Deborah Bird Rosephilosophers, Lev Shestov, says that for us moderns, faith is audacity:
it is a refusal to regard anything as impossible ( 1970 , 33 ). One can
read Shestov’s audacity as a theological claim, which is certainly part
of his project, but one can also read it today as an ecological claim.
From this point of view, as long as the living world is fully alive, it
will be self-organizing and self-repairing, and thus it is a dynamic sys-
tem in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is not
knowable as a whole by any of its constituent parts. Faith in both so-
cial and ecological terms is audacious because it rests on consent. It
requires submission to, and thereby enables a flourishing participa-
tion in, pattern, process, and mystery.
Shestov’s ( 1982 , 105 ) view is that the desire to be able to encom-
pass and explain everything constitutes a forfeiture of “the capacity
to come into contact with the mysterious.” This view holds special
significance for anthropologists, as our work brings us into contact
not only with that which is mysterious to us but also with that which
is mysterious to our teachers. Impossibility, in an ecological context,
defines the paradoxical knowledge that life exceeds our capacity to
understand it. In the context of anthropology, audacity can be read
as faith in three conjoined propositions:
- That differences within the human family are real (see Hornborg
2001 ), - That understanding is possible across differences, and
- That understanding never exhausts itself; there are always possibili-
ties for more questions and more understandings.
My commitment to a recursive epistemology urges me to resist con-
clusions, but I shall offer a few words in the mode of summary. Bates-
on’s concept of a recursive epistemology speaks to our connectivities
with our research partners and teachers, and these entanglements be-
come constitutive of our own personhood. The practice thus requires
particular kinds of faithfulness to experience and to ethics. When we
become entangled in an ethics of dialogue and fidelity, we are called
upon also to bring those entanglements into our academic lives and
work. Anthropology thus has the potential to contribute to the leading