Lebner, Ashley. Not Such A Thing As A Concept. A Radical Tradition From Malinowski To Asad and Strathern

Article
Anthropological Theory
No such thing as a 0(0) 1–26

! The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
concept: A radical sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1463499618805916
tradition from journals.sagepub.com/home/ant
Malinowski to Asad
and Strathern
Ashley Lebner
Wilfrid Laurier University
Abstract
In light of renewed questions about the relationship between anthropology’s past and
future, two radicalizations of the British tradition are particularly worth exploring:
those of Talal Asad and Marilyn Strathern, arguably the most widely read anthropolo-
gists beyond the discipline, and the most regularly misunderstood. Asad and Strathern
are rarely engaged together because the anthropologies that their works have inspired
operate quite separately, their mutual implications left unexplored. And yet, tracing the
development of Asad’s and Strathern’s respective work reveals a deep resonance,
beginning with their training in the concern with translation, which owes more to
Malinowski than anthropologists today are generally aware. The paper argues that
reading Asad and Strathern together can help mitigate the over-cultivation of the
“concept” in recent anthropology, multiply insights into the constitutive relations
among anthropology, science and the secular, and refine perspectives on the legacy
of British anthropology and on anthropology’s future politics.
Keywords
anthropological metaphysics, British social anthropology, concepts, experimental writ-
ing, politics, relations, secular knowledge
Corresponding author:
Ashley Lebner, Department of Religion and Culture, Wilfrid Laurier University, 75 University, Avenue West
Waterloo, ON, CA N2L 3C5.
Email: alebner@wlu.ca
2 Anthropological Theory 0(0)
Talal Asad and Marilyn Strathern are arguably the most widely read anthropol-
ogists beyond the discipline, yet they have rarely been discussed together. Their
first field sites and monographs were continents and conversations apart: Asad
(1970) studied political authority among North African nomads in the Sudan,
while Strathern (1972) wrote on the Papua New Guinean Highlands, kinship,
and gender. Furthermore, these beginnings drew them into very different debates:
on politics, religion, and the secular (among others) for Asad, and on exchange,
science, and law (among others) for Strathern.
Yet from these very different perspectives, Asad’s and Strathern’s scholarship
nevertheless intersect. When read alongside one another, it becomes clear that each
is elucidated, even transformed, through the terms of the other. Indeed as we will
see, Asad’s mature work is more explicitly concerned than Strathern’s with
describing-while-decomposing the concepts that animate the Euro-American sec-
ular domain and its “politics”: from the secular’s defining distinction between
politics and religion, to the state doctrine of secularism that helps regulate these
distinctions vis à vis the individual—a set of relations I also call here “secularist.”
For her part, Strathern is more overtly concerned with displacing the concepts of
individual-society and their metaphysical effects in order to better write through
relations. That is, she consistently writes to enact the point that relations (inter-
personal and conceptual) are the grounds of knowledge and should therefore be
privileged over the analytical concept. Different as they may be, reading Asad and
Strathern together nevertheless reveals a deep resonance that derives from their
roots in the concern with translation in social anthropology. And recognizing this
resonance is where we can begin transforming our understanding of each: though
she hardly ever uses the term “secular,” when read alongside Asad, Strathern
emerges as a student of the ever-proliferating Euro-American secular and its impli-
cations for scholarship. Read alongside Strathern, Asad appears as privileging
relations over the analytical concept, even as he focuses on conceptual relations
and shifts.
In short, reading Asad and Strathern together helps consolidate insights into the
history and legacy of British social anthropology and offers valuable tools, not for
replicating their modes of writing, or immediately escaping the secular (an impos-
sibility for now in any case), but for always remaining attuned to the spread of
secular knowledge and its most potentially distorting, even colonizing, secularist
concepts and forms.
To animate this argument we must look at the development of their respective
oeuvres and explore four crucial points where their scholarship meets. I start with
how their mature work builds on a position found in more embryonic form in the
British anthropological tradition beginning with Malinowski: that there is no such
thing as a concept, that concepts always exist in relation, including partaking in, and
being shaped by, relations beyond the conceptual. The first two sections below elab-
orate this point, discussing the cultural translation school of British social anthro-
pology and its often occluded debts to Malinowski which I show inspired Asad’s and
Strathern’s increasingly radical modes of description. Indeed, if Strathern and Asad
Lebner 3
are often perceived to have achieved a degree of sui generis “theoretical” notoriety,1
grounding their work in a tradition first borne by Malinowski –known for his field-
work, and often written off as being theoretically “soft” (Douglas, 2003 [1980):37)—
transforms our understanding of all three scholars.
The second point of intersection between Asad’s work and Strathern’s work is
where we can start to see their differences and their resonances more clearly, and
thus begin to shift our understandings of each. In an exploration of their respective
concern with the human (Asad) and the individual (Strathern), Strathern emerges
more as a student of the Euro-American secular than she has appeared before. It is
true that in addition to not using the term secular, Strathern hardly ever refers to
religion: the concept whose relation to, and distinction from, a host of other concepts
constitutes and animates the modern secular domain (concepts including politics,
nature, even reality, see Lebner 2019). Nevertheless, like Asad, Strathern is acutely
aware that the notion of the autonomous, self-owning human individual should not
be considered a “natural” object of anthropological analysis. Yet here is another
difference: the denaturalization of the individual (and the individual’s perennial com-
panion, secularism) is an outcome or end of Asad’s analysis, while the displacement of
the individual (and its perennial companion, society) is the beginning of Strathern’s.
Still, in light of Asad’s work, Strathern’s critical eye for the concepts that secure the
individual can first be read as an awareness of the proliferation of the secular. With
that perspective, Strathern’s displacements of the individual and its analogues can be
grasped as writing against the secularist state’s norms of differentiation—against its
colonization of relations in both politics and ethnography.
The third point of convergence between Asad’s and Strathern’s work has to do
with the radical, if very different, experiments both scholars have undertaken with
writing style. Asad develops a fluid and provisional way of writing aimed at under-
mining conventional forms of reason and argumentation, while showing that the
secular, which is genealogically built around core conceptual oppositions, is itself
always in transformation, and is therefore difficult to grasp, and ultimately difficult
to escape. For her part, Strathern’s writing conveys both less and more hope of
“escape.” While Strathern maintains that we will long remain trapped in our own
scholarly languages of description (inherited from the Enlightenment; Strathern,
2005), she has devised a way to carve out another, more relational, less individu-
alizing, less secularist metaphysic by displacing the individual and society not only
as concepts, but also as metaphysical analytical form: because concepts, and espe-
cially these concepts, can structure the way we think about analysis, from the
conventional notion of (individual, transcendent) authorship to the idea of
theory-building as somehow distinct from ethnography.
Finally, with Strathern’s relational writing in view, Asad’s writing can also
begin to be read differently, and another point of intersection—and transforma-
tion—becomes clear: though Asad is not known as a relational thinker, he can be
read to be writing through relations. That is, he can be read as foregrounding, like
Strathern, how relations are what constitute, and promise, conceptual shifts and
transformations in secular knowledge.
The central aim of this paper, then, is to show that Asad and Strathern are part
of the same tradition and, when read together, their differences become tools that
can help grasp, navigate, and write through the perennial constraints of secular
scholarly knowledge and keep transforming it. I say perennial, as reading Asad
with Strathern teaches us that we may never definitively (for now) depart the
secular, precisely because it is not merely the religion–secular binary that needs
to be “overcome”—a truism that is now repeated in contemporary scholarship well
beyond Asad’s original interlocutors (Haraway, 2016). Rather, scholars should
become more attuned to how numerous relations and distinctions constitute the
secular, how these condition contemporary scholarship, and how to mitigate their
weightiest effects. In particular, scholars should be aware of how secularist meta-
physics—the conceptual and interpersonal relations and distinctions that animate
state secularism—can quietly insinuate themselves into, colonize, and distort, our
ethnographies and our politics. With this in view, we can begin seeking alternative
metaphysics even within our current scholarly languages that allow for difference
to emerge, facilitating transformations in description and knowledge.
Of course, given my necessarily close focus on their work, much will remain in
the background. Yet in conclusion, I will gesture to other influences on their work
and to ways to write through their collective insights going forward. Conjuring the
1980s crisis in representation via Clifford Geertz’s response to Writing Culture will
throw the scholarship of these two radicalizing anthropologists into further relief
and show how reading them side by side might help move us through some current
scholarly impasses. My suggestions, useful to keep in mind in what follows, will be
that reading Asad and Strathern in parallel can help reanimate the subfields
inspired by their work: on secularism and on science, respectively. More broadly,
their scholarship incites us to be more aware of the proliferation of both secular
concepts and secularist concepts. Even with overlaps, also perceiving differences
between them can help transform what we might grasp as anthropology’s politics. I
will clarify as I conclude.
Translation and the critique of concepts

in British social anthropology
The idea of anthropology as a practice of translation is still with us. In fact, Asad’s
paper on cultural translation in British anthropology first published in Writing
Culture (1986) and later reprinted at the heart of his Genealogies of Religion (1993),
remains a reference for new discussions on these matters, though they move off in
their own creative directions (Viveiros de Castro, 2004). My concern, however, is
not to engage recent thinking. Rather—and before showing how Asad and
Strathern critically engage translation—I want to re-establish that the concern
with translation was a vital part of Malinowski’s legacy. This is not a minor his-
torical detail, either for the discipline or for this paper. Indeed Malinowski’s legacy
in this regard has been consciously and unconsciously repressed from the
Lebner 5
mid-twentieth century forward. Restoring an understanding of Malinowski’s influ-

ence and how it has been sidelined will show Asad’s and Strathern’s deep con-
nections, and also re-situate their work as interventions in a discussion about
concepts and ethnography that stretches back to the inception of anthropology
in Britain.
There is a longstanding misconception that an interest in translation emerged
suddenly in the post-war period under the leadership of Evans-Pritchard at
Oxford. For example, Louis Dumont referred to Evans-Pritchard’s 1950 Marret
Lecture, where he described anthropology as an art of translating between cul-
tures, as the explosion of a “bomb” in the discipline (Dumont, 1975[1968]: 334).2
While few anthropologists now recall Dumont’s account, his idea that the
“translation school” originated with Evans-Pritchard is extended in the present
by Asad’s own brief comments on the matter (as I personally can attest; Lebner,
2016b)—and by a piece by Ernest Gellner that Asad (1986) critically engages:
Gellner’s still influential “Concepts and Society” (1970[1962]; e.g., see narratives
in Collins, 1985; Corsın-Jiménez and Willerslev, 2007; Holbraad, 2017). As we will
see, despite their profound differences, Asad and Gellner both minimize
Malinowski’s own concerns with translation (see also Douglas, 2003[1980]3).
“The translation of cultures,” Asad notes, has “increasingly become an almost
banal description of the distinctive task of . . . anthropology . . .[Yet it] was not
always so much in evidence” (1986: 141). Malinowski, Asad states, “one of the
founders of the so-called functionalist school, wrote much on ‘primitive language’
and collected enormous quantities of linguistic material (proverbs, kinship termi-
nology . . .) for anthropological analysis. But he never thought of his work in terms
of the translation of cultures” (ibid.: 141). It may be true that Malinowski did not
organize his work around this phrase initially, but Asad’s claim is misleading: by
1935, Malinowski was defining the anthropologist’s “task” in essentially those
terms: to “translate the native point of view to the European” (1935: ix).
But even at the beginning of his career, Malinowski deemed cultural descrip-
tion, and more importantly ethnographic fieldwork, to be conditions of possibility
for any translation of terms and vice versa. He was concerned, for example, with
the task of bringing home to a European reader the vocabulary of a strange tongue.
And the main result of our analysis was that it is impossible to translate words of a
primitive language or of one widely different from our own, without giving a detailed
account of the culture of its users and thus providing the common measure necessary
for a translation (Malinowski, 1923: 470).
John Firth, a leading British linguist, cited this passage in his contribution to
Raymond Firth’s Festschrift for Malinowski, noting that Malinowski was recog-
nized even beyond anthropology as consistently concerned with the problem of
translation (ibid.: 94). He even suggested that Malinowski’s early work found
echoes in Wittgenstein (ibid.), a resonance that would be subsequently repressed
by commentators (see below and notes 2 and 3).
The concern with translation and concepts deepened during Malinowski’s

career. In Coral Gardens and their Magic (1935) Malinowski radicalized his earlier
stance.
There is no science whose conceptual, hence verbal, outfit is not ultimately derived
from the practical handling of matter. I am laying considerable stress on this because,
in one of my previous writings, I opposed civilised and scientific to primitive speech,
and argued as if the theoretical uses of words in modern philosophic and scientific
writing were completely detached from their pragmatic sources. This was an error,
and a serious error at that. Between the savage use of words and the most abstract and
theoretical one there is only a difference of degree. (Malinowski, 1935: 58)
It is not coincidental that Ernest Gellner cited this passage in his last, posthumous-
ly published book, Language and Solitude, where he lamented that Malinowski had
denied the existence of “culturally-transcendent” concepts, moving Malinowski
even further away from a rationalist position (Gellner, 1998: 152–153).
Certainly, structural-functionalists minimized talk of Malinowski’s influence on
the discipline (Kuper, 2015[1973], see also Note 3). However, a good part of the
responsibility for the repression of Malinowski’s thinking on concepts must be laid
at the feet of Gellner, who marshaled Malinowski throughout his career to buttress
an agenda that he only partially in jest called “Enlightenment Secular
Fundamentalism” or “Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalism” (Gellner,
1992: 76, 80; Skorupski, 1996). This agenda included a campaign waged since
his first book (Gellner, 1959), which was written to counter Wittgensteinianism
in philosophy—in particular its rejection of overformalized abstractions or con-
cepts. Gellner’s aim instead was to establish the asymmetry and primacy of
Western scientific knowledge and concepts over other (especially religious) knowl-
edges. As Chris Hann (1996) puts it, Gellner, who left philosophy for anthropol-
ogy, “seized upon” Malinowskian empiricism “as an attractive synthesis and
antidote” to Wittgensteinianism (ibid.: 46). The result was that Gellner, in both
his own work and in Malinowski’s, “downplay[ed] the concepts through which
people live their lives” (ibid.: 61).
It is worth noting a key example of how Gellner curated Malinowski’s legacy
during his lifetime: his essay “Concepts and Society” (1970[1962]), whose argu-
ments have since been creatively deployed, though less critically than they deserve
(Collins, 1985; Corsın Jiménez and Willerslev, 2007; Holbraad, 20174). “Concepts
and Society” centers on the “over-charitable defense” of indigenous concepts
among anthropologists practicing cultural translation. Rather than discussing
Malinowski’s early views on translation as a source of these ideas, he hearkens
back to Durkheim’s critical engagement with Kant.5 However, Durkheim was
much more partial to Kant’s a priori universal categories than Gellner allows
(Durkheim, 2001[1912]; Schmaus, 2004: 15). That is, Durkheim was certainly
more universalist and rationalist regarding concepts than Malinowski was.
Lebner 7
Malinowski was skeptical of universalizing categories—and skeptical to a cer-

tain extent of Durkheim (Young, 2004: 237). And here, a surprise: this is evident
from even before his Trobriand fieldwork, as attested by his 1913 review of
Durkheim’s Elementary Structures of Religious Life. There, Malinowski ques-
tioned Durkheim’s “bipartition of men, things, and ideas into ‘sacré et profa-
ne’ . . . religious and non-religious . . . But is it universal?” Malinowski asked
rhetorically, “I feel by no means persuaded” (1913: 526). He also questioned
Durkheim’s concept of society, which he argued “must [be] label[led as] an entirely
metaphysical conception,” because Durkheim endows it “with all properties of
individual consciousness [i.e., will, aims, and desires]” (ibid.: 528).
Malinowski’s critiques of Durkheim are especially relevant here because Asad
and Strathern radicalized this skepticism about the concepts of “religion” and
“society,” as we will see. These critiques also remind us that, from Malinowski
forward, anthropology has been concerned with the problematization of both
scholarly and native concepts through ethnography. To be sure, Malinowski did
not reject all theory or concepts (he was very partial to the “individual,” for exam-
ple). Yet Malinowski represented a shift from Frazerian and Durkheimian evolu-
tionism to modern ethnography precisely because of his concern to bring the
understanding of concepts in their context to the writing of ethnography.
Strathern writes, “What must be laid at Malinowski’s door is the proclamation
of the kinds of spaces that had to be made in ethnographic writing to convey ‘new’
analytical ideas” (Strathern 1987a: 259). It is the result of this proclamation that,
thereafter, “modern ethnographers sought to dislodge the taken-for-granted status
of Western concepts,” and so “the development of a technical terminology [in
anthropology] proceeded hand in hand with self-scrutiny” (ibid.: 206). In other
words, Malinowski promoted the understanding of indigenous ideas through eth-
nography in order to re-order anthropological concepts.
This discussion leads me to the following conclusion: cultural translation
became popular neither because it was entirely new, confectioned independently
by the “Oxford School,” nor because it was a direct prescription of Durkheim’s.
Instead, we must acknowledge that although Malinowski saw the need for anthro-
pologists to “at times, go beyond the verbal and even . . . beyond the conceptual
outfit of the natives” he was convinced that “in building up his concepts the eth-
nographer must never go beyond native facts” (1935: 18–19). Indeed, by focusing
on “context” above all, Malinowski was translating and transforming
Durkheimian sociological insights for a new discipline, social anthropology, and
a new genre of writing, ethnography. Thus pace Gellner, Malinowski shaped an
anthropological tradition at odds with the kind of secular Enlightenment funda-
mentalism that Gellner sought to defend.
This is not to say that Malinowski was not promoting a secular form of knowl-
edge, he certainly was: it was Malinowski who “effectively brought the historical
partnership between British anthropologists and missionaries to an end” (Young
2004: 333). Though if Malinowski developed professional fieldwork methods to
free anthropology from the religious biases in missionary reports, he also did so to
begin interrogating established concepts and distinctions through ethnography. As

such, though Malinowski did not speak in these terms, we can say that through a
new secular tradition, Malinowski began interrogating the secularist faith in a
reality grounded in conceptual stability (e.g. ‘religion,’ ‘society’) that Asad and
Strathern would later go on to decompose.
Asad, Strathern and the “political turn” in anthropology

I have foregrounded Malinowski in order to demonstrate how Asad’s and
Strathern’s work radicalize a tradition present since the beginning of the disci-
pline—not to disregard the fact that anthropology in Britain was seen as increas-
ingly fragmented from the 1960s. In fact, Asad discussed this fragmentation in his
introduction to Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, which reflected a general
awareness that what had united the discipline until the mid-twentieth century—the
aim of documenting, comparing, and typologizing the structures of primitive soci-
eties—no longer seemed to be a theoretically or politically worthy goal in the
shadow of decolonization (Asad, 1973a; see also Kuper, 2015[1973]). Asad
explained that anthropologists began to focus on a “multitude of fragmentary
problems—political, economic, domestic, cultic, etc.” (Asad, 1973a: 13) and ulti-
mately turned to other disciplines for theoretical inspiration, especially those offer-
ing more political angles.
I do not debate this account of disciplinary change, yet we should also consider
how Asad’s and Strathern’s responses to what we could call the discipline’s
“political turn” help us see the tradition they were transforming more clearly.
Asad’s subsequent engagement with the critique of colonialism and Marxism,
and Strathern’s engagement with feminism eventually produced similar results:
they intensified their critiques of the conceptual conventions of newly-influential
debates in anthropology.
Asad: Marxism and beyond, 1970–1993

Key exegetical works barely mention the British tradition as an inspiration for
Asad’s work (Anidjar, 2010; Scott and Hirschkind, 2006). This may be because
Asad was a vocal critic of predominant social anthropology from early in his
career. For example, in his thematic contribution to Anthropology and the
Colonial Encounter, “Two European Images of Non-European Rule” (1973b),
Asad discusses the “ideological dimensions” of anthropological theories of polit-
ical consent, which added to his discussion in The Kababish Arabs (1970). In par-
ticular, Asad (1973b) notes that the functionalist description, propounded by
Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, of African political systems as consent-based, ulti-
mately legitimated the twentieth-century colonial project in Africa—as much as the
older orientalist view of Islamic rule as “despotic” justified an earlier period of
colonial expansion.
Lebner 9
On the basis of this critique, Asad called for an anthropology more aware of the
ways that power in the West is “linked to the practical conditions, the working
assumptions, and the intellectual product of all disciplines representing the
European understanding of a non-European humanity” (1973b: 19). Thus even
before Asad’s turn to Foucault in the 1980s, he was calling for an anthropology
that would consider how various powers shaped its concepts and therefore knowl-
edge. Through the 1970s, Asad was consistently critical of anthropological con-
cepts and texts, especially those by political and economic anthropologists (e.g., his
discussions of rationality (1974) and ethnicity (1975)). Today, Asad is perhaps best
known for his critique of religion (especially of Clifford Geertz’s definition) and for
showing that religion was not a neutral or stand-alone analytical concept, but was
a product of a particular Western, Christian, and secular history (Asad, 1983,
1993; see discussion in Lebner, 2015, 2016b).
Asad’s critique of religion was clearly geared to distinguish his project from
Geertzian cultural anthropology. Yet it can also be seen as ushering in a period of
re-engagement with the British anthropological tradition. Asad’s (1983) discussion
of religion built on decades of debate on the category of belief (Evans-Pritchard
1956; Needham 1973; Pouillon 1979; Ruel 1982), and it was followed soon after by
his contribution to Writing Culture, on translation in British anthropology (1986).
Scholars seem to consider this piece merely a moment of theoretical interest (Scott
and Hirschkind, 2006: 5), with Asad perhaps recalling an older anthropological
modality in order to dispose of it, much as the other contributors to Writing
Culture seemed keen to do. Nevertheless, to see Asad as aiming to disqualify the
British tradition, and the school of cultural translation, is incorrect.
Instead, Asad hoped to make “the anthropological task of translation more
coherent” (1986: 156). To do so, he pointed precisely to the blind spots of
Gellner’s “Concepts and Society” (1970 [1962]). In essence, Asad argued that
Gellner’s concern with replacing “over-charitable” translations with a program
of pointing out irrational “nonsense” was blind to the “inequality of [descriptive]
languages” (1986: 156). Blind, that is, to how Western languages, and English in
particular, have enormous power to both represent and ultimately modify the
receiving language. Asad argued that anthropologists should explore the
“asymmetrical tendencies and pressures in the languages of dominated and dom-
inant societies as means to render their ‘cultural translations’ more coherent and
informed” (1986: 164). While this echoes Asad’s early discussion in Anthropology
and the Colonial Encounter, it also shows a greater willingness to engage and
recuperate the tools of the British tradition in which he was trained. Indeed,
Asad was developing the very idea of tradition at the same time—in particular,
how the concept of tradition might help build an anthropology of Islam. Though
Asad does not refer to social anthropology as a tradition, the notion nevertheless
captures the sense that social anthropology has been built around a series of texts
and entails a set of discourses and debates that have variously oriented intellectual
and ethical practice through time (Asad, 1986: 146). Combined with his reading of
Foucault, it was Asad’s re-engagement with the British concern with “translation”
that ultimately helped convince him that Marxism’s conceptual apparatus also
brought its own obscuring assumptions. This brings us to the first point at
which Asad’s work meets Strathern’s.
Strathern: Before and after feminism, 1970–1987

It happened so quickly that no one seemed to notice: Strathern went from engaging
the notion of translation (e.g., Strathern, 1985, 1987b) to declaring it a “fancy”
(Strathern, 1988). Yet this shift is important: Strathern’s entire oeuvre from Gender
of the Gift onwards is written on the premise that it is ultimately impossible to fully
translate the knowledge practices of others into “our own” descriptive languages
(Lebner, 2017a). Nevertheless, it is not only her critical engagement with the idea
of translation that places Strathern in the same tradition with Asad; it is also her
response to the political turn in British anthropology.
Strathern did not quite have an extended feminist period in the same way that
Asad had a Marxist period. First it was the ethnographic demands of her field site
(as well as growing up with a “pre-feminist feminist mother”) that inspired her to
write a monograph focused on women—becoming one of the first anthropologists
to do so (Viveiros de Castro, Fausto and Strathern, 2017, 42). She was drawn
further into feminist debate when Annette Weiner accused her of male bias (ibid.;
Weiner, 1976). Her response began by reaffirming core social anthropological
principles that she would then come to radicalize.
Strathern responded to Weiner’s critique in her Malinowski Lecture of 1980
(given the year after Asad marked his first departure from Marxist anthropology at
the same podium; see Asad, 1979; Strathern, 1981). “Notions such as male bias or
the woman’s point of view” Strathern said, “can be tremendously productive, and
certainly alter the way we ‘see’ . . . Yet the sounds of our own industry should not
deafen us to the point of forgetting that others are creative too” (1981: 684). While
her appetite for direct critique changed with the development of her particular
form of redescription, and I speak to this below, her response to Weiner’s feminist
provocation marked a deepening of her interest in the challenge that indigenous
knowledge practices posed to Euro-American scholarly trends.
Initially, Strathern adopted a critical strategy similar to that which Asad was
pursuing around this time, though instead of interrogating consent, religion, belief,
or ritual, Strathern began to question nature, culture, law, social control, and
inequality and, finally, the individual, transforming her writing style in the process.
It is worth pausing on Strathern’s interrogation of inequality, for it gives us
insight into her radical displacement of conventional analytical concepts, due pre-
cisely to her view of their deep interconnections. Though Asad was always intent
on questioning key anthropological concepts, he did not ultimately question ana-
lytic concerns with power, inequality, and politics, so directly. Strathern’s edited
volume Dealing with Inequality announced a self-conscious position that she had
been refining from the time she was drawn into the debate by Weiner: that the
conventional understandings of inequality often mobilized in discussions of sex
Lebner 11
and gender invoke a network of concepts informed by Western models of

“industrial process” (Strathern, 1987b: 285). This series of concepts includes the
notion of hierarchy confronting and being challenged by individual agency, and
the series draws power from “a pervasive notion of society’s industry in relation to
the natural world, a cosmology that sees transformative process at the heart of the
individual:society or nature:culture relationship” (Strathern, 1987b: 300, Note 3).
Strathern only hinted here at the broader critique of “individual:society” that
appeared in Gender of the Gift in the following year, yet it is clear that the meta-
phor from capitalist industry, which is also echoed in her original response to
Weiner, helps open the question of whether feminist critique, and conventional
anthropological understandings of human agency more generally, are as emanci-
patory of both anthropological selves and others as scholars imagine.
Asad’s own later critique of “agency” is perhaps better known than Strathern’s
(Asad 1996, 1993, 2003; also Mahmood, 2005). Yet the resonance of their positions
is important to register. Their shared sense that agency should not be ascribed only
to those who individually confront and free themselves from hierarchy and tradi-
tion brings into view the convergence of their projects at an even more fundamen-
tal level: in their shared questioning of the “human individual” as the essential unit
of anthropological analysis.
Human/secularism, individual/society
If, as I have argued, Asad’s and Strathern’s mature work grew out of a common
tradition initially elaborated by Malinowski, to now explore their respective inter-
rogations of “the human” and “the individual” is to reveal deeper affinities and
begin to see how both are transformed in light of the other, through their differ-
ences. Strathern (1988) began questioning the concepts of individual and society
well before Asad wrote about the human in Formations of the Secular (2003).
Nevertheless, Asad’s interrogation of the human as a key figure of secularism
helps make visible his keen awareness of the knowledge effects of Euro-
American secular forms—a similar awareness to that which undergirds
Strathern’s own writing. Reading Asad in fact helps elucidate how Strathern’s
interrogation of individual/society contributes to an anthropology of the secular,
while critiquing secularist metaphysics, even if she hardly ever uses these terms.
Asad: Secularism and the human

The chapters of the first section of Formations of the Secular explore how notions
of myth, enchantment, agency, pain, and cruelty are tempered by their positions in
secular discourses—so-called because they are based on a foundational distinction
from religion. In the second section, Asad turns to the heart of the matter with a
chapter titled: “Redeeming the Human through ‘Human Rights,’” which is largely
about individualism (2003: 262). Asad describes the human individual as the pri-
mary figure of secularism. Secularism, after all, is the state (political) doctrine
geared (perceived) to regulate the relation between religion and politics in order to
protect individual rights, especially the right to freedom of religion. Asad’s aim is
not only to reveal the “good intentions” behind the political doctrine of secularism;
it is also to explore secularism’s “shadows,” which he identifies as the secular
conceptual grammars that have come to constitute secularism, including its contra-
dictions, its “dark side” (2003: 16). While there are potentially many secular gram-
mars or traditions (see also Furani 2015), and I return to this, I distinguish as
“secularist” those grammars that centrally constitute secularism.
In Asad’s hands, human rights becomes an especially rich instance of the con-
ceptual grammars that animate both secularism and its contradictions. Asad shows
that there is a particular notion of the “human” that the current human-rights
regime protects, which is surprisingly limited: this regime is concerned only with
the human in its capacity as a “natural,” rather than a “civil” political being. The
practical paradox that this engenders is that, for example, torture is considered an
abuse of human rights, but the killing of civilians through aerial bombardment is
not. Another important contradiction is that if human rights do not apply to the
political aspect of human bodies, which “belong” to nation-states, human-rights
laws also have “no meaning” outside of the judicial institutions controlled by
individual nation-states (2003: 129). Put otherwise, and this is Asad’s conclusion,
human rights “become floating signifiers that can be attached to or detached from
various subjects . . . by the most powerful nation-states” (2003: 158). In short,
human rights are a universal good, but they are always elusive in practice, because
they are decided or ignored by states.
If Asad shows that what counts as the “human” in the contemporary human-
rights regime is quite particular, there is a second way in which he interrogates the
universality of human rights. He shows how human rights, as we know them, have
been shaped by Medieval and Early Modern debates about natural law, where we
can find concepts and assumptions that continue to shape them today. These
debates developed the idea that an individual human being has natural, inalienable
rights that are independent of that being’s civil status. For instance, Hobbes (1985/
1651) argued that sovereign individuals in a state of nature could transfer their
natural rights to a political sovereign who could then end the natural state of war
of all against all. Many contemporaries disagreed with Hobbes on various points,
yet Asad reminds us that Hobbes posed the question that remains at the root of
liberal secular politics today: How can a sovereign state best recognize and safe-
guard individual sovereignty?
Asad shows that through these debates, and through the legal institutionaliza-
tion of their language, the human became the individual. That is, the human
became “a sovereign, self-owning agent—essentially suspicious of others—and not
merely a subject conscious of his or her own identity” (2003: 135 [original italics]).
Crucially, the political doctrine of secularism, which upholds the individual right
to religious belief free from state interference, was created precisely to protect and
promote this individual, especially its sovereignty, and forestall conflict and war.
That is, the individual and the liberal secularist state, which depends as much on
Lebner 13
notions of natural humanness as on the privatization of religion, were concretized

together, with all of the contradictions and exclusions that this entailed.
As I noted, Formations of the Secular is not solely about the birth of the indi-
vidual and its connection to the secular. Many argued similar points well before
Asad (Weber is a prominent example). Yet Asad was among the first to point out
the connection between the human and secularism and to denaturalize assumptions
about the good of conceptions such as “human rights.” Asad’s aim was obviously
not to condemn attempts to make the world a more inclusive place. Instead,
he hoped to show that state secularism is less clearly a solution to social problems
than a site from which modern secular personhood is defined: as an individual
with rights in political society (see also Asad’s later discussions, e.g., 2015). And it
is the naturalness of the notion of an individual with rights in political society that
goes to the heart of why “secularism” also seems so natural—and so difficult
to question.
Strathern: Individual and society

Strathern focuses on devising a form of description after or beyond the awareness
that the individual should be questioned alongside the conceptual-cum-political
structures elaborated to secure it. Yet it is important to understand that because
she sees the individual as connected to society in the first instance, she can be read
as responding to proliferating forms of Euro-American secularist politics,
like Asad.
Unlike Asad, Strathern is not known for debating “politics,” anthropological or
otherwise. One reason for this is that politics, often defined as the struggle over
modes of power and especially governance, already casts a long shadow. Like
inequality, or indeed religion, politics is a weighty Euro-American concept that
is often all-too-quickly written into our ethnographies and can obscure rather than
elucidate the relations we hope to describe. More importantly, however, politics is
one of society’s integral domains—one of its closely allied concepts. Yet for
Strathern, although she never quite puts it this way, another politics, and another
metaphysics, becomes possible when we do not begin with society, its perennial
companion the individual, or their analogues.
For this reason, Strathern’s work is both deeply political and yet rarely explicit
about the politics of her critique of society. An important key to her attitude
toward politics, which resonates with Asad’s, is an early contribution to the
Manchester-based “group for debates in anthropological theory,” titled “The
Concept of Society is Theoretically Obsolete.” Of course, it is important to note
that she was occupying the position of a proposer of a motion, not choosing to
defend her position per se. Nevertheless, her argument is instructive for under-
standing it: she notes that her redescription of Melanesian “society” in the Gender
of the Gift was written against the backdrop of Thatcher’s (and Reagan’s) neo-
liberalizing governments, whose modus operandi can be characterized by
Thatcher’s assertion, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual
men and women and there are families” (cited in Strathern, 1996: 53). For
Thatcher, discarding the “abstract” notion of society made the “individual” and
thus individualism real—concretizing the sense that persons are autonomous, self-
owning, rational maximizers. “You see what has happened” Strathern says, “In
one fell swoop Thatcherism could gather up all kinds of collectivities and organ-
isations with a social presence and dump them. They no longer derive legitimacy
from their social nature because society no longer exists” (ibid.: 54). Ultimately,
Strathern notes, “[w]here the individual is produced ‘in opposition to’ society, the
move conceals social formations and power relations” (ibid.). Thus, like Asad,
Strathern points out the political effects of a heightened concern with individuals,
as this concern can inhibit our understanding of the work of relations.
The problem of individual and society is not merely a political concern. It is also
an ethnographic problem: Strathern’s interrogations were also catalyzed by her
ethnographic encounters in “Melanesia” (the site of her own fieldwork but also in
some sense a “fiction”), where she found that the frame of individual and society
obscured how relations actually worked through persons. One of her well-known
moves in Gender of the Gift was to elaborate on the Melanesian “dividual” as
containing, being divided by, extensive sets of relations—with society, or relations
(which she also calls sociality), being within rather than outside the person.
Strathern does not merely displace society and the individual in favor of soci-
ality and the dividual. Rather, she recognizes that these interlinked concepts of
individual and society are intimately connected to numerous other concepts that
echo their form and together reproduce a certain metaphysic. It is helpful to dem-
onstrate this displacement first with reference to Strathern’s critique of social
anthropology, and especially structural-functionalism. Certainly, social anthropol-
ogists were told not to “reify” society, and to use “person” over “individual” to
emphasize “how [the person] was already an element of a social relationship,
already . . . a function of relating,” a relatum (Strathern, 2005: 41). And yet,
social anthropologists were still attached to thinking with the society-form, they
were concerned with describing kinship “systems[,] which made up a ‘complex
unity’ or more generally . . . structure[s], which constituted ‘an arrangement of per-
sons in institutionally controlled or defined relationships’”(Radcliffe-Brown, cited
in Strathern, 2005: 41). That is, despite the awareness among social anthropolo-
gists that the concepts of individual and society created problems for ethnography,
their conceptual attachments to encompassing, transcendent “systems,”
“structures,” “complex unities” composed of individual “entities” reinstalled
what I have called “society thinking” (Lebner, 2017a, 2017b). And this society
thinking made certain kinds of relations, especially persons composed by relations,
hard to see.
In other words, Strathern is not only concerned to displace the individual con-
cepts of society and individual. She also tries to locate and remove from the struc-
ture of her accounts those concepts and analytical forms connected to society
thinking. Her privileging of conceptual forms that make the compositional prop-
erties of relations (that is, relations as internal rather than external to entities) more
Lebner 15
visible, such as dividual and sociality, even shows how although she is constrained
by scholarly language, she pushes against the concept of “the concept,” whose
noun form conjures an individual entity with external relations.
This may seem quite different from Asad’s accounts in Formations of the Secular
and elsewhere, which end rather than start by denaturalizing the concepts of the
human and the individual, yet the overlap is important. Strathern’s writing against
society thinking is also, in a deep sense, against the logic of the secularist state—a
transcendent entity that produces and secures distinctions among society, religion,
and politics, as much as the individual. Moreover, like Asad, Strathern is aware of
and vigilant about the extension of such conceptual grammars and their coloniza-
tion of others in both ethnography and politics.
Writing through relations, transforming anthropology

Just as reading Asad helps us transform Strathern into a critic of ever-expanding
secular/ist logic, we can look at Strathern’s writing to deepen this understanding
and to also see Asad’s own writing anew. For unlike Strathern, who offered a
primer on her approach to writing against society thinking and through relations
(see Strathern, 2004[1991]), Asad has not explicitly elaborated on his writing style.
Yet, if read alongside Strathern’s, Asad’s writing also emerges as deliberately
shaped to deflect the potential distortions produced by secularist Euro-American
concepts and reason. And here a surprising fourth point of intersection comes into
view, allowing for another transformation: Asad’s writing emerges as also privileg-
ing the relation and transformation over the (analytical) concept.
Strathern’s redescription
Alfred Gell (1999) was perhaps the first to write about Strathern’s challenging
writing style, though few have described how it is structured at all levels around
Strathern’s efforts to displace society thinking and write through relations. I noted
above that this entailed not only removing the concepts of society and individual
from her writing, but also removing every analytical echo of them where possible.
Society thinking includes the sense of a hierarchically positioned body (such as a
society, scholar, or theory) encompassing (or shaping, viewing, or comparing)
individual entities (like humans, societies, objects, or concepts). Strathern’s strat-
egy has been not just to remove this hierarchically positioning framework but to
also allow a new relational metaphysic to guide her writing, which is always
also analysis.
Writing through relations is perhaps more radical than it sounds. One way of
describing writing through relations is that Strathern begins by displacing as much
as possible her individual perspective. Instead she writes as a Melanesian might, or
more precisely, as Strathern has apprehended and incorporated the Melanesian
perspective grounded in relationally constituted, divided personhood. That is,
she tries to write horizontally, through the relations that have come to compose
her, rather than as a transcendent individual, who evaluates societies, developing a

“theory” or unitary concept that will encompass and explain these social instances
in an argument staged in linear form.
What does displacing the individual perspective look like on the page?
Essentially, vignettes, or stories of relations, are placed in succession, often with
Melanesian vignettes alongside Euro-American ones. The aim is not ultimately to
compare, but to elucidate one side through the other—and to transform under-
standings of both, bringing them closer together—rather than to abstract, or to
produce a hierarchical or scaled view. As readers may have noticed, this method
has informed my own approach to bringing Asad and Strathern into relation,
although Strathern displaces the individual perspective more radically than I
have here.
What does it feel like to read through Strathern’s radical displacement of the
individual? Simply put, as you begin to make new connections, you can feel as
though you are losing yourself – but that is the point. By placing vignettes side by
side, Strathern tries to reproduce (managing to not-quite-replicate) a Melanesian
perspective on the movement from participant observation to writing. This rede-
scribes and re-inscribes the challenge of ethnographic experience both as research
practice and as artefact of narrative. In other words, her analogical ethnographic
writing seeks to convey what it is like to try to see, write, and understand the world
as Melanesians might, through relations first and last.
Asad’s redescription
David Scott’s description of Asad’s writing now offers a useful counterpoint to my
description of Strathern’s:
[Asad’s] inquiries always have about them a deliberatively exploratory . . . provisional

character . . .[He is] “sketching landscapes” (to [conjure] Wittgenstein) . . .[rather than
offering] a series of monographs compiling comprehensive accounts of the way the
world is there—or then.
Scott also shows how a certain tension marks Asad’s style of investigation (Scott,
2006: 320; Note 4). On one side are Asad’s genealogical concerns inspired by
Michel Foucault, that is, a skepticism toward power/knowledge and an intention
to interrogate its effects. On another side is Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of tra-
dition, which Asad first engaged in 1986 (Note 3). It is this tension between gene-
alogy and tradition, Scott claims, that explains why, for example, Genealogies
(1993) “does not take the form of a thoroughgoing deconstruction of . . . contempo-
rary anthropological understandings of religion, but moves on quickly to describe
(or better, redescribe) aspects of . . . contrasting religious traditions, medieval
Christianity and Islam” (Scott, 2006: 140). This is also why Asad is reluctant to
write as a conventional critic, as one “who already knows . . . the directions . . .[of]
his dissatisfactions” (ibid.: 137).
Lebner 17
It is certainly the case that skepticism of conventional Euro-American knowl-

edge and critical modalities have guided Asad. However, with the tradition of
British anthropology in view, and with Strathern in mind, one might offer another
reading. In his later work, Asad has chosen to decompose and displace conven-
tional concepts by writing through the relations between and within them. Rather
than offer a systematic argument about the boundaries or definition of religion and
secular, in Genealogies of Religion and Formations of the Secular, Asad chooses to
move between the description and the unbinding of these concepts. He does this
most notably in the latter volume, where his even more fluid writing conveys
through form as much as content his substantive argument: that secularism is
enmeshed and sustained by—and can only be grasped through examining—a
broader domain of ever-shifting-but-interrelated secular concepts, conceivable as
such because they are distinguished from religion. I explored this above in relation
to his discussion of the human, but it is important to emphasize that while Asad
identifies predominant grammars that have animated secularism, like indeed the
self-owning and autonomous human individual, he also moves consistently
through different conceptual constellations. Asad wants to remind us of two
nearly opposite points at once: first that contemporary secularism is sustained
by a secular epistemology that has had particular political effects, and second
that the secular more broadly is constantly moving, expanding, and transforming.
If the secular is ever-transforming, and is thus not a discretely bounded episteme
but instead is spreading, can we ever escape? Asad engages this question only
implicitly. Scott has described Asad’s thought as more tragic than romantic in
this regard. If romance assumes a “horizon of emancipation . . .[where] the past
is there to be overcome on the way to a preconstituted future,” Scott explains, then
“the tragic sensibility is poignantly aware of the ineradicable metaphysical traces
that connect us to what we leave behind” (2006: 152). I concur with Scott’s evo-
cation of a certain dwelling with impossibility, but I see Asad as more sanguine and
less bound to the secularist valuation of “pleasure and pain” than Scott’s conern
with tragedy allows (see also Iqbal’s 2018 critique). Asad’s writing implies that
though the secular might be spreading, there are many ways that it will be dis-
turbed and redirected, both within and outside of scholarship—a fact to which
anthropologists, he insists, should remain attuned.
It is in this final sense that Asad’s work intersects with Strathern’s, whose
mature work is directly committed to both the impossibility of escape and to the
work of relations, and therefore ultimately to transformation. Strathern shows that
it is possible to find and develop an alternative metaphysic from within the broader
secular Euro-American tradition—as long as we make space for, and work
through, the differences we find within it. After all, relation is itself a model and
conduit of “secular knowledge,” as Strathern has noted in one of the only places
she has used the term “secular” (1995: 18). Relation can be so considered, she
argues, because the relation was “ushered in with the seventeenth or eighteenth
century conviction that world (nature) is open to scrutiny” (ibid., see also
Strathern 2005: 62). The world being put “on the same plane” as humans (1995:
18) while humans’ terrestrial relations are distinguished from the divine, is precise-
ly, Asad might clarify, what makes ‘relations’ a secular model of knowledge.
Yet it is important to underscore that a relational metaphysic, even if it might be
“secular,” is different from the predominant secularist metaphysic that haunts
many anthropological projects. A relational metaphysic, for example, does not
seek to determine and hold in place entities, such as individuals, concepts, or
societies. Rather, it leaves open the possibility that whatever might be perceived
as an autonomous entity mediated through “external” relations, can actually be
constituted by, preceded by, “internal” relations.7
Though Asad does not explicitly adopt a relational metaphysic, I do not think
that he would disagree about its importance for scholars, and for anthropologists
in particular. Asad, like Strathern, is ultimately telling his readers that they should
remain aware not only of the secularist tradition that has come to dominate
thought and practice through the state form. He is also asking readers to remain
open to apprehending the many other secular traditions, their potential others, and
the relations between them, being elaborated within the west and beyond.
Conclusion
Because my aim has been to focus on the connections between the works of Asad
and Strathern—in order to transform our understanding of their radicalizing
work—other relevant influences and traditions have been backgrounded. One
influence was the “crisis in representation,” a period when anthropologists precise-
ly began questioning how to write about others. The crisis in representation was
arguably an outgrowth of the political turn in US anthropology, and it was rep-
resented most famously by the book Writing Culture, which was a critique of
predominant cultural anthropology at the time, especially of one of its key pro-
ponents, Clifford Geertz. I have only mentioned in passing Asad’s important
critiques of Geertz, which preceded Writing Culture, and I have essentially ignored
Strathern’s temporary and mischievous alliance with culture in her critique of
society (1988). I have focused instead on the earlier British anthropological tradi-
tion that quietly grounded Asad’s and Strathern’s experiments with writing, and
which inspired their respective responses to “cultural anthropological” reactions to
the crisis. Indeed, in their own ways, Asad and Strathern questioned the very forms
in which anthropologists write more than any of the more radically self-conscious
discussants of the “crisis in representation.”
While recalling Geertz at this juncture is no substitute for that discussion, he
offers a counterpoint for my conclusion. Works and Lives, Geertz’s memorable
response to Writing Culture, diagnoses a style that Asad, Strathern, and others had
begun distancing themselves from in the 1980s. Geertz called this style Akobo
Realism, after a little-known text, “Operations on the Akobo and Gila Rivers
1940–41,” which describes Evans-Pritchard’s military exploits in the Sudan
during World War II. Written for the readership of The Army Quarterly (i.e.,
not for anthropologists), Evans-Pritchard’s text displays the essence of his
Lebner 19
approach to writing: “There is the suppression of any sign of the struggle with
words . . . the overriding point of every image, every elegance, every nod, is to
demonstrate that nothing, no matter how singular, resists reasoned description”
(Geertz 1988: 61). Evans-Pritchard, Geertz infers, homogenized the more anxious
“I-Witnessing” initiated by Malinowski and consolidated the sound of the British
“School,” which “is held together far more by this manner of going about things in
prose than it is by any sort of consensual theory or settled method” (ibid.: 59).
Geertz admits, however, that the style had spread. It was an incredibly powerful
“theatre of language—in ethnography, the most powerful yet constructed . . . .
Even most Americans sound, by now, a bit like ‘Operations on the Akobo’”
(ibid.). Nevertheless, this language only “bends our categories . . . it does not
break them” (ibid.: 61).
Geertz had neither Asad nor Strathern in mind when writing this, but his
account throws into relief a number of points I have made in this paper.
I began by arguing that what united the British “School” was more than style.
I revisited the history of translation in early British social anthropology to show
that it was influenced far more by Malinowski—and indeed Malinowski’s interro-
gation of theory and analytical concepts through ethnography—than Oxford-
centered histories, including Asad’s own, often allowed.
Revisiting this anthropological tradition then helped me to begin describing the
connections between, and transforming, Asad’s and Strathern’s work. It made
visible how Asad’s and Strathern’s respective responses to the political turn in
anthropology—their interrogation of some of its key concepts—both drew on
their anthropological tradition and transformed it. Then, continuing to read
them alongside one another helped transform the apprehension of each in turn.
On the one hand, I explored the convergence of their projects at their concern with
the human/individual in secularism/society, and we began to see how Strathern
could be considered a student of the secular. On the other hand, through my
discussion of their experiments with writing, I showed how both aimed to displace
predominant secularist concepts and forms of argument, and how Asad, like
Strathern, even pushed against the concept of “the concept” in anthropology, by
writing through relations.
Reading Asad and Strathern together also reminds us that they were writing
against something that Geertz’s description of Akobo Realism implies but does not
elaborate analytically: that conventional “reasoned description,” and especially its
general protection of our modes of classification, might indeed be a colonial war by
other means. It is a discouraging and even uncomfortable point, most acutely
because most of us can do little about it. That is, most of us do not have the
skill to so radically experiment with scholarly conventions, and, if we do, we will
likely not be allowed such experimentation by journals, reviewers, and editors (not
to mention hiring and tenure committees), especially early in our careers. How,
then, to proceed?
I should underscore that I have not argued that readers should attempt to
emulate Asad’s or Strathern’s writing, and I do not think that either scholar
would want this. For instance, Strathern has explicitly invited others to develop
their own forms of writing through the different relations that compose them
(Strathern, 2011). I have merely made a most general suggestion: that we should
read Asad and Strathern together because both the form and content of their
writing can help consolidate insights, arguments, and ultimately politics through
which anthropologists can continue to write and transform their traditions.
But more specifically, such reading can help invigorate two areas of anthropo-
logical and interdisciplinary debate that have been largely conducted separately to
date. One area is the study of secularism, indebted to Asad, which has thrived but
is now stalling on its focus on the state governance of religion and the destabili-
zation of the religion–politics binary (see also Lebner, 2015). While this focus has
been productive to date, it forgets what Asad and even Strathern might say: even if
the state is a powerful site of these forms of categorization, it is not the only source.
Rather, whole domains of thought and practice quietly proceed in some distinction
to religion, thus re-entrenching it, both within and beyond the state, in Euro-
America and at many sites beyond—including in academic scholarship. We
cannot therefore remain so focused on one or two concepts; we must train our-
selves in the details of secular conceptual relations and distinctions and especially
their secularist constellations, even as we challenge them.
Anthropologists of science and medicine have begun elaborating an allied per-
spective, in particular noting that “less attention has been paid to how the work of
constructing political secularity has itself been achieved through [science] and
medicine” (Whitmarsh and Roberts, 2016: 204; Roberts, 2016). Moreover, these
scholars note that anthropological studies of science and medicine have largely
proceeded in an unselfconsciously secularist fashion: they have generally deemed
“natural” the distinctions between science and religion, and as result have treated
the “religious” elements they encounter as epiphenomenal—“unreal”—rather than
constitutive of the nature in question. However, what we learn from the intersec-
tions of Asad’s and Strathern’s work is that an answer to anthropologists’ unself-
conscious secularity seems to lie less in embracing a “nonsecular” approach, as
Whitmarsh and Roberts suggest, or even simply displacing the naturalist distinc-
tion between nature and culture, as advocated also by proponents of the ontolog-
ical turn, who often dialogue with anthropologists of science (Holbraad and
Pedersen, 2017; Viveiros de Castro, 2003; see discussion in Lebner, 2017b).
Instead, reading Asad and Strathern together reminds us that it might be hard
to find a definitive “outside” to the secular in our scholarly concepts and languages,
even as we can write against secularist metaphyiscs.
What seems necessary is precisely for anthropologists to become more attuned
to secular formations, not with the aim of definitively escaping them but with the
goal of becoming aware of how the most weighty secularist assumptions—those
conceptual and interpersonal relations that echo in the secularist state—might
affect our ethnographies and our politics. I have been trying throughout to distin-
guish the particularities of secularist metaphysics from the domain of the secular
more broadly, although the extent of the secular–secularist difference remains an
Lebner 21
open question. As I have discussed at length elsewhere (Lebner, 2015), there is a

tendency among some readers of Asad to read the secular as also, inextricably,
“secularism,” which can be escaped if we simply stop asking about the difference
between religion and politics. Reading Asad with Strathern, however, I am not
convinced it is so easy to remove all trace of the distinction from religion in
our scholarly languages. Indeed, if we pretend it is not there even when it is, or
if we ignore the connection between contemporary realities and the secular, we
may risk succumbing to secularist naturalism once more. For now, then, a com-
bined effort to seek conventional secularist grammars and their others seems to be
a key tool for discerning difference and facilitating transformation within the sec-
ular scholarly languages through which anthropologists still, inevitably, write.
Indeed, for good or ill, whether it is spoken or not, our scholarly languages are
still quietly considered not to be “religious.” Though it is clearly vital for anthro-
pologists to continue to make space for religious perspectives, I do not think the
distinction between them and scholarly languages will be dissolved any time soon,
even if we declare the difference irrelevant.
Thus I have wanted to convey what Asad’s and Strathern’s work together sug-
gest: that secular logics proliferate, often naturalizing the secularist primacy of the
concepts of individual, state, and society (and their echoes) over the transformative
potential of relations. Yet the latter’s potential effects on our descriptions cannot
be mitigated only by mobilizing or displacing this or that concept, as no one or two
concepts contain the power to stifle our ethnographies and retrench our conser-
vative politics, or for that matter, free them. This does not mean that we should
stop displacing and creating concepts. Rather, it seems that it is only by first
keeping all the conceptual and interpersonal relations and distinctions in view—
with an eye on their potentially secular/ist natures – that we can begin to enact the
transformations that our traditions invite, and that our future politics (if we should
even call it politics) will ultimately require.8
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank those who closely read, critiqued, and encouraged me to keep going
with this piece: Seçil Dagtas, Girish Daswani, Sheri Gibbings, Tanya Richardson, an anon-
ymous reviewer, and most especially Erik Mueggler, who offered invaluable intellectual
engagement throughout this paper’s writing. Julia Eckert, co-editor of Anthropological
Theory, also deserves special thanks for pushing me to make important arguments more
salient. Gil Anidjar’s encouragement years ago is also kindly remembered. Finally, deliver-
ing and discussing a shorter version of this paper also improved the final product. I thank
the participants of the workshop “Thinking about science, religion, and secularism” held at
the University of California, Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (April 27, 2018) and
Yunus Dogan Telliel, the organizer, for stimulating reflections.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.
Notes
1. Note that Strathern rejects the theory–ethnography distinction, that is, ethnography is
already theory (see discussions in Lebner, 2016, 2017a, 2017b). For his part, Asad thinks
anthropology is unduly narrowed if built only around a hyperbolic notion of “fieldwork”
(Asad, 1994, 2003).
2. Evans-Pritchard’s lecture certainly caused scandal. But I question Dumont’s implication
that Evans-Pritchard was introducing new and independent thinking, at least with
regards to Evans-Pritchard’s stated interest in meaning and semantics. In fact, by describ-
ing anthropology as an art of translation, Evans-Pritchard was mobilizing an important
aspect of Malinowski’s teachings, although it had long been repeated that Malinowski
had nothing much to teach beyond method – he was deemed theoretically ‘soft’ (Douglas,
2003[1980]: 37). It was in part due to this “softness” that Malinowski had been dismissed
as a matter of principle in the structural functionalist heyday, while anthropologists
promoted a “robust” (and ‘theoretically-informed’) ‘science of society.’ Hence the
‘bomb’ of Evans-Pritchard recuperating some of Malinowski’s concerns (alongside inter-
ests in French anthropology and Wittgenstein. See Firth (1957) and a posthumous admis-
sion by Gellner (1998), regarding Malinowski’s resonances with Wittgenstein. See also
Morton (2007), on evidence regarding the roots of the Malinowski-Evans-Pritchard rift.
3. Douglas’ (1980) biography of Evans-Pritchard barely mentioned Malinowski, emphasiz-
ing instead that Evans-Pritchard’s “own independent reasoning brought him to
two principles enunciated in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations” (2003[1980]:
31): (a) that a language can only proceed from considering the activity in which
it develops and, (b) that “overformalized” abstractions, or concepts, should be
rejected (cf. Firth, 1957). Leach published a scathing critique in the London Review
of Books (1980), detailing a number of her “perverse” historical erasures. He noted in
particular how she ignored Malinowski’s thinking on “faith and morals” (ibid.: 24, 25).
4. Collins (1985) and Holbraad (2017) reproduce Gellner’s points about Durkheim (though
Collins cites Gellner prominently as a point of departure while Holbraad acknowledges
and summarizes a generic exegetical literature). Corsın-Jiménez and Willerslev (2007)
offer a very charitable and creative reading of Gellner, though as a result ignore the
“theological prejudices” (Gellner, 1970[1962]: 45) and the hyper-rationalism that ulti-
mately drive his argument.
5. If Kant deemed the compulsive character of our categorical concepts to be “hidden in the
backstage recesses of the individual mind,” Gellner recounts, Durkheim maintained that
concepts came to stick because of public, observable, and consistent social “work,”
especially ritual and religion (1970: 23).
6. For Asad (1986: 14), “A tradition consists . . . of discourses that seek to instruct practi-
tioners regarding the correct form and purpose of a . . . practice that . . . is established
. . .[and] has a history . . . and . . . future . . . through [practice in] a present.”
Lebner 23
7. It is worth noting that Strathern thinks that conveying the nature of relations is always a
challenge, as “the concept [of relations] may turn out to be at once key for comprehend-
ing symbiosis and a linguistic impediment to describing it” (Strathern, 2017: 16). Here
Strathern means that even conceiving of relations as a “concept” produces descriptive
problems that we need to continually be mindful of.
8. See Lebner (2019), for discussion of anthropology, secularity and the problem
of “politics.”
References
Anidjar G (2010) The idea of an anthropology of Christianity. Interventions: International
Journal of Postcolonial Studies 11(3): 367–393.
Asad T (1970) The Kababish Arabs: Power, Authority and Consent in a Nomadic Tribe.
London: Hurst.
Asad T (1973a) Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press.
Asad T (1973b) Two European images of non-European rule. In: Asad T (ed) Anthropology
and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press, pp. 103–120.
Asad T (1974) The concept of rationality in economic anthropology. Economy and Society 3
(2): 211–218.
Asad T (1975) Anthropological texts and ideological problems: an analysis of Cohen on
Arab villages in Israel. Economy and Society 4(3): 251–282.
Asad T (1979) Anthropology and the analysis of ideology. Man 14: 607–627.
Asad T (1983) Anthropological conceptions of religion: reflections on Geertz. Man 18
(2): 237–259.
Asad T (1986) The concept of cultural translation in British social anthropology. In:
Clifford J and Marcus G (eds) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 140–164.
Asad T (1993) Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and the Reasons of Power in Christianity
and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Asad T (1994) Ethnographic representation, statistics and modern power. Social Research
61(1): 55–88.
Asad T (1996) Comments on conversion. In: van der Veer P (ed) Conversion to Modernities:
The Globalization of Christianity. London: Routledge, pp. 263–274.
Asad T (2003) Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Asad T (2015) Reflections on violence, law and humanitarianism. Critical Inquiry
41(2): 390–427.
Collins S (1985) Categories, concepts or predicaments? Remarks on Mauss’ use of
philosophical terminology. In: Carrithers M, Collins S and Lukes S (eds) The Category
of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 46–82.
Corsın Jiménez A and Willerslev R (2007) An anthropological concept of the concept:
reversibility among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute 13(3): 527–544.
Douglas M (2003[1980]) Edward Evans-Pritchard. London: Routledge.
Dumont L I975 (I968). Preface ro the French. edition of E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer
(trans.) M. Douglas & J. Douglas. In: Beattie JHM and Lienhardt RG (eds) Studies of
social anthropology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Durkheim É (2001[1912]) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.
Evans-Pritchard EE (1956) Nuer Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Firth JR (1957) Ethnographic analysis and language with reference to Malinowski’s views.
In: Firth JR (ed) Man and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw Malinowski.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 93–118.
Furani K (2015) Is There a Postsecular? Journal of the American Academy of Religion 83(1):
1–26.
Geertz C (1988) Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Gell A (1999) Strathernograms, or, the Semiotics of Mixed Metaphors. In: The Art of
Anthropology. Oxford: Berg, pp.29–75.
Gellner E (1959) Words and Things: An Examination of, and an Attack on, Linguistic
Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Gellner E (1970[1962]) Concepts and society. In: Wilson BR (ed) Rationality: Key Concepts
in the Social Sciences. Evanston: Harper and Row, pp. 18–49.
Gellner E (1992) Postmodernism, Reason, Religion. London: Routledge.
Gellner E (1998) Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg
Dilemma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hann C (1996) Gellner on Malinowski: words and things in central Europe. In: Hall JA and
Jarvie IC (eds) The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 45–64.
Haraway D (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Hobbes T (1985/1668) Leviathan. London: Penguin.
Holbraad M (2017) The contingency of concepts: transcendental deduction and ethnograph-
ic expression in anthropological thinking. In: Charbonnier P, Salmon G and Skafish P
(eds) Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology after Anthropology. London: Rowman &
Littlefield, pp. 152–181.
Holbraad M and Pedersen M (2017) The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Iqbal K (2018) Chronopolitics of tragedy in the anthropology of secularism.
Anthropological Theory Forthcoming.
Kuper A (2015[1973]) Anthropology and Anthropologists: The British School in the
Twentieth Century. London: Routledge.
Leach E (1980) Cairo Essays. London Review of Books 2(23): 24–25.
Lebner A (Forthcoming 2019) On secularity: Marxism, reality and the Messiah in Brazil.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 25(1).
Lebner A (2017a) Introduction: Strathern’s redescription of anthropology. In: Lebner A
(ed) Redescribing Relations: Strathernian Conversations on Ethnography, Knowledge and
Politics. Oxford, New York: Berghahn, pp. 1–38.
Lebner A (2017b) Interpreting Strathern’s unconscious critique of ontology. Social
Anthropology 25(2): 221–233.
Lebner A (2016a) La redescription de l’anthropologie selon Marilyn Strathern. L’Homme
218(2): 117–150. Translated from French by A Dorval.
Lebner A (2016b) The anthropology of religion: historical and contemporary trends. In:
Parson W (ed) Religion: Social Religion. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks.
Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference, pp. 235–252.
Lebner 25
Lebner A (2015) The Anthropology of Secularity Beyond Secularism. Religion and Society:
Advances in Research 6(1): 62–74.
Mahmood S (2005) Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Malinowski B (1913) Review: Les Formes Élémentaires De La Vie Religieuse. Folklore 24
(4): 525–531.
Malinowski B (1923) The problem of meaning in primitive languages. In: Ogden C and
Richards A (eds) The Meaning of Meaning. London: International Library of
Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method, pp. 296–337.
Malinowski B (1935) Coral Gardens and Their Magic: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the
Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands. London: George Allen &
Unwin Limited.
Morton C (2007) Evans-Pritchard and Malinowski: the roots of a complex relationship.
History of Anthropology Newsletter 34(2): 10–14.
Needham R (1973) Belief, Language and Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pouillon J (1979) Remarques sur le verbe croire. In: Izard M. and Smith P. (eds) La fonction
symbolique, pp. 43–51.
Roberts E (2016) Gods, Germs, and Petri Dishes: Toward a Nonsecular Medical
Anthropology. Medical Anthropology 35(3): 205–219.
Ruel M 1997[1982] Christians as Believers. In: Belief, Ritual and the Securing of Life:
Reflexive Essays on a Bantu Religion. Leiden: E.J. Brill, pp.36–59.
Schmaus W (2004) Rethinking Durkheim and His Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Scott D (2006) The tragic sensibility of Talal Asad. In: David S and Hirschkind C (eds)
Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, pp. 134–153.
Scott D and Hirschkind C (2006) Introduction: the anthropological skepticism of Talal
Asad. In: Scott D and HirschkindC (eds) Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad
and His Interlocutors. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 1–11.
Skorupski J (1996) The post-modern Hume: Ernest Gellner’s ‘Enlightenment fundamental-
ism’. In: Hall J and Jarvie I (eds) The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, pp. 467–496.
Strathern M (1972) Women in Between: Female Roles in a Male World: Mount Hagen, New
Guinea. London: Seminar Press.
Strathern M (1981) Culture in a netbag: the manufacture of a subdiscipline in anthropology.
Man 16: 665–668.
Strathern M (1985) Kinship and economy: constitutive orders of a provisional kind.
American Ethnologist 12: 191–209.
Strathern M (1987a) Out of context: the persuasive fictions of anthropology [and comments
and reply]. Current Anthropology 28(3): 251–281.
Strathern M (1987b) Conclusion. In: Strathern M (ed) Dealing with Inequality: Analysing
Gender Relations in Melanesia and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 255–277.
Strathern M (1988) The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Strathern M (1995) The Relation: Issues in Complexity and Scale. Cambridge: Prickly
Pear Press.
Strathern M (1996) The concept of society is theoretically obsolete. In: Ingold T (ed) Key
Debates in Anthropology. London: Routledge, pp. 60–66.
Strathern M (2004[1991]) Partial Connections. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press.
Strathern M (2005) Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Always a Surprise.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Strathern M (2011) What politics? Common Knowledge 17(1): 123–127.
Strathern M (2017) Naturalism and the Invention of Identity. Social Analysis 61(2): 15–30.
Viveiros de Castro E (2003) And. Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology.
Viveiros de Castro E (2004). Perspectival anthropology and the method of controlled equiv-
ocation. Tipitı 2(1): 3–22.
Viveiros de Castro E, Fausto C and Strathern M (2017) Within the limits of a certain
language: interview with Marilyn Strathern. In: Lebner A (ed) Redescribing Relations:
Strathernian Conversations on Ethnography, Knowledge and Politics. Oxford, New York:
Berghahn, pp. 39–61.
Weiner A (1976) Women of Value, Men of Renown: New Perspectives in Trobriand Exchange.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Whitmarsh I and Roberts E (2016) Nonsecular medical anthropology. Medical
Anthropology 35(3): 203–208.
Young M (2004) Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Ashley Lebner is Assistant Professor of Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier

University. She is editor of Redescribing relations: Strathernian conversations on
ethnography, knowledge and politics and is currently completing a monograph,
After impossibility: The problem of friendship in settler Amazonia. Her new research
focuses on science, secularity and the future in Brazil.

Lebner, Ashley. Not Such A Thing As A Concept. A Radical Tradition From Malinowski To Asad and Strathern

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Lebner, Ashley. Not Such A Thing As A Concept. A Radical Tradition From Malinowski To Asad and Strathern

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Article

No such thing as a 0(0) 1–26

Translation and the critique of concepts

mid-twentieth century forward. Restoring an understanding of Malinowski’s influ-

The concern with translation and concepts deepened during Malinowski’s

Malinowski was skeptical of universalizing categories—and skeptical to a cer-

begin interrogating established concepts and distinctions through ethnography. As

Asad, Strathern and the “political turn” in anthropology

Asad: Marxism and beyond, 1970–1993

Strathern: Before and after feminism, 1970–1987

and gender invoke a network of concepts informed by Western models of

Asad: Secularism and the human

notions of natural humanness as on the privatization of religion, were concretized

Strathern: Individual and society

Writing through relations, transforming anthropology

her, rather than as a transcendent individual, who evaluates societies, developing a

[Asad’s] inquiries always have about them a deliberatively exploratory . . . provisional

It is certainly the case that skepticism of conventional Euro-American knowl-

open question. As I have discussed at length elsewhere (Lebner, 2015), there is a

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Durkheim É (2001[1912]) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Oxford: Oxford

Ashley Lebner is Assistant Professor of Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier

You might also like