Dr. Jack David Eller

Jack David Eller (PhD, Boston University) is a cultural anthropologist and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology with Woxsen University (Hyderabad, India). His doctoral research concentrated on religion in an Australian Aboriginal society, and his subsequent work has specialized in religion, ethnicity, and violence. His books on these subjects include From Culture to Ethnicity to Conflict: An Anthropological Perspective on International Ethnic Conflict (University of Michigan Press), Violence and Culture: A Cross-Cultural and Interdisciplinary Approach (Wadsworth), Cultural Anthropology: Global Forces, Local Lives (Routledge), Introducing Anthropology of Religion (Routledge), and Psychological Anthropology for the 21st Century (Routledge).

While his work has always been multidisciplinary, he has recently moved more solidly in that direction, for instance in his Social Science and Historical Perspectives: Society, Science, and Ways of Knowing (Routledge). Like many scholars, he has also become more involved in contemporary social and political issues, as in his Trump and Political Theology: Unmaking Truth and Democracy (GCRR Press).

He has specifically previously published articles or chapters on agnotology, agnomancy, and even apisteology, such as “Agnomancy: Conjuring Ignorance, Sustaining Belief” (2020) and “Informulacra and Information: Fake News, Truth Substitution, and Other Sovereign Acts” (2023). Most recently, he published a book-length survey of research on nonbelief, titled Apisteology: The Study of Not-Believing (Routledge) and is currently working on compiling a Routledge Handbook of Apisteology.

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The problem of knowledge is probably the oldest problem in philosophy. Epistemology—the study of what we can confidently claim to know and how we achieve this knowledge—comes logically before all other questions, not only in philosophy but in the natural and social sciences. For centuries, the assumption was that ignorance or not-knowing was only an absence of knowledge and that when people were provided with information they would automatically know the truth. In recent years, we have observed that matters are not so simple; information is abundantly available, but people often—strangely and frustratingly often—do not know it or believe it.

Knowing is more than having access to data or facts. Therefore, it became necessary to think of not-knowing as a valid subject of investigation in its own right, which scholars dubbed ‘agnotology’. This field reveals methods regularly employed by corporations, governments, and other agents to deprive people of knowledge and inundate them with non-knowledge (lies, propaganda, misinformation). My own work explores agnotology and what I call agnomancy or the ‘conjuring’ of ignorance. This led me to an even more overlooked topic: apisteology (a-pistis or not-belief). Not-believing is more than a sheer absence of belief; it too is the product of social forces and techniques. Prior to and more fundamental to (not-)believing are trust and commitment or identity (what I call troth), which determine in the first place who we accept as authorities and what information we will accept, ‘believe,’ and ‘know’. Today, questions of (not-)knowing and (not-)believing may be the most urgent ones for our society, our species, and our planet.