Article

Anthropological Theory
12(3) 295–319
Virtual Christianity ! The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1463499612469586

anthropology ant.sagepub.com

Jon Bialecki
University of California, San Diego, USA

Abstract
This article claims that the collective object of an anthropology of Christianity should be
Christianity as a virtual object, in the sense used by Gilles Deleuze: a field of multi-
plicitous potential with effects on the formation of the actual. This position is necessi-
tated by the recurrent inability/refusal/demurral of the anthropology of Christianity to
define what its exact object is. This inability/refusal/demurral is a symptom that can be
traced back to a larger anthropological shift towards a nominalist ontology, a disciplin-
ary tendency which is exemplified in the recent anthropological interest in Deleuzian-
derived assemblage theory. After showing how current anthropological uses of Deleuze
have neglected his concept of the virtual due to the same nominalist tendency, this
article then argues that taking up Deleuze’s virtual realism would reconfigure assem-
blage theory in such a way that it would make the project of an anthropology of
Christianity substantially more intelligible, as well as undoing what appear to be
points of contestation internal to the sub-field.

Keywords
Anthropology of Christianity, assemblage theory, Deleuze, ontology, the virtual

I find fascinating that many scholarly writers – those in the Nietzschean tradition, for
instance, like Deleuze and Guattari, or even Hardt and Negri – express faith in a certain
kind of vitalism that will animate history, that will escape logocentrism, that has the
power to give birth to redemptive action that will move beyond culture and tradition.
When one listens to many born-again Pentecostals, they’re saying a similar thing.
Jean Comaroff (2011: 169)

Corresponding author:
Jon Bialecki, Department of Anthropology, Social Sciences Building Rm. 210, 9500 Gilman Drive, University of
California, La Jolla, CA 92093–0532, USA.
Email: jbialecki@ucsd.edu
296 Anthropological Theory 12(3)

The things we can define best are the things least worth defining.
Roy Wagner (1981: 39)

An anthropology, but of what?

In what may be a small irony, the anthropology of Christianity can be seen as the
child of the anthropology of Islam. As originally put forward by Joel Robbins in
the first essay to call for an anthropology of Christianity, ‘What is a Christian?
Notes toward an Anthropology of Christianity’, the anthropology of Islam could
serve as an exemplar for what an anthropology of Christianity would look like. As
Robbins presents it, the anthropology of Islam is a metaphorical place where
‘people working in different geographic areas publish in the same fora, read one
another’s work, recognize the relevance of that work for their own projects, and
seek to develop a set of shared questions to be examined comparatively’ (Robbins
2003: 192); this is what Robbins himself wishes to midwife through his call for an
anthropology that would be centered on communities that understand themselves
as being Christian.
Now, Robbins does not spend too much time in his essay imagining what those
shared questions would be (though he does suggest that a few exemplars might be
found in the special issue that the essay was an introduction for), but he does make
an odd move in suggesting the one question that should not be given too much
attention: Robbins suggests that anthropologists of Christianity should not tarry
by spending too much time on the issue of what kind of object an ‘anthropology of
Christianity’ would be addressing in the first place. Such a move, he says, is
unnecessary to the venture.
While it may seem obvious that an anthropology of Christianity would be
focused on Christianity, Robbins notes that such a project is theoretically prob-
lematic, though he states that this should not delay us. Again referring to the
anthropology of Christianity’s Islamic sire, Robbins observes that the initial call
for an anthropology of Islam by Abdul Hamid el-Zein ended paradoxically with a
denial that ‘Islam’ was any one object; as El-Zein stated in closing his call for an
anthropology of Islam,

. . . neither Islam nor the notion of religion exists as a fixed and autonomous form
referring to positive content which can be reduced to universal and unchanging char-
acteristics. Religion becomes an arbitrary category which as a unified and bounded
form has no necessary existence. ‘Islam’ as an analytical category dissolves as well.
(El-Zein 1977: 252)

Despite this rather unpromising first moment, a call for a study of an object that
the very instituting call for claims does not exist, Robbins observes that El-Zein’s
position has been ‘routinely rejected’, though none of the arguments against it
‘would count for much in a high level theoretical debate over whether or not it
Bialecki 297

is possible to establish objects that can be examined cross-culturally’ (Robbins

2003: 194).
Robbins makes note of this because he was concerned that an anthropology of
Christianity could be smothered in its crib by what Robbins calls ‘object dissolving
critique’, that is, arguments animated by the same logic that El-Zein closes his essay
with. As Robbins observes:

[t]here are many kinds of Christianity, and when the number of different kinds is
multiplied by the number of different situations in which they have been spread and
the number of different cultures to which people have adopted them, it is hard to
escape the conclusion that at best we are dealing with Christianities rather than with
Christianity, and that at worst these Christianities really have rather little in common
with one another. (2003: 193)

This wealth of difference, if taken as a denial of any commonality, would pre-

vent the formation of the kind of comparative community that Robbins longs for.
This community was all the more necessary because, as Robbins saw it then,
‘anthropologist of Christianity’ was a ‘stigmatized’ identity (2003: 195) because
of the distasteful nature of Christianity to most anthropological sensibilities (also
see Harding 1991). Already spurned as crypto-Christians, this possibility of differ-
ence could keep anthropologists of self-professed Christian populations from
cohering around Christianity as a (phantasmatic) common issue.
However, Robbins tells us, the anthropology of Islam shows that some common
foundation need not be laid down before an anthropology of Christianity can begin
construction:

What the history of the anthropology of Islam teaches us is that the intellectual
obstacles that confront any effort to establish the anthropology of a world religion
can be overcome. What is more, they can be overcome even in the absence of fully
developed theoretical arguments for why disciplinary strictures against any devalu-
ation of local variation should be relaxed in order to allow comparison to take place in
these cases. (2003: 194)

In other words, get along to go along – let us first see what can be done, and only
later take the time to figure out our warrant for it. But we must do so at the cost of
not knowing what our object actually is, presuming for the sake of the project a
totality that may only perhaps be realized later on.
As an instituting gesture, there is something to this openness that should be
respected, concerned with what can be crafted later on rather than with policing at
the outset. However, what I would like to take the time to point out is that this odd
elision is not particular to Robbins. I argue that there is a recurrent refusal or
inability to define exactly what Christianity is.1 This is in part because of the
diversity of ‘Christianities’ out there, but also, I claim, because of the unconscious
influence of a kind of nominalist ontology in contemporary anthropology; and
298 Anthropological Theory 12(3)

I also argue that, oddly enough, it is the intellectual tools being turned to in con-
temporary nominalist anthropology that will get us back to a realism that can
allow us to talk meaningfully about the anthropology of Christianity as having a
single object, without doing violence to the wealth of ‘Christianities’ out there as
well. I argue that we should take the object of anthropology to be Christianity in its
virtual form, as a multiplicity which is predicated on and produces difference, even
as that difference is still comprehendible.
The best way to make this case, though, is to start by showing that Robbins’s
demurral is met by other instances of declining to give an object for the anthro-
pology of Christianity, or in some cases by an attempt that falls apart when looked
at in broad daylight. With that I’d like to turn to Fenalla Cannell’s introductory
essay to The Anthropology of Christianity (2006), the other candidate for an insti-
tuting call for an anthropology of Christianity. Like Robbins, Cannell too sees
Christianity as suffering under a kind of interdict: Christianity is ‘the repressed’ of
anthropology, where the religion acts as an ‘anxiety’-provoking object whose
potential ethnographers are stigmatized by a suspected belonging, or at least a
susceptibility to conversion (Cannell 2006: 4). The fraught relation ‘between
anthropology and Christianity’ is something that must be worked through, she
suggests, and in the introduction to the volume Cannell presents herself as engaging
in that very therapeutic work.
And it is here, at the very cusp of her working through the fraught relationship
between Christianity and anthropology, that something curious begins: an elision
as to what Christianity is, which seems to be fittingly the kind of symptomatic
omission that one might expect when attempting to articulate the repressed. It is
not that she does not try. ‘In considering this question’, Cannell tells us ‘it is
necessary to reach some provisional working definition of the term Christianity
itself. This is something more difficult than it might first appear’ (2006: 5). The
difficulty, Cannell tells us, lies is the multifold nature of Christianity that Robbins
also observed. Cannell notes that there are ‘diverse ways’ to ‘balance these models
of what Christianity does against the specificities of local interpretations’ (2006: 6),
as exhibited by the contributors to her volume; Cannell’s own approach is to deny
that Christianity is an ‘arbitrary construct’, but merely insist that it is a ‘historically
complex one’ (2006: 6). ‘It is not impossible to speak meaningfully about
Christianity, but it is important to be as specific as possible about what kind of
Christianity one means’ (2006: 6). This is because ‘Christianity is built on a para-
dox’ with a ‘central doctrine’ that is a vision of the incarnation and resurrection
that points simultaneously to both the spirit and flesh, leading to a core ambiva-
lence (2006: 7). Cannell suggests that ‘a recognition of the centrally paradoxical
nature of Christian teaching allows us to move some ways further in con-
ceptualizing. . . local encounters with missionary Christianities’, pointing to how
‘the unorthodox position remains hanging in air’ (2006: 7).
Now, as we will see near the end of this essay, this observation that other
potential readings of Christian practice and thought tend to linger on, even in
the absence of institutional endorsement, has a great deal of merit, but it is not
Bialecki 299

by any means a ‘definition’ of what the object of an anthropology of Christianity

would be, and certainly not one that can assuage another set of anxieties – anxieties
about whether Christianity is an entity that can hang together enough to be an
object of study. It at best tells us one of the features of what we are addressing, but
this paradoxically is a predicate that cannot be given to ‘Christianity’ alone nor,
would one imagine it, can it be the only predicate that Christianity bears. We also
cannot hang a definition of Christianity on a ‘central doctrine’, for to do so is to
take the side of a certain orthodoxy, since the position that Cannell takes up,
though recurrent, is not uniform throughout Christian history. Christianity may
be historical, it may be paradoxical, but these terms do not tell us what is the nature
of the object we are interrogating.
What is interesting is that Cannell and Robbins are not alone in this inabil-
ity or demurral to name an object; numerous subsequent authors addressing
the possibility of an anthropology of Christianity have also either declined or
been unable to give us a picture of what kind of object Christianity is, at least
in the eyes of an anthropology orientated around it. An instance of the failure
to specify what the object of an anthropology of Christianity might be seen
in Gil Anidjar’s ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Christianity’ (2009). In a
sustained encounter with Talal Asad, Anidjar, who works primarily in litera-
ture and religion, gives another call for the creation of an anthropology of
Christianity, drawing on Asad’s work on the anthropology of Islam to create a
concept that is adequate to dealing with Christian diversity. Andijar, however,
does not himself produce such a concept, being content to observe that it must
be expansive (covering doctrine, spaces of power, and peoples). In any event,
Andijar insists that a concept of Christianity by nature must be a polemical
concept, having only enough consistency to allow us to ask the better question
of what it is that Christianity does politically, which is his true concern. Again,
we end without a concept.
We can say something similar about Tomlinson and Engelke’s observation
(2006) that Christianity frequently has a concern with meaning; this claim, while
backed by the ethnographic material presented in the accompanying edited volume
(Engelke and Tomlinson 2006), is at best a claim about probability, about the likely
or common behavior of an object, rather than its nature, especially since, as these
ethnographic sketches testify, meaning can fail at times but Christianity still
endures. Indeed, Tomlinson and Engelke, in asserting that Christianity ‘is not a
stable, singular object’ (2006: 19), seem to take away as much as they give when it
comes to identifying exactly what the object of an anthropology of Christianity is.
Alongside Robbin’s and Cannell’s demurral, and Tomlinson and Engelke’s
equivocation, stands Michael Scott’s (2005) refusal. Here Scott attempts to articu-
late what should be the program of an anthropology of Christianity, charting a
middle-ground between what he sees as an essentialism regarding what
‘Christianity’ might be taken to be on one hand, and Robbins’s ‘object-dissol-
ving-critique’ on the other. He does this by allowing for emergent properties as
Christianity (again, whatever that is) interacts with what he calls ‘indigenous
300 Anthropological Theory 12(3)

religions’, and the latter ‘appropriate portions of Christianity expediently and tran-
siently without far-reaching consequences for their indigenous models of reality
and moral order’ (2005: 117). Because aspects of Christianity can be selectively
peeled off, especially as Christianity is never encountered whole cloth, Scott sees
Christianity as being constituted by nothing less than diverse ‘logical trajectories’
resulting from different responses to a ‘problematic’ – a problematic that not all
Christians, Scott wishes to emphasize, feel compelled to take up in the first place
(2005: 118, 119). This seems to be again an argument that the anthropology of
Christianity has no real object, that Christianity in its end is, contra Joel Robbins, a
thing of ‘shreds and patches usable in a piecemeal fashion’ (Scott 2005: 104; cf.
Robbins 2004: 3; also see Lowie 1920: 441); Scott says otherwise, but he provides
no conceptual frame to take up Christianity in his way without it becoming purely
ephemeral. We will see later on, as with Cannell, there is much to recommend in
Scott’s project, though the choice between multiplicity and having a concept of
Christianity as an analytic object is a false one.
While I am at it, I should observe that the first set of review articles regarding
the anthropology of Christianity did no better in giving a definition of Christianity
(Bialecki et al. 2008, Lampe 2010), content as they were merely to document
refrains in the efflorescence of literature that appeared over the last decade. The
Bialecki et al. piece never even broaches the question in the first place, and the
Lampe piece ends with the refrain that in Christianity ‘there is no clear and widely
shared explanation of what constitutes Christianity or how to understand it’, a
conscious echoing of El-Zein’s position regarding Islam (Lampe 2010: 82). Again,
absences or elision, but no definition of an object.
One last possibility for grasping an anthropology of Christianity might be the
hope that while one has not been explicitly stated, an unspoken consensus on this
question might have been reached by the various articles and ethnographic mono-
graphs that could be seen as constituting this project. As practiced, the anthropol-
ogy of Christianity is suffused by two concerns: one, roughly, that might be
thought of as language ideological (see Bialecki and Hoenes del Pinal 2011)
and another that might be classed as Foucauldian-informed interest in Christian
practice as a form of subjectification (Bialecki n.d.). Indeed, it seems that Foucault
is over-represented in the anthropology of Christianity. However, given the port-
ability of these models to other concerns, it seems a stretch to say that these con-
cerns tell us something specific about what the object of an anthropology of
Christianity is. Foucauldian and semiotic analysis are not by any means particular
to Christianity (whatever that is) or Christian objects (whatever they may be)
alone.
This recurrent demurral/refusal/failure is important because the anthropology
of Christianity has not had the same good fortune as its father. In some ways, the
anthropology of Christianity’s luck has been the inverse of the anthropology of
Islam, which began its life by denying its own possibility, only to have that impos-
sibility brushed aside as unproblematic. In contrast, the anthropology of
Christianity is assailed by doubts regarding its consistency as an ethnographic
Bialecki 301

object. While acknowledging the worth of the ethnography that has come out of it,
Chris Hann (2007) has questioned the value of an anthropology of Christianity as
an overarching project, saying that it obscures comparative thought, both within
various types of Christianity, but also between Christianity and other forms of
religiosity. ‘Why’, Hann asks, ‘demarcate one world religion as a suitable
domain for comparison’ (2007: 46)? Hann also faults the anthropology of
Christianity for an idealist bent, though he does note that it cannot be described
as having a ‘crudely predictive idealism’ (2007: 405). Interestingly enough, he
echoes Scott in suggesting that rather than focus on Christianity, we focus instead
on problems as the ‘key entities’ (2007: 406), something that we will return to later;
but what we should focus on now is Hann’s rejection of tradition as a ‘suitable
domain’, indicating that in Hann’s eyes there is no integrity, no real object, no
phenomenon in itself that needs to be charted. More recently, John Comaroff has
taken Hann’s objections and repackaged them as an accusation that the anthro-
pology of Christianity is ‘reductionistic, incoherent in defining its subject matter,
contradictory in the claims it makes about that subject matter, and unreflective
in its idealism’ (2010: 529). For Comaroff, it is a retreat to the culture concept by
way of religion conceived of as ‘immaterial’ and ‘ahistorical’, and is part of habits
that ‘give anthropology a bad name’, a false solution to a larger disciplinary crisis
(2010: 529).
There have been other criticisms as well. From its first moments, there has been
a concern that the anthropology of Christianity has been too narrow in its
purview; Brian Howell worried that studies of Pentecostalism had overshadowed
other forms of Christianity (Howell 2003: 235), a complaint that Hann has
joined in his repeated observations that Orthodox Christianity has made scant
appearance in the literature (2007; Hann and Goltz 2010). Taken altogether, all
this forms quite a bill of particulars, and a dizzying one, if one includes the quali-
fications, hedging, and elisions made by some of the proponents of an anthropol-
ogy of Christianity themselves. The anthropology of Christianity takes as its object
something with no fixity and yet is in need of being rescued from essentialism. It
must be spoken about at once in careful historical terms and yet is ahistorical,
immaterial and suffused by idealism yet overrun by Foucauldian subjectification
and regimes of power; finally, it is too ethnographically diverse yet too centered on
a single exemplar.
This is traditionally the moment when we would start asking which of these
accounts and critiques have merit, and which do not; in short, separating goats
from sheep. I would like to ask a different question, though. What if we were to
start out with the postulate that, law of the excluded middle be damned, everyone
was right, even when their descriptions of the still mysterious object of the anthro-
pology of Christianity seemingly contradict each other? I would like to do this by
taking what seems to be a sidestep into the question of anthropological ontology, a
sidestep that may seem unrelated but will in the end allow us to answer the question
that has stood at the center of our discussion so far: what is the object of the
anthropology of Christianity?
302 Anthropological Theory 12(3)

Nominalist anthropology and the exemplary assemblage

Now, ontology is an issue that has received a great deal of attention recently in the
anthropological literature (Henare et al. 2007; Keane 2009; Magnus 2010; Laidlaw
2012; Pedersen 2012) but not always in the sense that I wish to invoke it. Today in
socio-cultural anthropology, discussions of ontology are usually at the level of
mapping ethno-ontologies, of articulating alternative, non-western modes of ima-
ging being – the most striking instance of this being the work on shamanic per-
spectivalism (Viveiros de Castro 1998; Willerslev 2007). While this has been an
exciting field which promises to open up new lines of inquiry not only for anthro-
pology generally but also for the anthropology of Christianity (Vilaca 2011), it is
not what I have in mind. What I am referring to now is not anthropological
articulations of others’ imaginings of what sorts of beings count as entities that
exist and what their properties are; rather, I am talking about anthropology’s own
ontology, what the discipline considers to be ‘real’ and, conversely, what it con-
siders not to be real as well.
My claim here is that, as of late, anthropology has become increasingly nom-
inalist in its ontology. By nominalism I mean the ontological position that rejects
the existence of abstract objects, of universals, or of both of them altogether (see
Rodriguez-Pereyra 2008); it is in short a claim that only individuals exist, and is a
form of thought usually juxtaposed against realism, a contrasting stance towards
ontology which grants that in some way universals, abstractions, and categories
can be said to have an existence beyond their mere crafting and use by human
beings in ways that have performative social effects. A full charting of the reasoning
and evidence behind this claim of a contemporary nominalist anthropology, and an
enumeration of the inevitable exceptions to it, would require at least an article-
length exegesis in and of itself, so only a quick sketch is really possible here.
Nominalist strands of thinking in the discipline go back as far as Edward Sapir’s
sparring with Alfred Kroeber, a debate that turned over whether the ‘superorganic’
could be considered to be an entity in its own right, or merely a mirage caused by
the conglomeration of linguistic, cognitive, and psychological properties locatable
at the level of the individuals that comprise the interrogated category of ‘the social’
(Kroeber 1917; Sapir 1917). However, during most of the 20th century, the direct
or indirect influence of Durkheim’s and Mauss’s social theory on anglophone social
science, and the particular influence of the concept of culture on American anthro-
pology, kept the discipline from slipping into the nominalism that constitutes
Anglo-American ‘common sense’ (see Dumont 1992: 1–2; Rabinow 1988).
Accounts differ as to what the engine of a shift towards nominalism was. In one
account the nominalist turn was another pendulum swing in anthropological
theory, a counter-reaction to universalist and essentialist trends in mid-century
social theories (Zenner 1994). Other accounts see it as the outgrowth of the con-
ceptualizing of anthropological abstractions and universals themselves. In this nar-
rative the shift was a result of a critical turn, not unlike an immunological disorder,
in which anthropological theory was directed against its own reasoning apparatus
Bialecki 303

and categories that were previously taken to be the social science analog of natural
kinds were placed into question, now suspected of being artifacts of, if not the
discipline itself, then at least of broader social-science engineering (Rabinow 1988).
Finally, there is the narrative in which this shift is at least partially symptomatic of
large-scale transformations in the political economy of the West (Kapferer 2005).
Either way, the result of this turn has been a suspicion of the totalities that com-
promised the units of comparative analysis, and indeed of recognizability, of an
earlier anthropology, including the social, the notion of the ethnographic site, and
even the idea of culture (though the latter concept often has some ideational vio-
lence visited upon it as part of the rejection process: see Brightman 1995). As put by
Matti Bunzl, contemporary anthropology is infused with ‘a desire to challenge all
essentialisms and question all generalizations; the ethnographies of today are often
simultaneous exercises in total deconstruction and absolute empirical specificity’
(2008: 57). Back to (just and only) things in themselves, to misuse Husserl.
This shift has not been all at once, and one can intuit in the literature gaps between
the programmatic abandonment tout court of outward affiliation with larger classi-
ficatory totalities that run against a nominalist ontology, and the still under process
creation of new modes of forming ethnography that escape nominalism in practice as
well as in thought; this might account for the increasingly bricolage-like use of theory
in anthropology today as conceptual stop-gaps (Knauft 2006). However, despite the
lag between disaffiliation and actual transformations in practice, and the degrading
effect that nominalism has on theory itself, one can see in anthropological theory
some effects of nominalism. One long-running sign is the growing interest, running
from the mid-80s to the present, in theoretical tools whose vigor is dependent on
their being deployed in localized, circumscribed manners; a leading indicator here
was the shift from modes such as Marxian analyses, predicated on large-scale
abstractions such as labor and ideology, to that of a Foucauldian interest in insti-
tutional and quasi-institutional arrays stabilized by tactical deployed practices of
knowledge and power (even if, in the hands of some of the less agile practitioners,
these analytic Foucauldian categories were unthinkingly endowed with near-meta-
physical significance and scope).2 The interest in ‘person-centered’ ethnographies in
psychological anthropology, and anthropological accounts of individual biogra-
phies in socio-cultural anthropology, is another nominalist tell. A more recent
index of the shift has been the adoption of Latour-derived actor-network theory
outside the confines of science-studies, where the analytic was originally crafted;
predicated on enchained and individual actants, it is a view of causality perfectly
suited for those skeptical of larger abstractions and universals.
But perhaps the most developed nominalist mode of organizing and accounting
for ethnographic data is the idea of the assemblage. Unlike actor-network theory,
‘a conceptual apparatus somewhat more domesticated to classical theory’, assem-
blage theory is predicated on material and temporal flux (Marcus and Saka 2006:
102). The assemblage, we are told in the introduction to Ong and Collier’s sizable
and influential edited volume Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics
as Anthropological Problems, is characterized by the ‘heterogeneous, contingent,
304 Anthropological Theory 12(3)

unstable, partial, and situated’ (Collier and Ong 2004: 12). As observed by Marcus
and Saka, the allure of the term assemblage is the way in which it brings together
the heterogeneous and the ephemeral (Marcus and Saka 2006: 102). The appeal of
this to a nominalist anthropology is obvious. It is a denial of not just essentialism
but of even any kind of long enduring solidity. Everything must be taken as it is, a
chance and passing agglomeration, resistant to being captured by any of the uni-
versals or abstractions that is an anathema to contemporary anthropological
thought.
While the Ong and Collier piece might seem to be a natural place to look at
how the assemblage functions, I’d like to turn instead to the works of Jarrett
Zigon instead (2010, 2011a, 2011b). There are two reasons to look to Zigon.
First, as a theoretically accomplished anthropologist who has recently placed
the concept of the assemblage in the forefront of his thought, he shows us
what assemblages look like in the era of nominalist anthropology. The second
reason is that, as opposed to other anthropologists of his generation who have
also invoked the assemblage in the study of religion (see e.g. Rudnyckyj 2010),
Zigon has relied upon assemblage theory in an ethnographic scenario where it
might make sense to describe oneself as, if not engaging in, then at least being in
dialogue with the anthropology of Christianity, and yet he has declined to do so;
this despite the fact that his citation pattern shows that he must have some
awareness of the sub-field (writing often on the subject of morality, he has
been deeply engaged, though not always uncritically, with the works of Joel
Robbins [see Zigon 2009a, 2009b]). A discussion of Zigon’s use of assemblage
theory will show how a certain kind of anthropological nominalism is interfering
with a definition of Christianity necessary to make the project of an anthropology
of Christianity more cogent; I also claim that an analysis of what assemblage
theory is (and also is not) for Zigon will show us a way to work back to a
conception of Christianity.
In his work under consideration here, Zigon’s ethnographic object is Russian
Orthodox church-sponsored attempts to rehabilitate heroin addicts, primarily as
encountered at The Mill, a residency program situated in the rural periphery of
St Petersburg. Zigon’s project is not just how it is that these heroin users win a
coveted rare spot in the drug treatment facility, and then struggle to comply with
its disciplines, all in order to at least partially escape the pull of addiction and live
what they call a ‘normal life’; Zigon also wishes to make a contribution to the
theory of morality and ethics. To do this, in his ethnographic accounts he is
sensitive to the diverse sources of the discourses and practices that constitute
The Mill, which are taken not just from various historical strata of orthodoxy
but also from what Zigon portrays as more unlikely sources, such as the Soviet
language of the ‘new man’, neoliberalism, and secular western therapeutic tech-
niques. Zigon is also attentive to the sensibilities that the patients themselves
bring to the facility, as well as to their pre-existing senses of habitus, and to
the new bodily dispositions that disciplinary techniques are attempting to
inculcate.
Bialecki 305

Zigon attends to these diverse discourses, practices, and dispositions to make the
point that ethical and moral systems are not a totality; stitched together, they form
what he calls a moral and ethical assemblage, a nonce-structure that denies any
whole. Extrapolating globally from his findings, he claims that

the theory I outline here denies the common philosophical and social scientific
assumption that a moral totality – in either universalist or relativist terms – exists
anywhere in the world, and rather sees all particular social contexts defined not by one
morality and its ethics, but rather by a unique local moral and ethical assemblage
constituted by the various aspects. (Zigon 2010: 5)

Further, each of the discourses and practices that constitutes the assembly is
never encountered in complete form, even as a subsumed portion of the assem-
blage. Only ‘various aspects’ of the constituting discourses and practices are
encountered as they are activated in moments of what Zigon has earlier called
‘moral breakdown and ethical demand’. Totality, if it is experienced at all, is an
illusion brought about as an aftereffect of an enunciation or action that follows a
moment of breakdown, where it seems that these disparate strands have come
together to produce the emergent, and now self-definitional, act.
In this focus on foreshortened temporalities and distinct composite elements, we
can see how this is line with the idea of the assemblage as found in contemporary
anthropology. Further, we can see in the logic of the assemblage some of the
reasons why Zigon would decline to see his project as part of an anthropology
of Christianity, even if his object of study was a Russian Orthodox religious
rehabilitation center. First, anything like Christianity is unlikely to be encountered
in a way where it is not stapled together with a host of other autonomous entities.
Therefore, why let only one component part play a determining role, or even an
autonomous one, in the conversation? And in fact, in a note that is only a slight
tangent from our point, Zigon argues that despite the Russian Orthodox intentions
and control over the treatment center, it is a neoliberal sensibility and telos that
ends up shaping the forms of subjectivity that the center inculcates; orthodoxy has
no force or directionality of its own that is orthogonal to the ‘stronger discourse’ of
neoliberalism.
Second, we can see that since the whole is an illusion and is never encountered, it
appears that the constituent part of the assemblage, the part that we are tempted to
call ‘Christian’, is itself an assemblage, historically formed, heterogeneous and
unstable. If this is the judgment of nominalism, and if nominalism is the sensibility
of the age, we can see why the inhibition to invoke universals or abstractions can
stand as a block to giving Christianity a form wide enough to encompass all the
divergent manifestations that comprise it. We are left in a position very close to
Michael Scott’s, as discussed in the section on clamant conceptions of an anthro-
pology of Christianity: bits of Christian material shorn off, repurposed and
denuded of whatever energies or directionality they might (theoretically) have
had before their disaggregation.
306 Anthropological Theory 12(3)

Virtual realism
I want to be careful about stating what I’m claiming here, of course. I am not
stating that everyone writing on the anthropology of Christianity is animated by a
nominalist instinct, nor that what they have put forward is not a useful contribu-
tion to the field; rather, I’m merely stating that a general tendency to be skeptical
regarding abstractions and universals, along with the multifarious nature of
Christianity itself, is working in such a way to inhibit articulating what it is that
the putative object of an anthropology of Christianity could be. To substantiate
this, I’ve used the anthropological apparatus of ‘the assemblage’ as an exemplar of
the kind of reasoning that this tendency to be skeptical of abstract and universals
engenders, and shown in Zigon’s work how the logic of the assemblage, as it is used
in contemporary anthropology, mitigates against giving Christianity any coherence
as an object. What is not being claimed is that either the anthropology of
Christianity on one hand, or nominalist anthropology or the assemblage on the
other, is intellectually deficient or ethnographically manqué, merely that they are
both, vis-à-vis each other, inimical concepts. They both seem to have value, at least
in the eyes of contemporary anthropology, in as much as they are ‘growth stocks’,
recent anthropological developments that show continued thriving – only not
together (as it may seem at this point in the discussion), at least not if one
wishes to think rigorously.
However, I think that there is an element in the assemblage that itself forms
assemblage theory that can allow us to think through this impasse. Let me illustrate
this by returning to Zigon. As Zigon notes (2011a: 16), the concept of assemblage
has a history that transcends that of Ong and Collier; the assemblage was crafted
by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus (1987).
However, that reference to the idea’s native space is the only moment that Deleuze
and Guattari, singularly or together, appear in Zigon’s book. Zigon’s assemblage is
what Ong and Collier have made of it, heterogeneous and ephemeral, but not
necessarily what Deleuze has made of it. Working back to Ong and Collier them-
selves, we see that in the introduction they refer us to the same work, supplement-
ing it with a reference to Deleuze’s Foucault (1988); and yet Deleuze appears as
more of a name invoked than as a metonymic indication of the specifics of a
technical means of thinking something through. Indeed, this is part of a larger
pattern with discussions of the assemblage; as Marcus and Saka have noted,
‘none of the derivations of assemblage from Deleuze and Guattari of which we
are aware of is based on. . . a technical and formal analysis of how this concept
functions in their writing’ (2006: 103). It is evocative power of the assemblage, and
of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing in general, which seems to be appealing, rather
than any formal engagement with the specificities of their thought.
Of course, I hesitate a bit to bring up Deleuze. While, as we have seen, Deleuze
has been granted space in anthropology for a while now, his recent enumeration as
one of the ‘four main themes of particular significance’ in the American
Anthropologist sociocultural anthropology year in review list (Hamilton and
Bialecki 307

Placas 2011; see also Biehl and Locke 2010) makes the coin embossed with the
name ‘Deleuze’ seem so common that one cannot but help suspect that its metal is
being adulterated. But then this is the point. The solution to this is not to shy away,
but to take up Deleuze in the ‘technical and formal’ manner that Marcus and Saka
suggest. When one does this, what is striking is that despite Deleuze’s interest in the
heterogeniety, ephemerality, and becoming that has made him such an object of
interest to contemporary nominalist anthropology, Deleuze himself is not a
nominalist.
First, as Manuel DeLanda has observed, Deleuze is comfortable talking about
kinds of totalities in a way that nominalist anthropology would balk at; there are
moments in Deleuze’s works where he talks about ‘‘‘society as a whole’’ and spe-
cifically, of a virtual multiplicity of society’ (DeLanda 2002: 195; see also Deleuze
1994: 186, Deleuze and Guattari 1977, 1987). This is of course the kind of over-
arching entity that nominalism is trying to escape from. But this use of the word
‘virtual’ brings us to an important qualifier. Because if we want to say that Deleuze
is a realist instead of a nominalist, we have to grant that he is not a realist in the
same way that, say, Plato or the mythical mid-20th-century cultural anthropologist
might be thought of as a realist. As John Rajchman has said, ‘[w]e might call
Deleuze a ‘‘realist’’ of a peculiar sort – a realist about virtualities that can’t be
forecast or foreseen, that have another relation to thought’ (2000: 62).
It appears, then, that we have to have an understanding of what the virtual is if
we are to grasp what might be the gap between Deleuze and nominalist anthro-
pology, and what difference a more technically informed reading of Deleuze might
bring to the problem of an anthropology of Christianity. Like a single thread, the
idea of the virtual runs either explicitly or implicitly through most of his authored
or co-authored works, an outstanding consistency for an author who was more
than willing to use different language in different works to do what appears to be
the same conceptual labor. The concept of the virtual was originally taken from
Bergson, where it stood as a sort of metaphysical memory, an immaterial, con-
densed compendium of the past that existed coeval with the present (and in some
ways encompassed it). As reworked by Deleuze, the concept of the virtual contin-
ued to have an air of this (Deleuze and Parnet 2007: 148–52), but it serves more as a
way of speaking about an unquantifiable field of generative potential in being and
thought, a potential intelligible yet specifically undeterminable in advance of devel-
opment, a potential that is always threatening to run off at times in different and
disparate directions, a potential which serves to constantly bring new ‘actual’
entities into being. Described by Deleuze as ‘real without being actual, ideal with-
out being abstract’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 156), it is a means of granting a
sort of ontological status of real to both the this potentia and the objects they
engender, and to demarcate this potentia as having its own characteristic apart
from those of the ‘actual’ world.
While the virtual has been taken up as a way of speaking about material and
ideational processes in general, based on Deleuze’s endorsement of a univocal
ontology of pure difference it is clear that, however else the Deleuzian virtual
308 Anthropological Theory 12(3)

can be discussed, Deleuze himself also intended it to be a means of discussing

thought; this can be seen most clearly in Difference and Repetition (1994), which
contains Deleuze’s most detailed working through of what the virtual is, and
the relation that it has with the actuality that the virtual engenders. A review of
this gives us ways to think about kind, nature, and degrees of potentiality inherent
in the concept of the virtual, yet without thereby framing it in a deterministic
manner.
The virtual in Deleuze is not fixed; as he puts it, ‘[i]deas are by no means
essences’ (1994: 187). This is important because essentializing the idea would
mean thinking in terms of the virtual as a model for the actual, privileging repre-
sentation and typological thought in a way that would undermine his insistence on
the ontological primacy of difference. What Deleuze is trying to get away from is
any moment where the virtual idea, historically produced and mutable, might be
mistaken for the Platonic idea (or the caricature of the idea of culture), transcend-
ent and ahistorical. Deleuze escapes this in four different ways.
First, for Deleuze, the virtual idea is not unitary; as he expressed it, ‘[a]n Idea is
an n-dimensional, continuous, defined multiplicity’ (1994: 182), meaning that it is
composed of multiple elements which differ qualitatively as opposed to quantita-
tively, with elements of the idea having their own separate axis on which they can
act even as they tend to fuse into concepts that are contiguous in intellectual space.
In short, aspects of the idea, even while conjoined, are independent of each other,
and the difference between elements must be thought of qualitatively. This sense of
play and fusion suggests some kind of transformation within the virtual, which
brings us to the second way in which the idea escapes fixture. For Deleuze, the
virtual is a process, or at the very least always in motion, meaning that the virtual
idea is purposefully unfixed while at the same time not indeterminate as it brings
the actual into being. This can be seen in a competing definition of the idea
(Deleuze, whatever else he was, was not uncharitable in producing definitions,
often giving multiple ones for the same concept). In this second definition, he
painted the idea as ‘a multiplicity constituted of differential elements, differential
relations between those elements, and singularities corresponding to those rela-
tions’ (Deleuze 1994: 278). In this sequence we can sketch out the processual
unfolding of the idea, the series through which open aspects of the idea are
assembled, through which these aspects are put in differential relation to each
other, and finally through which they produce singularities that can be seen as
being an expression of those differential relations. Aspects are initially empty;
purely virtual, indeterminate, they are given determination by their relation to
other equally ‘empty’ aspects. For Deleuze, these relations are differential relation,
differential in the sense of the term as it existed in infinitesimal calculus. The term
differential is important here, as it points to the variable yet reciprocal relations
that aspects of the virtual idea have with one another and through which they are
given determination, allowing for at times incremental variance in play in the
relations that constitute an idea, while at other times also allowing for vast differ-
ence. In other words, the difference between aspects of the idea need not be utter
Bialecki 309

difference of negation found in either Hegel or structuralism. Rather, there can be

gradations of difference between aspects of the idea. This concept of gradations of
difference means that the virtual idea is in a sense topological, capable of undergo-
ing a great deal of torsion while still expressing the same set of relations, much the
way that a coffee cup and a donut are topologically the same shape despite obvious
extensive differences between them.
The way in which the concept of ideas undergoing a degree of torsion, of a
mutability of the idea as it simultaneously corresponds to what seems to be differ-
ent forms, allows us to understand a third manner in which the idea is not an
essence. As progressive determinations of these differential relations occur, they
indicate the singularities which will correspond to them, in the same way that an
equation corresponds to its solution. It is for this reason that Deleuze refers to the
virtual as problem, in that the various indeterminate virtual aspects are given a
specific determinate content as they are individualized from the ephemeral virtual
to the actual, the realm where objects are capable of being thought of as discrete,
extensive, and quantifiable. It is because of this transition from the virtual to the
actual, which with each repetition produces something new due to the different
circumstances that the operation is carried out in, that Deleuze says that virtual
ideas as problems ‘belong on the side of events, affections, or accidents rather than
on that of theorematic essences’ (1994: 187).
Finally, there is another way in which the virtual idea differs from the Platonic
idea. Much like the actual has its history, virtual ideas have history as well, being
both ‘made and unmade’ and capable of being put in different relations with
other virtual ideas over time (1994: 187). To be more exact, though, rather than
having a history, the virtual, in that it points to the creation of something new, is
a break from history, and rather than saying that it is in time, the virtual occurs
in the ‘dead time’ that belongs neither to eternity nor to time. This temporal
oddness does not mean that the virtual is not informed in a way by the actual
that it forms. Much as the actual is the result of an individualization over time,
the virtual is itself attached to, addressing, and predicated upon actual entities,
creating a resonance between the actual and virtual as they go through their
vicissitudes. It is affects and percepts, intensities that are nothing more than
actuality experienced not as extensivities but as force (see Deleuze 1988b: 91–
2), that trigger the further actualizations of the virtual, which along with memory
affect the mode through which a narrow swath of the virtual idea will be actua-
lized yet again. Viewed synoptically, then, the actual and the virtual run alongside
each other as a double series that is separate and yet resonant, ‘echoing each
other without resembling each other’ (1994: 189). The actual, however, constantly
obscures the virtual, with the extensive produce of virtual processes in effect
covering up the other divergent lines inherent in the virtual that happened not
to be actualized; and while there is always a way to ‘ascend’ back to the virtual
from the actual, a process that Deleuze calls counter-effectuating (Deleuze and
Guattari 1996: 157, 159), Deleuze speaks of seeing the trace of the virtual in what
has been actualized as if it were no easy task.
310 Anthropological Theory 12(3)

Diagramming the assemblage

Although this presentation has to, by necessity, boil it off to the point of being
flavorless, this is a functioning enough presentation of Deleuze’s virtual to meet our
proximate needs: an understanding of the difference between anthropological
assemblage theory and Deleuzian assemblage theory. This, though, is itself just a
way-station to grasping what might be the object of an anthropology of
Christianity. Let us start then with a first question: What does the virtual mean
for those who would be using the assemblage as an analytic tool in the anthropol-
ogy of religion? It does nothing to impeach their ethnographic description of the
state of affairs on the ground, but it suggests that they have not given Christianity
the autonomy it deserves.
In his book-length exploration of Deleuzian assemblage theory, DeLanda
makes two observations that are relevant for our discussion here. The first
is that assemblages can be, and often are, component parts in other assem-
blages (DeLanda 2006: 21), meaning that, like a matryoshka doll, there can be
endless encompassing assemblages, each predicated on the smaller constitute
assemblages that they subsume. This is interesting in light of the second aspect
of assemblage theory that I wish to foreground: assemblages are characterized
by more than their heterogeneous mixture but come in what we might call
‘phylums’. DeLanda has observed that while the assemblage is in a way nom-
inalist in that we cannot speak about ‘species’ of assemblages but only indi-
vidual assemblages, that does not mean that there is not a certain anatomy to
assemblages writ large; assemblages are marked by certain ‘topological invari-
ants’, spaces of possibility that limit, but do not exhaust, the potentiality of
assemblages:

The notion of the structure of a space of possibilities is crucial in assemblage

theory given that, unlike properties, the capacities of an assemblage are not
given, that is, they are merely possible when not exercised. But the set of possible
capacities of an assemblage is not amorphous, however open-ended it may
be, since different assemblages exhibit different sets of capacities. (DeLanda
2006: 29)

DeLanda compares these to phylum in the animal world, which he presents as

‘abstract body plans’ which ‘cannot be specified using metric notions such as
lengths, area, or volumes, since each realization of the body-plan will exhibit a
completely different set of metric relations’. Because of this non-quantifiable
nature, ‘only non-metric or topological notions. . . can be used to specify it’
(DeLanda 2006: 29).
DeLanda’s name for this topology that ‘structures the space of possibilities
associated with the assemblage’ is the diagram (DeLanda 2006: 30), a name that
he takes from Deleuze’s short book on Foucault (Deleuze 1988a), the same book
that inspired Collier and Ong. DeLanda wishes to underscore the fact that each
Bialecki 311

assemblage, while individual, is associated with a diagram that is by no means

necessarily unique to it:

Thus, while persons, communities, organizations, cities and nation-states are all indi-
vidual singularities, each of these entities would also be associated with a space of
possibilities characterized by its dimensions, representing its degrees of freedom . . . [i]n
other words, each of these social assemblages would possess its own diagram.
(DeLanda 2006: 30)

Since each of these diagrams allows for a space of play, and also because each of
these diagrams is historically constituted, DeLanda tells us, they are without
essence, even if they characterize the manner of an assemblage’s composition
and transformation.
It should be no surprise to hear that the diagram is another way to speak about
the virtual, having an autonomy from the actual (or as DeLanda calls it, the dia-
gram is ‘mechanistic-independent’; DeLanda 2006: 31). This, combined with the
earlier observation that assemblages can have other assemblages as constituent
parts, has effects for how assemblages operate – and specifically for how we
must think about assemblages that constitute Christian material. If it holds that
the assemblage has a virtual image in the sense of the diagram of a virtual idea, then
it holds too that the constituent parts of the assemblage, as potential assemblages in
their own right, have their own autonomous virtuality as well, and that whatever
work the larger subsuming assemblage’s virtuality or diagram does, the virtual
image of the subsumed assemblages does the same for the constituent assemblages
that comprise its parts.
What does this mean for our discussion of Zigon? Not to put too fine a point on
it, if Christianity is a thing of shreds and patches, then at least in the eyes of a
reading of assemblage theory that takes the conception of the virtual seriously, then
it is an assemblage, and if it is an assemblage it is not just a thing of shreds and
patches but itself a recursively embedded entity formed by a virtual image that is a
manifold, an abstract topology, with various axes granting it various degrees of
freedom and certain capacities – axes that are independent of each other even as it
is that conjunction of various singular axes that gives the specific characteristics of
various Christianities as they are actualized. In short, if one wishes to include
Christian elements in an assemblage, it seems that rather than allowing for an
escape from a realist account of Christianity, it demands it; and that rather than
having Christianity vanish in the expression of an assemblage, Christianity rather
insists on the level of the virtual, and therefore as a virtuality it has the capacity to
always have the larger assemblage actualize its diagram in a new way in which the
Christian element of the admixture might spin the assemblage’s expression in new
directions. And since the ‘event’ of the virtual is always occurring, this Christian
torque is always in potential ready to leave its mark. This means that Zigon is right
to focus on the nonce aspect of the assemblage as he does in his description of how
it effects moral and ethical action, but wrong to see it as by force always allowing
312 Anthropological Theory 12(3)

the dead hand of neoliberalism to win every throw of the dice. Like all virtualities,
Christianity insists, and insists in determined, but undeterminable, ways.

Virtual Christianity in the age of nominal anthropology

The idea of a virtual Christianity has an importance beyond our discussion of
Zigon, though; in fact, it brings us back to the issue that started this article. I
would like to suggest that this acknowledgment of a virtual aspect of various
actualized Christianities gives us a task for those interested in an anthropology
of Christianity, and it does so in a way that not only affects those interested in
assemblage theory with religious elements, but also those who have struggled with
what the object, goal, or warrant of the anthropology of Christianity might be.
Following the logic of the discussion above, it seems to me that the proximate goal
of an anthropology of Christianity is to engage in the work of counter-effectuating
virtual Christianity, with the further goal of grasping how virtual Christianity’s nature
as a virtual multiplicity allows it to be actualized in differing manners at differing
moments, becoming part of larger social assemblages in diverse ways.
This act of counter-effectuating means working back from various actualized
Christianities and, with an eye towards the specific local affects and precepts that
ran through the virtual to create those actualizations, attempting to intuit the
virtual multiplicity that engendered that actuality. This can be done through work-
ing back from ‘solution’ to ‘problem’, to see how various forms of Christian prac-
tice are the ‘result’ of multiple problems. Under this approach, each problem could
be thought of as axes or elements of the virtual multiplicity, whose differing solu-
tions account for the shifts in the topology of the virtual. This is not surprising. Not
only have we seen again and again a call for the anthropology of Christianity to
work at the level of problems, from people such as Chris Hann and Michael Scott,
but in point of fact the anthropology of Christianity has been from its very incep-
tion dominated by various ‘problems’. Examples of these problems are the tension
between the fact of mediation and the desire for immediacy and presence in
Christian-inflected forms of communication (Keane 2007; Engelke 2007); there is
also the problem of collective as opposed to individual accountability that runs
through Joel Robbins’s works; we must also remember the issues of Christian
‘territorialization’, of who even ‘counts’ as a Christian in any local instantiation
(Garriott and O’Neill 2008), and of how indigenous entities (Meyer 1999) or folk-
ontologies (Scott 2007; Mayblin 2012) with a history apart from Christianity will
be threaded into new Christian assemblages. This list of problems is not exhaustive
by any means, but it shows how the contours of this field can be seen as being
shaped by actualizations of virtual problematics.
What has not been thought through is to ask how each of these problems
sketches out various continuums of potential, and how selection of a tranche
from this continuum resonates with other tranches selected from other problems/
continuums without limiting the formal independence of all these axes/continuums
from each other at the level of the virtual. In short, because we have thought of
Bialecki 313

Christianity in a nominalist way, rather than as a real, though virtual, object, we

have not charted what we might call the mutagenic capacity in its diagram, the way
in which Christianity may be many things – an unlimited number of things – but not
everything or anything, and how shifts and transformations in one axis of the vir-
tual anatomy, the diagram of the assemblage, interact with other axes. In short,
these problems are perhaps found in every instance of Christianity, but the solu-
tions vary, and the privileging of one solution over another may vary not only from
region to region but between various moments as each Christianity is always in a
state of becoming.
It is for this reason that we should be wary of Hann’s suggestion that anthro-
pologists of Christian populations should not privilege intra-Christian comparisons
but ground themselves solely in larger comparative endeavors instead. While such
extra-Christian comparative efforts should be encouraged, privileging them over
intra-Christian comparisons only makes sense if Christianity is not a domain where
comparative work would yield particularly productive results, which is what one
would expect if Christianity in effect did not exist, if Christianity had no onto-
logical basis. Here, we have argued that it does. As we’ve seen, Christianity takes
the appearance of differing actualized Christianities because it exceeds any particu-
lar actualized instance of it. It is a multiplicity, subject to play at the joints, that is
brought into being in different circumstances. It is that continual possibility to have
some other tranche of the virtual actualized that gives it what Cannell called its
paradoxical nature, this sense of potentia that is never seemingly exhausted or
conquered, popping up again and again like Marx’s revolutionary mole.
I would further argue that it is the play of divergence that, in a way not yet
consciously articulated, has foregrounded the virtual aspect of Christianity; this is
why, despite the recurrent Foucauldian refrain in the anthropology of Christianity,
the charge of idealism recurs with both Hann and Comaroff, and this also is why
John Comaroff is in an odd way right to describe the putative object as ‘timeless’.
To the degree that we are touching on the virtual, we are touching on the aspect of
Christianity that is ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’, and on
the aspect of Christianity as a virtual object that is situated not in moments but
always between them; potential subsists even when not actualized, floating on
between times, but not within them. Of course, we slip out of time to the virtual,
located neither in eternity nor in the moment, only so that we can throw ourselves
back into the swim of social processes at the level of the sensible; the goal is not to
merely sketch out Christianity in a virtual state but to have a sense for the range
and complexity of actualized elements from it, so that we can grasp how these
actualized elements themselves can be folded into larger assemblages. This again is
something that has been already occurring in the anthropology of Christianity,
perhaps most explicitly in Simon Coleman’s thinking through Pentecostal and
Charismatic Christianity as a ‘part culture. . . worldviews meant for export but
often in tension with the values of any given host society’ (2006: 3; see also
Coleman 2010: 800). Whatever else these actualizations are, they are rarely, if
ever, total systems, and must entwine themselves, sometimes agonistically, with
314 Anthropological Theory 12(3)

other elements to make larger assemblages; it is this latter phenomenon that is the
true object of concern, but can only be addressed if we can grasp the pluriform
variety of insistent Christian becomings first.
I would also say that while this does not excuse it by any means, this task of
counter-effectuating back to the virtual explains how it is that the ethnographic
interest in Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity is due to more than its global
exponential growth. Remember that the virtual does not thunder directly into the
actual, but that various intensities, which Deleuze in his work with Guattari (1996)
calls affects and percepts, are threaded through the virtual after they are condi-
tioned by habit and memory (Deleuze 1994: 70–128); after actualization both the
intensities and virtualities are covered up by the actualities that follow. Deleuze
does suggest that there are moments where affects and percepts can be ‘monumen-
talized’, where they can be caught up in an aesthetic mode of expression in a way
that does not obscure them, but rather displays them. This opens up a whole new
line of argument that cannot be done justice here, but it should be noted that the
importance of the aesthetic to Pentecostalism has already been observed by Birgit
Meyer (2010, 2011). While all forms of religiosity (and, indeed, all forms of human
life) are conditioned by the affective and the perceptual, there does seem to be a
recurrent thematic in Pentecostalism to foreground the production of, and to lux-
uriate within, heightened affective states that suggests that Pentecostalism is ripe
for counter-effectuating. Under this line of thought, Pentecostalism and
Charismatic Christianity, while in no way exhausting a Christian virtual, are the
sort of low-hanging-fruit of the anthropology of Christianity when it comes to
ways to see at least from one position the Christian virtual in sensible form.
Now, caveats: three about the theory used to inform the anthropology of
Christianity in this article, and one about the anthropology of Christianity itself.
First, the conception of a Christian virtual should not be taken to mean that
Christian material cannot escape Christian virtual fields of belonging; as the long
anthropological history of religion has shown, syncretisms happen, and Christian
material can be deterritorialized and reterritorialized in the same way that ‘a club is
a deterritorialized [tree] branch’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 172). Wrenched away
from context and placed as an element in another virtual multiplicity, it would be
doing entirely different work, and we should be alert for that, but only if we can see
that there has been a break with the Christian virtual. Repurposing occurs, but so
do different actualizations of the virtual Christian form, and we should only
assume that we are not dealing with the latter when the Christian topology
cannot be found, despite the presence of some Christian elements (an excellent
example of this might be secularism, which could be considered a radical reterri-
torialized form of certain self-erasing features of Christianity).
But we still do not have a grasp yet of when that happens, because the work of
identifying a Christian virtual has only begun, and much of what passes as debates
about what might as well be the ‘essence’ of Christianity in the anthropology of
Christianity literature has only been charting the range of variability in both within
and between Christianities, often cast in a polemical tone that has done little to
Bialecki 315

further debate but instead has been more orientated towards policing what can and
cannot be thought by social scientists. Thinking about the full play of possible
Christianities within and between ethnographic scenes is something that has not yet
really occurred, and we cannot be sure we are dealing with deterritorialization and
not differentiation until we have imagined a virtual Christianity adequate enough
to think through the range of Christian actualities, including historical actualities,
such as the odd early burgess-shale type efflorescence of Christian forms like
Docetism, Patripassianism, and Marcionism. It is because of this that I have to
offer the second caveat: this article no more offers a firm definition of what the
object of an anthropology of Christianity is then did Robbins, Cannell, Scott,
Engelke-Tomlinson, or even Andijar. What this article does do is to enlist
Deleuze in the effort to scrape together an ontology that would make something
similar to a definition possible. Here we come to the third caveat. We should be
clear that it is in this definitional work that the idea of the virtual serves us.
Christianity is no more, or no less, ‘virtual’ than any other entity; it is just that
due to nominalist anthropological presumptions, we need the virtual to see various
Christianities as in some way products of a single differentiating field.
Which brings us to the final caveat. There will most likely be those who will be
unhappy with the way that Deleuze was used here; there will be complaints that
Christians are not proper Deleuzian nomadic subjects, that Christianity is too
molar, too Oedipal, too much locked into the logic of transcendence to be thought
through in this fashion, too part of an older order to participate in the question of
how the new is created (see Bialecki 2010: 710); Deleuze’s long-standing antipathy
to religion, and particularly to Christianity, proves this, they will say. There are two
answers I have to those complaints. First, to the degree that it is true, and there are
certainly forms of Christianity that Deleuze would find politically and aesthetically
objectionable, it should be remembered that Deleuze spent as much time and
energy on that which hinders a certain kind of freedom as he did on that which
participates in freedom. However, we can think of his obvious fondness for
Kierkegaard, or his paean to belief in Cinema 2 (Deleuze 1989: 172–3) to see
that there were moments where a certain kind of Christian ethos was not automat-
ically inimical to him. And that brings us to the second point, that just as we don’t
know what a virtual Christianity might be, we don’t have a full inventory of what
actual Christianities are; to say that this long-standing yet rapidly mutating field all
falls under a single ban, it being too molar or too monological, without attending
to its variations and transformations, is in a sense to let one’s Deleuze get in the
way of one’s Deleuze, and to forget that in the last moment, at least in anthropol-
ogy, it is theory which must be adequate to reality – and not reality which must be
adequate to theory – as we encounter the real.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following for discussions (or, at times, debates) that were helpful in
formulating this argument: Waqas Butts, John Dulin, Jonathon Friedman, Rebecca
Gordon, Naomi Haynes, Jordan Haug, Ian Lowrie, David Pedersen, and Joel Robbins.
316 Anthropological Theory 12(3)

I would also like to acknowledge the comments of two anonymous reviewers, whose insight-
ful comments were greatly appreciated. All infelicities are mine alone.

Notes
1. For a very different articulation of, and solution to, this problem see Garriott and O’Neill
(2008); as we shall see later on in this essay, though their understanding of the problem
differs from the one presented here, their answer to the problem has a great deal of value.
2. The history of kinship as an anthropological concept is also another relevant example of
this phenomenon, a point for which I would like to credit to one of the peer reviewers of
this article.

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Jon Bialecki is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of California, San

Diego. He writes on North American neo-charismatic Christianity, on global
Christianities, and on the anthropology of Christianity, and he is currently com-
pleting a manuscript on the implicit logic of self in the charismatic practices of
Southern Californian members of the Vineyard church-planting movement and the
effects that these constructions of personhood have had on these believers’ political
and economic practices. His work has been published in several edited volumes, as
well as in academic journals such as the South Atlantic Quarterly, American
Ethnologist and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute; he was also
recently a co-editor of a special issue of Anthropological Quarterly that focused
on Christian language ideology.