The Christianity of Grace

It is well-recognised that ‘western’ social categories, such as that of the bounded individual (Dumont 1985), have been shaped by European Christianity(ies). This is also true of the scholarly constructs by which those of us trained in Eurocentric contexts seek to understand the world.² The social sciences themselves seem to reflect Jewish and Christian scriptural assumptions, with contemporary economics, for example, starting from the post-Edenic premise that our world is one of scarcity and hardship (Sahlins 1996). Despite their self-conscious founding as ‘rational’ disciplines, this theological hangover has also shaped anthropology, sociology, and the adjacent field of religious studies. Indeed, as Tomoko Masuzawa (2005) explains, the emergence of a scholarly discourse of comparable, geographically defined ‘world religions’ in the nineteenth century worked not to relativise Euro-Christian theology but to ensure its hegemony.

Our field, then, ‘is not always so “secular” as it likes to think’ (Cannell 2005: 352). This is particularly true of anthropological analyses of religion. Fenella Cannell, for example, has argued that an Augustinian asceticism continues to influence what ‘counts’ as Christianity for ethnographic purposes. Yet although anthropologists are increasingly coming to grips with this ‘theological prehistory’ (ibid.), we have been slow to recognise the lingering effect of the doctrine of grace on our systems of classification, categorisation, and value ascription. To put this another way, although at least one of our central texts discusses the role grace plays in the lives of others—Weber's Protestant Ethic has been taught to generations of anthropology undergraduates—we tend not to notice its subtle influence on the categories we use to analyse those others’ lives. (Where grace's influence is recognised in our founding texts—as in Robert Yelle's [2018] recent account of the distinction between charismatic and bureaucratic authority—it is usually by historians or political scientists rather than ethnographers.) Incorporating grace more fully—more transparently, perhaps—into our scholarly toolkit, we contend, offers new ways of engaging with influential texts and classic debates, including on central anthropological topics such as morality, exchange, and value.

Take, for example, Jonathan Parry's widely (and deservedly) celebrated Malinowski Memorial Lecture, ‘The Gift, the Indian Gift and the “Indian Gift”’ (1986). Parry's re-reading of Marcel Mauss’ The Gift argues that the distinction between ‘interested’ and ‘disinterested’ giving only takes on its particular moral weight in capitalist contexts: ‘an elaborated ideology of the “pure” gift is most likely to develop in state societies with an advanced division of labour and a significant commercial sector’ (Parry 1986: 467; see also Pitt-Rivers 1992 and Sanchez et al 2017). Yet what is also ‘essential…is a specific type of belief system’, one which valorises an otherworldly hereafter at the expense of the here and now. Such ‘salvationist’ or ‘world’ religions, he argues, encourage an understanding of unreciprocated giving as ‘a liberation from bondage to [the world], a denial of the profane self, an atonement for sin, and hence a means to salvation’ (ibid: 468). Meanwhile, this same otherworldly orientation contributes to the conceptual separation of the economic sphere from other social realms, thus entrenching ‘the ideological elaboration of a domain in which self-interest rules supreme’ (ibid: 496).

Somewhat curiously (at least from our perspective), Parry's essay never mentions ‘grace’. Yet it seems to beg the question of grace's ‘always something extra’. Is it not possible that those societies most heavily influenced by (certain forms of) salvationist religion are invested in an ideology of free gifts not because giving offers ‘a means to salvation’, but because salvation is achieved through receipt? To put it another way: might not the (Protestant) Christian understanding of grace as a gift that can never be reciprocated, which flows unilaterally from divine beings to human ones, have encouraged the development of a market economy in which all exchanges between humans are seen as transactional, in which there is no such thing as a free lunch (cf. Weber 2002 [1905])?

From this perspective, perhaps anthropologists’ eagerness to uncover the quid pro quo—our assumption that ‘the notion of a “pure gift” is mere ideological obfuscation which masks the supposedly non-ideological verity that nobody does anything for nothing’ (Parry 1986: 455)—reflects not only the post-Fall cynicism identified by Marshall Sahlins (1996), but also a Christian theology in which only divine beings offer gifts that truly reject a return (cf. Laidlaw 2000; Shryock and da Col 2018: xxv–xxvii).

The concept of grace, then, offers new ways of looking at old questions. But it may also influence the very questions we have come to ask. As Vincent Lloyd (2011), who pens our Afterword, notes, many of our academic paradigms—at least in the Euro-American academy—betray a supersessionist logic in which the light of ‘grace’ (or a stand-in, such as freedom, rationality, or modernity) ousts the dark irrationality of ‘law’ (sometimes figured as tradition or tribalism). This triumphalism is evident in fields as diverse as politics, philosophy, and political theology (cf. Yelle 2018). Anthropology, meanwhile, has at times tended towards the opposite extreme, emphasising continuity even in contexts of conversion and apparently rapid social change (Cannell 2005; Robbins 2007).

Perhaps this is unsurprising. As the discipline of the ‘Savage Slot’ (Trouillot 2003), anthropology historically produced the difference between ‘west’ and ‘rest’ that it claimed to study. Efforts to ‘reinvent’ the field beyond this binary have, in Jonathan Rosa and Yarimar Bonilla's (2017: 205–206) assessment, largely failed to subvert its ‘continued investment in colonial logics’. (Colonialism's impact on local iterations of grace is a theme that runs throughout this collection, but comes to the fore most clearly in Gareth Breen's article.) In presenting some societies as more deeply bound by cultural rules than others—law trumping grace?—ethnography's recent past risks a problematic reaffirmation of the grace/law dyad.

If anthropological categories have been subtly shaped by the doctrine of grace, then those of us trained in ostensibly post-Christian Eurocentric contexts—regardless of our interest in religion in general or Christianity in particular—ought to pay close attention to its afterlives, to the biblical traditions that are often the ‘background noise’ of our analysis (Shryock and da Col 2018: xxxv). In what ways do scholars (re)produce theological narratives in which grace replaces law (or, indeed, in which law refuses to be ousted)? In what ways has our discipline reiterated Euro-Christian (and arguably anti-Semitic) caricatures of deterministic cultural law? These are questions, we suggest, to which all readers of our foundational texts must attend.

The Sociality of Grace

As much as grace—conventionally understood and in terms of the genealogies of (Christian) personhood—might be recognised to operate at the level of the individual's relationship with the divine, it can also be approached in terms of collectives. For example, in the Pentecostal churches where Edwards did fieldwork during Myanmar's fraught democratic transition, there was much talk of the nation itself being saved by God's grace (che zu daw ajaun). The contrast here was not just with the law of karma assumed to animate the moral reckoning of demographically dominant Buddhists (see also Mahadev 2019), but also with the authoritarian law of the military junta that had ruled the country for decades. The grace/law dyad was operational both at the level of nation and at the level of the individual, the two being interrelated insofar as God's saving the nation was bound up with his saving the individual Buddhist souls therein.

The articles in this collection reveal grace's ability to traverse scales in this fashion, its capacity to collapse individual and collective futures into streamlined soteriological trajectories. Indeed, as Breen's contribution suggests, it is precisely in this kind of collapsing that grace is most clearly felt. Breen shows how the early followers of the Chinese Christian reformer Watchman Nee apprehended grace as a feeling of excess first experienced in the context of collective communion, in the breaking of bread together. The church that emerged from these early gatherings is today replete with ‘participatory’ rituals that allow worshipers to experience grace as a feeling of expansion ‘beyond themselves, their families, their cities and nations’. What grace depends on, at least for Breen's Taiwanese interlocutors, are relations not only between individuals and God but also between people themselves. Grace, in other words, is a decidedly social phenomenon.

There is, of course, a certain irony here—at least if we choose to conceptualise grace as the ultimate ‘free gift’ (cf. Sommerschuh, this volume). In an essay responding to Parry, James Laidlaw suggests that the idea of the ‘free’ or ‘pure’ gift has not been taken seriously by anthropologists because the possibility of a gift that ‘would play no part in the creation of social relations,… [that would] create no obligations or connections between persons’ was one they refused to countenance (2000: 617). ‘Even if such a thing existed’, Laidlaw writes, ‘it would be of no serious interest to anthropology’. In his analysis of Jain donations, Laidlaw proceeds to offer an example of a pure gift, or at least something that closely approximates that ideal, one that does not produce relations—a gift that ‘makes no friends’, as he puts it.

The articles in this collection do not so much lend evidence to the argument that pure gifts may exist so much as they offer the possibility that the free gift of grace—even if approached in Laidlaw's terms, as something that transcends the bonds of obligation and reciprocity—may also be embedded in social relations. Indeed, our contributors ask—and this resonates with the questions raised by Pitt-Rivers—whether grace is not, in fact, a condition and consequence of those same relations. In this sense, our focus on grace (notwithstanding its centrality to projects of individual salvation) does not reaffirm the place of the individual in anthropological studies of Christianity. Rather, it complements recent moves to offer a corrective to that tendency by considering how ideas about salvation emerge from and animate the collective character of Christian life (Handman 2015; Luhrmann 2012; McIvor 2020; Roberts 2016; Vilaça 2016).

In her study of migration among Guinean performing artists, Adrienne Cohen (2018) illustrates how this might work with respect to the Muslim concept of baraka, which she defines as ‘divine grace’.³ The migrants she worked with seek this grace through displays of care for their kin networks at home. Grace, in this reading, is ‘the fundamental link between kinship and capacity; doing good for one's kin is what allows people to acquire divine grace and hence protection and success’ (2018: 276). Important here is the act of displaying care: it is the fact that these actions are seen or recognised that guarantees the protection of grace. This emphasis on recognition or publicity resonates closely with how grace functions in several of the articles in this collection. Indeed, as Naomi Haynes (2014: S358), drawing on David Graeber's (2011) understanding of society as a ‘potential audience’, has argued, it behoves us to reflect on the ‘intended and accidental audiences for Christian claims’. Questions of recognition and comparison run through the articles assembled here. What does grace allow us to see? How is grace itself seen? How does it mediate relations between selves and others or help define those very categories?

Consider Nofit Itzhak's analysis of moments of successful and failed healing in post-genocide Rwanda. The churches she attended devoted a great deal of time and energy to efforts to heal their attendees from trauma and suffering. However, some church-goers would or could not heal. Efficacious healing through grace, Itzhak discovered, ultimately required recognition. Public testimonies that emphasised sacrifice were particularly effective, suggesting that healing is part of a therapeutic process ‘that can be conceived of as gestures of sacrifice and gifting, taking place between the suffering person, the divine, and social others’. An effective sacrifice is dependent on the participation of (and recognition by) ‘social others’. Grace is both embedded in and establishes relationality—though its effects, as Sommerschuh stresses in his contribution, can be deeply ambivalent.

Similarly, among the Romanian Orthodox Christians Giuseppe Tateo focuses on, grace must be seen to be done. These Christians, who survey the post-socialist religious field for the presence or absence of har (charisma or grace), often find that contemporary priests honour this quality only in the breach. They treat their vocation as a secular job, dispensing the sacraments with an eye to increasing their own wealth. By contrast, when the faithful come across a cleric who is ‘full of har’, congregants flock to him, creating devotional communities both in person and online.

Tateo argues that these public assessments of the presence or absence of grace must be approached in light of the widespread anticlericalism that has accompanied (what is seen as) secularisation. They need to be understood, in other words, as taking place in a time of the secular. It is to grace's relationship with the question of time—secular and religious—that we now turn.

The Temporality of Grace

‘If there is one thing that anthropologists working in other fields know about the anthropology of Christianity’, writes Haynes (2020: 57), ‘it is that conversion entails “radical and absolute” rupture’. As she notes, one of the field's most productive areas of debate has focused on the ‘rupture’ of conversion and the extent to which it might upend ingrained anthropological tendencies towards ‘continuity thinking’ (Robbins 2007). Grace is in many ways at the heart of this story, providing both the conditions that make rupture possible and the means by which it unfolds. Indeed, for Mahadev (2019), one way of thinking about how grace and karma get framed in Sri Lanka as ‘rivalrous reckonings’ is to approach them in terms of the continuity/rupture divide. Where karma implies chains of moral continuity that span multiple lives, grace offers to break these chains. Sinhala Buddhist opposition to Christian evangelism is thus motivated not only by nationalist and anti-colonial sentiment but also by a suspicion of the ‘tricks of spontaneous Christian grace’ (ibid.: 428).

Ruptures in and through grace appear in the ethnographies that follow—for instance, in the radical break from an emphasis on honour to an emphasis on humility among Aari converts in Sommerschuh's article. And yet, as Haynes (2020: 58) notes, ‘There are only so many ways to make the point that conversion entails rupture on some fronts, continuity on others’. How, then, might the anthropology of grace help move these discussions forward? Beyond this, what might it contribute to the burgeoning anthropology of time?

Laidlaw (2000: 622) argues that a ‘pure gift’ must not only ‘make no friends’; it must also suspend the flow of time. This is because common-sense understandings and experiences of linear time offer ground for causal connections, as well as the possibility that a gift might, in the future, be repaid in some fashion. Similarly, grace can be seen to ‘[stretch] the horizon of time’ to a point where the conditions for predictability and causality are undermined (Shryock and da Col 2018: xxix).

For many Christians, this extended horizon is part of what orients actions in the here and now. Among the Sri Lankan Christian left of whom Mahadev writes, for example, the pursuit of social justice activities—such as advocating for garment industry workers or opposing mega-construction projects—in the face of constant and predictable defeat depends on just this kind of ‘prophetic’ temporal orientation. Speaking of a campaign against a Chinese-funded development project set to displace local fishing communities, a priest and committed activist tells Mahadev: ‘The construction will go on. And we will go on as a sign of our resistance….We will not achieve our end. China will buy out and win over the people.’

Grace, then, allows for action not only amidst uncertainty but also in the face of certain defeat; in the shadow of a rupture that one knows will never come. Graeber (2012) suggests that grace might be usefully considered, alongside such concepts as fate, luck, baraka, and mana, as a ‘technology of the future’—that is, a means not only of predicting what happens next but of influencing it too. Rather than seeing grace only in moments of rupture—and law, by extension, in moments of continuity—might it be more productive to approach it as a means of acting on time (Bear 2014), even ‘tricking’ it (Moroşanu and Ringel 2016)?⁴

The Guinean performing artists studied by Cohen seem to approach baraka in rather this fashion: as ‘the most powerful and enduring mode of generating human capacity’, a method for building successful futures amid the insecurities and uncertainties of global migration (2018: 284). Yet the articles in this collection also point to grace's temporal instability. Far from enduring, grace is often experienced as a fleeting sensation in a passing moment. It is always in flux, waxing and waning in response to human and divine actions. It can be lost, as in the case of the Romanian priests discussed by Tateo, just as it can be gained, as in the moments of personal testimony documented by Itzhak. In the Taiwanese church history compiled by Breen, ‘the mystery of God's grace does not remain solved for long: it experientially deteriorates, never works in practice as it is supposed to in theory and emerges anew in unexpected ways.’

These articles focus not just on the promise or ideal of grace's permanence and enduring, eternal nature but also on its flows and undulations—on what Laurie Denyer Willis (forthcoming) calls its ‘whoosh’. For her evangelical interlocutors in Rio de Janeiro, grace is:

there, and then not there. The feeling of lightness might linger for a moment, an evening, maybe even months, but these spaces are not firm. Rather—like a good perfume or even a stench—it is in and out, very much there and then completely gone, simply a recollection until—whoosh—there it is back again, an emotional assault.

Just as grace seems to mediate between individuals and collectives, it also seems to mediate across temporal scales—from a passing momentary sensation to the temporal expanse of a messianic age in a world to come. Anthropologists have done much in recent years to document the conditions of temporal multiplicity that so many of us inhabit, the overlapping rhythms, tempos, and time-maps that collapse past, present and future (Bear 2014; Miyazaki 2003). What grace offers, though, is a way of considering how that multiplicity is lived and felt (Ssorin-Chaikov 2017). For some, the fleeting experience of grace can be a reminder that they dwell in what Jon Bialecki calls the ‘already/not yet’: ‘a time split in twain through the event, a cleaving of the present moment into past and future…[in which] things are either redeemed or are in need of redemption’ (2017: 46). If, as Mahadev suggests, such a time provides something of the imaginative ground on which a politics can be pursued by those in search of better futures, what kind of futures might grace help us imagine?

The Potentiality of Grace?

Pitt-Rivers’ essay emphasises agency over structure: the choice to give, rather than the obligation; the willing sacrifice, not the ritual requirement (cf. Shryock and da Col 2018: xxviii). Grace suggests not only that radical change is possible but that we can choose to pursue it—or choose, perhaps, to receive it. If it enables, from an emic perspective, our interlocutors’ navigation of difficult historico-political terrain, in what ways might it prove useful to ethnographers who see their work, in part, as a way of orienting their readers towards the possibility of more gracious futures? We have already noted that the doctrine of grace may have implicitly influenced the anthropological canon. But what if it were more explicitly acknowledged as an analytic tool?

In posing this question, we seek to emphasise the potential relevance of an anthropology of grace. Anthropologists increasingly find themselves conducting ethnography in hyper-industrialised, late-capitalist societies, where they must situate their work in relation to state-managed regimes of extraction, regulation, and retribution (Koch 2018). The ‘always something extra’ of gratuitous forgiveness may offer new ways of theorising the pressing social questions these anthropologists explore, among them debt, tax, the decline of the welfare state, and the criminalisation of poverty (Graeber 2011; Morgen and Maskovsky 2003; Peebles 2010; Sheild Johansson 2020).

In practice, we suggest, the logic of grace is already operational in these debates. Scholar-activists who advocate the forgiveness of debt, for example, implicitly draw on the spirit of grace by highlighting the religious genealogy of calls for jubilee (Graeber 2011). Treating debt as an opportunity to demonstrate grace—to wipe clean yesterday's slate, to deny interest accrued—is, perhaps, a potential means of transcending the logic of debit and credit by which human lives are so often governed. Indeed, as Steinmüller's contribution suggests, it is possible that grace's significance lies precisely in its refusal of such a reckoning: for Wa prophets, grace is ‘the incommensurability that emerges at the margin of a world that is being measured’.

Yet this incommensurability can also be used to suggest that others—and Others—simply do not measure up. In such instances, grace's analytic utility can be found in its laying bare the double-edged nature of the gift, the financial, moral, and even spiritual hierarchies that gift-giving implies, indexes, or creates. At the evangelical church in London where McIvor carried out fieldwork, for example, the community's understanding of grace-as-uniquely-Christian was maintained through constant comparison with—or caricaturing of—Judaism and ‘Old Testament’ law (and other traditions deemed to rely on ‘rules and rituals’, such as Catholicism and Islam). This supersessionist chauvinism is easily translated to a global register: while calls to institute an international debt jubilee seem, on the one hand, to centre progressive futures, they also reinscribe the colonial violence of a North–South relationship that frames creditor nations as having the right to ‘forgive’ debt in the first place. When one considers the kinds of payments such countries claim—such as the ‘independence debt’ France demanded from Haiti (Daut 2021; Farmer 2004)—this logic becomes all the more repugnant.

If grace can be strategically mobilised in international relations, it can also affect those at the community level. Omri Elisha (2008), for example, has argued that socially engaged US evangelicals struggle to reconcile their desire to be compassionate to those in need with their theologically weighted understanding of ‘accountability’, according to which the recipients of divine grace (or human charity) ought to show their gratitude through reformed behaviour. When grace is not acknowledged in the way these wealthy, primarily white evangelicals believe it ought to be, complaints of ‘compassion fatigue’ accompany racialised handwringing about the risks of ‘enabling sin’ among the (apparently undeserving) poor (2008: 162).

Grace's shoring up of systemic inequality also comes to the fore in Thomas Thornton's (n.d.) ongoing research on Alabama prisons, which shows how incarcerated persons in ‘faith’ dorms see grace as central to personal transformation. Thornton argues that taking this theology seriously complicates simplistic understandings of prison life that emphasise either compliance with or opposition to the penal project (cf. Dubler 2013). Yet it is not just incarcerated persons who speak of grace. Significantly, it is also the prison staff, who encourage religious adherence as a means of rehabilitation. Given the anti-Black racism that suffuses the penal system, the prison's embrace of grace as a disciplinary tool can be seen as one more example of the state's efforts to control the Black church; what Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (2020) has provocatively termed ‘the Body of Christ in Blackface’. This, too, has a supersessionist pedigree. As J. Kameron Carter (2008: 4) has argued, the origins of contemporary US racism, including anti-Blackness, may lie in early Christianity's efforts to ‘sever itself from its Jewish roots’ by racialising both Christianity and Judaism (cf. Lloyd 2011: 26).

In developing an anthropology of grace, then—whether we are analysing local conceptions of it or using it as an analytic tool—we must remain attuned to its perils as well as its promises. The romance of ‘something extra…something over and above what is due’ should not anaesthetise us to the fact that liberatory ideals and orientations can also produce what Savannah Shange (2019) terms ‘progressive dystopias’: systems focused on isolated social justice ‘wins’ rather than fundamental change. Such ‘wins’ offer a temporary moment of catharsis—another type of ‘whoosh’, perhaps—but fail to challenge the systems that result in the (much more frequent) losses experienced by marginalised individuals, communities, and regions.

Still, we suggest, the promises are there. In his Afterword to this volume, Vincent Lloyd offers a reading of former US president Barack Obama's rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’ in the wake of the murder of nine members of Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist. It is easy, Lloyd suggests, to tender a critical analysis of this scene: to emphasise grace's interaction with state power, nationalism, respectability politics, and domesticated narratives of hope. Obama's performance of grace, Lloyd notes, ‘pacifies’. But taking grace seriously—as our contributors seek to do—requires us to see beyond this frame, to attend to the ways in which grace acts with and upon those who come in contact with it, including for the better. For one thing, as the ethnography gathered here reminds us, grace is a language through which diverse communities worldwide frame their pursuit of the good (even in instances where, as Bialecki [2009] suggests for his interlocutors at the Vineyard, its prophetic promise risks overwhelming to the point of paralysis). Grace, as the leftist clergy with whom Mahadev worked see it, constitutes an ethical imperative. If now is the time to re-examine ‘what it is that we are doing with anthropology…to respond to planetary crises, create alternative horizons of possibility, and address the rampant inequalities and vulnerabilities that exist in anthropology and beyond’ (Romero 2020), then anthropology, too, should take note of this imperative. Pitt-Rivers (1992: 244) suggested that grace, like honour, could supply ‘the point of junction between the ideal and the real world’. Perhaps it is also a way of bringing about the former in the latter.

Conclusion: The Grace of Anthropology

The promises and perils of grace are at the centre of the stories our contributors tell. The trade-offs of gracious living form the ethnographic core of our opening article, which focuses on the complex interaction of honour, humility, and love among the Aari of southwestern Ethiopia. As Sommerschuh argues, flows of grace travel through hierarchically-organised social relations—even as they also threaten to overwhelm those same bonds. Love is similarly at the heart of Itzhak's analysis of healing rituals in a Catholic Charismatic community in post-genocide Rwanda. When such rituals work, Itzhak tells us, it is because of the grace that emerges in the meeting between the suffering person, God, and an audience of social others.

The social dimension of grace is central also to Breen's historical ethnography of the followers of Watchman Nee and Witness Lee. For these Christians, the contradictions that inhere in the concept of grace do not undermine its importance; rather, they are desirable features that ensure its ability to mediate between the ideal and the real. In post-Socialist Romania, by contrast, contradictions—in the form of accusations of hypocrisy—lead Orthodox Christians to turn away from certain clergy, whom they accuse of lacking grace. Tateo's article shows, however, how the exceptions—those priests who manage to retain grace—draw a disproportionate number of followers, even in the face of anticlerical trends.

The exceptions of grace are also at play in our last two articles. Mahadev's historically grounded study of the Sri Lankan Christian left points to an ecumenical praxis that stands out—both against the dominance of Buddhist nationalism and against the exclusivism of the evangelicals with whom she previously worked. For this group of activist nuns, priests, and theologians, grace is what drives a politics of care and advocacy across lines of difference. In Steinmüller's article, it is a world of calculation from and against which grace (or bwan) emerges. His history of three generations of Lahu and Wa prophets on the Myanmar-China border suggests that, if we are willing to push beyond the Christian frame, we might seek grace at the periphery of the worlds of measurement to which we have become so accustomed. Finally, the collection's Afterword asks us to take this journey one step further. By encouraging us to consider ethnography's contribution to theo-political debates beyond our disciplinary boundaries, Lloyd frames our project as one that is relevant not only to those outside the anthropology of Christianity but beyond anthropology itself (cf. Robbins 2020).

As we have noted, our focus on grace is inspired by Pitt-Rivers’ work on the ‘always something extra’ that it seems to entail. This gratuity—a gratuity that is both achingly familiar and yet difficult to theorise—is of particular import for anthropologists. Indeed, for Pitt-Rivers, ‘hospitality and grace [figured] centrally as both objects and methods of study’ (Shryock and da Col 2018: xiv). How might we take seriously the suggestion that grace implicates and enchants both anthropologists and those we write with, about, and for—not least because, by participating in the ethnographic project, our interlocutors grace us with a gift we cannot possibly repay?

In pointing out our indebtedness to our interlocutors, we do not seek to romanticise a discipline with a complicated relationship to the colonial project (Asad 1973; Jobson 2019). Nor do we want to imply that this feeling of obligation is necessarily legitimate. As the debate sparked by Benjamin Teitelbaum's (2019) recent call for an ‘immoral anthropology’ suggests, there are (and should be) limits to ‘scholar-informant solidarity’. Rather, we draw attention to the methodological import of grace as a reminder of the necessity of ethnographic humility—including as regards our object of inquiry.

In calling for an anthropology of grace, we have made bold claims. We have argued both that uncovering its unrecognised supersessionist logic will enable a re-appraisal of part of the anthropological canon, and that the explicit incorporation of grace into our scholarly toolkit will offer new ways of understanding sociality and temporality. But these points are only a beginning. Other ethnographers are better placed to illuminate those things that ‘count as extra’ in contexts, cultures, and communities that we have been unable to address here—not least as regards those alternative concepts of power, gratuity, and divine providence, such as baraka and mana, that this collection mentions only briefly.

We humbly invite our readers, interlocutors, and collaborators, then, to seek out the ‘always something extra’ that we have not (yet) provided. After all—and as many of our interlocutors would agree—humility is good for grace.