Edmund Searles
The secularization of the self is a source of both liberation and alien-
ation. Released from the fetters of faith and fear of God, enlightened
subjects have discovered a world free of the direct influence of God.
New disciplines and doctrines have emerged from this impulse, cul-
minating in novel understandings of mind, body, and history. The en-
lightened subject is now positioned to apply rigorous methods to the
study of epidemiology and the transmission of diseases, leading to
the possibility of longer and healthier lives. The enlightened subject
is also free to imagine and enact new forms of commodification and
exchange, and, with the right luck and ingenuity, generate unimagi-
nable levels of wealth and power.
But all is not rosy with the modern subject. Loosened from a love
and fear of God and the security of a faith-inspired, sacramental life,
the self has become an object of self-loathing and self-deception. Ob-
sessed with a heightened self-consciousness, the self becomes trapped
in its own images of itself and in the projection of its desires and inse-
curities onto the world. The self now struggles to make itself an ob-
ject of desire to others, a process that continues today in almost sur-
real proportions. Television is replete with shows offering a complete
makeover of one’s body and personality via plastic surgery, interior
design, and a new wardrobe and hairstyle. In these conditions, the self
seems lost in a world devoid of sacramentality, of mystic presence.
In this essay, I examine my own spiritual odyssey through various
worlds of enchantment and disenchantment. Using my fieldwork ex-
periences in the Canadian Arctic, the Alaskan Subarctic, and Guinea-
Bissau, West Africa, as a guide, I explore how I have come to believe
what I believe. I also analyze how my position as a person and eth-
nographer keeps changing in response to my questioning the taken-
for-granted assumption that anthropology is a vocation in the Webe-
rian sense of the term and that I am a secular subject.
Levi’s PhobiaSeveral months into my dissertation fieldwork project, my fiancée (now
wife—Michelle C. Johnson) and I encountered a fascinating reincar-
nation story, revealing to us a belief that still prevails strongly among