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The Immanence ofTranscendence: God and the

Devil on the Aberdeenshire

CoastJoseph Webster

a

aUniversity of Cambridge , UK

Published online: 12 Nov 2012.

To cite this article:Joseph Webster (2013) The Immanence of Transcendence: God

and the Devil on the Aberdeenshire Coast, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 78:3,

380-402, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2012.688762

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2012.688762

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The Immanence of Transcendence:

God and the Devil on the Aberdeenshire

Coast

Joseph WebsterUniversity of Cambridge, UK

abstract In Gamrie (a Scottish fishing village of 700 people and 6 Protestant

churches), local experiences of divine providence and demonic attack abound.

Bodily fluids, scraps of paper, video cassettes and prawn trawlers were immanent car-

riers of divine and demonic activity. Viewed through the lens of Weberian social theory,

the experiences of Scottish fisher families show how the life of the Christian resembles

an enchanted struggle between God and the Devil with the Christian placed awkwardly

in-between. Because, locally, there is no such thing as coincidence, these Christiansexpected to experience both the transcendent ordering of life by divine providence

through Gods immanence and the transcendent disordering of life by demonic

attack through the Devils immanence. Where this ordering and disordering frequently

occurred through everyday objects, seemingly mundane events being given a washing

machine or feeling sleepy in church were experienced as material indexes of spiritual

reality. Drawing on the work of Cannell (on transcendence), Keane (on indexicality)

and Wagner (on symbolic obviation), this paper argues that attending to the materi-

ality of Scottish Protestantism better equips the anthropology of religion to understandChristian experience by positing immanence as a kind of transcendence and transcen-

dence as a kind of immanence.

keywordsChristianity, enchantment, materiality, Weber, Scotland

ethnos, vol.78:3,2013(pp.380 402), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2012.688762

# 2013Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis

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While sitting in Roberts car waiting for him to drop off some

dry cleaning in town, I noticed his Bible had what looked like a

new bright yellow laminated bookmark sticking out of it. I picked

up the Bible and saw that the card was actually a reading schedule. It read:

The Goal: To read one chapter of the New Testament each weekday. This will take

us through the New Testament in one year. As you read, remember to be expectant,

God wants to fellowship with you and speak to you every day

When Robert got back to the car he said that it had been given to him when

attending a meeting at a local charismatic church. Seeming puzzled by myenthusiasm for a card he was just using for a bookmark, Robert simply told

me that they all planned to read the Bible together so I let the matter drop.

But what does it mean to read the Bible with expectancy? How do Christianslike Robert come to experience this divine fellowship? Is God the only one who

speaks, or do other supernatural forces intervene, and in what ways? Local

experiences of divine providence1 and demonic attack2 show how the life of

the Christian in northeast Scotland, when glossed as a spiritual battle, comes

to resemble an enchanted struggle between God and the Devil with the

believer placed awkwardly in-between. Because, in Gamrie, there is no such

thing as coincidence, these Christians expected to experience both the trans-

cendent ordering of divine providence throughGodsimmanence and the trans-cendent disordering of demonic attack through the Devils immanence.Drawing on Keanes (2008) evocative suggestion that religions may not

always demand beliefs but will always invoke material forms, this paper

builds upon Webers (1969, 1978a, 1978b, 1978c) notion of enchantment by

arguing that immanence is fundamentally concerned with materiality. In

making this argument, I aim to contribute to the anthropological literature on

materiality and religious immanence in three ways.

First, by considering the role that material objects played in enchantment,I critique the long-established assumption that Christianity, and particularly

Protestantism, is purely a religion of ascetic transcendence (Cannell 2006: 39).To the extent that Christianity is not only indirectly implicated within the

world of material objects but also directly engaged in deploying objects, Can-

nells call for anthropology to escape the paradigm of Christianity-as-an-

impossible-religion is vital if our ethnographic understanding of this religion

is to move beyond essentialist assumptions about the irreducible difference

between beliefs and objects, words and materiality.

ethnos, vol.78:3, 2013(pp.380402)

Immanence of Transcendence 381

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In taking up Cannells call, I do so within the regional context of northeast

Scotland and the ecclesialhistorical context of the Radical Reformation (see

Baylor 1991), thereby adding to our ethnographic knowledge of a region we

know surprisingly little about, religiously or otherwise. By showing how

Scots-Protestantism is co-constituted by a local semiotic ideology andrepresentational economy (Keane 1997, 2007), this paper also speaks intomuch broader anthropological debates about the place of objects within

global Christianities.

Second, I want to argue that in order to escape the opposition between

words and objects, the task is not to break up received anthropological formu-

lations of the material and the metaphysical into their distinct constituent parts,

but rather to conflate those parts, showing them as an experiential whole. This

requires seeing transcendence as a kind of immanence and immanence as a kindof transcendence. I argue this by drawing upon Wagners (1978, 1986) work on

symbolic obviation3 and Keanes (1997,2006,2007,2008) work on indexicality.4

Third, insofar as disenchantment, for Weber, is centrally concerned with the

modern subjects loss of inwardly genuine plasticity5 (Weber1978a:148) and its

replacement with the senselessness of progress ad infinitum(Weber1978a: 137), Isuggest that, for Christians along the Aberdeenshire coast, life is neither secular

nor disenchanted but animated by plasticity (Weber1978a: 148) and cosmological

rootedness

6

and modern enchantment. Examining Webers view ofdisenchant-ment, then, also provides new anthropological perspectives on longstandingsociological disputes about modernity and secularism (see Cannell 2010; Bruce2011).

But first, a word of ethnographic context.

Gamrie, Northeast Scotland

Between September 2008 and January 2010, I spent 15 months living in

Gamrie, a small fishing village in northeast Aberdeenshire home to 700people and 6 churches attempting to answer the rather blunt question:

why is there so much religion going on in such a small place? Of the six differ-

ent places of worship in Gamrie, one is an evangelical Church of Scotland, four

are loosely referred to as Brethren and one is a Free Presbyterian Church of

Ulster. All six churches have been heavily influenced by premillennial dispensa-

tionalism (cf. Harding 2000) and Christian Zionism, and, to a lesser extent,

Pentecostalism. Looking beyond the immediate bounds of the village, the sur-

rounding coast contains dozens of churches, the majority of which are Brethren,

Pentecostal or independent evangelical. It is within this context of Scottish, non-

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conformist and often somewhat fringe Protestantism that my research is

situated.

Not surprisingly, much of my time in the village was spent attending public

worship and other church organised events; I would attend these meetings any-

where between7and 10times a week.7 Along with the main Sunday services(morning and evening) I would attend home and church Bible studies, pro-phecy meetings, prayer meetings, singing nights and evangelistic meetings as

well as more informal coffee mornings, church youth clubs and mens get-

togethers. As well as these explicitly church-based field sites I also worked

across a range of other locations including the houses of key informants, the

Gamrie harbour, the Fishermens Mission and the Fraserburgh fish market.

I also worked on two different deep sea prawn trawlers during my last winter

in the field.Despite church attendance in Gamrie sitting at roughly 33%8 placing the

village much closer to the British figure for1851than 2000(Bruce 2001:194) the social, economic and demographic makeup of the village was changing

rapidly. Indeed, Gamries present was suffering a triple pinch in economics,

demographics and eschatology. Economically, Gamrie was experiencing a

Scotland-wide contraction of the fishing industry combined with an increasing

concentration of EU fishing quotas into the hands of fewer skippers. Demo-

graphically, Gamrie was seeing a rapid ageing in its church-attending popu-lation, compounded by a significant falling away of members and adherents

in their teens, twenties and thirties. Eschatologically, Gamrie was living onthe cusp of Armageddon with signs of the end times being sought (and

found) in all aspects of the present and near future (cf. Guyer2007). Economics,demography and eschatology gave Gamries committed Christians an experien-

tial certainty that they inhabited the last of the last days as both Christians and

as fishers.

Why Be Expectant?

One Tuesday night in December, I was invited to a friends house for tea. Our

time of fellowship started with a long discussion about the merits and draw-

backs of various Bible translations, in which both the husband (Billy) and

wife (Betty) went to various parts of the house to retrieve and thumb

through several Bibles of assorted versions, sizes and stages of decay. At

some point, Betty came across a long forgotten, creased and very stained

piece of paper that had been folded up and tucked into the first few pages of

one particular Bible. Her eyes lit up and she moved over to my side and said

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Look at this Joe I want to show you something. She carefully removed the

piece of paper and slowly unfolded it. As Betty read it over to herself it was clear

that she was holding back tears. Having composed herself she related to me the

story of its discovery.

Her husband was on the brink of bankruptcy because he was struggling tomeet the repayments on his boat, and, as a result, she was constantly alone inthe house because he was always away at sea, fishing. She was also struggling

with personal problems to the point that God felt very distant from her. On

this particular morning, she could not stand being in the house alone anymore;

so she went for a walk through the village. Betty was keen to point out that

she did not know where she was going; she wandered down the brae towards

the harbour, her mind full of her troubles, silently crying out to God for help in

prayer. As she went round a crook in the road, something caught her eye. Itwas a small piece of paper fluttering in the gutter. She felt inexplicably compelled

to investigate, picking it up to find it was a tear-off page from a Choice Gleaningsday-by-day scriptural calendar popular among the Christians in the village. On it

was a short Bible verse from the Book of Psalms: God is our refuge and our

strength, a very present help in trouble. Betty turned to me, lowering the

paper, eyes shining with held back tears: Now wasnt that amazing! After

showing me the paper, she reverently folded it back up and put it in its home,

placing the Bible on top of the others and started to prepare the tea.Roberts bookmark was very clear: As you read, remember to be expectant but why? If Bettys story has anything to tell us, it is that her God is a God ofimmanence and providence. Other stories from other informants could and

would have led to similar conclusions. Boyd was led to accept a job at the Fish-ermens Mission after experiencing what he called a series of Godincidences

Some people write these things off as a coincidence he told me, but as a Chris-

tian. . .God has His hand on these things. Iain received direct signs from God

about where to camp and exactly how much petrol to buy when touring

Europe. When Jim was born again he destroyed 750 of Harry Potter mer-

chandise9 he had in his shop, then, after checking his accounts, discovered he

was exactly 750 up on sales from that same time the previous year. Robertshould read expectantly, then, for exactly the same reasons that Betty and

Boyd and my other friends did because, as Boyd told me, God has His

hand on these things (job offers, account checks, petrol tanks, scraps of

paper) in ways that are too significant just to be able to write off completely.

God was not only experienced as immanent by first being experienced as

providential, but this initial experience of providence was itself contingent on

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the abolition of coincidence and its replacement with the local category of

Godincidence. Bettys story encapsulates this spiritual world view. Her

encounter was amazing because it appeared to her as an undeniable act of

divine providence. God placed that specific piece of paper with that specific

verse in that specific place at that specific time in order that she would find itand have her heart encouraged. But why was Bettys encounter not pure seren-dipity? It is helpful here to turn to Weber.

Weber, Plasticity and (Dis)enchantment10

For Weber, at the heart of the modern scientific paradigm lay the tragicconcept of progress ad infinitum the belief that humans were travellingalong an evolutionary trajectory which, by definition, would endlessly render

the achievements of the past as insignificant footnotes along the road ofmodern progress. This modern condition, was, for Weber, cruel and meaning-

less:

Science has created this cosmos of natural causality and has seemed unable to answer

with certainty the question of its own ultimate presuppositions. [. . .] Viewed in this

way, all culture appears as mans emancipation from the organically prescribed cycle

of natural life. For this very reason cultures every step forward seems condemned to

lead to an ever more devastating senselessness. The advancement of cultural values

seems to become a senseless hustle in the service of worthless, moreover self-contra-dictory, and mutually antagonistic ends. (Weber1978c: 355 7)

To the extent that Weber uses science as a trope for modernity, the devas-

tating senselessness of the modern condition springs from the failure of science

to apprehend its ultimate presuppositions (Weber1978c:355) of rational calcu-

lation and progress. Asceticism comes to dominate worldly morality primar-ily through the economic conditions of machine production as divorced from

the highest spiritual and cultural values [of] religious and ethical meaningleaving only purely mundane passions in its wake (Weber1976: 1813). With

the metaphysics of religion having been replaced by banality and predictability,

the world becomes disenchanted.

As religion moves further down the road of intellectualism, its charisma

and mysticism are replaced by doctrine and book religion, giving ever

more weight to the rationalist assumption that the entirety of the cosmos is

knowable and thus subject to learning (Weber1978c:351). This collapse of the

monopoly over metaphysics that traditional religions once held opens up

space for the development of alternative salvations (Weber 1969: 602 10;

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Bellah1999: 9 11) and (re)enchanted polytheisms rooted in politics, aesthetics

and eroticism. This fragmentation this loss of plasticity (Weber1978a: 148)

in human experience is incommensurable insofar as it places these (newly dif-

ferentiated) spheres of sociality in competition with each other. Religion comes

to inhabit an independent sphere, forced to conduct its business (for that iswhat it increasingly becomes) through the rationalist framework of modern cal-culation.

Yet a key distinction remains for Weber between salvationist religions and

other essentially reactionary sources of ultimate value: where the world

religions of old were inextricably tied to wider experiences of the cosmos;

this is not so for the modern soteriologies of politics, sex and art. Weber,

drawing on Nietzsches discussion on beauty and the unholy, has this to say:

But all these are only the most elementary cases of struggle that the gods of the

various orders and values are engaged in. . .We live as did the ancients when their

world was not yet disenchanted of its gods and demons, only we live in a different

sense. . . The bearing of man has been disenchanted and denuded of its mystical but

inwardly genuine plasticity. . .Today the routines of everyday life challenge religion.

Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the

form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives and again they

resume their eternal struggle with one another. (Weber1978a: 1489; emphasis added)

The final consequence, for Weber, is the loss of the inwardly genuine plas-

ticity and metaphysical holism of pre-modern subjects. Physically, where

humans were once sated with life, they are now wearied by it (Weber

1978c: 3567); no longer are moderns held by the meaningfully bounded

closure that labouring within the organic life cycle afforded (Weber 1978c),

left as they are to the senselessness of unending rational advancement and

the crushing realisation that all achievement will be counted only for its inevi-table redundancy. Metaphysically, where pre-moderns lived with only one

model of salvation in any given society, moderns, as described above, live

with many. It is in this sense that the gods ascend[ing] from their graves

(Weber1978a:149) have lost their cosmological rootedness. Rational modernity

is not littered with dead gods but with separate and competing gods; it is

marked not by secularisation but by segregation.11 Out of either intellectual

paralysis or moral nihilism, moderns expose themselves to the relativity offree floating and competitive polytheism whose fragmented impersonal

forces (Weber1978a:149) engender morally sceptical, post-metaphysical, disen-

chanted sociality.

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My Christian informants were left wrestling with a dual reality; an enchanted

universe lived within an increasingly disenchanted village; enchanted words

spoken by a disenchanted language; enchanted objects held within a disenchanted

materiality. This was particularly true of the fishing industry. Trawlers were instru-

ments of mechanised labour and sites of divine salvation; EU fishing quotas wererational bureaucracies and part of a demonic plot to enslave the human race via theimposition of worldwide famine. Even the phenomenon of disenchantment was

given an enchanted gloss: the unsaved were spiritually blinded by the Devil,

whose greatest trick was an act of disenchantment, that is, to persuade the

world he doesnt exist. While for some, epistemologically, God and the Devil

had vanished, ontologically and thus existentially their presence remained

unaltered. The reaction of the saved was to fight against the assumption that

the routines of everyday life challenge religion (Weber 1978a: 149). Indeed, forGamries Christian fisher families, the opposite was asserted as true; that is, their

experience of religion challenged the routines of everyday life.

The Semiotic Ideology of Representational Economy

As fishers of prawns and men, life was both modern and enchanted. But how

was this modern enchantment inflected locally? I turn here to Keane (1997, 2007)and to the related terms of semiotic ideology and representational economy.

Semiotic ideology can be taken to refer (in intentionally broad terms) to whatone believes about the world within which signifying practices take place

(2007: 18). More than this and in relation to representational economy it

refers to the ideas and practices that position language alongside materialityand causation:

[Semiotic ideology] is predicated on some capacity to take language as an object

within experience. That is, it involves at least some incipient form of objectification

. . .This emphasis on materiality means. . .that ideas and the practices they invoke

have not only logical but also causal effects. . .

They are part of what we could call

a representational economy[which] situates[s] words, things and persons . . .dynami-

cally within the same world with one another. (Keane 2007:179)

In this sense:

Semiotic ideology is a reflection upon, and an attempt to organise, peoples experi-

ences of the materiality of semiotic form . . .[that] exist[s] as much within a represen-

tational economy of causes and effects as within a realm of logics and meanings.

(Keane2007:21)

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Crucially, the power and effects. . .of semiotic form. . .are not fully deter-

minate; they have quite different implications in different contexts (Keane

2007: 17). Bettys and other like stories that revolved around a certain under-

standing of providence only made sense contextually insofar as they refused

to acknowledge the existence of coincidence. The representational economyof providence abolished the possibility of coincidence (cf. Luhrmann 1989:151) by instantiating the new semiotic ideology of Godincidence with the

effect that every detail in daily life had the potential to be rendered as a personal

encounter with the divine. The specificityof Bettys encounter was importantbecause it gave her a particularly acute sense of the immanence of Gods trans-

cendence. To echo Wagner (1986: 8), for Betty, the as if had become the is:

God (or, perhaps less provocatively, Gods providence12) was close enough to

hold in her hands, read, and then fold up and place back inside a Bible.But are all forms of materiality equal bearers of Gods immanence? Where

the representational economy of providence extends to the semiotics ofvillage gutters and pieces of paper, I want to suggest that, in potentiality, allmaterial forms function equally well as indexes of divine presence. This

emerges from local expressions of a non-conformist theological tendency to

reject imposed hierarchy and external regulation in favour of devolved organis-

ation and individual authority (cf. Bauman 1983: 356). The beauty, power or

emotional resonance of a religious object was not, in Gamries representationaleconomy, a result of conforming to a canon of formal ecclesiastical procedures

but emerged through lay Bible reading, prayer and Christian conversation such was the post-hoc nature of the semiotic ideology of Godincidence as a

material and linguistic practice. Similar stories were related to congregantsattending prayer meetings: personal revelation through the scriptures, dramatic

answers to prayer, promising evangelistic encounters all these conformed to

the wider representational economy through the sharing of experience (cf.

Taylor1995:238). The classification of Bettys textual encounter as providential

was establishedafterthe event, in its telling and retelling (through what someChristians affectionately refer to as gossiping the gospel), thereby granting

the semiotics of Godincidence a normative, socially legitimate character.

Providence, Enchantment and Material Things

The washing machine at my landladys house had broken. Sarah knew she

could not afford a new machine. Sunday came and Robert picked me up to

see friends for lunch in between services. As we chatted, Robert, totally out

of the blue, turned to me and asked: you dont know anyone that needs a

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washing machine do you? Because my new flat came with one and I dont have

anywhere to put my own. Having got over my initial astonishment I explained

that Sarah badly needed one as her own machine had broken just a few days

ago. Well, there you go then, said Robert with no particular sense of surprise

she can have my one, commenting on how the whole situation was a clearGodincidence. I phoned Sarah to tell her the news. She was delighted andsaid what an answer to prayer it was.

Providence also took a much lower level form bumping into someone on

Main street that you needed to speak to, getting your exhaust fixed quicker than

expected, receiving a phone call seconds before you were about to leave the

house all of these were read as Godincidences, that is, as Gods sovereign

provision. Theres no such thing as coincidence, only Godincidence!

Gamries Christians would tell me. But what representational economy doesGodincidence inhabit alongside the world of material things? Even the quintes-

sentially spiritual experience of divine providence is inescapably rooted in thesemiotics of material processes, and this, as a result of the verbosity of everyday

social affairs. As Keane reminds us:

The realism and intuitive power of objects often derives from indexicality, their appar-

ent connection to the things they signify by virtue of a real relation of causality or con-

junction. That is, they point to the presence of something. (Keane2006:311)

Indexicality, then, points to the materially immanent presence of God. Gods

omnipresence is not limited to a theological concept, a somatic emotion

(Csordas 1994) or absorption into the inner worlds of imaginations (Luhr-

mannet al. 2010) but is experiencedexistentially(Wagner1978: 34; Keane 1997:20) in and through the material semiotics of washing machines, scraps of

paper, discarded merchandise and exact amounts of petrol.But how do these objects differ from ritually segregated and sanctified

objects of immense religious and monetary value? In an important functionalsense, they do not. The similarity here with certain orthodox Christian under-

standings of religious objects is striking. Hanganu (2010), for instance, in consid-

ering the agentive power of the rain-making icon of Saint Ana in Romania,

emphasises that the efficacy of such objects is inextricable from the personal

and material biographies in which they are entangled. Those sharing the

name Ana either personally, or through living or dead kin become specially

implicated in the ritual procession of the icon by virtue of such relatedness,

which functions as a sort of divine prototype for enchanted action in the

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world. Crucially, the power of the materiality of the icon does not necessarily

reside primarily in its being constructed from beautifully preserved precious

metals and stones. Indeed, it was the badly damaged paintwork of other rain-

making icons allegedly the result of the countless rainfalls endured

(Hanganu2010: 41) that attested to their power. The power of iconism, forKeane (1997), is its ability to form an existential connection between sign andsignified (20). And the same is the case for indexicality:

Indexical signs are linked to what they signify by existential connections: they show

causal effects. . .or actual proximity. . .By their very character, they also forge bonds

between causal and logical meanings. (Keane 1997:79)

Viewed in this way, Bettys scrap of paper may be seen not just as words on a

page, but as a kind of icon, that is, a divine prototype (Engelhardt2010) for pro-vidential encounters. The scrap of paper, in signifying an existential connection

between her personal-material biography and Gods divine presence becomes

an object of amazement because of both the time at which it intervened in

Bettys life and the form it took when it did so; a personal crisis averted by a

scrap of material that could (and should) have been swept away by the slightestgust of wind. As a water-damaged, rain-making icon attests to its own efficacy,

so too did Bettys scrap of paper exist as a self-referential testimony to its own

providential power and divine intentionality. It became an icon of itself(Wagner1978: 32). Thus

Christianity in whatever form it takes is embedded in ordinary practices . . .[and]

creates recurrent practical means by which these concepts can be lived in concrete

terms. (Keane2006:310)

This is precisely my argument about the way in which divine providence

operates in Gamrie ontology: it is embedded in the ordinary practices of

daily life in the semiotics of doing laundry or fuelling a car. Providence, asa representational economy, is lived in concrete terms through an attitude of

expectancy to the point that

. . .material things. . .are enmeshed in causality, registered in and induced by their

forms [and] as forms. . .remain objects of experience. (Keane 2008:124)

But what kind of a world did the Christians of Gamrie inhabit in order for the

semiotic ideology of Godincidences to be a taken-for-granted part of everyday

life? Their world was an enchanted one, which, by providence, was made alive

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with a kind of magic, thereby restoring (or perhaps preserving) the inwardly

genuine plasticity (Weber 1978a: 148) of life. Importantly, enchantment was

not only the effect that providence brought to bear upon the world it was

also the cause. To explain the agency of enchantment in the world we need

only to look as far as coincidence. What does the world have to be for it tobe completely lacking in chance? It has to be a world driven by irresistibledivine intention and enchanted by a sense of cosmological rootedness and con-

nectedness to divine activity otherwise the abolition of coincidence would be

absurd.

It is intriguing to note that, in their struggle to conceptualise coincidence

and despite strong ontological disagreements my Christian informants and

Luhrmanns (1989) occult magicians seem to share a foundational hermeneutic

challenge:

When a magician is struck by a remarkable coincidence, it is hard for them to blame

contingency rather than cause. . .Magicians begin to pay attention in different ways

. . . The desire to find ritual presents a hermeneutic challenge: magicians become

skilled interpreters of symbolic association and learn to anticipate these unfolding

patterns in their lives. (Luhrmann 1989:152 3)

Whether we talk of hermeneutics or semiotics, magicians or Christians, the

effect is broadly the same: enchantment works its magic by inscribing super-natural intentionality upon the world (cf. Evans-Pritchard 1976: 2232)

through the abolition of the category of coincidence, thereby bypassing the

need for symbols (in our case, symbols of providence) to act as secondary

indexes of a primary reality. The magic of enchantment functions as a semioticshort circuit, freeing symbols from the need to do any more work than simply

pointto themselvesas the actual object of Gods immanence. Indeed

. . .a metaphor or other tropic usage assimilates symbol and referent into one

expression [whereby] a metaphor is asymbol that stands for itself. . .

[and] assimilatesthat which it symbolises within a distinct, unitary expression (collapsing the distinc-

tion between symbol and symbolised). (Wagner1978: 25)

Several conclusions about the nature of Gamries representational economy

emerge. First, such an economy is governed by providence where the peopleof God read and walk and talk and live with a sense of the utmost expectancy of

having an encounter with the divine. Second, it produces a world where coinci-

dence is abolished and is replaced by Godincidence; where divine foreordina-

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tion the irresistible intentionality of God renders the personal details of

everyday life as an intimate experience of (micro) predestination and (macro)

cosmological rootedness. Third, this representational economy brings God

close, not only through the religious rituals of preaching, reading scripture

and praying, but in a way that allows God to be experienced as actuallypresent, that is, as materially immanent, in the semiotics of washing machinesand so on. Finally, the causal effect of this is that the world is made alive

with a kind of magic that charges everyday life with deep spiritual significance;

a magic that restores plasticity to human experience by showing the world to

be totally lacking in chance and the unintended. It is a world, in short, that is

defined by enchantment.

The disjuncture between received anthropological notions of Christianity as

a religion of transcendence wherein God withdraws from man (Cannell2006: 39) and the lived experience of my informants is striking. Betty and

my other friends inhabit a representational economy where material imma-nence and spiritual transcendence are, in important respects, one and the

same: just as God was experienced as materially present in everyday objects,

so too objects indexed the presence of God. But troublingly to my friends,

God had no monopoly over enchantment. Demons, too, were experienced as

a reality that had to be lived with and battled against. It is to this experience

of demonic attack and the immanence of the Devil that I now turn to.

Demonic Attack

Johns first encounter with evil spirits was when he was working for a church

in northeast Scotland. Soon after his arrival, a local woman called Moira

attended a gospel meeting during which she began to manifest that she was

possessed by evil spirits by screaming and writhing on the floor. Things gotso bad that a neighbour was forced to take her home. The next day John

phoned Moiras neighbour and said that the Lord had given him the key tohelping her demon-possessed friend. When they met the following week,

John prayed over Moira with dramatic effect, counting47individually identifi-

able evil spirits that were cast out of her. As they came out, Moira was vomiting

up what John called slime from somewhere inside her body: She was actually

bringing it up into a bucket, he said. Moira told him she could feel the spirits

crawling up her back like worms, fighting to get out of her body. In a matter

of minutes they were gone and she was completely free (cf. Meyer1999: 46).

What insights can be drawn from Moira and her47evil spirits? The imma-

nence of the Devil was embodied in the chaotic disordering of demonic attack

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that inverted the representational economy of divine providence: far from

granting an intimate experience of the divine that the believer delights in,

demonic attack imposes a terrifyingly personal and grossly abusive experience

of the Devil that the believer fears. Where we can, without too much difficulty,

imagine the ways in which God and the Devil are said to be different, it seemsthat the ways in which they operate as a semiotic ideology are intriguinglysimilar.

Demonic attack, a friend told me, is part of the cost of trying to break

through into the kingdom of darkness; its just one of the things to expect

when you are engaging in spiritual warfare. By glossing the Christian life as a

spiritual battle, demonic attack, like providence, was not only strongly

marked by the intentionality of supernatural forces, but was to be expected

(cf. La Fontaine1998). As with the expectation of illness or disease, such experi-ences were frequently located in the body. Demonic attack, as with providence,

was also spoken of as having a distinctly ordinary character. While described aslike warfare acute and episodic it was also spoken of as a daily struggle, as

a chronic and persistent undermining of ones Christian walk of faith.

It was a Sunday in late July and I was sitting in the Kirk with Iain. As the min-

ister stood to preach, introducing his eight main points (it was going to be a

long sermon, apparently), I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Iain

began to sway a little. The minister was soon in full flow: they devoted them-selves to the apostles teaching! Iain nodded forward and then jerked his head

upright. They devoted themselves to fellowship and the breaking of bread!Iains eyes closed and he began to snore quietly. And they were filled with

joy! I gave Iain a dig with my elbow, and, as if in slow motion, he openedhis eyes and lifted his Bible a little more upright. And then his head began to

drift down again.

After church Iain came over for lunch and we chatted as I prepared the pork

and potatoes. When we were ready to eat we sat at the table in the kitchen and I

asked Iain to say the grace. Rather than pray a brief blessing upon the food, he

prayed a long and rambling prayer asking God to forgive him for repeatedly

falling asleep in church. When the amen came, food had not even been men-

tioned. As we ate, Iain told me how he thought his sleepiness in church was theresult of demonic attack. He never normally fell asleep in church, he told me,

but in recent weeks had repeatedly done so. Nor did he feel that he was particu-larly tired before church or even during the first part of the service. He only ever

felt sleepy right at the point where the sermon was due to begin, and as soon as

he was outside all feelings of lethargy left him. This pattern, Iain explained with

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real frustration, had been repeated; he was falling asleep just at the point where

Gods word was being expounded. This, he concluded, amounted to clear evi-

dence that the Devil was attacking him. When he looked at me for comment, I

rather hesitantly suggested that he might pray against tiredness before church

in future. He seemed to think this would be a good idea and we left it at that.Iains fatigue was not a series of unfortunate coincidences, because, in

Gamries representational economy, mischance had been abolished by my

informants assertions that theres no such thing. Only two explanations

remained divine testing or demonic attack. God did make bad things

happen in order to bring his people back to himself, my friends explained.

My friend Mary was particularly aware of such events, not only in her own

life but also in world affairs, speaking at length about how swine flu, the reces-

sion, the British MPs expense scandal and many other woes had been broughtto us by God. I think God is ruffling up the waters to bring people down to their

knees in prayer. Yes, I think God is laying the foundations for revival she wouldmuse to me as we sat by her electric heater drinking tea. Divine testing, then,

was the unfolding of God-ordained suffering designed to show people their

helplessness without Him as their protector and provider.

This sense of God as protector and provider was particularly acute among

fisher families. I heard stories of Christian skippers, who, having occasionally

gone against their conscience to fish on a Sunday, experienced divine judge-ment by catching no fish and tearing their nets on the seabed. The Devil,

too, was implicated in fishing disasters. Fierce storms were sometimes said tobe the result of demonic forces: bad weather on Friday and Saturday followed

by perfect fishing conditions on Sunday, only to return to storms on Monday(causing maximum financial disincentive to keep the Lords Day) was a

pattern one informant insisted was of demonic origin yet others suggested

such patters were the result of God testing their commitment to Sabbath obser-

vance.

The picture was rarely straightforward: one fisherman told me how his

father and three crew members were killed in a storm which he himself sur-

vived a tragic event that led, that very night, to his born-again conversion.

People did debate the spiritual authorship of such events. Some, for example,said that the crisis over gay ministers in the Church of Scotland was sent from

God (to bring his faithful remnant out of the denomination to preserve theirmoral and ecclesiastical purity), while others said it was of the Devil (to spoil

the witness of faithful evangelicals in the national Kirk). These arguments,

while often running unresolved, in no way undermined the central ontological

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assumption that such events were of spiritual origin. To my knowledge, I was

the only person who ever suggested that such-and-such was acoincidence. Theresult such remarks produced were instructive. Often I would be given a

knowing smile and reminded that there was no such thing! At other times

the reaction was somewhat sharper and I would be rebuked. Whatever theirreaction, the point my friends were making was clear: in Gamries semioticideology, suggestions of coincidence were tantamount to a denial of both

divine sovereignty and demonic activity, and thus akin either to blasphemy

or spiritual foolhardiness.

Demonically ordained suffering was often fairly mundane a husband and

wife bickering, a move towards paraphrasing scripture rather than translating it

literally, reduced EU fishing quotas these were all deliberate attacks of the Evil

One and were experienced as such by my Christian informants.13

In this sense,the enchantment of the world had a totalising effect nothing was left to

chance because the agentive powers of God and the Devil were always atwork. Crucially, however, this representational economy did not strip my infor-

mants of agency. Indeed, the gospel message called on those who heard it to

make a decision for Christ rather than deciding to reject Him. Deciding which

experiences were to be categorised (post hoc) as divine testing and which asdemonic attack was a further agentive act. Simple logic often prevailed; God

would not make one fall asleep during a sermon, so such fatigue must bedemonic. Where no obvious explanation was available (as with the global reces-

sion) it was through the deployment of words in prayer, Bible reading andChristian conversation that authorship was established.

But what about the realm of the material? Did thingsplay the same role indemonic attack as they did in providence? By developing Cannells critique of

the received anthropological notion that Christianity is first and foremost a reli-

gion of transcendence, I want to suggest that objects did indeed play a key role

in grounding local experiences of the demonic by quoting from a sermon which

stirred a friend to decisive action:

When we become Christians, what sortawicked stuff do we still hang onto? What

sorta things do we meditate upon which is going to open up our minds to the

enemy?. . . If you have been in the Freemasons, do you destroy all your artefacts:

your robes, your books, your medallions? If you have been involved in witchcraft

do you take all your paraphernalia and your stuff and burn it, according to what

the scripture teaches? Or do you put it in a box and put it up the loft somewhere,

and then you wonder why you cant get any blessing?

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As I was leaving the hall, Billy came alongside me and urged me to come

back to his house. As we walked he told me that a friend had given him a

box of video cassettes which contained teaching from some unknown religious

group, and, after a series of unsettling spiritual conversations with this friend, he

had become unsure about their orthodoxy. Billy was clear that he did not wantthe cassettes in his house if they were full of false teaching, especially if theymight bring demonic attack upon his family as the preacher described. When

we established that the videos were Seventh Day Adventist he said he

wanted them burned. I suggested that he could just throw them away. He

shook his head saying that someone might find them. In that case, I offered,

we could easily pull out and cut up the magnetic tape; this would make them

unwatchable while saving the need to burn them which would create an

awful smell to which his neighbours might object. But Billy was quite surewhat needed to be done. He must burn them that night.14

As with providence, local experiences of demonic attack force us to confrontthe materiality of bodies (cf. Bialecki 2011). The Devil possessed Moira and

threatened to kill her by throwing her down the stairs. She felt the evil spirits

crawl up her back and eventually vomited them out. The Devil overcame

Iains body with fatigue. His eyes closed, his head dropped and his breathing

slowed to a soft snore he fell asleep. These bodily experiences were not inci-

dental to demonic attack; they were not just fleshy window dressing for an ethe-real encounter these experiences of the flesh werethe demonic attack.Symbolic obviation thus becomes eminently material. Indeed, an obviation

sequence. . .does not saythings but makesthem, and then disappears into itsresults (Wagner1978:252). Demonic attack, then, disappears into the materialityof the body just as divine providence disappears into the materiality of scraps of

paper, only to then reappear in lived experiences of the immanence of transcen-

dence. Further, not only does the Devil possess peoples bodies with demons

and evil spirits, he is also indexed (existentially) in video tapes, Masonic robesand so on. In this sense, a box of witchcraft paraphernalia put up in the loftstill exerts a power over its owner and their household it blocks blessing, pre-

sumably from the Holy Spirit. It is not enough, therefore, to reject thesepracticesand relegate theirmaterialtraces to a box in the loft. The inwardly genuine plas-ticity (Weber1978a: 148) of Gamrics religious experience renders such a neat

separation of self from body from object an impossibility. The box of wickedstuff must be burned according to what the scripture teaches, and this,

surely, because objects are cosmologically rooted (that is, powerfully con-

nected) to human selves and bodies. Such connectedness is located within

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their semiotic materiality, that is, inside their thingnessas objects. Objects, then,have an agency outside of human intentionality, that is, they have indexical

effects that are independent of their usage by people while still impactingupon the very experience of those people (cf. Gell 1992). The only solution is

to destroy their materiality and in so doing, to remove them from the represen-tational economy of wider human experience.

Of Bodies and Things

Such observations force us to take seriously Cannells (2006: 14) suggestion

that Christianity is not simply a religion of transcendence. What we see in

local experiences of the materiality of both providence and attack, then, is

not the radical discontinuity of an impossible religion (Cannell 2006: 39),

but rather its opposite, that is, a radical continuity (and plasticity) betweenspirit and flesh, word and object, seen and unseen, transcendent and immanent.So radical is this continuity that it becomes an enchanted conflation. Billys

video cassettes needed to be burned not simply because they indexed the exter-nal material immanence of a transcendent Devil (although they did do that) but

also because they were themselves the immanence of Satan an existential

icon of demonic attack.

What we see, then, is not Satan in flesh, but in plastic. Such a state of affairs is

made possible by the semiotic ideology of everyday objects that are enchanted(made alive) by the immanence of transcendence. Thus, as with providence,

not only are incidences of demonic attack rooted in materiality, but so is

their ability to bestow a sense of spiritual immanence. Where Gods omnipre-sence was experienced existentially through washing machines and scraps of

paper, so too was the omnipresence of Satan experienced existentiallythrough witchcraft paraphernalia and video cassettes. It is here that we see

the clearest convergence of Cannells view of the immanence of Christianity

with Keanes view of materiality. As Keane states:

Religions may not always demandbeliefs. . .[but] will always invoke material forms. It is

in this materiality that they are part of experience. . .provoke responses. . .have public

lives and enter into ongoing chains of causes and consequences. (Keane 2008:124)

Like providence and the experience of Godincidence, demonic attack is

given a life outside linguistic utterances in so far as the objects that actually con-stitute these experiences themselves have an independent (and immanent)

material existence. Keanes point is made again

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. . .even in its most abstracted and transcendent, the human subject cannot free itself

from objectification. It retains a body, it continues to work on, transact and possess

objects. (Keane2006:321)

And it could only be this way in so far as the Devil and his demons just like

Christ and his people have a real material existence, both in bodies (think here

of crucified flesh and demonic possession) and in objects (washing machines

and witchcraft paraphernalia). Demonic attack, like providence, not only

retains a body (Keane 2006: 321) but also work[s] on. . .objects (Keane2006: 321) with the effect (and again we notice the same in providence) that

spiritual immanence is made an undeniably real and startlingly everyday experi-ence. Where God was brought close by Godincidence, Satan was brought close

by demonic attack, close enough, in fact, to make you vomit slime, fall asleep in

church or cause evil to befall your family because of a box of videos in the base-

ment. The work of symbolic obviation the collapsing of one existential

modality. . .to produce another (Wagner 1978: 34) enchants the world of

these Scottish Protestants by transforming material signs of providence andattack into material referents of the immanence of transcendence. I haveargued that taking seriously this enchanted obviation might be a way to act

upon Cannells challenge to the anthropology of religion that

If transcendence is not necessarily exclusively Christian, then it is even more clearlytrue to say that Christianity is not exclusively a religion of transcendence. (Cannell

2006:41)

Demonic attack, then, acts to secure the existential experience of immanence it makes the Devil and his angels not only an embodied and material reality,

but a reality that is so close that a demonic encounter is eminently expected as

part of living in a village defined not by disenchantment but by the plasticity and

cosmological rootedness of enchantment.

Conclusions

By considering my friends experiences of divine providence and demonic

attack, I have argued for three main points. First, if anthropology is to continue

to develop its understanding of Christianity in all its global forms, it will need to

take proper note of Cannells assertion that Christianity is not a religion fully

definable in terms of transcendence or asceticism in this sense it is not an

impossible religion but is rather closely implicated within the modern

world of material objects. This is the case, I have shown, even within the

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ideal typically ascetic Protestant denominations born of Scotlands Radical

Reformation, namely, the various types of non-conformist Presbyterian and

Brethren churches found in Gamrie and all along the Aberdeenshire coast.

Second, to the extent that providence and attack areabout the transcendent

(insofar as they concern both the divine and the demonic), these religious experi-ences are also fundamentally concerned with religious immanence. Indeed,

viewed through Keanes (2006) theory of indexicality and Wagners (1978)

theory of symbolic obviation, immanence comes to be experienced as a kind of

transcendence and transcendence as a kind of immanence. Such an observation

can only be made by closely attending to the semiotic ideology of a local rep-

resentational economy (Keane1997,2007). For Gamrie, this requires attending

to the ways in which words, bodies and objects circulate within a wider

economy of divine provision, protection, testing and judgement as set againstdemonic deception, temptation and attack. Experiences of spiritual battle are

real insofar as they forgeexistentialconnections (Wagner1978:34; Keane1997:20) between materiality and divine presence, and in so doing, bring about

causaleffects (Keane 1997: 240) in everyday life clean laundry, stormy seas,bouts of fatigue and so on. All of this, crucially, is the result of the ways in

which particular ontologies, like obviation sequences, operate as Roberts

bookmark told us at the level of the eminently expected, not saying things but

making them, and disappearing into their results (Wagner1978:252).Third, coming to terms with these assertions of divine and demonic presence

involves viewing the world not as disenchanted, separable and secular, but asdefined by a cosmological rootedness that furnished their daily lives with what

Weber (1978a: 148) referred to as inwardly genuine plasticity. It was this rootedness(the sense of being unavoidably implicated inthe real functioningoftheuniverse and

its contents) and plasticity (the sense that ones life was driven by a coherent sense of

ultimate value) that imbued the lives of my informants with a sense ofmodernenchantment, to the point that even disenchantment was given an enchanted

(that is, demonic) gloss. This was made possible to bring the argument full

circle by the magical power of words, bodies, scraps of paper and prawn trawlers

to transform themselves from the as if of signs to the is of referents, and in so doing,

to become glossed as everyday manifestations of the immanence of transcendence.

Notes1. Divine providence referred to Gods omnipresent and omniscient extension of

care, that is, His daily intervention in human affairs by way of intimate protectionand provision.

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2. Demonic attack referred to the activities of the Devil and demons that sought toharm Christians spiritually and/or physically.

3. Wagner defines symbolic obviation as the collapsing of one existential modality. . .to produce another (Wagner1978:34). In the context of semiotics, the sign becomesthe signified.

4. Keane defines indexicality as that which signifies by virtue of a real relationship ofcausation or contiguity to its object (Keane 1997: 19). The realness of such arelationship is said to be existential.

5. For Weber, inwardly genuine plasticity describes an existential state of being, oftenbut not exclusively inhabited by pre-moderns, characterised by a deeply held sensethat ones personhood is founded upon a unified, coherent and cohesive commit-ment to ultimate value (Weber1978c:356).

6. By cosmological rootedness I refer to my informants sense that their Christianlives were unavoidably implicated in the real functioning of the universe and itscontents.

7. During my fieldwork I was open about the fact that I was a committed Christianand a member of the Free Church of Scotland. While this helped reassure some ofmy informants that I was saved, others were unconvinced.

8. This figure includes seasonal residents (English incomers) who owned holidayhomes in the village, the vast majority of whom never attended church. Weeklychurch attendance among locals was far higher, at around 70%, but varied byage (higher for older people; lower for youth).

9. The Harry Potter books were held by many in Gamrie to be demonic literatureused by the Devil to desensitise children to the evils of witchcraft.

10. While the concepts of enchantment and disenchantment are not as foundational

as, for example, value or calling, they are helpful in bridging Webers ideas aboutreligion, economics and modernity to my own ethnographic data on daily experi-ences of divine providence and demonic attack.

11. Webers lack of optimism about the devastating senselessness of modern disen-chantment was marked (Cannell 2011: 2) but not unqualified. The possibility thatentirely new prophets could arise did not escape him, nor did the potential for agreat rebirth of old ideas and ideals. Such scenarios, however, existed alongsidethe equally real prospect of the mechanised petrification of religious values(Weber1976:182).

12. Clearly, multiple interpretations are possible regarding how divine presence is

experienced (cf. Engelke 2007). A helpful alternative to positing a literal materialdivine presence might be to suggest that the providential relationship that Bettyhad with her God came to be expressed materially. Yet, as we shall see, such aninterpretation does not seem to fit with experiences of demonic attack.

13. The similarities here with La Fontaines (1998) analysis of tales of satanic child abuseand beliefs in the literal existence of a cult of Satanists are striking.

14. Billy told me the next morning how the videos had burned for hours, billowingclouds of black smoke. Such an urgent, literal destruction warns me against a meta-phorical interpretation of Billys actions that night. Billy seemed anxious to destroynot a set of demonic metaphysical relationshipsthat might have unwittingly devel-

oped between himself and the Devil, but rather a kind of evil physical presence.

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