Image: As the workshop focused on enhancing discussions between senior scholars on the topics of relativism and reproach within theologically engaged anthropology approached, Associate Director of CTEA, Dr. Hannah Grace Howard, sat down with Dr. Maya Mayblin to discuss her relevant research. She is one of five anthropologists invited by CTEA Director, Dr. Derrick Lemons, to participate in this exciting research pathway. Mayblin is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. Her research is primarily based in Brazil, where she works on topics ranging from politics, theology, and popular Catholicism, to gender, kinship, ritual, and child labor. Below, a transcript of the conversation: HGH: Thank you so much for making the time for this conversation, I really appreciate it. You said you’re taking this call from Italy. Can I ask what you’re doing there? MM: Well, I’ve been on research leave, so I just spent four months in Amazonia in Brazil for my own research and now I’m here with my husband who does research here. So I’m trudging along behind him now and trying to sort through my data and write it up while he collects his. It's really nice to have a little break from Edinburgh and teaching. It's delightful. It's starting to get a bit warmer now. We've got lovely views. The house is really run down, but there is a beautiful view of the mountains. HGH: Wow that’s really nice, so charming. It’s similar in Greece where I do my research… So just to get us going and ground the conversation, can you generally introduce a bit more about yourself and the research you conduct in Brazil? MM: Of course. I'm a social anthropologist, and I'm a senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Edinburgh where I've been for most of my career. I got my PhD from the London School of Economics so I come from this, I suppose, quite solid British empirical tradition of social anthropology where we were certainly all taught to be very relativist. I've always worked on Brazil on the intersection of politics and religion – Catholicism, Roman Catholicism in particular - but I am slightly reluctant to describe myself as an anthropologist of Christianity. I suppose I am more comfortable saying that I'm a social anthropologist who is interested in a wide variety of intersections that repeatedly arise. Kinship, gender, and morality I would say are the base intersections my work keeps returning to. As I've got a career’s worth of data from my connections in Brazil, that is a country which keeps pulling me back and Catholicism, which ties it all together, keeps pulling me back as a subject, as well. HGH: Thanks for that framing. It’s funny for me to hear you say that you're reluctant to call yourself an anthropologist of Christianity. I suppose I understand the reluctance, but I teach your books so much in my Anthropology of Religion and Anthropology of Christianity classes. Your work really comes up all the time, so I think definitely in some ways you're legible under that title. I think that is part of why perhaps you've been roped into these conversations around theology and theopolitics. In terms of thinking through what the Center does - how did you get interested in the in the theology question of it all? Because certainly people who do other work on Christianity, on religion, on kinship, morality, and gender are not necessarily thinking through the theology piece. What's your connection to that? MM: I would say that the people that I did my first PhD fieldwork with were both existentially but also theologically reflexive people. They weren't formal theologians, but when they weren't spending time doing ritual or performing religion, they were really spending a lot of time sitting around on doorsteps and talking about moral conundrums. They were citing Bible stories. A well-known Brazilian anthropologist, Otávio Velho, once went out of his way to make the point that in this particular part of Brazil, what scholars tended to brand as folk Catholicism, and dismissed as ‘superstition’ was something far more complex. Where older accounts framed people of the northeast as slightly backward - people who hadn't yet quite evolved, Velho did a lot of work within the Brazilian Academy to reframe this. He described, instead, a “biblical culture.” That was the phrase he gave to it, and I would say, in a sense, that a “biblical culture” is what I found when I set out to do my own research even if that wasn’t what I initially went out looking for. So perhaps the theology, such as it is present in my earlier work, comes very much from my interlocutors. My engagement with Catholic theology in its more formal expressions – at least as it stands in the Catechism of the Catholic Church - becomes a more conscious activity in my most recent book, which is on the intersection of politics and religion in the context of Catholic priests going into party politics. So I’m dealing there with religious and legal definitions of secularism, but also I'm coming at it ethnographically via priest politicians who are deeply religious and refer a lot to scripture. The prohibitions and sanctions on Catholic priests entering party politics, and taking on secular political offices are of course theological in origin. I also found myself turning to formal theology in order to understand priesthood as institution, and particularly the practice of clerical celibacy. Priests are kind of expected to be political, you know, they're expected to work in and amongst people, to improve the world and society. So they are expected to be political in a sort of Foucauldian or even Biblical sense - in that everything we do in struggling for the good is ‘little p’ politics. But there are certain actions that cross a line in Catholic social teaching and theology on priesthood and politics. Priests cannot front political parties in a democratic system because then, theoretically, they are no longer serving all of, only a part of a society. Because I was dealing with those questions, I was going back to the catechism of the Catholic Church a lot. I was engaging with theologians a bit more explicitly, and I would say that's continued in my research. HGH: Interesting, so a really deepening trajectory with it. MM: Yes, and my latest work is on Catholic environmentalism in Amazonia, and retains a theological interest because it engages with Laudato Si, Pope Francis's encyclical for the environment. Currently I am looking at how that particular document both grew out of more homegrown Brazilian liberation theology documents and theological productions that had actually long been present in Amazonia but really took off with Laudato Si and, following the release of that, with the Synod for the Pan-Amazon. That Synod gave a whole new impetus to this kind of emergent theology of the environment. So in this research, I'm talking to priests again, but also to Amazonian missionaries - whether nuns, environmental activists, or lay leaders of churches dotted about the Amazon. This is leading me to engage with theology on the sanctity of life. It's an interesting field, one which very explicitly brings theologians, anthropologists, and all kinds of scholars and scientists together. The synod has even been discussed as an ‘experiment’ in that sense, you know. So I guess I am currently part of this quite conscious experiment in conversation, and of course that puts me right in the center between the sorts of knowledge that anthropologists and sociologists bring and the knowledge and skills that liturgists, pastors, and theologians bring to discussions about creation and the environment. HGH: Wow, thank you for sharing that. Certainly for me, but I'm sure for everyone else as well, the intersection is so clear. The way you describe your interlocutors across your projects and how you couldn't ignore their theology, it was just really in them, they were really doing it all the time, it has so much resonance with my own interlocutors. With you really being in the center of that conversation now, you're probably aware that we're in the third phase of funded research at the Center. And we’re hoping to tackle particular kinds of questions, which you've made some references to already, around relativism, the limits of relativism, the possibilities of it, combined with this era of critique, maybe even bordering on reproach, that we find ourselves in. MM: I find the project is a very interesting one and I’m deeply sympathetic to its spirit. In fact, I agree very much that anthropology should not retreat into a kind of amoral, empty sort of relativism where nothing can ever be compared or criticized. I’m also very appreciative of the efforts being made to start this conversation, Joel Robbins’ work in particular, and I think it’s amazing the ability he has to really zoom in on the questions we’ve been hovering around in our discipline for decades without openly asking. He really has a talent for identifying theoretical impasses and opening up new tunnels for conversation. But I would also be a bit cautious, you know, about the idea that it's our role, or even within our material or mechanical capacity, to stand outside people's worlds and deliver definitive moral verdicts on them, and while I don't think that's what's being asked of us with this particular project, I would definitely say that, as an anthropologist, this is something to be cautious of. For me, relativism has never been an absolute refusal of judgment, you know, and I reject any claim that anthropological relativism is necessarily or inherently nihilistic. HGH: Yeah, yes of course. MM: At least, I’ve never considered myself to be a practitioner of relativism in any nihilistic sense. Although that’s a matter for other people to judge, perhaps. What I can say is that I have always seen relativism as perhaps a more subtle ethical discipline than that, also, that we should be careful not to think of relativism as all one thing. In anthropology there are definitely degrees and nuances in how we frame and present human situations in relativistic terms. How we do relativism can vary - we can do it well or we can do it badly. And, you know, I’ve always found that good ethnography is good in part because it has its own moral force. Now, where is that moral force? It's often indirect, and I think this is something that has been commented on before. You know, we know this, that the goal of the anthropologist, rather than prescribing conclusions or judging, is to present people’s situations in enough detail with enough depth that readers are forced to think. It's all about the reader, it's about your audience, it's about wanting your audience to be forced to grapple with the ambiguities that they encounter in the text themselves and to form their own moral judgments. I think some of the solutions that are being proposed to relativism’s apparent failures, by Robbins and Lemons, like value pluralism, are really interesting ones. Even in our writing about other people's values – we're always sort of looking for different people's goals or visions of the good and how they’re competing with one another, so there is this whole idea that you might be able to map out for people the goods that they themselves are claiming to be reaching for and to help them see from a distance whether they're achieving those. It's a great idea, but at the same time we should be cautious of overly neat or positive models of action which the notion of ‘values’ sometimes edges toward. I’m not sure people live their lives consciously ranking values, or selecting between them. Mostly, as human beings, our hands are tied –that is the nature of ‘culture’. Sometimes we inexplicably choose the path that is less good for us. We go towards pain, and aporia. I also think what people value most highly is always in flux. It changes across a lifetime, across circumstances. HGH: Absolutely yeah, and sometimes from day-to-day. MM: Right, and I think one of the things that good ethnography does is it shows us that instability and that complexity. It is not just a case of “here's a set of values and people are failing to achieve the values that they say are the most important.” I suppose I’m cautious about trying to take on some sort of simplifying diagnostic role, even if I definitely empathize with the spirit of the project in relation to the moment we're in. After all, we all want our work to contribute to the good in some way. I doubt there's any anthropologist, even the most relativist of relativists, who doesn't in some way imagine their work as contributing to the good. In this day and age, more than ever - such is the politics of representation, and the pressure to reckon with anthropology’s past role in colonial violence. All this weighs heavily on us. We want to contribute positively. At the same time, I am hesitant to overestimate the transformative power of moral diagnosis and judgement. Judgement is easy, transformation is harder. Instead, we should recognize that our ethnographic descriptions, observations and interpretations matter profoundly, just in different ways. I don't think they straightforwardly translate into ethical or political change. I think that's one of the problems we have as a discipline and it's where we get stuck - you know, there's a big emphasis now on scholarship with impact. Well, I don't know how much this is part of the discourse in the states. HGH: I think it’s probably what we’re calling activist anthropology. MM: Yeah, right. So today we have a variety of rubrics telling us what the aim of research should be. Long gone are the days of pursuing knowledge for its own sake. Knowledge can only be collected if the point is to change something in a practical sense, to better our actions. But we're not talking enough about how descriptions of culture are meant to translate into change. What mechanical, material, or infrastructural conditions have to be in place for that sort of translation to be effective. There’s a classic line that Pope Francis gave in an address in Bolivia, back in 2015. He’s diagnosing the problem of climate crisis and poverty, partly laying the blame on the evils of capitalism when he suddenly clarifies that diagnosis is not an answer. We know what is causing the problem. There’s no mystery about it. We are suffering, he says, from an “excess of diagnosis”. I think there's a danger that anthropology occasionally risks that too. You know, we assume that by naming or denouncing a phenomenon, it's equivalent to changing it. I think we just have to be a little bit realistic about what our contribution is, and I don't think the alternative to strong relativism is the anthropologist becoming a moral arbiter, but on the other hand, I'm definitely all for a recognition that these are times where we do need to speak perhaps more clearly to the ills that humanity faces, without it sliding into what Robbins has called an overemphasis on ‘the suffering subject’ or Sherry Ortner has labelled as ‘dark anthropology’. With my paper, I'm perhaps less interested than the organizers of the symposium in whether we have the right intellectual tools to do the job of judgment. I'm kind of interested in what material and cultural conditions allow judgments to work, and I think one of the things I was alerted to in studying the Synod for Amazonia was how anthropologists have been attempting to mobilize judgments for a long time, as have theologians, but, in a sense it took the profile of a religious world leader, a Pope, and the infrastructure of a Catholic Church to advance things. In other words, it took a particular sort of gendered person, a particular sort of religiously gendered person of a high enough office to enact certain kinds of judgments (against capitalists, extractivists, politicians, etc) with force. The point is you can possess all the right knowledge and research on which to make a water-tight argument for one moral action over another, but that doesn't mean that your value judgments or recommendations for action are going to be listened to by the masses. How we receive judgments is as much a material and infrastructural question as it is an intellectual one. When I say material, I mean literally down to the body we have. There are cultures where no one's going to listen to a woman, you know, they're only going to listen to a man; and we've all had experiences of not being listened to by certain people because of who we are in a structural order. If you've got teenage children, you will know what it's like to have all the best advice for them, but they're not going to hear you. Yet, they might hear it from somebody else. The judgments that you as parent level at them just go in one ear and out the other. So it’s not just whether we have the skills or the knowledge to do the judgment but whether we’re the right person, at the right time. HGH: Sure, it’s like who is the receptacle of authority. MM: Exactly. How there can be appropriate and inappropriate vehicles for certain kinds of message. I guess that's what interests me. HGH: That's really interesting and I think that’s a very nuanced and careful take on all of this that I really appreciate. In terms of pulling that into your paper, can you give me a few more sentences of a summary of the paper you're bringing into the workshop? Maybe more of its ethnographic impetus? It sounds like it’s really around the judgmental authority of the Pope. MM: The paper sort of has quite a historical focus on how anthropologists and Catholic missionaries were working in parallel for a long time in Amazonia, whilst trying to keep one another at bay. For a long time they had an awkward relationship, as they were in Amazonia with different aims – missionaries to convert communities, anthropologists to study them . But the relationship became less awkward when the Brazilian government started “developing” Amazonia. Anthropologists and missionaries then started to collaborate politically in defense of what I call “life interconnected” - which encapsulates both human and non-human life-forms within a single idea of community. So the paper is about how this loose idea of life interconnected, rather than a precise definition humanity, served as the overlap in value systems. Both groups valued Indigenous ways of life which they saw as more deeply socially interconnected with ‘nature’, and so sought to protect communities against the destructions of deforestation and capitalist extractivism. Bringing this narrative into the present I examine how this shared moral project to defend life in Amazonia gained intensity with the Synod for the Pan-Amazon. This big conference brought anthropologists, biblical scholars, liturgists, together for intense workshops to hammer out the details from their different perspectives of how to “save” the region, partly by reinvigorating the role of faith and the sacramental presence of the Church in hard to reach parts of the forest. So I'm looking at how what started out as an antagonistic relationship became a much more collaborative one. I'm looking at the definitions that brought anthropologists and Catholic missionaries together, because there remain crucial differences in the ways these two camps understood “life interconnected”. But nonetheless, those differences weren’t insurmountable. There was enough common ground. So what I became interested in was not simply how moral judgment is formed intellectually, but how it becomes socially efficacious. HGH: Hmm, yeah great expansion. MM: I suppose my point is that no small piece of research or critique by a lone anthropologist or any other scholar is up to addressing the scale of the environmental issue threatening Amazonia. Knowledge, but also moral authority needs to be appropriately scaled, mediated, embodied. In Amazonia anthropologists are always crying out, issuing judgments, but mostly these fall into a sort of void – a scholarly void of ‘excess diagnosis’. However, with a Pope on their side, some anthropologists were able to amplify their cries. And despite some loss of nuance in the details, I would say that the Pope and the Synod itself were very effective allies for the anthropological academy to promote its message in Amazonia to an audience it would never have reached through academia alone. One of the reasons this was important was because the issues that anthropologists were fighting the good fight for over the course of the mid-20th century up to the present day just kept escalating. Anthropologists went from trying to protect particular indigenous groups and particular geographic territories to trying to protect Amazonia as a region and from there to trying to protect tropical biomes in general and the planet more widely. The focus basically widens from “defend this group of people” to “defend our planet”, so I'm interested in how the vehicle through which judgment is enacted has to scale up also – how it made sense for anthropologists – many of whom where not themselves Catholic - to join forces with Catholic activists. HGH: Yeah, okay so interesting. That’s a really fascinating ethnographic intervention into this conversation. Thank you so much for explaining. As you know I'm doing conversations with some other scholars involved in this, and I'm really excited to hear you talk with some of the others about the scales of what it becomes about - from a group to a region to the planet and maybe even to something outside of the planet, which one of the papers contends with. So I'm really excited for these conversations that are going to be spurred from this. That really brings me to my last question. I really am so thankful you've shared so much of this, but we're headed into two full days to have these conversations with each other and I think it's going to be really generative. So what are you most looking forward to about that? MM: Oh, I'm most looking forward to meeting new scholars who I've never met, reconnecting with scholars I do know but haven't seen for many years, and above all having the chance to lose myself in fascinating discussion for a couple of days. That instinct in me to engage in these sorts of debates and to learn from others will, I hope, be nourished. I know workshops are always the best places for that to happen. As with the issues we have circled in conversation here, the workshop will address some of the deepest existential questions we are facing today. Yeah, I'm just really grateful to have this opportunity.
