Received: 26 February 2023 Accepted: 6 June 2023 DOI: 10.1111/amet.13244 FORUM: WHAT GOOD IS ANTHROPOLOGY? CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST Anthropology as spiritual discipline T. M. Luhrmann Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, Stanford, USA Correspondence T. M. Luhrmann, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, Stanford, USA. Email: luhrmann@stanford.edu Funding information National Science Foundation, Grant/Award Number: 185122; John Templeton Foundation, Grant/Award Number: 55427 Abstract This essay invites us to understand ethnography not only as a science-like comparative enterprise but also as a spiritual discipline. This is because ethnography enables us to imagine other ways of living in the world. The fieldwork, the writing, and even the reading of ethnographies provide people with some external perspective on themselves. Ethnography thus allows people to develop a more a nuanced sense of what, for them, should constitute the good. KEYWORDS ethnography, spirituality, the good I have been wondering recently whether we should think about ethnography as a spiritual discipline, as a practice that enables us to imagine other ways of being and that draws us closer to what we might call the good. When I began to study anthropology, I thought of ethnog- raphy as a kind of literature. The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz’s (1973) collection of essays, had recently come out. In it, Geertz presents himself, as he puts it, not so much as a scientist in search of facts but as a literary critic in search of meaning. Some years later, his Works and Lives (Geertz, 1989) explicitly treats ethnography as a literary genre. For him, the question is not what anthropologists discover but what they do with words to persuade their readers that what they describe is really there. He seems less interested in whether what they say is true and more interested in how their writing comes to feel true. He sees them as writers—tellers of stories, singers of tales, novelists manqué—who use what they have learned from the field to invite the reader into a new experience of the human condition. That was how I read ethnography as well. I sat with Vincent Crapanzano (1980) in his interviews with Tuhami, a Moroc- can tile maker. I felt his sadness at the wound in Tuhami’s soul and the weird awkwardness of the anthropologist who comes to know someone so intimately and then gets on a plane to leave. I was captivated by Lévi-Strauss’s (2021) own astonishment at the artwork on Caduveo bodies, by his sense of the slow slog through a dense and dangerous jungle, by the near mystical merging he describes at the end of Tristes Tropiques, when he seems to fall into the eye of a cat and disappear. I read ethnogra- phies for the way they grabbed at my heart and for the wonder of how differently one could live in the world. Then came critique. I remember sitting in the seminar room as Talal Asad invited his Cambridge seniors, those great shaggy lions of Africanist anthropology, into an acknowledgment of their complicity with colonialism. I remember opening Writing Culture (Clifford & Marcus, 1986) when it was published in 1986 and reading Crapanzano’s (1986) frothing denunciation of Geertz. In that essay, Crapanzano accuses Geertz, in effect, of lying and of exploiting the people who took him in. I took from James Clifford’s (1986) eloquent introduction the depress- ing insight that by writing about people in other, poorer social worlds, I too was compliant and coercive. The winds of change had been blowing from the first day I arrived in Cambridge for graduate study. I did my fieldwork in London, with middle-class white people. These days, I think of anthropology as a kind of science, a word I would not have used when I was younger, although I tend to use it in the more expansive French meaning, as a form of systematic knowledge. I see us in the business of cultural comparison, and I understand this as a political commitment to make sure that white, middle-class European Americans are not treated as the sole measure of humankind. This is a different kind of political commitment from that of the politics of rep- resentation, a politics according to which scholars should not represent a social world different from their own. That way lies intellectual apartheid. In fact, I have come to think of my work as having “find- ings,” by which I mean a conclusion that emerges from an empirical investigation and that calls out for explanation. Here are examples of findings from my own work: that persons with schizophrenia in the United States report voices with more vio- lent content and more violent commands than in many other American Ethnologist. 2023;1–4. © 2023 by the American Anthropological Association. 1 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/amet