Webster, Joseph. 2013. The Anthropology of Protestantism: Faith and Crisis among Scottish Fishermen
Reviewed by Matt Tomlinson (Australian National University)
This book is an innovative attempt to understand the relationship between language and materiality in terms of the Protestant doctrine of consubstantiation, âthat view of the Christian Eucharist that attempts to explain the real (material and spiritual) presence of the body and blood of Jesus as existing alongside the real material presence of the bread and the wineâ (208). It is anthropology with a theological aura, but also a skillfully crafted ethnography that will appeal to scholars who donât normally mix the anthro- and the theo-.
Websterâs ethnographic subjects are elderly fishermen and their wives in the northeast Scottish village of Gamrie. They provide a boatload of evidence that they live in a world that is, as the author puts it, both modern and enchanted. Many are members of Brethren churches and radical individualists as well as strict fundamentalists. As individualists, they distrust any authority except their own, leading one critic to characterize their attitude as âevery man is his own skipper and he can go wherever he likesâ (59; n.b., as they go wherever they like, they are likely to be watched by their neighbors, who keep binoculars at home âto see what others were up to further down the braeâ [6]). As fundamentalists, they hold the Bible to be literally true, and they enthusiastically track signs of the end of the world.
The Brethren also create signs of the end of the world: for example, they support a program called âMillion Treesâ which aims to plant trees in Israel in order to fulfill statements in the Book of Isaiah that it will âblossomâ in the end times. Part of their work is defensive, too, as they fight off supposedly satanic attacks. One of the bookâs many vivid stories concerns a man who decides that he must burn a boxful of Seventh-day Adventist videotapes because he fears they are âfull of false teachingâ and could serve as a devilish conduit (167). The fishers of Gamrie are continually engaged in such compulsive projects. They act authoritatively (preaching, planting trees, burning videotapes) while displacing their own agency (assigning ultimate causality to either God or the devil), feeling that they must do something but cannot really control things that matter dearly to them. Webster describes the tense, sad situations they find themselves in as a result: âThe pressure my Christian friends felt to âwitnessâ to âthe need to be born-againâ was enormous.⊠The weight of sorrowâŠon elderly Christians whose families were not âsavedâ was heartbreaking to witnessâ (70).
The Brethren are also frustrated to find economic and demographic power slipping out of their control. The fishing industry is changing in unwelcome ways as the EU imposes its regulations, competition grows, and the price of new, economically viable boats rises out of reach for all but the wealthiest skippers. Each of these dynamics has its own religious associations. For example, the fishers see the EU as the Antichrist. Younger villagers leave the industry and also leave the Brethren, and the elderly churchgoersâ senses of decline resonate with their sense of the worldâs slide toward its final days. Webster refers to the three pressures of economy, demography, and eschatalogy as a âtriple pinch,â and he treats them as mutually reinforcing rather than hierarchically determinative.
Toward the end of the book, Webster mentions Max Weberâs discussion of the modern âalternative salvationsâ of politics, aesthetics, and eroticism (205-206). In many ways, the fishers of Gamrie seem anti-political, aesthetically grim, and necrotic rather than erotic. But Webster is a patient and profoundly sympathetic observer as well as a talented writer. He never rushes to make a point but lets it develop, and when stories arrive they feel well groomed and naturally fitting. He does not make fun of the more outlandish claims he hears, but does not hide behind false objectivity, either, admittingâin passages that manage to be honest, non-judgmental, and funny at the same timeâhis discomfort at his friendsâ more extreme pronouncements. (After Kenneth, a boatâs skipper, explains to his non-Brethren crew members his views on the connections between sin, death, and herbivoresâ teeth, âKenneth looked triumphant. Brice looked unconvinced. Todd looked uninterested. I felt a bit embarrassed. Eventually we all fell back to tailing prawns.â) One of my favorite passages in the book was this description of preaching, which indicates Websterâs observational skills and authorial playfulness:
âThump it oot!!â would be the (only half joking) advice given to preachers on the evening they were due to âtake the gospel.â Menâs faces often went puce as they shouted from their platform about the immediate imperative of being âborn-again.â âMan is lost! Guilty! Born in sin!â Martin roared at us from the front of the hall with the occasional fleck of spittle shooting out of his mouth and catching the light as it descended on those sitting in the front row. (88)
Warning: the first few rows may get wet. The ethnography is deliciously salted with descriptions like this, as well as representations of the local dialect. âBut thatâs the problem,â one friend declares while criticizing a preacher who is all head and no heart, ââŠthereâs nae love in it ataw you kenâ (thereâs no love in it at all, you know [96]).
Websterâs main theoretical move, made consistently throughout the book, is to argue for the co-construction of conventionally opposed categories such as linguistic and material, past and present, saved and damned, and immanent and transcendent. This move leads to fine observations such as this one about how preaching was really aimed at people who were not in the church: âIt wasnât the âsoul stateâ of the congregation that mattered, but the brute existenceââout thereâ in the worldâof the category of the âunsavedâ that determined what and how and why men preachedâ (90). But this kind of argument can also overemphasize interconnectedness and give metaphors a gravity they canât sustain. Here, the tension between secular anthropology and theology becomes acute. For a secular anthropologist, consubstantiation is a metaphor; for a Protestant theologian, it might begin as such, but must go beyond metaphor, combining the analogical connection into a full identification.
This theological move from metaphor to full identification colors Websterâs analysis of co-construction. His analysis is innovative and consistent, but might frustrate theologians and anthropologists alike. In a chapter on preaching, he develops the argument that sermons are sacrifices and feasts, and concludes that âThe sacrificial outcome is both the immanence of transcendence and the transcendence of immanenceâ (85). But isnât the point of âtranscendenceâ as a conceptâin some varieties of theology, anywayâthat it ultimately escapes this kind of folding-in, this knowability? For semiotic anthropologists, by comparison, if transcendence and immanence are opposed but co-constitutive categories, then they are necessarily calibrated in fractally recursive relationships in which âthe distinction can be reproduced repeatedly by projecting it onto narrower and broader comparisonsâ (Gal 2005: 26-27). Attention to fractally recursive relationships would have clarified distinctions between co-constitution and âconflationâ (a term Webster uses frequently) and possibly between immateriality/materiality and transcendence/immanence as well. Without distinguishing these categories, the universe can seem like an endless swallowing-up in which symbols donât just stand for themselves, they stand for everything else too.
So here is the stark question which should interest both anthropologists and theologians: can the Protestant model of consubstantiation offer new insights about semiosis? Websterâs book says yes; I am not convinced, but I admire this effort to mount the argument. The Anthropology of Protestantism enriches the engagement between anthropology and theology, and is a valuable contribution to the anthropology of Christianity and the study of language and materiality. It deserves to earn a wide readership.
Gal, Susan. 2005. Language Ideologies Compared: Metaphors of Public/Private. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 23-27.