ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the theological concept of mystery as a means of considering ethnographic knowledge as a parallel process of knowledge in human relations. It works through the argument by presenting the anthropological concerns knowledge as they have been articulated in the past twenty or so years, the so-called epistemological turn. As anthropologists continue to work through the epistemological turn, mystery provides such an opportunity for imagination. Author's purpose is to demonstrate how mystery, in the knowledge of God, has been taken as indispensable to the knowledge of God's otherness and is productive, rather than limiting, in the pursuit and claim on knowledge itself. The chapter describes the conversations of anthropology and theology together in order to demonstrate how the theology of mystery can and does serve to orient anthropological understandings of knowledge, self, and other. Mystery is used in scripture to refer to the work of God and humanity's relation to it.
