Edmund Searles1881 (Green 1979 ). This event not only improved his ethnography
but also inspired him to become an ardent defender of Zuni lands and
religion. S. B., a Winnebago whose autobiography was translated by
Paul Radin ( 1963 ), remembers his conversion as being rather imme-
diate and intense. After ingesting peyote, he was deeply moved by the
overwhelming presence of Earthmaker (God).
Victor and Edith Turner were repositioned by their research among
the Ndembu in southern Africa in the 1950 s. Returning to England,
they joined the Roman Catholic Church, a decision that led to ten-
sions with their friends and colleagues (Engelke 2000 ). Roman Ca-
tholicism, however, satisfied their hunger for ritual and shaped much
of Victor Turner’s future work on symbolism and ritual in various cul-
tural contexts. More recently, Paul Stoller ( 2004 ) describes how the
experience of cancer clarified his understanding of Songhay sorcery
and allowed him to draw connections between his Jewish identity as
a child and his quest to be a sorcerer’s apprentice. Stoller states that
his encounter with cancer deepened his faith, but he doesn’t specify
how. Perhaps this is a symptom of a bias in the academy. The Cana-
dian anthropologist Roderick Wilson describes how his faith in Chris-
tianity “reinforced [his] own awareness of the sacred” and broadened
his appreciation of modern shamanic practices (Wilson 1994 , 207 ).
At the same time, however, his faith made him feel deviant from the
dominant society of the academy, a place where faith and religion are
discussed only in appropriate academic contexts and seldom as an as-
pect of one’s own identity.
The idea that having faith or being a Christian is a form of deviance
resonates with my struggle to understand secularism and its grip on
a disenchanted world. Perhaps this is why I feel tentative writing this
essay. Nevertheless, I would be lying if I claimed that ethnographic re-
search in Africa, my marriage to an anthropologist of religion, and my
return to the Episcopal Church has not repositioned my relationship
to Inuit spirituality. As my understanding of the world has changed,
so has my belief that the world cannot be explained by cognitive and
material forces alone.
Debates about faith and religious belief continue to pit philosophers
against theologians, scientists against priests, spiritual healers against