
troubled inheritor of that same and different, unified and unifying Christendom, and of the Christian tradition) has extended itself largely through the
activities of financial institutions internal to todays western democracy (14).
He then points out that it was European Christians who perpetrated the
genocide against the Jews ! a justified, but highly contested, designation (24).
Later, he goes on to argue that for critics to take suicide bombing as sacrifice is
to load it with a significance that is derived from a Christian and postChristian tradition (51). Fifth, he elaborates at some length on the claim that
the horror experienced in the West at suicide bombing may have some
connection with the Judeo-Christian tradition (65), and particularly with the
Crucifixion (68, 73) ! the most famous suicide in Judeo-Christian history, as
Asad calls it (84), and perhaps the most compelling representation of the truth
of violence (86). Finally, he argues that this singular suicide incidentally
inscribed persistent notions of sacrifice into the heart of modern liberalism
(whereby the death of the self ! and, preferably, of the other ! provides the
means and model for redemption, a notion at work in the argument that some
humans have to be treated violently in order that humanity can be redeemed
(63). Indeed, in Christian civilization [sic!], the gift of life for humanity is
possible only through a suicidal death; redemption is dependent on cruelty or
at least on the sin of disregarding human life: OSB 86). Now, having said and
i n t e r v e n t i o n s ! 11 :3
.........................
25 Elsewhere as
well, Asad wants to
caution that
liberalisms secular
myth should not be
confused with the
redemptive myth of
Christianity, despite
a resemblance
between them (FS
26, and see also 61!
2). Have we
accounted for the
confusion, then? Or
for the resemblance?
And who is at risk if
such caution is not
exercised?
384
done all this, Asad strikingly reiterates what he had asserted at the beginning of
On Suicide Bombing, namely, that I do not mean . . . that todays modern
world is, as many hold, simply an unfolding of Christianity (4).25 I quote
again the later formulation, which turns out to serve at once as premise and
conclusion: The modern secular world retains a contradictory view of life and
death, although that view is not a simple replay of Christian paradox. The
genealogy is not a line of patriarchal descent (95). Like the West and its
multifarious faces, Christianity must certainly not be conceived of as a simple
and unified entity. Through its transformations, it is neither simply an
unfolding, nor a simple replay of its past. Nonetheless, this does suggest ! or
rather, it adds to the argument ! that an understanding of Christianity has
something do with genealogies, none of which have to follow a straight line of
patriarchal descent.
We seem to be repeatedly brought back to the question: What is
Christianity? Neither a simple unfolding, nor a line of descent, Christianity
is at once much more, and in a way much less, than what the name
Christianity now evokes, the way in which it functions. Such was always
the case, as Asad shows so well. This internal division ! of name and thing,
and more ! no doubt prevents Christianity, in its effective history, from
becoming the explicit object or concept it otherwise seems to deserve. Will
there be ! can there be ! an anthropology of Christianity? And would it
enable further reflections on the concept of religion? Is Christianity a
religion? Has it ever been? Is the West Christian? Is that what many hold,
as Asad suggests (I do not mean by this that todays modern world is, as
many hold, simply an unfolding of Christianity: OSB 4)? Asad makes clear
that if Christianity names that which remains, if at all, religious in the West,
if Christianity is still a religion, it is not so in the sense that western
commentators take this to mean (95). But what is it that they mean? And
why? After all, when they speak about religion ! and they do speak of it, God
bless them ! in the context that Asad describes, and when they activate and
project Christian conceptions, however derivative these might be, they seem
to do so dominantly in order to refer to other religions. In a manner not
unsimilar to the idea of a war on terror, which has been uniquely
developed and expressed in a particular place, the concept of religion they
inflict is theirs to be deployed, politically, geopolitically. These scholars,
journalists and commentators invoke, in other words, a polemical concept.
They do so secularly, of course. After all, we live, as they themselves
repeatedly claim, in a modern secular world, no longer in a religious one,
God forbid, and certainly not a Christian one (no globalatinization, not
now!). Even the Pope, Benedict XVI, recently said so (something which did
not prevent ! indeed, something which may have enabled ! his joining forces
with secularized civilization on the subject of Islamic unreason; desperately looking for moderate Muslims). Still, even on the mode of
Gil Anidjar
26 Note another
reference in OSB to
the space of
violence, upon
which, Asad says, all
constitutional states
rest. He continues:
In a liberal
democracy, all
citizens and the
government that
represent them are
bound together by
mutual obligations,
and the actions of the
duly elected
government are the
actions of all its
citizens . . . There
may be criticism by
particular citizens of
the governments
actions . . . but until
these are conceded
constitutionally by
the government, all
citizens remain
bound to the space of
violence that its
representative
government inhabits
(OSB 29). One
understands why,
like the West and like
the modern state,
Christianity could
contain many faces
at home, while
presenting a unified
front abroad.
27 One may be
reminded of the
similar logic
operating in the
distinction between
social life and
documents in the
history of
anthropological
fieldwork. As Asad
convincingly writes,
there documents
are not regarded as
part of social life
itself but as
385
........................
denegation, there appear to linger Christian modes of understanding,

sensibilities or practices, however transformed, and even a Christian concept
of religion.
So then, when did Christianity (or at least the particular place from which
the stream of articles and television programmes grew, from which
university professors and journalists might otherwise be seen as speaking)
become ! alternatively, when did it stop being ! a religion? Or: when did it
become merely a religion? When did the West start (or stop) having a religion,
a religious ideology, religious laws and authorities, religious beliefs, opinions
and practices? And when did religion start (or stop) being modern? When did
the West, when did modernity, become something else entirely than what is
called religion? Recalling the difficulty of thinking the historical subject, the
historical substrate of the transformations of which we partake, it should
nonetheless be possible to ask otherwise, even if paradoxically: when did
Christianity start (or stop) being Christianity? When did it begin (or stop)
being itself? Did it ever? Asad has addressed these questions and given us the
means to pursue more elaborate answers for them. He has explained not only
when (much more than a simple historical question, of course: cf. GR 2!3),
but also touched on why, for what purposes and with what effects conceptual
apparatuses were put in place, that articulate these and other transformations.
He has interrogated the hierarchical differential of power which these
questions (and more pertinently, their answers) uphold, the divisions they
establish and sustain. He has mapped, in other words, the idea of a historical
space in which violence circulates (OSB 15).26 The concept of religion is a
polemical concept that constitutes and frames violence and the space of its
circulation. That space, marked by the transformation or advent of religion, is
also sustained by its evasive persistence (and persistent evasiveness), as we
have seen. Can the same be said about Christianity? Indeed, what Asad alerts
us to is the fact that in most discussions of Christianity, everything is as if, like
religion, Christianity were only a restricted part, a reduced and marginal
division, of a much larger space (even if considered within the limits of that
particular place) from which we ourselves are separated.27 As a religion
(which the West would no longer be nor have, being at the forefront of a
modern secular world), Christianity would be only one, small and well
contained, element or set of elements found within a much larger genealogy
(the latter emphatically not a list of biblical begats), one that needs to be
properly explored. Whether in this restricted sense or in a larger one,
Christianity is somehow distant, marginal and even under-explored. Christianity is like religion itself, yet it often goes unmentioned, concealed under
the universal term religion. As the place from which we speak, it is like the
Holy Land, perhaps, which also goes unmentioned in On Suicide Bombing.28
Like religion, as a religion, Christianity is the name of that from which we are
distant, separated, absent.
i n t e r v e n t i o n s ! 11 :3
.........................
(unreliable) evidence
of it ! not as elements
that enable or
prevent or subvert
social events, only as
(incomplete) traces
that record them
(GR 8n6). Asads
surprising point,
made later on and as
it were in passing
(while arguing about
the importance of
science and its
combined operations
with technology),
corresponds quite
precisely to his
description here: my
point is that science
and technology
together are basic to
the structure of
modern lives,
individual and
collective, and that
religion, in any but
the most vacuous
sense, is not (GR
49n33).
386
But then, implicit in all that we have seen, it could also be argued that
Christianity is a concept. Or is it not? Minimally, it is structured ! it
functions ! like a concept that arranges and rearranges elements, if a smaller
and more limited amount of elements (a shifting pattern of convergence and
dispersal of contingent elements: OSB 95) that emerge and withdraw from
pertinence. A restricted Christianity, as it were. And still, have we not seen
that the scholar is hardly confronted with an arbitrary collection of elements
and processes that he happens to call ! or rather not call ! religion or, for
that matter, Christianity (GR 29)? Have we not argued instead that the
entire phenomenon has to be seen in large measure in the context of
Christian attempts to achieve a coherence of doctrines and practices, rules
and regulations (29)? Is it not the case, then, that Christianity has itself
become a political category, a polemical concept, that serves either to
define a total normative structure in equilibrium, or to dissolve the concept
of a total structure altogether and replace it by others (Asad 1975: 259)?
How did it come to be so? What role did its restriction, indeed, its occlusion,
play toward the efficacy of this and other concepts? And what are the
others that replaced it? These are called by other names, names like the
West, perhaps, or modernity. And there are other others, of course, that
define a new (or allegedly new) total normative structure. There is even
religion. Be that as it may, it may very well be the case that we desperately
need an anthropology of Christianity.
From Restricted to General Christianity:

Anthropology Without Reserve
28 At this point, one
may consider that the
extraordinary
phenomenology of
horror conducted by
Asad in OSB would
have to account for
the response to and
investment in all
suicide bombings (I
turn now specifically
to the dissolution of
the human body and
the horror this
generates [OSB 76],
unless one explained
why no such
response has been
registered or publicly
expressed at the
Although the West contains many faces at home it presents a single face abroad.
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular
It is undoubtedly true that in various epochs and societies, the domains of

life are variously articulated, and each of them articulates endeavours that
are appropriate to it. How these articulations are constructed and policed,
and what happens when they are changed (forcibly or otherwise), are all
questions for anthropological inquiry (GR 167). What we have come to
confront, however, by way of the grammar of the concept of religion, is that
Christianity has yet to be recognized as a concept and to become the explicit
object of such anthropological inquiry. The editor and contributors to a
recent collection aptly titled The Anthropology of Christianity ! a gesture of
indubitable and conscious novelty ! rightly tell us as much, and they credit
Talal Asad, if not only him, for having moved the topic of Christianity to a
more central place again on the disciplinary agenda (Cannell 2006: 4).29
Gil Anidjar
Tamil Tigers [who
initiated the practice
of suicide bombing in
its current form]).
And if horror is not a
universal emotion
(Bataille was
horrified, of course,
but one needs to
look at the faces of
the onlookers and of
the executer in the
picture: they do not
seem to express
horror [OSB 82]), if,
as Asad shows, the
site of the response
has something to do
with Christianity (or
at least with the
Crucifixion), should
not the very site of
the Crucifixion, the
specific investment in
this site, be
considered as well?
Might one be
forgiven the
suggestion that a
Christian investment
in Jerusalem and in
its surrounding bears
some connection to
Asads deliberate
focus on the United
States and Israel in
their relation to
suicide bombing
(OSB 2)? It is
puzzling to note that
this connection is
neither mentioned
nor thematized in the
book.
29 My cursory
treatment of this
important anthology
is in no way a
reflection of its
worth in my eyes. I
do consider it a
significant
breakthrough and a
rich contribution to
387
........................
They are right, of course.30 Asads crucial anthropological forays into

medieval Christianity and beyond did lay the groundwork for an anthropology of Christianity, and his reflections on modernity are very much where
this anthropology takes place.31 And although one must admit that this is
not how Asad himself conceptualizes his work, the acknowledgement is
important. In Formations of the Secular, for example, Asad called for
an anthropology of secularism, to be distinguished from an anthropology
of religion (this last, perhaps pleonastic expression ! an anthropology
of religion ! Asad has not, I think, actively deployed) and suggests,
from the title onward (Christianity, Islam, Modernity) that it be
conceptually articulated within, or on the side of, an anthropology of
Christianity. Finally, in a contribution to a proximate question, Asad wrote
the following:
If it is true (as I argue) that Europe includes a complex history and a shifting
geography ! that it articulates and intersects with the times and spaces of other
communities, states, civilizations ! what can an anthropology of Europe be? I am
not sure whether a satisfactory answer can be given to this question. But the advice
that it is enough to do ethnographic fieldwork in geographical Europe surely will
not do. Some idea of Europe must be presupposed here. I would go further: I am
certain that no anthropology whatever can do entirely without the idea of Europe
and of the acts that perform its civilization. (Asad 1997: 721)
Asad has never presented himself explicitly as an anthropologist of

Christianity, but one may argue that everything in his work functions as if
he did. This seems to remain the case even if when pressed on the question of
whether Christianity could serve for him as the name of an encompassing
epistemic space, one that would give him a privileged, critical vantage point,
his answer tended toward the negative (TT 283!4). For Asad never fails to
provide us with crucial pointers toward an anthropology of Christianity at
the same time that he signals toward the essential reasons that prevent the
formulation of such a project ! to repeat: the concept of religion is a
polemical concept at work in a hierarchical field of power which has
gathered elements not to be arbitrarily undone, as if by fiat. He underscores
the difficulties involved in what such a project might otherwise look like.
It is therefore crucial for Asad to express his scepticism of any
notion that the West is the flowering or playing out of a kind of Christian
destiny (282). The teleological understanding he had described earlier
implies that one recognize the active orientation making up the western
tradition retrospectively as well as, rushing ahead to the future, prospectively.32 This is, in fact, part of what Asad elaborates upon when he
speaks of the contingency of shifting elements and of the centrality of a
tradition.
i n t e r v e n t i o n s ! 11 :3
.........................
the very issues I am
trying to engage (or
more precisely, that I
see Asad as
engaging). The
volume should also
be considered along
with Serge Margel
(2005), a momentous
work that
scrupulously attends
to the conceptual
mechanism at work
in distinguishing
between religion
and superstition as
well as its scholarly
inheritors in the
study of religions
(in Christian lands,
as the book title has
it, marking an
important
continuity).
30 One should
however note that, at
the explicit level, the
chapters of
Genealogies of
Religion are not
presented as an
anthropology of
Christianity. They
are rather intended
as a contribution to a
historical
anthropology that
takes the cultural
hegemony of the
West as its object of
inquiry. More
precisely, they
explore ways in
which western
concepts and
practices of religion
define forms of
history making (GR
24).
31 It is sometimes
forgotten, Asad
points out in a
footnote relevant to
388
The most extensive argument on the concept of tradition that Asad has
offered is found in the lecture from which I have borrowed my title: The Idea
of an Anthropology of Islam. Now, it would be incorrect to assume that one
can simply transpose, indeed, translate, the concept of tradition from one
(religious?) realm to another, say, from Islam to Christianity. The first
reason to refrain from doing so, one which we have just seen, is that Asad
himself has never recommended that as an explicit option. I have just argued
in fact that he has given us more than one indication that this is not what he
is consciously engaged in. Yet, to the extent that Asads lecture (and the bulk
of his other work) does contain numerous pointers toward an anthropology
of Christianity, or at least toward its possibility (or impossibility), it might be
helpful to read it with our questions in mind.
We begin, then, with an apparently simple fact. A religion ! whatever else
it might be ! is also made up of its followers (After all, religion consists not
only of particular ideas, attitudes, and practices, but of followers: FS 194).
This does not mean that Islam is simply what Muslims everywhere say it is
(IAI 2), nor that Christianity is what Christians say it is (perhaps especially
so, since many say that it is not!). When it comes to Christianity (whether or
not it is a religion), it does mean that we must consider
the long history since Constantine, in which Christian emperors and kings,
lay princes and ecclesiastical administrators, Church reformers and colonial
missionaries, have all sought by using power in varying ways to create or maintain
the social conditions in which men and women might live Christian lives. (IAI 3)
The history of these men and women is, of course, the history of Christianity.
What it includes and what it excludes (Liberation Theology and the Moral
Majority are two examples which Asad brings up as plausible contenders)
may or may not belong to the essence of Christianity. But it would be
difficult for an anthropologist to ignore the limits of this history and all its
dimensions. It should be difficult for him to ignore what has been
understood as Christian practice and discourse throughout history as well
as what has not (IAI 3). One of these practices and discourses, at any rate,
and one intimately connected with unequal distributions of power and
knowledge, has to do with a distinctive feature of Roman Christians, of
these men and women living in the West. Asad points out, by way of
contrast, that Christian communities living among Muslims in the Middle
East were not noted for their scholarly curiosity about Europe . . . and
Muslim travellers often visited and wrote about African and Asian societies,
if not about Europe (IAI 4). What is however curious, and indeed,
distinctive, he writes, is rather the reasons why Roman Christians were
interested in the beliefs and practices of others (IAI 4). In order to explore
these reasons, it will not do to reify or essentialize either Islam or
Gil Anidjar
this matter, that in
the world outside
Europe, evangelical
Christianity often
played a central
political role in the
nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries
. . . Missions were
also extremely
important in the
modernization of
secondary and higher
education in the
Middle East. Local
Christian minorities,
educated and
sometimes converted
by European
missionaries, not
only played a notable
part in popularizing
western ideas of
history, archeology,
politics and so on,
but their role in
adapting western
nationalist ideologies
to local conditions
was also
outstanding (GR
207n13). From the
perspective of the
receiver, the West
presents a single face,
Asad says elsewhere.
Is this the face of
religion (not
mentioned as such
here)? The face of
Christianity?
32 I wonder whether
Asad does not
naturalize the
teleological relation
to the future he
describes as
belonging to the
Christian modern
(as Webb Keane
beautifully calls it),
when he writes in
OSB that inscribed
in the body is an
389
........................
Christianity. One ought instead to be looking for the institutional

conditions for the production of various social knowledges, since forms
of interest in the production of knowledge are intrinsic to various structures
of power, and they differ not according to the essential character of Islam or
Christianity, but according to historically changing systems of discipline
(IAI 5). It may be easy to grant this point, without however agreeing with the
implicit claim that the specific, if varied, structures of power and the
historically changing systems of discipline, because contingently related to
it, have nothing to do with Christianity (or, if this can be shown to be the
case, with Islam). To paraphrase Asad again, as I have done earlier, the
argument here is not against the attempt to generalize about [Christianity],
but against the manner in which that generalization is undertaken (IAI 5).
There are historically specific structures of power, particular orderings of
distinction that separate between the church and the king, and there are
also specific systems of discipline which, within western Christendom,
cannot be thought of as external to Christianity, even and perhaps because
they are distinct from those embraced by Christians in West Asia and
elsewhere. Indeed, in order to understand the nature of their relation to
Christianity (in its historical transmutations, not in some alleged essence),
Asad suggests, they must be conceptualized as belonging to the history of
Christianity.
Christianity, in other words, cannot be conceived merely as a number of
local churches or as a collection of (converging or contradictory) doctrines,
as simply a matter of belief, a few lingering practices (with poor or growing
records of church attendance) or of restricted instances of power (the
Church) and disciplines that would have been deployed in order to create or
maintain the social conditions in which men and women might live Christian
lives (IAI 3). It must also be taken to refer to these men and women we have
mentioned, as well as to the lives they lived as good (or bad) Christians in
complex negotiations with (a restricted) Christianity, even if ! not a
particularly weak matter ! by way of denegation or opposition. Christianity,
in other words, is the name we could use to designate the differential
distribution of political and institutional power, the definition and
enforcement of doctrines and practices, the structures of possible and
impossible actions ! possibilities of action and of conceptions, of belief
and of non-belief ! that were sustained, transformed or excluded by it ! but
by what, precisely? A culture? A civilization? A society? A political regime?
An economic one? A series of each of these? Clearly, there is a considerable
diversity in the beliefs and practices of all Christians. And the first problem
is therefore one of organizing this diversity in terms of an adequate concept
(IAI 5). None of the abstract terms I have just suggested (culture, civilization,
and so forth) will do, if only because each will immediately be seized by its
historical and already operative universal and universalizing meanings.
i n t e r v e n t i o n s ! 11 :3
.........................
image of the future

that is nothing more
than a continuous
unbinding or
emptying 83). Does
this refer to every
body? Does it not
recall instead the
kenosis of God in
Jesus Christ?
390
Christianity (which includes western Christendom but is not exhausted by it,

as the expression history of Christianity indicates) seems a much likelier
candidate as the adequate concept we are looking for in order to account for
the prominence of religion, in order to produce an anthropology of what is
otherwise called the West or modernity. And though the word (and
concept) of Christianity runs the risk of including (or rendering invisible)
those Christians that had little to do with the particular Christianity Asad
lingers with, it might be agreed nonetheless that it is a more contained, a less
colonizing, concept than religion.
Let us admit that Christianity is not a consensual term. It is important to
recall that Asad himself emits a number of valid objections to it, if mostly
implicitly. I would venture that, for him, Christianity is and is not a concept
in the sense I have tried to follow and elaborate. Minimally, it has not
congealed fully as a concept. Among the reasons we have considered for this
is that Asad takes historical difference (modernity) to supersede (rather
than to inscribe and perform) the difference Christianity makes. For him at
any rate, it is not Christianity that enacted and produced an internal division
through the concept of progress and of modernity (even though we know,
for instance, that the idea of progressive evolution ! biological as well as
social ! responded to Christian sensibilities in the latter part of the
nineteenth century: GR 20). It is not Christianity that has brought about
and performed (continuing to perform) the distinction between religion and
politics, religion and law, religion and science (GR 27!54). Christianity,
for Asad, is neither subject nor concept, not the essential midwife of our
modern secular world, nor perhaps that very world itself, whether before or
through its transformations (OSB 10). But is the West? Is the West a
concept in the sense we have been exploring? Is it a subject? Is Europe? Is
modernity? And if so, for whom? Who, after all, are the players in this
naming game? Recall that devising narratives about the expressions and
expressive intentions of dramatic players is not the only option available to
anthropologists. Social life can also be written or talked about by using
analytic concepts. Not using such concepts simply means failing to ask
particular questions, and misconstruing historical structures (OSB 9;
emphasis added). Whose expressive intention was it, after all, to devise
narratives of rupture (one could say, of conversion) and declare itself no
longer what it was? The midwife? The baby? Or the bathwater? It is as if
Christianity was the only player for whom there would be only one option,
namely, to devise its own narrative of how it became not who or what it
already was, but no longer and never again what it had been (pre-liberal
Christianity: OSB 88). But what if Christianity were what it has, in fact,
become? And so one could propose with Asad ! as if it were simply his
contribution, rather than something that emerges from the necessary
conditions he contemplates and analyses, from the questions that must be
Gil Anidjar
33 I do not mean to
suggest that there can
be such an
anthropology, nor to
ignore the possibility
that anthropology is
a Christian science
(after the manner of
psychoanalysis as a
Jewish science).
Were this the case,
the expression
anthropology of
Christianity might
simply be redundant,
indeed, pleonastic.
And perhaps it is. Be
that as it may, my
attention to this
problem was
heightened by Asad
himself, of course, as
well as by the
meticulous study of
the concept of
superstition offered
by Serge Margel
(2005). As I
mentioned above,
Margel magisterially
shows how
constitutively linked
superstition is to the
concept of religion
within the Christian
tradition and so all
the way to the
modern study of
religion. Interestingly
enough, and as his
title indicates,
Margel does not
explicitly propose the
concept of
Christianity as the
object of his inquiry,
although, as with
Asad, the argument
could be made that
he does nothing else.
34 On
anthropology at
home, elaboration
and critique, see
Panourgia` (1995).
391
........................
asked ! the concept of Christianity, without which, there can be no

anthropology of Christianity.33 It is a polemical concept, of course, not
the name of an unchanging essence (it may be worth recalling, as Asad often
does, that concepts are neither definitions, nor reifications, although they
can play such roles as well, obviously). It is no less polemical, no less
essential than Islam (and, one would perhaps think, no more so either),
although it does function and operate within a very distinct hierarchical
differential of power.
And now to what may still appear as the key question: is Christianity a
religion? The answer is undeniably yes, of course. But today this is hardly a
well-pondered answer. Christianity is rather the essentialized result of a
history that has only begun to be interrogated ! first and foremost by Talal
Asad. Indeed, when it comes to Christianity and religion (or Christianity and
anthropology ! but this is perhaps different), the matter is dependent on far
more than the way in which religion itself is defined. Indeed, anyone
familiar with what is called the sociology of religion will know of the
difficulties involved in producing a conception of religion that is adequate for
cross-cultural purposes. This is an important point because ones conception
of religion determines the kinds of questions one thinks are askable and worth
asking (IAI 12). Interestingly, this is precisely the moment when one would
have expected to see Asad perform another of his powerfully typical and
tropical moves (the kind of spectacular turning of tables I pointed out earlier).
Perhaps, he had written earlier, our question is best approached by turning
it around (IAI 4). Following his lead, what this would mean here is that we
should look again at the site from which the concept is deployed ! after the
fashion of anthropology at home.34 Back to the Holy Land, or, as Serge
Margel has it, en terre de chre tiente . After all, the reason why the concept of
religion has to be cross-cultural is because it emerges from a specific area, by
the hands of specific agents. It is itself the result of cultural translations !
discourses and practices ! that have been well documented and reflected
upon, and prominently so by Asad himself.
Once we turn the lens, as Asad enjoins us to, what becomes of our
question? What question (or questions) are we now able to ask? I propose
the following, provisional formulation: what does the concept of religion do
for Christianity? In other words, what is gained (or lost) ! and for whom ! by
embracing the conception that Christianity is (or is not) a religion? In the
perspective thereby opened, Asad would importantly not agree that it is
necessary to reach some provisional working definition of the term
Christianity itself (Cannell 2006: 5). That is because, again, definitions
are not required for concepts to become operative. Indeed, for my part,
I would suggest that we follow Asad in not asking what Christianity is
(definition), nor what it means (interpretation).35 Perhaps we should only
ask what Christianity ! or its concept ! does. We can certainly concede that
i n t e r v e n t i o n s ! 11 :3
.........................
35 Another
incarnation of this
essay was meant to
borrow another title
(from Susan Sontag
this time), namely,
against
interpretation. One
could in fact follow
the thread of
opposition to
hermeneutics
throughout Asads
work. See, for
example, OSB (31,
41, 81) and TT (257,
269, 272).
392
Christianity is neither a distinctive social structure nor a heterogeneous

collection of beliefs, artifacts, customs and morals (IAI 14). We do not
know what Christianity is, except to say that it has not reached its full
potential as an adequate concept, at least as Asad deploys such concepts. But
consider what we have seen, namely, that without a concept of Christianity,
and therefore without an anthropology of Christianity, no answer to the
question of religion (and whether Christianity is one; for what purpose; with
what effects), no account of the concept of religion, could ever be
forthcoming. Let me recall what Asad himself had said about an anthropology of Europe, which is worth quoting again:
What can an anthropology of Europe be? I am not sure whether a satisfactory
answer can be given to this question. But the advice that it is enough to do
ethnographic fieldwork in geographical Europe surely will not do. Some idea of
Europe must be presupposed here. I would go further: I am certain that no
anthropology whatever can do entirely without the idea of Europe and of the acts
that perform its civilization. (Asad 1997: 721)
According to these essential, and profoundly ambitious, guidelines, anthropology has not even begun. For an anthropology worthy of that name to
occur, Asad seems to suggest, what we need is less a definition of
Christianity, than an idea of it. What we need, in other words, is a concept
of Christianity and of the acts that perform its civilization ! its religion (in
the most expansive, and specifically local, sense of the term). Like Europe,
the concept of Christianity will have to be a polemical concept. That is
because qua concept, it is a relationship of power. It is a structure of possible
actions, the enactment of essential divisions and their distribution across a
hierarchical differential of power. It is a distinctive style of action (for a bad
conscience, Asad wryly points out about Europe, is no bar to further
immoral action, it merely gives such action a distinctive style ! and what is
Europes religion if not its bad conscience? What is Americas?) (TT 230). It
is the power of discipline and the structure of sovereignty (which divides and
distributes pain and suffering, fear and terror, and the wearing of shoes at
airport terminals) as well as the operations that distinguish the church from
the state, violence from politics (terrorism from war), politics from
capitalism (and both from religion), East from West, missionaries from
human rights workers, and the spread of democracy from the civilizing
mission. As I said, Christianity is a polemical concept. And although it is a
concept that has yet to be fully elaborated ! questions yet to be asked ! I
would venture that its most promising, indeed, its most powerful formulation is found in the writings of Talal Asad.
Gil Anidjar
393
........................
R e f e ren c e s
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Anidjar, Gil (2007) Semites: Race, Religion, Literature, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Asad, Talal (1960) Correspondence, Man 60 (May):
73!4.
Asad, Talal (1970) The Kababish Arabs: Power,
Authority and Consent in a Nomadic Tribe, New
York: Praeger.
Asad, Talal (1973) Two European images of nonEuropean rule, in T. Asad (ed.) Anthropology and
the Colonial Encounter, Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
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Asad, Talal (1975) Anthropological texts and ideological problems: an analysis of Cohen on Arab
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Asad, Talal (2001) Reading a modern classic: W. C.
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Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (eds) Religion and
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