Comments on the occasion of receiving the ASM Lifetime Achievement Award

Anthropological research and christian faith

Thank you so much! You do me great honor with this award, and I am so grateful to Roberta King and Darrell Whiteman, as well as the Stratherns via video, for your remarks and presentation. I also acknowledge the ASM Board members who made this award possible, and regret that Sr. Madge could not be with us. Former recipients of the ASM Lifetime Achievement award are an august group—my heroes. Somehow I can’t imagine myself in this company. After all, I am only an anthropologist in search of the relationship between Christianity and culture.

I have lived my academic career in the space between anthropology and Bible translation. It has been a hybrid, neither anthropological nor biblical per se. Rather it is both anthropological and Christian by virtue of who I am and what I have done—an anthropology of Christianity if you will (Robbins and Haynes, 2014). My career reflects a blend of these two perspectives, thereby creating something radically different from either by itself—I am better for it.

In keeping with the conference theme this year, my experience with the Samo changed my understanding of Christianity in many unexpected ways that enabled me to view the Bible and the people who populate it through Samo eyes. Because of the Samo, I know God in ways I would not have otherwise experienced— I embody what Homi Bhabha called a “third space” (Bhabha, 2009).

As a Bible translator seeking to make sense of the Samo religious schema, associating the biblical stories with their mythology and recognizing the relative truth of both was central to the Samo acceptance of the rest of the Bible. From their perspective, if the Baibo Booka rang true with respect to mythological themes, then it must be true in other areas as well, such as the role of ancestors, the plight of the human soul, and the need for a mediator. By equating the “old man” of their mythology with the caring God who desired good for all humankind, they were able to forgive their bitter enemies. They could put their traditional cannibalism aside, not because a government officer or a missionary set the rules, “don’t kill and don’t eat,” but because their own cultural sensitivity for relational decency forced them to do so—all people are under the care of the same all-encompassing and loving Ayo, ‘God’ (Shaw, 2022: 76–79).

Such anthropological and theological connectivity, in turn, affected me. As an anthropologist, I attempted to conceptualize the biblical meaning and the context in which it originally made sense. As a Bible translator, I processed the biblical text in a radically different context (Shaw, 1988: 223). What I came to understand was how similar the biblical and Samo conceptual bedrocks actually were. Thus, I was the one who was outside the circle of hermeneutical understanding. As Evans-Prichard noted, ultimately “the theologian takes over from the anthropologist” (Evans-Pritchard, 1956: 322). Indeed, the two inform each other through an appreciation of the people who bring them together. And what is most interesting to me is how theological the people we have opportunity to learn from actually are. If the definition of theology is “thinking about God,” then theology is a universal reflection each society indulges in. Such awareness brings new insight to bear upon how we process spiritual information anthropologically. Thus by extension the anthropologist’s research can, in turn, potentially be informed by the faith of those we research, thereby bringing insight to everyone (Larsen, 2014: 109, 173, 216).

Missionaries who are outside the spiritual circle of the people they seek to evangelize can learn much about their own spirituality (Donovan, 1978). Taking missiology beyond presenting a message to discovering spiritual realities missionaries are not aware of brings new insight into God’s intentions for all humankind (Gilliland, 1989: 10–12). What I learned in seminary was of little use in terms of the categories the Samo brought to interpreting the biblical stories and passages we translated. Their perspective brought new insight and awareness that my Western, systematized theology, did not account for. Thus, I remain indebted to my Samo sisters and brothers as well as to my anthropological and theological colleagues for opening new vistas of understanding that provide a greater awareness of God. While our Western intellectualism has slain the categories and institutions that held God sacred, we have much to learn from holistic perspectives that combine heaven and earth with humanity squarely in focus (Ps. 8).

While anthropologists may have tried to slay God, the people we have studied resurrected this superhuman being, which they have factored into every aspect of life (Larsen, 2014: 226–27). Through our writing we present their world so others can benefit. And how we re-present them reflects back on our own anthropological and theological heritage (Shaw and Van Engen, 2003: 12–14). Our cultural research transforms our objectivity into a relativity that conforms our inquiry of humanity into the likeness of God (Anderson and Guernsey, 1985: 19). In turn, those we embrace in their humanity recognize that being human is reflective of God’s presence with them. As the Samo say, “God has put his feet in our mud.”

So, as an anthropologist and a missiologist, I must take both disciplines seriously. The relevance of each, with its respective foci on culture and the Bible, encourages me to integrate both disciplines, as they are connected to my experience with the Samo. Furthermore, as a cultural specialist, closely interacting with the people I have sought to make known to others, I have benefited immeasurably in spirit and in deed. In short, as Nicodemus gained new understanding about his history and his spirituality and was born again, and as the Samo connected their awareness of their place in the cosmos with the presence of the Holy Spirit and gained “new life that did not begin again,” ¹ so I too have been born again (Shaw, 2022: 89–90). My respective disciplines have created a new awareness of God’s perspective as he gathers us all from every language, people, and place to be together with him. By God’s design, we can collectively celebrate our particularity (Pike, 1967; Eriksen, 2010) while also realizing our universal identity (Eriksen, 2010) as human beings created in the imago Dei.

Thank you all for this honor. I am deeply humbled. May God’s blessing be upon each one as you too explore this chasm between our disciplines and embrace the necessary hybridity that characterizes who we are as missiologists accounting for the reality of our existence (Shaw and Burrows, 2018).