Afterword

Abstract How should we understand the complex and often contradictory role the other-and-more-than-human occupies in the lives and imaginations of people in the Middle East? Adopting a self-consciously post-secular stance on this question, the contributors of this special section convincingly show the theoretical and narrative possibilities of methodological attunement to the other-worldly and transcendent, to the divine. As I finished reading the section, I was struck by how the ethnographic task of reckoning with God seemed to end up meaning mostly reckoning with theology, with people talking about God. But if to take God seriously anthropologically is above all to pay attention to how our interlocutors themselves take God seriously as they grapple with the range of social, political and economic forces shaping their lives, where does that leave the issue's broader aim of going beyond an anthropocentric anthropology?