The religious beliefs and experiences of others have long been grist to the anthropological mill. In much anthropological scholarship however there is a resolute silence on the anthropologists’ own relationship to the domain of the ‘spirit’. Recent scholarship in the anthropology of religion has been highly critical of the Christian underpinnings of much of what is ostensibly secular anthropology (as in the works of Evans-Pritchard, Mary Douglas and Victor Turner among others). The commitment to a religious belief, if not simply a religious upbringing, was seen to be a ‘polluting’ influence to the proper study of the religion of others in their own terms. In turn scholars adopting a genealogical approach have shown how the very discipline of a secular anthropology of religion is itself the product of a highly Christian intellectual legacy. In his later years, anthropologist, friend and mentor Joel Kahn turned his attention precisely to the study of the pursuit of the sacred in a secular age. Starting from what he describes as his own ‘ontological crisis’ as a secular American Jew Kahn looks to the Western encounter with Asian religion to set out the domain of what he calls ‘gnostic scholarship’ that looks to the religion of others not as a cultural artefact but as, ultimately, a source of radical subjective displacement. In the spirit and memory of Joel Kahn this paper discusses the anthropological encounter with the sacred not as an object of knowledge about ‘cultures’ but as a source of gnosis. Expanding on the implications of Joel's work for an anthropology of religion this work draws upon the author's fieldwork among Catholic devotees of Padre Pio to propose a form of embodied surrender as a pre-requisite for an intersubjective engagement with the ontologically other worlds of our informants.

中文翻译：

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人类学家最后的鞠躬：追求神圣的本体论与神秘主义

其他人的宗教信仰和经历长期以来一直是人类学研究的结晶。然而，在许多人类学研究中，对于人类学家自身与“精神”领域的关系，却始终保持缄默。最近宗教人类学的学术研究对许多表面上是世俗人类学的基督教基础提出了高度批评（如埃文斯-普里查德、玛丽·道格拉斯和维克多·特纳等人的作品）。对宗教信仰的承诺，即使不仅仅是宗教教养，也被视为对以他们自己的方式正确研究他人宗教的“污染”影响。反过来，采用谱系学方法的学者表明，世俗宗教人类学学科本身就是高度基督教知识遗产的产物。晚年，人类学家、朋友和导师乔尔·卡恩（Joel Kahn）正是将注意力转向了对世俗时代对神圣追求的研究。从他所描述的他自己的“本体论危机”开始，作为一个世俗的美国犹太人，卡恩着眼于西方与亚洲宗教的相遇，从而确立了他所谓的“诺斯替学术”的领域，该领域将他人的宗教视为一种文化人工制品，但归根结底，它是激进主观位移的来源。本着乔尔·康 (Joel Kahn) 的精神和记忆，本文讨论了人类学与神圣的相遇，而不是将其作为关于“文化”的知识对象，而是作为灵知的来源。扩展乔尔的工作对宗教人类学的影响，这项工作借鉴了作者的