The otherwise and grace: Exploring theopolitical connections

Abstract

Although they are not often in explicit conversation with each other, several scholarly contributions about the otherwise and grace, respectively, echo each other in striking ways. In this article, the author explores some of these echoes. Assembling theoretically various approaches to the otherwise and grace allows him to show that they both tread on similar theopolitical paths, and to identify three points on which they converge: excess, incarnation and turbulence. The article is structured around these three confluences. Each section begins with a description of a particular way of approaching the otherwise, which is then compared with a similar way of approaching grace. Each section concludes with reflections on the spaces of convergence thus identified, and it is argued that they constitute promising sites for the deployment of a ‘theopolitical analytics’ in anthropology.

Introduction

The Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you. Peace I bequeath to you, my own peace I give you, a peace which the world cannot give, this is my gift to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid. (John 14:26–27)

In these two short verses found in the Gospel of John, Jesus explicitly links the Spirit that will remain in the world after his departure and his peace, an otherwise relation to the world formerly impeded by sin but made possible once again through his life and sacrifice, thus connecting God’s unrepayable and continuous gift of love to the world, and the edification of a community differently oriented to the world, in excess of the world, in the world, but not of it (see John 17:16) – grace and the otherwise.

In this article, I aim to explore these two concepts across various scholarly contributions, which, although not explicitly in conversation with each other, echo each other in heuristically evocative ways. My objective is not to provide any exhaustive or overarching theory about either grace or the otherwise. I rather seek to bring together different ways of approaching these concepts in order to highlight the points on which they converge. In the same way as a curious experimenter might bring together two viscous surfaces only to slowly separate them afterwards and contemplate the hybrid filaments now connecting them, I want to bring disparate literatures on the otherwise and grace together in order to look at the network of theopolitical connections made visible by such encounters. These connections allow me to show that the otherwise and grace tread on similar theopolitical paths, and to argue that the striking conceptual intersections that emerge from these theoretical assemblages offer promising empirical and theoretical sites for the deployment of a ‘theopolitical analytics’ in anthropology (McAllister and Napolitano, 2020).

The article is structured around three such intersections: excess, incarnation and turbulence. Each section begins with the presentation of a particular way of approaching the otherwise, which I call the political, ontological and turbulent otherwises. I then proceed to present reflections developed by anthropologists, philosophers and theologians about grace that show interesting homologies with the approaches to the otherwise previously discussed. Each section concludes with brief reflections on how the identified intersections constitute potential spaces of investigation for a theopolitical anthropology.

Relating in excess

The ontological otherwise

Otherwise, as word – otherwise possibilities, as phrase – announces the fact of infinite alternatives to what is. (Crawley, 2017: 2; original emphasis)

Although there is no overarching consensus about what the otherwise is or might be, the forms it could take or what it does, there is a sense that it is characterized, as the quote above suggests, by its exteriority in relation to any given world at any point. Despite significant variations, the three approaches to the otherwise that I describe in the following sections associate it with ‘forms of life that are at odds with dominant, and dominating, modes of being’ (Povinelli, 2011). The form and content of these ‘dominant, and dominating, modes of being’ vary between the approaches and are briefly discussed in each section. However, in this article, I am not so much interested in circumscribing the what against which these three approaches position themselves as I am in looking at how they do so.

Anthropologists have been at the forefront of the theorization of the first approach that I want to discuss: the ‘ontological otherwise’. Proponents of the ontological otherwise recognize the multiplicity and heterogeneity of the worlds in which humans and other-than-humans live and interact, and denounce the dangers of western modernity’s attempt at erasing the realities that do not fit within its world view (Blaser and De la Cadena, 2018; Escobar, 2020; Ghosh, 2016; Kohn, 2015). One of the characteristic features of western modernity is the distinction it makes between nature and culture. According to this world view, there is one nature, which can be studied by natural sciences and exploited by capitalism’s extractive projects, and a multiplicity of cultures, which inform the ways people inhabit and interact with this nature. Furthermore, the view of western modernity is that only humans are endowed with agency (Latour, 1993). Any world view that does not accept this binary division or that assigns agency to ‘natural’ or spiritual beings is deemed to be fundamentally mistaken (De la Cadena, 2015). In the 2000s, anthropologists started to question these assumptions and proposed both that it was necessary to go ‘beyond nature and culture’ (Descola, 2005; see also Viveiros de Castro, 2004) and that worlds existed that could not be reduced to the modern world view. Highlighting the colonial underpinnings of the ‘one-world world’ approach and critiquing its enduring relevance in contemporary extractivism, Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena (2018: 4) have proposed the concept of the ‘pluriverse’, referring to the multiplicity of existing worlds while advocating for encounters between these worlds and for the negotiation of ‘their difficult being together in heterogeneity’ (see also Escobar, 2020: 26–28). In these encounters between worlds, what one finds is excess.

The work of De la Cadena (2015) is useful to understand this concept. Indeed, through the ethnographic work she conducted with Mariano and Nazario Turpo, a father and son engaged in relationships with earth-beings in and beyond the Peruvian village of Pacchanta, De la Cadena realized that her world (the modern one) and that of the Turpos, although partially connected, were not perfectly translatable into each other. Instead of suppressing the ‘radical difference’ emerging from the encounter of their worlds by making the Turpos’s world fit into hers (the ‘one-world world’ approach), she decided to explore this incommensurability with them. This allowed her not only to better understand their world, but also to unveil the modern limiting practices through which the existence of their world was denied. Following Ranajit Guha, De la Cadena defines the limit as ‘the first thing outside which there is nothing to be found and the first thing inside which everything is to be found’ (Guha, 2002, quoted in De la Cadena, 2015: 14; De la Cadena’s emphasis). She adds:

The limit reveals itself as an onto-epistemic practice, in this case, of the state and its disciplines, and therefore a political practice as well. Beyond the limit is excess, a real that is ‘nothing’: not-a-thing accessible through culture or knowledge of nature as usual. (De la Cadena, 2015: 14–15)

One of the many examples that De la Cadena gives is the land struggle in which Mariano Turpo was engaged in the 1960s. During this struggle, both Mariano’s leftist allies and the state understood land as something like ‘the agricultural ground from where peasants earned a living’(De la Cadena, 2015: 110), and the struggle as one about ownership of the land. For Mariano, skilful at navigating worlds, it meant that, but ‘not only’ (De la Cadena, 2015: 110). De la Cadena explains that Mariano and the people of his community lived ‘in-ayllu’, that is in a form of relationality that brings together – and into existence – people, earth-beings and place itself (De la Cadena, 2015: 102). Therefore, ‘land’ for Mariano was not something exterior to him on which he hoped to gain property (or at least it was not only that), but rather part of the relational being ‘in-ayllu’ of which he was also a part. Although there was no place in the modern politics of his allies or the state to recognize this reality, it did not stop existing. It constituted an excess to their modern world view.

This instance of excess and the several others that De la Cadena documents point to the existence of otherwises that emerge and are revealed in the encounter between incommensurable worlds. Whereas the response of western modernity to such excesses has been erasure, proponents of the ontological otherwise, following the Zapatistas, advocate for a world ‘in which many worlds fit’ (Blaser and De la Cadena, 2018; Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, 1996). Here, the objective of the encounter between worlds is not to attain sameness but divergence – that is, ‘the coming together of heterogeneous practices that will become other than what they were, while continuing to be the same’ (De la Cadena, 2015: 280). For proponents of the ontological otherwise, the world is always-already otherwise in the sense that there are always-already other worlds out there – otherwises that are revealed and constituted when worlds come into contact and enter in relation. Ontological excess is the result of the encounter between worlds that are incommensurable.

‘Something extra’

This idea of an ontological excess that can never be entirely grasped echoes in interesting ways what various anthropologists have had to say about grace and its logics. In his seminal 1992 text on grace and anthropology, Julian Pitt-Rivers (2011: 425) famously writes: ‘The only general rule that can be cited is that grace is always something extra, over and above “what counts,” what is obligatory or predictable; it belongs on the register of the extraordinary (hence its association with the sacred)’. For him, although the conceptual origins of grace can be found in ‘the pure gratuitous gift of God’ (Pitt-Rivers, 2011: 429), ¹ it is not limited to describing divine–human relationships, as it also characterizes relations of exchange between people (see Edwards and McIvor, 2022: 7; Sommerschuh, 2022). ² For Pitt-Rivers (2011: 429), the core of grace is gratuity. It is about giving something to someone out of pure favour, with the sole intent of giving pleasure to the other. The gratuitousness of the gracious gift does not imply that there is no obligation attached to it (see Sommerschuh, 2022: 20), but rather that any return is entirely dependent on the receiver (Pitt-Rivers, 2011: 430). In a similar way as the ‘radical difference’ from which the ontological otherwise’s excess emanates is not something that someone has, but rather a ‘relational condition emerging when (or if) all or some of the parties involved in the enactment of a reality are equivocal . . . about what is being enacted’ (De la Cadena, 2015: 275), grace’s excess is not the thing that is exchanged, but what emerges from a relation of gratuity. In other words, grace is the excess that is manifested when someone (human or not) gives although nothing is due and in the absence of any quantifiable or exactable expectation of reciprocity. ³ It goes beyond reason and justification. As such, the gracious gift is full of uncertainty. According to Pitt-Rivers (2011: 440–444), Marcel Mauss (2012) – in his famous theory about the gift – tried to explain away this ambivalence by theorizing an obligation to return despite the apparent gratuitousness of the gift. Unconvinced by this explanation, Pitt-Rivers prefers to stay with the paradox, to dwell in its indeterminacy, as this is precisely, for him, the interest of the concept.

Pitt-Rivers’ (2011) understanding of grace links it with the idea of excess characterizing the ontological otherwise, but approaches it from another direction. Here the point being made is not so much that worlds are excessive in their heterogeneity, but that social relations (including relations with other-than-human beings) are always prone to potentially destabilizing excesses originating from gratuitous exchanges. If relations of exchange are what weave worlds into ‘embagged’ social spaces (Povinelli, 2011), ⁴ gratuity is a thread that can potentially reshape them. The question, raised by the concept of grace, of how uncertainty and incommensurability get inserted within – not simply between – given worlds (see Graeber, 2015) is one that opens up the ethnographic field to proximate and unexpected otherwises, and calls therefore for an ethnographic attention to how the excess of grace can transform worlds. In other words, it opens up the question of the possibles that are made possible (Escobar, 2020) through grace. Amira Mittermaier’s (2019) Giving to God is a brilliant example of what an ethnography exploring this question can look like.

Set in Cairo after the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Giving to God is an exploration of the forms of charitable giving in which various people engage. In the cases that she discusses, Mittermaier introduces us to people who prepare and give food to others without expecting anything in return. Although Mittermaier does not use this concept, the logic of grace is at play in the cases she describes. ⁵ Whether it be Shaykh Salah who, every day, prepares and distributes meals freely at the Sayyida Zaynab Mosque, the numerous young Resala volunteers who engage in programmes of food distribution for poor people, or Nura, who has turned her own home into a place where people can stay and eat freely, all these people engage in gracious giving. If they do not expect anything from the receivers of their gifts, it is because their giving is entirely oriented towards God (Mittermaier, 2019: 180). Indeed, at the basis of their charitable actions is a recognition that all their giving is to and from God. Engaging in such gratuitous acts allows them to get closer to God. Mittermaier (2019: 3–5) argues that this ethics of giving, which brings together this-worldly and otherworldly concerns, is one that goes counter to the ethics that support the projects of neo-liberal development endorsed by the Egyptian state and the politics of pity that characterizes humanitarian reason. According to her, these charitable givers’ relationships with God bring them to act concretely in this world in ways that bear ‘radical potential’:

It is radical precisely because it disrupts a future-orientedness and instead stubbornly addresses need in the here and now. It foregrounds distribution, relationality, and interdependency rather than entrepreneurship and the individual’s right to work and make a living. It is neither about economic growth nor about compassion toward, or the deservingness of, the poor. It is not even about human rights. It is to and from and because of God. (Mittermaier, 2019: 181)

Consequently, Mittermaier (2019: 158) argues that these practices of giving ‘point to an Otherwise’, a world in which relations are differently oriented. ⁶ Here, we can see another dimension of grace’s excess. Indeed, in this case, gratuitous giving is not excessive because of its gratuitousness but, by being radically present-oriented and by freeing the receivers from any sort of obligation towards the givers, it exceeds the violent and discriminatory world that is actively being built, in Egypt and elsewhere, by the logics of neo-liberal development (Mittermaier, 2019: 155–178) and humanitarian reason (Fassin, 2012; Ticktin, 2011).

Theopolitical analytics

In their introduction to the 2020 issue of Social Analysis dedicated to ‘Theopolitics in/of the Americas’, Carlotta McAllister and Valentina Napolitano (2020: 1) argue for the deployment of theopolitics in political anthropology. For them, a

theopolitical analytics proposes to examine the theological sensoria through which performances by the living, the dead, and a host of more-than-human entities are able to incarnate [the substance of politics], beyond or in flight from their capture by the sovereign powers of church and state. (McAllister and Napolitano, 2020: 3)

Theirs is an invitation to think about the ‘rhythms and aesthetics’ of politics in ways that recognize the elasticity of sovereignty and the implication of more-than-human beings in its performance (McAllister and Napolitano, 2020: 6). In both the cases analysed by De la Cadena (2015) and Mittermaier (2019), a thorough ethnographic attention to the involvement of other-than-human beings in worldly politics allows them to uncover excesses challenging ‘dominant, and dominating, modes of being’ (Povinelli, 2011). Further analyses of how excesses are empirically enacted by a host of different actors in ways that challenge and unsettle – but also sometimes support – modernity and its institutions would contribute greatly to the development of a theopolitical analytics in anthropology.

Actualizing the ideal

The political otherwise

While the first way of approaching the otherwise discussed above pictures it as an ontological excess, the second way is more about imagination and politics. Having imagined that the world could be other than how it is and being dissatisfied with the current state of affairs, proponents of this approach want to change their society’s relation to the world. They want to bring about a ‘political otherwise’. In this approach, the otherwise appears not as an excess, but as a reorientation that turns ideals into actuals. The otherwise is given expression in a transformative project(ion) relying on the actualization of an ideal through which society is supposed to be reoriented. The political otherwise is evanescent. Once the new relation to the world has been established, it becomes the new norm.

The political otherwise is what one encounters in manifestos. Indeed, many manifestos are characterized by two elements: the denunciation of structures of oppression and the revindication of a better, fuller world to come. In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (2020: 26) proclaim the inevitable fall of the exploitative bourgeoisie and, with it, the arrival of a world ‘in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’; in his ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, André Breton (1972: 14, original emphasis) denounces the strictures of reason on thought and wants imagination and dreaming to be welcomed into the realm of the real in order to constitute an ‘absolute reality, a surreality’; in the ‘Cannibalist manifesto’, Oswald de Andrade (1991: 44) rails against cadaverized, static thought and asks for a reality that is not ‘dressed’, in which ideas and projects are shared, reoriented, deviated and cannibalized in ways that constantly keep them alive and abolish any claim of priority or superiority; in their ‘Situationist manifesto’, the Situationists (1960) denounce the ‘bureaucratization of art and the whole of culture’, and demand that technological improvements be seized and put to the service of a humanity freed of oppression so that ‘everyone will construct his own life’; and in ‘A cyborg manifesto’, Donna Haraway (1991: 154) writes against Man and wants humans to embrace without fear ‘their joint kinship with animals and machines’, and live to the fullest their insertion in the new polymorphous information system of our times.

Be it capitalism, reason or heteropatriarchy, to name a few, these manifesto writers all denounce institutions that they see as being profoundly alienating and announce another world – a world in which humanity will realize itself more fully. In these manifestos, the alternative world is pictured as yet-to-come, but it is announced that its arrival will mean the profound transformation of society and the establishment of a new norm. In this supersessionist approach, ⁷ the otherwise can only be a project that self-consumes through its realization. Indeed, the actualization of the ideal described in the project entails that what was an alternative vision becomes the new dominant system and therefore loses its otherwise-ness. The potential realization of the ideal borne by revolutionary projects is precisely what gives them political traction.

However, the translation of an ideal into the actual world, when it is attempted, is not something that goes without tensions. In some cases, the ‘dreaming’ on which these projects rely can even become a source of oppression. For instance, in Dreamworld and Catastrophe, Susan Buck-Morss (2000: ix) argues that capitalism and communism both offered models of how to channel industrial modernity into the project of building a utopian realm of happiness where all needs would be satisfied. Unfortunately, it rapidly became the opposite: both models ended up siphoning the energy of Utopia into the project of building an industrial modernity that brought disappointment and pain (Buck-Morss, 2000: 205). In the case of the Soviet Union, which Buck-Morss (2000: 58) describes with great historical detail, economic modernization became ‘the very definition of revolution’. This meant that the realization of the socialist ideal kept being constantly delayed to a future that would arrive only after industrialization.

Contrastingly, Buck-Morss (2000: 49) shows that the Russian artistic avant-garde had engaged, both before and after the 1917 Revolution, in artistic practices that ‘interrupted the continuity of perceptions and estranged the familiar, severing historical tradition through the force of their fantasy’; the effect of such practices ‘was to rupture the continuity of time, opening it up to new cognitive and sensory experiences’. The artists of the Russian avant-garde were not trying to bring ideal into actual. Rather, they were experimenting with both: ‘By not closing the gap between dream and reality, the artworks of the avant-garde left both dream and reality free to criticize each other’ (Buck-Morss, 2000: 65). Their practices did not follow the path of the political otherwise envisioned by the Russian leaders. Indeed, for the political vanguard, what Russia urgently needed if it wanted to fulfil the revolution was economic modernization. The political leaders considered that the revolution was something to accomplish in time rather than a suspension of time during which to experiment with utopian creations. Under their leadership,

art was no longer to inspire imagination in a way that set reality into question but, rather, to stage affirmative representations of reality that encouraged an uncritical acceptance of the party’s monopolistic right to control the direction of social transformation. (Buck-Morss, 2000: 62)

In the temporal space opened between the ideal reorientation of society and the perpetual postponement of its actualization, oppressive power throve (Buck-Morss, 2000: 205). The ‘dreamworld’ that supported the Soviet revolutionary project became a catastrophe. ⁸

Reorientation through grace

A complex tension between ideal and actual is also present in cases involving grace. As I have already indicated in the previous section, there is a paradox at the heart of grace between gratuitous giving and reciprocation. It is precisely the complexity of this paradox that Pitt-Rivers (2011) appreciated. There is both an impossibility and a necessity in the gratuity of the gift. There, ideal and actual collide (Pitt-Rivers, 2011: 448). Rane Willerslev has argued, in the case of the Siberian Yukaghirs with whom he worked, that ideal and actual constantly intersect in gift-giving: ‘such acts also contain within them – importantly and significantly – a faith in the ideal of the free gift given out of boundless love, which although it is a virtual impossibility is always at work in any actual gift giving’ (Willerslev quoted in Venkatesan et al., 2011: 228; original emphasis). The Yukaghirs judge their actual practices of gift-giving according to their ideal of boundless love, even though it is impossible to fully reach it. Without this ideal, gift-giving would be impossible. This distance between ideal and actual is precisely what makes grace both possible and problematic.

This tension and the difficulties that accompany it are made clear in a case studied by Omri Elisha (2008) about how a group of American evangelicals dealt with the moral challenges stemming from the necessity and impossibility of the unconditional gift. Elisha shows how the American evangelicals were brought by their experience and understanding of grace to reproduce class and race divisions while trying to cater to the needs of less privileged people. Indeed, these conservative evangelicals understood and felt the immense gift of God’s grace as something that had transformed their lives and pushed them to engage in altruistic acts of compassion towards less fortunate people. These acts of compassion were imagined as unconditional. However, these evangelicals also understood compassion in its ideal form, ‘as a gift of such extraordinarily evocative power for both giver and recipient that the latter will inevitably experience it as transformative’ (Elisha, 2008: 171). The way they understood things, their practice of unconditional gift-giving, elicited in them by the action of God, was supposed to initiate a reorientation in their beneficiaries’ lives similar to the one they had experienced by receiving God’s grace. Because these evangelicals were themselves middle class, they expected the receivers of their ‘unconditional’ gifts to be touched in such a way that they would not only convert, but also change their socio-economic behaviours to match those of their givers. These evangelicals’ understanding of the mechanisms of compassion and accountability in their relation to God informed their behaviours and expectations regarding the people they were helping. When the receivers of their charity failed to adopt new behaviours, compassion reached its limits and support was withdrawn: the ‘dynamics of social power and alienation between suburban churchgoers and less privileged, objectified others’ were therefore reinforced by the tension between ideal compassion and accountability and their practical implementation (Elisha, 2008: 181; see also Luna, 2020: 171–194).

In this particular case, what is at stake is an understanding of grace as an experience that entails a moment of reorientation of one’s life. When this reorientation did not take place as the evangelicals were expecting – that is, as the life of their beneficiaries was not reordered – the contradictions between disinterested and interested gifting became a site for reproducing oppressive structures. Here, as in the case of the Soviet Union, power throve in the space opened between an ideal and its actualization. Although the scales and stakes at play in both cases are extremely different, both Buck-Morss (2000) and Elisha (2008) show how the translation of ideals into social reality can be fraught with many tensions and contradictions, in which domination can prevail.

Incarnations

The theopolitical concept of incarnation is particularly useful to think about these complex translations. McAllister and Napolitano (2020: 6) propose this concept to think about ‘the impossibility, but also the ordinariness, of that which somehow is at once human and divine, and which thus manifests both the power to constitute and the power of that which is constituted at one and the same time’. ⁹ This tension and entanglement between the divine and the human is particularly evident in the case described by Elisha (2008), in which the experience of the divine brought people to engage in compassionate acts towards other people. Here, ‘the impossibility, but also the ordinariness’ that characterizes gracious giving, ‘at once human and divine’, became the site of reproduction of unequal relations of power. In the case of the Soviet Union, what Buck-Morss (2000) shows is that the Soviet revolutionary project was supported by a ‘dreamworld’ that gave to the vanguard its political power. The constitutive power that was generated by the incarnation of the dreamworld was, however, misused by the political actors in their attempt to constitute a new politics. Through its incarnation, the dreamworld was turned into a catastrophe. What these cases show us is that ethnographic attention to these fraught moments in which ideals are incarnated requires us to look both at how people ‘organize their personal and collective lives in order to foster what they think of as good’ (Robbins, 2013: 457) and at what happens when ‘the good’ fails to be actualized perfectly. An ethnographic attention to incarnation would allow anthropologists to further explore a wide array of theopolitical situations in which otherworldly ideals mobilize/are mobilized by people while paying attention to the unequal relations of power and suffering that they can (re)produce, transform and subvert.

(Ante-)dispositions and turbulence

The turbulent otherwise

While the first approach to the otherwise discussed is interested in ontology and the second in politics, the last approach that I want to discuss is one that is concerned with what happens beneath and beyond political struggle. The otherwise described by the proponents of this approach is one that has always been there and that Power tried to contain, but to no avail. Here, the otherwise appears both as disposition (in the sense of an inclination to act in certain ways) and as ante-disposition (in the sense of predating any orderly arrangement). Inspired by Édouard Glissant’s (1990: 216) references to the ‘turbulence of chaos-monde’, I call this approach the ‘turbulent otherwise’.

In The Undercommons, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten write:

The false image and its critique threaten the common with democracy, which is only ever to come, so that one day, which is only never to come, we will be more than what we are. But we already are. We’re already here, moving. We’ve been around. We’re more than politics, more than settled, more than democratic. (Harney and Moten, 2013: 19)

These sentences illustrate what I mean by the otherwise as ante-disposition. Before – and after – Power tried to constitute a polis in which people would be contained, in which flesh would be bounded, ¹⁰ in which society would be arranged in an orderly disposition, is the Undercommons (Halberstam, 2013: 9; see also Crawley, 2017), a community of unbounded sociality that refuses its ordering. Among others, Glissant (1990) sees the western world’s obsession with the One, rootedness and unitary identity as one iteration of this attempt at ordering. Through colonialism, he argues, the western world tried to impose on the other the transparency of the self – that is, it tried to contain multiplicity by violently exacting its sameness (see also Crawley, 2017; Wynter, 1995). Everywhere, however, it was met by the resistance of the opaque, protecting diversity within the expense of Relation (Glissant, 1990: 74–75, 153).

In response to the reality of oppression, Glissant (1990: 23–34) advocates Errantry. Errantry is an openness to the multiplicity of actualities. In Errantry, the encountered Others’ relative opacity is recognized. Errantry is concerned with the multiplication of transformative encounters in the ever-moving expense of Relation (Glissant, 1990: 206). It is an otherwise disposition of encounter of Others’ worlds, an ‘aesthetics of turbulence’ (Glissant, 1990: 169) that refuses homogenization and that constantly redefines the selves in interaction. For proponents of this turbulent otherwise, there is no one solution to oppression, but there are processes of relating that seek ‘to feel where we come from to arrive at where we want to be, together’ (King et al., 2020: 13; original emphasis), spaces of encounter in which ‘same or different, strange or familiar, we are ready to be made more ourselves or something new’ (Dave, 2014: 170; original emphasis). These thoughts echo in striking ways what scholars in religious studies, philosophy and theology have had to say about grace.

The turbulent aesthetics of grace

Indeed, when experienced and contemplated, grace is supposed to overwhelm its recipients, to transform them, to direct them towards an otherwise sociality and subjectivity (Coleman, 2004; Elisha, 2008; Mahadev, 2022; Mossière, 2021). Seen under this light, grace appears as a transformative sensory experience. It is an aesthetics (Crawley, 2017) in the sense that it is ‘perception through feeling’, a bodily experience that ‘teach[es] us something new about our world, . . . [and] shock[s] us out of moral complacency and political resignation’ (Buck-Morss, 2000: 62–63). Whether the source of this sensory irruption in one’s life is God or absolute sociality is not a distinction – Durkheim (2007) would see there no distinction – that matters so much for this part of my discussion. ¹¹ What interests me, however, is how the disruptive irruption of grace can be linked with the turbulent otherwise. One of the most important studies in this regard is Ashon T Crawley’s (2017) Blackpentecostal Breath.

In this major work, Crawley explores the otherwise possibilities of Blackpentecostalism, the Christian revival that was launched in 1906 on Azusa Street by the African American pastor William J Seymour. Analysing the practices associated with this original form of Pentecostalism (shouting, testimony, tarrying, whooping, speaking in tongues), ¹² Crawley argues that they are the expression of a prior-to-power resistance of flesh to the violence of Whiteness/Enlightenment, an irruption of absolute sociality that refuses any categorization, the emancipatory vibration of being beside oneself. According to Crawley (2017: 176): ‘Blackpentecostalism, if anything, is an open-ended question, concerned fundamentally with how to strive against “the world”’. He describes Blackpentecostalism as one expression of ‘radical openness and sociality’ (Crawley, 2017: 102) – that is, as one iteration of this pulsating unquantifiable force that refuses containment and brings people to radically open themselves to Relation. ¹³ Although grace is not a central concept in Crawley’s analysis, related concepts like absolute sociality and the Spirit are. Referring explicitly to the works of Harney and Moten, and Glissant, Crawley’s book is a magisterial reflection on grace as ante-disposition – that is, as an irruptive force that escapes all forms of oppressive containment. ¹⁴

In addition to being a principle of ante-disposition, grace can inform particular dispositions. In Book Tenth of his Confessions, Augustine (1986: 203) beautifully realizes that God is within him: ‘And behold, you were within, but I was outside, searching for you there – plunging, deformed amid those fair forms which you had made. You were with me, but I was not with you’. For Augustine, God is within; its grace acts within. This is what Jesus came to reveal (Arendt, 1999: 229). However, individuals still have to open up themselves to God’s grace, to reconcile themselves with this principle that is active within them and that sin has veiled. Indeed, in Augustinian theology, it is considered that humans’ sinful habits (consuetudo) have created, within them, a ‘second nature’ and, around them, an artificial world, which both separate them from God (Arendt, 1999: 154–159; Bochet, 2018: 58). Through Jesus, however, humans are able to reconnect with God’s grace, extirpate themselves from the world they have imagined, ¹⁵ and develop their habitus, understood here as ‘an acquired disposition to cooperate with the will of God’ (Pitt-Rivers, 2011: 429; my emphasis; see also Bochet, 2018: 55; Mahadev, 2022). This acquired disposition is the result of the reconciliation of one’s will with grace. This reharmonization transforms how one acts.

The philosopher Simone Weil (1991: 104) illustratively evokes this idea when she writes: ‘Action is the scale’s pointer. One must not touch the pointer, but the weights’. For Weil, one must not modify one’s action, but change within oneself the balance between gravity and grace. Actions will follow (see also Kierkegaard, 2009: 34–57). According to Weil, in order for individuals to welcome grace in such a way, the self must be decreated, since ‘the self [le moi] is nothing but the shadow cast by sin and error that stops God’s light, and that I mistake for a being’ (Weil, 1991: 92). Once this difficult task has been done and one has succeeded in detaching oneself from one’s imagination of the social, love of one’s neighbour ensues. One should not go towards one’s neighbour for God but through God: ‘To go not towards the neighbour for God, but to be pushed by God towards the neighbour, like the arrow towards the target of the archer’ (Weil, 1991: 100). ¹⁶ Here, grace appears (among other things) as

the power that permits human beings to transform their natural tendency to increase their ego and to look for personal rights, into a supernatural tendency to decrease their ego, to be more focused on their obligations towards their fellow human beings, and to take care of their basic needs. (Estelrich, 2009: 245)

Grace blurs the boundaries of God, self and other through Relation.

Theopolitical virtues and otherwise anthropology

This depiction of grace as a disruptive force that requires/brings forth the refusal of society’s norms and elicits dispositions that push people beside their evanesced self and into anti-political ‘inactive actions’ (Lloyd, 2011: 142) clearly offers several points of connection with the turbulent otherwise as described above. ¹⁷ Although anthropologists might want to be wary of the idealizations in which Crawley (2017) indulges, ¹⁸ and cannot have direct access to the interiority described by Augustine (1986) and Weil (1991), the intersections of their depictions of grace with the turbulent otherwise offer fascinating ground for further theopolitical analyses. Here, otherwise and grace meet on the ground of (ante-)disposition and rely on the theopolitical virtues of love and faith. Drawing from the works of Gillian Rose, Lloyd (2011: 47) describes the virtue of love as a disposition to ‘put one’s self, in all its complexity, at stake’ in the encounter of the beloved, an openness to suspend all norms and enchantments so that, from this transformative encounter in vulnerability, ‘new practices, unexpected, will necessarily arise’. ¹⁹ Faith, for its part, is the disposition to acknowledge that the world is broken, that smooth surfaces are illusions, and to persevere nevertheless in contemplating and dwelling in the jaggedness of the ordinary (Lloyd, 2011: 57–58). Love and faith are theopolitical virtues in that they ‘refus[e] the hegemony of the visible’ and ‘mak[e] the invisible visible’ (Lloyd, 2011: 47, 69). They are dispositions that allow for the difficult but necessary endeavour of being-with-each-other beyond and below enchantments.

A theopolitical anthropology attuned to the virtues of love and faith could contribute to the ‘Otherwise Anthropology’ that was recently called for by various anthropologists in the ‘Theorizing the Contemporary’ forum of the Society for Cultural Anthropology (McTighe and Raschig, 2019). In their contributions to this forum, the authors argued for the development of a new emancipatory anthropological sensorium in which anthropologists would be open to being transformed by their research and interlocutors (McTighe and Raschig, 2019; Raschig, 2019; Stainova, 2019; Von Czechowski, 2019). Here, more than an object of study (although it is also that), turbulence is a call for transformed and transformative ways of doing anthropology. The work of Laura McTighe and Women With A Vision can serve as a helpful example.

In a recent article, McTighe offers both a great ethnography of the turbulent otherwise continuously being built by Women With A Vision and a reflection on how turbulent ethnographies can be conducted (McTighe with Women With A Vision, 2020). In it, McTighe presents what she calls ‘theory on the ground’ – that is, ‘theory developed in the midst of lived struggle, which carries forward the enduring resistant visions of generations past and grows them in and through the geographies of the present, towards new and more liveable futures’ (McTighe with Women With A Vision, 2020: 411). Throughout the article, McTighe clearly documents her own engagement in the field and how much her reflections and writing are impacted by the theorizing on the ground realized by the women of Women With A Vision. Following the example of Judith Weisenfeld, she lets this theorizing impact what she writes and how she writes it (McTighe with Women With A Vision, 2020: 415–417). ‘Mov[ing] with the WWAV [Women With A Vision] leaders’ (McTighe with Women With A Vision, 2020: 419), McTighe analyses the religio-racism that denies their existence, how they struggle against it, and how they engage in otherwising practices that ‘enchant’ the present. ²⁰ In doing so, the theory that emerges is not one that ends in smooth surfaces but rather stays close to the otherwising work realized by Women With A Vision:

To be certain, this world-transforming theory is rarely comfortable. It will render visible the religio-racist logics that give shape to our scholarly tools for studying religion, as well as to our seemingly self-evident understandings of where we should go to find them. But if we can hear this challenge and unite with its critique, theory on the ground can also become a catalyst. It can open new ways to live, think, be, and do otherwise – in the intimacies of our fieldwork relationships and our being in the world; in the pages of our ethnographies and the texts we write in the streets. (McTighe with Women With A Vision, 2020: 430–431)

McTighe’s approach therefore allows her not only to write an ethnography about a turbulent otherwise, but also to do ethnography in a turbulent way. Turbulence (or the virtues of love and faith) – as both an object of study and a method – would constitute a generative terrain for the development of a theopolitical anthropology.

Final remarks

The conceptual and experiential planes of the otherwise and grace do not correspond perfectly. Their ever-shifting surfaces are full of awkward hollows and hills. Yet, as I have argued throughout this article, both planes are connected at unexpected junctions and superposing them can spark new questions with ethnographic relevance. Both the otherwise and grace are rhythmed by irruptions and disruptions. They mobilize and create excesses, ideals and turbulent dispositions. They challenge and refuse ‘the hegemony of the visible’ (Lloyd, 2011: 136) while relating complexly to the ‘dominant, and dominating, modes of being’ (Povinelli, 2011) that characterize modernity. They mobilize subjectivity, politics, ontologies and aesthetics in related and mutually illuminating ways.

As I mentioned in the introduction, the purpose of this article is not to offer an overarching theory about either the otherwise or grace. Likewise, I do not contend that I have exhausted the possible connections between these concepts. ²¹ What I have set out to do in this article is rather to identify and discuss three distinct – yet overlapping – ways of approaching the otherwise and grace. In each case, bringing these concepts together has allowed for the identification of striking similarities. Following scholars in various disciplines, I have described the otherwise as an ontological excess manifested through the encounter of partially incommensurable worlds, as an ideal political project in tension with its actualization, and as a (ante-)disposition. Concurrently, I have described grace as an excess stemming from gratuitous exchanges, as an ideal evangelical project in tension with its actualization, and as a (ante-)disposition. I have argued that the three sets of connection that I have identified point towards fruitful sites of investigation and reflection for the deployment of a theopolitical analytics.

As the verses with which I opened this article suggest, grace and the otherwise have a long history of being associated together in complex ways that continuously assemble and disassemble the theos and the politikos. Anthropology’s growing openness to being influenced and unsettled by theology (Lemons, 2021; Napolitano, 2021; Oliphant, 2021; Pandolfo, 2007; Robbins, 2006, 2020) and other-than-human beings (De la Cadena, 2015; Latour, 2005; Viveiros de Castro, 2004), as well as its long-standing empirical and theoretical interest in power, politics and the gift, makes it a particularly apt discipline to explore the ongoing intersections between grace and the otherwise without unduly presenting them as smooth surfaces. Ethnographies of the worlds and possibles that exceed modernity, of the fraught processes of incarnation through which ideals make their way into the actual, and of turbulence would constitute exceptional opportunities to further explore how politics is performed and stretched through relations involving human and other-than-human beings.