Anthropology, culture, and early Christian studies
There are various levels at which the study of early Christianity
may be recommended. As we have just seen, religion is thriving
across the globe, and therefore, our understandings of other
societies need to take account of the role that religion plays in
them. This is something that has long been understood by anthro-
pologists, who are concerned with the study of human culture. In
speaking of ‘culture’ they do not mean, in terms of the rather
narrow élitist definition of the word, the best (literature, painting,
music, whatever) that humans have produced. Rather, they take
the term more broadly, to indicate something like collective
patterns of meaning, often expressed in symbolic terms, which
allow people to communicate – between each other and from one
generation to the next – their understanding of the universe and
their attitudes to life. In these terms, culture is an essential part
of what makes us what we are as human beings: social animals
who use these patterns of meaning to interact with each other
(Geertz 1973: 33–54). Such patterns of meaning may be expres-
sed in various sorts of symbols, such as words, gestures, or
pictures; but they may also be expressed in terms of belief.
As such, then, belief, including the organized form that we call
‘religion’, is a central element in our humanity.
Moreover, anthropologists have argued that religion often
provides a key to understanding a particular culture, above all in
terms of that culture’s efforts to impose order on the cosmos
(Geertz 1973: 87–125). Indeed, much of their work has been
focused on elucidating the ‘belief-systems’ (a bit of anthropo-
logical jargon meaning something like religion) of various
societies, not only in the traditional milieu of anthropological
fieldwork, among ‘other peoples’ living in the non-industrialized
world, but also increasingly in regions such as western Europe
(e.g. L. Taylor 1995). If anthropology can claim that in helping
us to understand both ‘alien’ or foreign cultures and our own it
has an important role to play in our modern pluralist society
(whether local, regional, or global), then the study of variousWHAT IS EARLY CHRISTIANITY?
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