When I first scanned the title of Loyal Jones’ 1999 study Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands, I balked. As a sometime student of cultural geography and an erstwhile devotee of the Terry G. Jordan school of material culture studies, the object of Jones’ preposition was hard to digest. “The Southern Uplands?” I thought, “What he means is ‘the Upland South.’” But that is not what he means at all. Caviling as the distinction may be, it makes a difference for Jones—a difference that he intimates in his introduction, and which bears, however implicitly, on his method throughout the text. In Jones’ rejection of the “missionary imperative,” and in his insistence on texturing his presentation of Appalachian religion with disjunctive and at times agonistic theological claims, we should hear a resistance to the reification of his region (think, for just one recurring example, of the way Jones distinguishes theological orientations as more or less “Calvinist” or “Arminian”): “Not the Upland South,” he seems to say, edging away from that monolithic singularity, “but the Southern Uplands,” a bricolage (9).

For a study penned at the close of the twentieth century, Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands is a curious text. Though Jones abjures superfluous “interpretation”—preferring instead to simply present “what is already abundantly clear” in the statements of the dozens of Upland people we encounter in the text—he nevertheless employs a stark hermeneutic that shifts our gaze away from the daily lives and material worlds of the Southern Uplands. In contrast to a prevailing trend in religious studies—which since the 1980’s has concerned itself much more with practice, or what people do, than with doctrine, or what people believe—Jones dissects Upland faith into classic theological categories. We hear much about grace, theodicy (through the menacing figure of the Devil), theological anthropology, and even a few excurses on Trinitarian theology. Not until the final full chapter do we move into the standard fare of “lived religion”: prayer practices, rural hymnody, testimony as a social (rather than purely theological) phenomenon.

With Jones’ rejection of the so-called missionary imperative comes a corollary rejection of the anthropological gaze. I won’t elaborate here on the historical link between missionary enterprise and the rise of anthropological thought, but suffice it to say that many 18^th and 19^th century colonial missionaries became proto-anthropologists and many more provided the data for budding anthropological inquiry in their respective metropoles. With his focus on theology and doctrine, Jones rehabilitates a methodological paradigm that has lately been neglected—and sometimes, more disturbingly, dismissed—in religious studies. If religious studies has, as John Gager pointed out when he lectured to Emory undergraduates earlier this month, been characterized by a movement from “theo-logy” to “anthropo-logy,” then Jones has brought us around that turn and back again. In rehabilitating Upland theologies as coherent expressions of doctrine—doctrine that can fit within the kind of accepted theological categories that any divinity student might recognize—Loyal Jones resists the religious and cultural “othering” of Upland peoples that has been so long perpetrated by the anthropological gaze. But I wonder if, in abandoning the social-anthropological gaze and its prevailing emphasis on practice, this text has not simply reinforced the othering power of that gaze. Indeed, Jones rehabilitates the theology of the Southern Uplands, laying bare its internal debates and impressive doctrinal variegation. But this appeal to theology comes at the expense of the anthropological discourse he abandons.