Being in Christ and Putting Death Its Place

In this bracingly original anthropological study, Miles Richardson uses forty years of empirical research to examine the ways Christians address the uniquely human question of death. Rooted in the author's personal story of why he became an anthropologist, the book illuminates how two groups, Catholics in Spanish America and Baptists in the American South, create being-in-Christ and thereby put death in its place. Richardson's striking scholarly thrust joins four-field anthropology (biological, cultural, archaeological, and linguistic) and a rigorous evolutionary framework to a post-modern dialogic, reflexive stance. s lively immediate method draws us into a creative dialogue with his text and into solidarity with the worshipers inside two distinctly rendered composite settings; the dark Nueva Esperanza iglesia, where Christ dwells in sight, touch, and taste; and the brightly lit Mt. Hope church, where the Lord is experienced in the Word of sermon and song. We journey across the Spanish American landscape to holy places where the immanent Christ works miracles and Good Friday signifies his sacrificial suffering, while in the American South pilgrimages lead to antebellum homes, and at sunrise on Easter Sunday, the choir sings of glorious resurrection and death finds its place in the salvation message of a risen Christ. General readers, anthropologists, and students of Latin American and southern culture will be enthralled by Richardson's combination of hard-won ethnographic detail and moving religious insight that speaks to the question of what to do about death within the construct of human evolution.

In this original anthropological study, Miles Richardson draws on forty years of empirical research to explore the paradox that while humans must die like all evolving life forms, they have adapted a unique symbolic communication that makes them aware of their naturally occurring fate; and through word and artifact, they dwell upon that discovery. Winner of the James Mooney Award of the Southern Anthropological Society In this bracingly original anthropological study, Miles Richardson draws on forty years of empirical research to explore the paradox that while humans must die like all evolving life forms, they have adapted a unique symbolic communication that makes them aware of their natu­rally occurring fate; and through word and artifact, they dwell upon that discovery. Using the concepts of culture and place, he illuminates how two groups, Catholics in Spanish America and Baptists in the American South, create ""being-in-Christ"" and thereby ""put death in its place."" The book combines biological, cultural, archaeological, and linguistic anthropology; a rigorous evolutionary framework; and a postmodern dialogic stance to view humanity as inescapably a product of nature without sacrificing the interpretative social constructions that ""turn a primate into a poem."" Hard-won ethnographic detail and moving reli­gious insight make this an enthralling work.