Should we worry about belief?

Suspicion of the concept of belief is now widely held among anthropologists. To determine whether this suspicion is justified, we must understand what belief is. Yet the question of how we are to reach an understanding of belief has not received much attention among anthropologists, who tend to assume that they know what belief-ascriptions entail whenever they criticize the use of the concept. But is this assumption warranted? This paper addresses this question by going back to a central text in the history of anthropological debate about belief, Rodney Needham’s Belief, Language, and Experience. It focuses particularly on Needham’s use of the later philosophy of Wittgenstein, arguing that Needham systematically misunderstands Wittgenstein’s work and misses the challenge that Wittgenstein poses to his own guiding assumptions about psychological concepts. The author argues that the failure of Needham’s critique of belief has broader implications. Although recent critics of belief are not motivated by Needham’s concerns, their understanding of belief-ascriptions, and so of the nature of belief, is continuous in important respects with the understanding that structures Needham’s work. If this is really a misunderstanding of belief, as Wittgenstein’s discussions of the concept suggest, then it follows that their criticisms are no more compelling than Needham’s. More specifically, it suggests that, like Needham, they are not really talking about belief at all. The author develops this argument with a discussion of the critiques of belief in the work of Joel Robbins and of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Martin Holbraad.