“Western” societies today are by and large post-Christian, in the sense that many people do not seriously identify with a religious denomination or sect, major public discourses—particularly academic ones—are secular, and Christian institutions and values are no longer naturalized in public politics.My secular sense that Australia is among the most secular societies in a largely secular “Western” world is evidently shared by committed Christians. A leading Anglican minister refers to Sydney as “a godless city” and differentiates “our Christian counter-culture” from “the world's culture” (Age Good Weekend [Melbourne], 22 Aug. 1998:12). In the United States, confrontation and competition from a host of born-again contenders can force post-Christian religious indifference into quasi-fundamentalist rivalry for the moral and political high ground, but mainstream academic discourses remain as resolutely secular as they have been at least since World War I. Given that this period has seen the heyday of anthropology's disciplinary professionalization,George Stocking locates anthropology's “classical” period from about 1920 to about 1965 (1992:93–4). it is not surprising that its dominant orientations have often been unreflectively sociopolitical, even though its usual proclaimed objects of study were, until relatively recently, putatively “traditional” “societies” with “cultures” aptly categorized as “religious.”