Journal for the Study of : Essays in honour of David Chidester

Editorial Introduction Materializing Religion: Essays in Honor of David Chidester

Johan M. Strijdom [email protected]

Lee-Shae S. Scharnick-Udemans [email protected]

In his recent Religion: Material dynamics, David Chidester (2018) selected a number of key concepts that have preoccupied him during his forty years of studying religion. Having contributed to critiques of the concept of religion as a modern Western imperial and colonial invention, Chidester is intensely aware of the legacy of the term but has nevertheless employed it productively as an analytical term. If the academic study of religion, as heir of a Protestant bias, used to study beliefs, Chidester has been a pioneer in foregrounding material terms as a corrective in the study of religion, crediting Marx as crucial ancestor of this approach for his insight into the material basis of religion. The terms essayed in this book, considered under the title material dynamics, were selected by Chidester for the real, practical consequences they have had in the world, and were grouped under three sections: Categories, formations, and circulations. Under categories, Chidester challenges us to reconsider a number of basic analytical categories in the academic study of religion: The prioritization of ideas over matter in imperial studies of religion; the Durkheimian opposition between sacred and profane in light of popular culture in which anything can be made sacred by intensive interpretation and ritualization; sacred time and space as historically contingent constructs that entail exclusions, hierarchies and contestations of ownership; and the crucial importance of the destabilizing

Journal for the Study of Religion 31, 2 (2018) 1-6 1 Online ISSN 2413-3027; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a0 Johan M. Strijdom & Lee-Shae S. Scharnick-Udemans concept of incongruity, which enables us to not only rethink myth and ritual, particularly in colonial conditions, but all categories in the study of religion. Under formations, he insists that religion be studied in context, by embedding it within the cultural, economic, and political forces that have shaped religious formations and the academic study of religion: Capitalism as a material force has shaped religion, but also functions like a religion; imperialism, colonialism, and apartheid constituted material political and economic conditions that profoundly shaped and altered religious formations of the colonized and colonizers, but also contaminated the academic study of religion. If dominant and religious studies under these conditions have systematically dehumanized colonized people, the latter have simultaneously also been creative agents in their interactions with colonizers. Circulations, properly theorized, he argues, focus our analytical attention on material changes, discontinuities and disruptions in space and time, as we track religious mobility, for example, in Zulu neoshamanism spreading globally through dreams and technology (as extensions of the conventional senses), and in sacred objects of economic exchange, such as ‘fetishes’ and cargo crossing oceans, or Tupperware and Coca-Cola being appropriated globally. Maintaining that the sense of touch is probably the most fundamental sense in our time, Chidester shows how it mediates religion materially by caressing and embracing on the one hand and striking on the other hand. Reading through these chapters of the book, which were to a large extent previously published, but brought together in a particular way in Religion: Material dynamics, one is struck by numerous overlaps and intersections. The value of foregrounding a specific term, and giving it theoretical depth to analyze religious phenomena, has been proposed and experimented with by Chidester as a strategy to produce innovative or cutting- edge knowledge in the academic study of religion. Foregrounding one concept, though, has clearly not excluded the conscious exploration of its intersection with other concepts, as Chidester emphasizes in the Introduction1 to his

1 Chidester (2018:10) captures all of this particularly well in the following paragraph: ‘The material dynamics of categories, formations, and circulations reveal different dimensions of Marx’s rendering of the “spiritual intercourse” of human beings as an “efflux of their material condition”. Categories reveal historical contingencies in thinking about religion; formations reveal forces at work in the

2 Editorial Introduction selection of material keywords: It is in relating categories to formations, formations to circulations, circulations to categories, and in unexpected inversions of terms such as ‘economy of religion’ and ‘religion of economy’, that we might gain new perspectives in the study of religion and religions. Remarkable has been Chidester’s keen eye for the intersection of disciplines, notably sociology and anthropology, to analyze religious cases exemplifying a key concept. At stake, as he always emphasizes, is an understanding of what it means to be a human being in a particular place and time, critically foregrounding the contested power relations that are created, maintained and challenged by religion as a human construct that works its real effects in the world. When David Chidester moved from the United States to in the mid-1980s to take up a lectureship in comparative religious studies at the University of Cape Town, he soon realized that the violent context of apartheid demanded a reconsideration of his interest in the poetics of religion that he had valued so much during his studies and doctorate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the 1970s. From now on he would deliberately merge poetics and politics. He would retain his interest in the materiality of religion, but also increasingly informed by postcolonial critical theories, develop perspectives from a South African location within a global context. Chidester has received several awards for his work. Analyzing systemic violence, he published Salvation and suicide: An interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown in 1988, and in 1991, Shots in the streets: Violence and , which earned him an American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in Religious Studies and a University of Cape Town Book Award respectively. Developing a critical analysis of the history of religious studies from a South African location, he published Savage systems: Colonialism and comparative religion in Southern Africa in 1996, and in 2014, Empire of religion: Imperialism and comparative religion for which he again received respectively an American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in Religious Studies and a University of Cape

emergence of religious configurations; and circulations reveal the mobility of materiality pulsating through religion in motion. Each dimension provides openings for multidisciplinary engagements in the study of religion. They can also be related to each other in exploring the intersections of categories and formations, formations and circulations, and circulations and categories’.

3 Johan M. Strijdom & Lee-Shae S. Scharnick-Udemans

Town Book Award for its contribution to the decolonization of the academic study of religion. These awards are but a faint reflection of the contribution that David Chidester has made to the academic study of religion, as one can see from the extensive list of his publications that we have included at the end of this issue. The essays in this volume are presented to honor David Chidester for the innovative, surprising, and substantial contributions that he has made to the field of religious studies within the South African context and internationally. Each of the authors engages with an issue that has been of major concern in David’s work. As editors we have grouped these essays loosely under four sections. In the first section, Decoloniality, Race, and Frontiers, Abdulkader Tayob argues that the Western study of religion can be decolonized by considering the use of the term ‘religion’ by modern Islamic intellectuals; Federico Settler examines contested relations between objects and black bodies within African religious contexts and indigenous knowledge systems; and Birgit Meyer proposes that Chidester’s concept of the ‘frontier zone’ under colonial conditions may be productively employed to yield insights into contemporary European urban contexts of religious plurality as ‘new postcolonial frontier zones’. In the second section, Pop Culture, Fakes, and Plasticity, Kathryn Lofton engages with Chidester’s work to explore the connection between the study of colonialism and pop culture; Paul Christopher Johnson argues with reference to Chidester’s notion of ‘authentic fakes’ that the notions of ‘fake’ and ‘authentic’ are basic to the making of religion as well as the study of religion; and Asonzeh Ukah mobilizes the concept of ‘plasticity’ in Chidester to investigate the ‘material dynamics’ of a in within changing political, economic, and cultural contexts. In the third section, Senses and Media, Johan Strijdom compares and assesses Chidester’s analysis of the ‘senses’ (understood as the conventional senses and their metaphorical uses, visions, and dreams, and new media as extensions of the senses) in European and indigenous African religions as well as the imperial study of religion, while Lee Scharnick-Udemans evokes Chidester’s theory of ‘wild religion’ to elaborate an analysis of ‘wild media’ within the South African context, taking apartheid’s banning of television as the devil and more recent responses of viewers to the television program, Lucifer, as case studies.

4 Editorial Introduction

In the fourth section, African Indigenous Religion, African Christianities, and the Future of Religion, Rosalind Hackett appreciates openings that Chidester’s Wild religion (2012) creates for studying indigenous African religions in innovative ways. Sibusiso Masondo underlines the irony that while Christian missions were meant to be an instrument of European imperialism to civilize ‘savage tribes’, they created by means of their missionary schools African intellectuals, who would cultivate an ideology of African nationalism and unity in the interest of the liberation of the colonized. Jonathan Jansen shows how Christian beliefs of the mission-educated Oliver Tambo provided his deepest motivation to work, as prominent leader of the African National Congress, to bring about a just political system in South Africa. Martin Prozesky, drawing on Chidester’s work, engages the divergent answers of two atheists to the question as to whether religion has a future, arguing that the divergence is due to their different views of what the term ‘religion’ refers to. In the concluding appreciation, Ed Linenthal adds a personal note in which he celebrates a history of friendship, but also of professional collaboration. Linenthal echoes sentiments that can be observed throughout the contributions. The fondness with which many of the authors recall encounters with David – both personal and professional – hints at a legacy for which there is sadly no accolade in the academy. However, as can be discerned from this volume of essays, David’s generosity, humor, and kindness, as friend, colleague, and mentor, are as appreciated and treasured as his intellectual contributions. We thank the contributors for their articles, the peer-reviewers for their constructive comments, and our copy-editor, Willem Oliver, for his meticulous work. We also thank the executive committee of the Association for the Study of Religion in Southern Africa, of which David was the president for many years, for entrusting us to bring this Festschrift to fruition. The product, we think, is a gift worthy of honoring a great intellectual. The list of publications at the end of this Festschrift gives an indication of the breadth and scope of Chidester’s intellectual journey. We thank David for providing us with this list. Finally, and most importantly, we wish David a productive retirement, which we hope will give him the opening to surprise us with even more innovative insights.

5 Johan M. Strijdom & Lee-Shae S. Scharnick-Udemans

References Chidester, D. 1988. Salvation and suicide: An interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chidester, D. 1991. Shots in the streets: Violence and religion in South Africa. Boston: Beacon Press. Chidester, D. 1996. Savage systems: Colonialism and comparative religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Chidester, D. 2012. Wild religion: Tracking the sacred in South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chidester, D. 2014. Empire of religion: Imperialism and comparative religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chidester, D. 2018. Religion: Material dynamics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Johan M. Strijdom Religious Studies University of South Africa [email protected]; [email protected]

Lee-Shae S. Scharnick-Udemans Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice University of the Western Cape [email protected]

6

Decolonizing the Study of Religions: Muslim Intellectuals and the Enlightenment Project of Religious Studies

Abdulkader Tayob [email protected]

Abstract The term ‘religion’ as a discursive term occupies a dominant, but neglected feature of Muslim intellectual reflections since the 19th century. Intellectuals from Muḥammad ʿAbduh (he died in 1905) to recent scholars like Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd (he died in 2010) have used religion as a critical term to develop a critique of tradition and modernity, and a strategy for renewal. This discourse may be compared with the study of religion since the 19th century that has also used religion to develop a perspective on the religious history of humankind. In this contribution, I argue that the two intellectual traditions that have employed religion – Kantian and the modern Islamic – point to very different ways of relating to the world, to the self and the ‘other’, and to the political condition of modernity. Rather than using the hegemonic Western tradition to make a judgment on the modern Islamic, I use the latter to point to the former’s peculiar proclivities. Using the modern tradition among Muslim intellectuals, I invite an inquiry into both from each other’s positions.

Keywords: Islamic studies, Islamic modernism, Islamic reform, religious studies, religion, Talal Asad, postcolonial, decolonial

Journal for the Study of Religion 31, 2 (2018) 7-35 7 Online ISSN 2413-3027; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a1 Abdulkader Tayob

Introduction Universities in South Africa and elsewhere have been called to revisit the colonial and imperial foundations of their disciplines and methods. Adopting the term ‘decolonial’ as opposed to ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’, students and scholars have demanded that universities detach themselves from the assumptions, practices, and values of Western scholarship (Grosfoguel 2011; Nakata, Nakata, Keech & Bolt 2012; Mignolo 2007). The contribution of postcolonial scholarship from the likes of Edward Said, Giyatri Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, and many others has been recognized and sometimes applauded its critical rejoinder to the colonial roots of the social sciences and humanities. However, it also stands accused for not completely overturning the colonial epistemological framework. Generally, the postcolonials are accused of using Western norms and terms to deconstruct dominant narratives. Foucault, Derrida, and Gramsci stand central in these critical reflections (Grosfoguel 2011; Mignolo 2007). In spite of themselves, they remain trapped – more or less – in the West’s hegemonic intellectual universe. This blanket condemnation cannot be sustained, and a closer look at the longer history of anti-colonial intellectual movements may offer unexpected insights. Studies on these earlier traditions need not focus on the dominant colonial narrative that always hovers in the foreground, but at the intellectual gestures of resistance and construction that traced a different intellectual history from the West. Assigning all previous anti-colonial traditions to the domain of the colonizer erases the contribution and value of the colonized and the subjugated. Such neglect reaffirms and confirms a deep colonial habit that the colonized may not speak as Spivak reminds us in her seminal essay (Spivak 2006). It assumes that scholars on the periphery of the colonial and postcolonial worlds were only reproducing the dominant tropes of the center. Taking seriously previous acts of resistance, intellectual or otherwise, brings the colonized and subjugated to the center of this decolonial moment. In this contribution, I revisit the religious tradition of reform (tajdīd) or awakening (nahḍah) that was launched in the 19th century in various Muslim societies across the globe. I argue that it turned into a sustained intellectual project to rebuild and create a new intellectual discourse of between the past and the present. The focus of this essay rests on religious discourse, arguing that it was a creative construction of tajdīd (renewal, reform) with a

8 Decolonizing the Study of Religions redefinition of religion and its linguistic referents. Using case studies from Muḥammad ʿAbduh and Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd, I argue that this intellectual reconstruction was founded on a discourse of religion (dīn). Such a discourse probed into the essence of religion and its functions, its meaning, its location in public and private life, and sometimes its distinction from the secular. The Islamic reformist discourse was an attempt to rethink the origin, meaning, functions, and language of religion for Islam and . Moreover, its intellectual and political interests may be usefully compared and highlighted with its Western counterpart that was emerging simultaneously in Europe, and that has since become known as religious studies, the history of religions, comparative religions, or sometimes the science of religion.

Religious studies in postmodern postcolonial perspectives In order to consider this religious renewal as an intellectual discourse, I want to turn to the discourse of religious studies which, since the last quarter of the 20th century, has been the focus of critical scholarship. Like other disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences, the study of religions has undergone a postmodern and a postcolonial critique of its origins, methods, and purposes. Some have focused on the theological proclivities that lurk in the study of religions, while others have pointed to its imperial and colonial collusion. These critical perspectives have built on Michel Foucault’s deconstruction of the modernist project1. They have unsettled the foundations of the discipline of religious studies, by turning it into an object of analysis. Where previously the ‘science’ of religious studies would be used to study a religious movement such as Islamic modernism, it can now occupy a position alongside it as a discourse that is subject to similar scrutiny and analysis. Jonathan Smith stands out as an early critic of the discipline. Some of his earlier remarks question the ontology of the sacred and the profane assumed in the discipline. While scholars of religion were assuming that the sacred and profane existed in the world inhabited by religious traditions, Smith argued that both were created through religious beliefs, texts, and practices (Smith

1 Using a genealogical approach that he developed from Nietzsche, Foucault pointed to the unthought and unexpected outcomes of what started off as rational and objective quests to understand the human condition (Foucault 1977).

9 Abdulkader Tayob

1978:97). While Eliade was discovering the mechanics of the sacred and profane, Smith was pointing to their creation through practices. Ritual, for example, was not a way to encounter an existing sacred, but it

represents the creation of a controlled environment where the variables…of ordinary life may be displaced precisely because they are felt to be so overwhelmingly present and powerful. Ritual is a means of performing the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are in such a way that this ritualized perfection is recollected in the ordinary, uncontrolled, course of things (Smith 1980:63).

Ritual was creating a classification of what is and what ought to be. For Smith, on the contrary, ‘there is nothing that is inherently sacred or profane. These are not substantive categories, but rather situational or relational categories, mobile boundaries which shift according to the map being employed. There is nothing that is sacred in itself, only things sacred in relation’ (Smith 1982:55). Smith uses a Saussurian or postmodernist framework to point to the arbitrary connection between the signifier (ritual, religion, etc.) and its signification (the sacred). These signifiers were social and cultural processes and productions. From this awareness that religions were creatively engaged in this ordering. It was a short step to reconsidering the role played by religion in the study of religions. Smith argued that the category ‘religion’ was invented to provide a useful service. The study of religions was engaged in a discursive construction of a category:

‘Religion’ is not a native term; it is a term created by scholars for their intellectual purposes and therefore is theirs to define. It is a second- order, generic concept that plays the same role in establishing a disciplinary horizon that a concept such as ‘language’ plays in linguistics or ‘culture’ plays in anthropology (Smith 1998:269).

There was no platonic-like ‘idea’ called ‘religion’, but a category imagined, created, and utilized by scholars of religions to identify and interpret phenomena. There was no underlying reality called ‘religion’ with a structure, function, and essence waiting to be discovered. The assumption that such a term refers to a reality, vague or idealized, is misguided. This critique was a

10 Decolonizing the Study of Religions deconstructive assault on the project of religious studies that aim to represent religions in particular, and religion in general. According to Capps, the seeds of this modernist framework were sown by Immanuel Kant when he proposed an a priori distinction between natural and revealed religions. Revealed religion was the religion represented in the Bible and other similar world religions, while natural religion was the idealized religion rooted in morality. Historical religions more or less reflected this idealized Kantian noumenon (Capps 1995:7). In the 19th century, the study of religions came to maturity when liberal Protestant theologians and their detractors used this Kantian framework to study religions in history and society. Those more committed to found their own religion to match the noumenon of natural religion that Kant posited. The natural religion of Kant became an idealized Christianity or an idealized religion. This trend reached its high point with Mircea Eliade in the 20th century (Capps 1995:117- 146). Those who were not inclined to theology, approached religion with a different set of questions. They followed functionalist questions on the effect of religions, its distinctive language, or its implications in politics and economics (Capps 1995:158, 209), but they always searched for recurring patterns and styles that characterize rituals, myths, and beliefs. Whether it was the ideal types of Weber or the styles of aesthetics more recently dominating the discipline, an underlying conception of religion (noumenon) with distinctive patterns and styles was not too far from the surface. The Kantian idea of the noumenon was becoming increasingly difficult to identify, but it remained in the background. It is not by accident that the Journal of the International Association for the Study of Religions, founded in 1954, is called Numen, meaning ‘a spiritual force or influence often identified with a natural object, phenomenon, or place’ (Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2018). The journal name belies the deep assumption of the discipline. In a slightly different critique of this history, Murphy argues that the study of religion was tracking the Hegelian fulfilment of the spirit (Murphy 2014:#9584). Whether the study of religion can be traced to Kant as Capps suggested, or Hegel, the argument of Jonathan Smith that religion as a general category or concept was assumed and invented for the discipline, is clear. Smith’s criticism is a reminder of this ghost of Kant and Hegel in the work of 19th- and 20th-century scholars of religion.

11 Abdulkader Tayob

Like other modernist inventions, religion belongs to the fertile imagination of modernist scholars, but in the case of the study of religions, the spirit of this critical mood in the discipline has been particularly directed against the theological proclivities that lurk in the discipline. The critical reflections of Smith were used to unmask this theology, without always recognizing its modernist Kantian or Hegelian roots. In some of the scholarship, old and new theologies became the target, and the Western modernist invention of religion deflected from direct criticism. Donald Wiebe and Russel McCutcheon stand out in this line of inquiry. Wiebe focuses his attention on the theology that undermines the discipline of the study of religion – from some of its eminent founders to current leaders (Wiebe 1991; 1994a; 1994b). He sometimes waxes nostalgic that the earliest founders of the discipline had been overturned by closet theologians who undermine the scientific basis of the discipline. McCutcheon follows a similar line of argument, focusing his energy on the fact that such a theology finds its way into the discipline by emphasizing that religion is unique (sui generis) and cannot be explained by other social facts and developments (McCutcheon 1995:302; 1997). Neither of these scholars considers the postmodernist criticism of positivism and modernity, nor do they seriously question the location and dominance of the discipline in Western, secular countries. In a rare admission that the terms used in religions originate in the West and from Christianity, McCutcheon brushed aside this important point (McCutcheon 1995:300). Committed to explanatory frameworks for the human and social sciences, Wiebe and McCutcheon belie a teleology that Western and non- Western scholars will eventually reach emancipation and enlightenment. This anti-theological spirit merits critical reflection for its discursive place in religious studies. The study of religion maintains a special relationship with theology, particularly Christian theology. The discipline emerged in Europe within theological faculties, from which it has tried in vain to distance itself. The theological shadow runs quite deep and may even be lurking in the critical scholarship that regularly announces its opposition to it. Apart from Wiebe and McCutcheon who maintain the boundaries of the discipline against theological incursions, we may compare Jonathan Smith’s argument that religion is not a native category with a similar argument first made by Wilfred Smith in the study of religion twenty years earlier, and whose Christian theological preoccupations are well known. Wilfred Smith argues in his influential The meaning and end of religion that religion as a reified object of

12 Decolonizing the Study of Religions study should be discarded in favor of religiosity (Smith 1962). Like Jonathan Smith, he too argues that religion was an invention of the study of religion, but he argues on theological grounds that the term prevented scholars from grasping the deep experience of religious people. For Wilfred Smith, religiosity was real and worthy of scholarly attention. He was not taking a postmodernist approach, but a theological one indebted to Paul Tillich and eventually to Kant and Protestantism (cf. Capps 1995:289). The essence of religion lay not in a tradition, but a feeling or experience. Jonathan Smith also rejects its reality but argues that it was an invention useful for scholars of religion. The close affinity between a Protestant theologian and a critique may not be as coincidental as it sounds. The postmodernist and theological Smiths may be distinguished from postcolonial scholars who have also recognized the invention of religion as an analytical category but went further by showing how the category was native to the history of the West. Talal Asad has taken the lead in this direction. Following the genealogy of religion, he shows how religion as a practice and category was transformed over a period of time in the church, in Western judicial thinking, and in the academic study of religions (Asad 1993). In a later book, he turns attention to the discursive construction of the secular. Here he shows how the idea of religion in the discourse of the modern state is vital to the construction of a secular framework and ethos. Religion and the secular are co-created in the modern academy and the modern state: ‘Religion has been part of the restructuration of practical times and spaces, a re-articulation of practical knowledges and powers, of subjective behaviors, sensibilities, needs, and expectations in modernity’ (Asad 2001b:221). Asad points to the discursive power of religion in Western societies, and unlike the Smiths and others, he turns his attention to the role played by the discipline in the history of Europe. Asad’s critical insight on the modern state’s politics of religion-making has been shown in other colonial and post- colonial encounters (Dressler & Mandair 2011; Dubuisson & Sayers 2003; King 1999)2.

2 A similar, but not postcolonial approach is evident in the work of Hans Kippenberg who has shown how religion, constituted in the study of religion as a category, was part of broader political and intellectual movements in Europe (Kippenberg 1983; 2000; 1994).

13 Abdulkader Tayob

At the University of Cape Town, David Chidester went beyond the academy and the history of the West. In a series of books, he has shown how religion as a term was reproduced in the structures set up by the modern and postcolonial modern state. He shows how such definitions were used on the colonial and imperial frontiers. The theories formulated by scholars to understand religions were applied in projects of subjugation and extermination. The systems of classification of the self and the ‘other’ were not neutral signifiers, but applied with violence and brutality in colonial wars of conquest and domination (Chidester 2004; 1996; 2014). Religion as a term may have been invented by scholars, but it was not completely dislocated from the political, religious, and social histories in which scholars operated. This brief review shows that the study of religions has a history in the Enlightenment project, with a particular focus on renewing or inventing a Christian liberal and Protestant theology. A more secular approach to the study of religions that focuses attention on patterns and contours of the religious has not strayed too far from its Kantian and Hegelian roots (exceptions include Murphy 2014; Raschke 2012). There has been an equally persistent entanglement with Christian theology that must be excised, making this feature a part of the discipline. Moreover, the discipline thrived on the representation of the ‘other’ that merged with national and colonial interests. All these were part of an allegedly neutral, or what Strenski as late as 2015 calls in his revised textbook, a ‘curiosity’ about religion, its elements, and its effects (Strenski 2015:171). Postmodern and postcolonial scholarship has unmasked this curiosity. With this background, it becomes difficult to uncritically use the terms and methods of the discipline without a great deal of circumspection. In an essay titled Beyond religious studies?, Chidester suggests a Hegelian stance of Aufhebung, ‘cancelling and keeping, disposing and transposing’ (Chidester 2017:75). Rather than holding on the coattails of this and other German and Western ancestors, I suggest that we start looking at the study of religions as an intellectual discourse in other cultural, historical, and political contexts. We should turn more seriously to the study of religion from the vantage point of the colonized, rather than restrict ourselves to merely reforming and refining the dominant discourse in order to continue objectifying religious movements and phenomena elsewhere. In this essay, I begin with the discursive tradition launched by Muslim intellectuals and how they construct a discipline of religion with very different goals and effects.

14 Decolonizing the Study of Religions

What is Islamic modernism or Islamic reform? Before the rise of fundamentalism and radicalism, the scholarly gaze was very much locked on to the development of what was generally called Islamic modernism. There are some insightful sociological studies conducted on its rise and its emergence among new social groups produced by colonialism and capitalism. These include the work of Schulze, Abaza, Moaddel, and Weissman who follow a classic Weberian approach that matches religious developments to new social groups (Weismann 2001; Schulze 2000; Moaddel 2001; Moaddel & Talattof 2000). My interest lies in the ideas produced in Islamic modernism, and their contribution to an intellectual discourse of Islam. Islamic modernism as an intellectual movement has not been given much credit. As Masud and Salvatore concludes, Western scholarship for the most part turned ‘around the key theme of Islam’s inherent deficit in coping with…modernity’ (Masud & Salvatore 2009:50). However, since the 1980s, the work of Talal Asad has opened a space to consider the discursive nature of religion in general, and Islamic in particular. Applying a discursive approach to Muslim intellectual labor, though, has not been uniform. Asad and those who followed him closely have used the idea of a discursive tradition to highlight the difference between an Islamic discourse and a western secular discourse of modernity. A strong binary logic informs their work, with an unfortunate judgment that Islamic modernism does not belong to a Muslim discourse. There are also others who have used Asad’s insights to point to transformations in the Muslim discourse and have been thus more accommodating to Islamic modernism. There is a distinct difference in the two readings, their identification, and representation of a modern Islamic intellectual discourse. Mahmood and Hirschkind have marked what may be called a dominant reading of Asad which casts Islamic modernism as a Western cultural and imperial invasion. In their influential studies on piety movements, they have represented Islamic discourses as the antithesis of Western discourses of the self and ethics respectively (Hirschkind 2006; Mahmood 2005). Mahmood argues that the women’s mosque movement in Egypt cannot be studied through the assumptions of a Kantian framework of freedom and agency. Using the idea of an embodied ethical tradition, she shows how piety was cultivated and developed without the need or necessity of freedom, agency, and choice. She particularly rejects the idea of reading resistance in

15 Abdulkader Tayob women’s religious practices as many feminists have argued (Mahmood 2005:23; El Guindi 1981; Macleod 1991). Hirschkind follows a similar method in identifying ethical practices through listening to and engaging with popular sermons through cassettes and radio broadcasts. He also identifies an ethical discourse of engaging, listening, and correcting the self. While some level of agency is admitted in the discourse identified by Hirschkind, he too concludes that the movement was not ‘simply a modernizing turn toward an increasingly individualized form of rational piety or as the deployment of religion for the task of consolidating a national culture’ (Hirschkind 2001:4). He believes that the discourse ‘need[s] to be analyzed in terms of a particular articulation of personal and political virtue within contemporary Islamic discourse’ (Hirschkind 2001:4). Clearly, Mahmood and Hirschkind are privileging insider (emic) terms to represent a unique non-Western Islamic discourse. More can be said of Mahmood and Hirschkind’s representation of Islamic discourse, but I find it more important to focus on their representation of Islamic modernism. In a highly cited work, Mahmood describes the Islamic modernism of Abū Zayd and his teacher Ḥasan Ḥanafī as nothing but an echo of imperial American hegemony (Mahmood 2006:337). Much earlier, Hirschkind also attempted an analysis of Abū Zayd’s work in comparison with his Islamist adversaries in a telling title Hermeneutics or heresy. Using the Islamic discourse of his detractors as a yardstick, Hirschkind concludes that Abū Zayd’s ideas are the product of a Western intellectual hegemony (Hirschkind 1995). One may find echoes of this judgment of so-called Muslim modernists in some of the essays written by Asad on modern Islamic discourses. In his path-breaking book, Genealogies of religion: Discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam, Asad discusses the criticisms directed at the Saudi government when it invited American troops to defend the Kingdom during the 1992 Gulf war. He singles out young religious scholars (ʿulamāʾ) who used the discourse of naṣīḥa to direct a ‘morally corrective criticism’ at the king (Asad 1993:214). As sound advice, naṣīḥa was part of the ‘Islamic tradition’ and the ‘ground on which that reasoning takes place’ (Asad 1993:236). He also mentions what he calls Western-educated moderns who opposed the state but expressed their concern in private or directly to some of the princes. Asad, however, adds that ‘they do not characterize their criticism in terms of the Islamic concept of naṣīḥah’ (Asad 1993:222 note 45). He seems to include only religious scholars as participants in an Islamic discourse, and ignores the historical role played by non-religious intellectuals

16 Decolonizing the Study of Religions such as poets, writers, mystics, and philosophers who acted as advisors to Caliphs, Sultans, and military leaders. In another essay on the transformation of the Sharīʿah in Egyptian law courts, Asad discusses the role of Islamic modernists like Muhammad ʿAbduh and Ahmad Safwat in this reformulation. I will discuss ʿAbduh below. Asad identifies Safwat as ‘a British-trained lawyer and advocate of sharia reform, who, like other evolutionary Victorian thinkers, saw the Qur’an as an archaic religious text that mixed together moral and legal rules, rules whose real significance must be identified by a historical teleology’ (Asad 2001a:10). This characterization of Safwat places him outside an Islamic discourse as demarcated by Asad. ʿAbduh, in Asad’s view, was not completely secularized due to his earlier exposure to Sufism. In general, though, Asad recognizes the contribution of modernist Muslims only in their support of and participation in ‘secular politics’. This representation of Islamic discourse reserves the right of judgment on the authenticity of Islamic modernist ideas, in favor of Islamist and piety discourses that maintained a theological framework that seemed to match the past and oppose the West. In spite of Asad’s explicit caution that voices of dissent should not be avoided in the study of Islam, he and his readers have done exactly that (Asad 1986:16). One can read Asad different from himself, taking a significant cue from his seminal essay: ‘An anthropology of Islam will therefore seek to understand the historical conditions that enable the production and maintenance of specific discursive traditions, or their transformation – and the efforts of practitioners to achieve coherence’ (Asad 1986:17; emphasis added). Also citing Asad, Armando Salvatore argues that a modern Islamic project, which includes both modernists and Islamists, was produced in conversation with Western interlocutors. He argues for an Islamic modernity that parallels and intersects with European modernity (Salvatore 1997). In numerous publications, John Bowen has found inspiration in Talal Asad for his study of Muslim discourses in local contexts (Indonesia and France) and in their encounter with modernity (Bowen 1987; 1989; 1993; 2001; 2004). Working on the reformist projects of the 18th-century Muḥammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb and the 19th/20th-century Muḥammad ʿAbduh, Samira Hajj also follows Asad and shows the transformation of an Islamic discourse of revival and reform (Haj 2009). She shows that ʿAbduh, in contrast to Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, sets up the framework for an Islamic modernity that remains committed to its historical discursive framework. In her study of more conservative trends in Egypt at the end of the 20th century, Salwa Ismail pays close attention to an

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Islamic discourse informed by political and class interests (Salwa 2003). All these studies have not excluded modernist contributions to a Muslim discourse of religion that is open to change. The impact of Asad has been influential in introducing a postcolonial critique in the study of Islam. It offers a window of opportunity to approach Islamic modernism, not as an object of study, but a discursive tradition in its own right. There is, however, a divergence in reading Asad, between those who value the role of Islamic modernists in an Islamic discourse, and those who see them as alien interlopers who have rejected the foundation and essence of the discourse. Asad himself and those who follow him closely represent Islamic discourse as the antithesis of a Western discourse of modernity, but there are scholars who appreciate the longer history of Islam, and try to identify Islamic modernity as a style of reasoning or response that is embedded in the history of Islam (cf. Voll 1983; 1982; Hoebink 1998). They also pay close attention to the transformation in the Muslim discourse.

Islamic modernism as an intellectual discourse I propose that we go beyond the metaphor of an encounter to appreciate the intellectual labor of modernist Muslims. Islamic modernism is not simply an uncritical or unconscious adoption of some modern, Western ideas that brushed off on those who read a book, studied in the West or met some Western intellectuals. They are reflexively and consciously creating definitions and categories of religion and the religious that are then applied to Islam and Muslims in the past and the present. They are doing what social scientists think is their exclusive preserve. Like other postcolonials, Asad questions the validity of using standard tropes and theories developed in the study of Islam in anthropology:

[O]ne’s conception of religion determines the kinds of questions one thinks are askable and worth asking. But far too few would-be anthropologists of Islam pay this matter serious attention. Instead, they often draw indiscriminately on ideas from the writings of the great sociologists (e.g., Marx, Weber, Durkheim) in order to describe forms of Islam, and the result is not always consistent (Asad 1986:12).

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Later in his essay he makes a more emphatic point when writing on how argument is written out in the study of an Islamic tradition:

In their representation of ‘Islamic tradition’, Orientalists and anthropologists have often marginalized the place of argument and reasoning surrounding traditional practices. Argument is generally represented as a symptom of ‘the tradition in crisis’…But these contrasts and equations are themselves the work of a historical motivation, manifest in Edmund Burke’s ideological opposition between ‘tradition’ and ‘reason’, an opposition which was elaborated by the conservative theorists who followed him, and introduced into sociology by Weber (Asad 1986:16).

Asad asks scholars of Islam and religions in general to be self-critical of the terms used from Christianity and the history of the West. These terms have a particular history which should not be uncritically applied to other cultures and traditions. He asks anthropologists, particularly scholars based in Western academies, to be conscious of the definitions of religion that they assume, and then use to posit representations. Asad introduces himself to anthropologists and social scientists in general, asking them to be more vigilant in their appraisals and representation. In an extensive review of critical scholarship that addresses the Western provenance of the terms in the study of religions, McCutcheon acknowledges this problem raised by Asad and Ninian Smart. Like most critical scholars, McCutcheon is unable to stray beyond the Western academy (McCutcheon 1995:290, 300). The fact is that Muslim modernists since the 19th century have created and defined terms to analyze, classify, and make judgments. It happens that they have used the very term used in the Western academic study of religions. Many a scholar of Islam, who is self-consciously adopting a definition of religion as Asad advises, would come across many a Muslim intellectual doing the same. They will find that they have used religion to launch and develop a discipline of Islamic modernism, or what I would prefer to call, Islamic reform. Recognizing this intellectual labor suggests that we appreciate a discourse of religion among Muslim reformists who are usually only studied as objects for analysis. Rather than merely identifying Islamic modernists as imperfect moderns, hybrids between Islam and the West, or heretics, I turn to them as developers and participants of a discourse on religion.

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Apart from scholars like Salvatore (1997) and Carool Kersten (2011), most studies on Islam ignore the self-reflexive and critical work done by Muslim intellectuals. A discourse of Islamic reform, led by reflections and inventions of religion and the religious as discursive constructions, helps their creators to produce new political and religious subjects, critique existing traditions, and chart new futures. It is a discourse that draws on the ideas of religion and reform that predates modernity. The word for religion and its plural exists in the intellectual history of Islam, and is extensively discussed in premodern theological, philosophical, and mystical works. From the 19th century, however, it is redefined and rethought, and plays a constitutive role in discussions and debates among Muslim scholars and intellectuals.

Modern Islamic reform: A discourse on religion I would like to present two contributors to this intellectual discourse. The first one comes from the 19th century in the exchange between Jamāl al-Dīn al- Afghānī and Muḥammad ʿAbduh on the one side, and Ernest Renan and a French Foreign Minister, Gabriel Hanotaux, on the other. Al-Afghānī and ʿAbduh are considered to be the founders of an Arab Islamic reformism and their impact and influence spread far into the 20th century. Focusing only on ʿAbduh’s writings in this exchange, I will show how he employs religion as a discursive term to identify Islam, criticize colonial practices, and imagine a different future for Egyptians and Muslims. My second example comes from the work of Naṣr Abū Zayd, where I will show how he uses the category of religion to criticize religious discourse and to fashion a new way of reading the Qur’an. Born in a peasant family in Lower Egypt in 1849, ʿAbduh was already looking for something better than the traditional education he was exposed to in Tanta. An uncle directed him to Sufism and then to the emerging modern sciences. Al-Afghānī’s visit to Egypt in 1872 had a profound personal and intellectual effect on him. In his first book written in 1874, Risālat al-Wāridāt, ʿAbduh describes al-Afghānī as his spiritual mentor. He completed his studies at Azhar, and took a teaching position for a short while. He was soon embroiled in the political upheavals of the day. Suspected of involvement in the anti- colonial revolt of Ahmad ʿUrabi Pasha (1879-1882), he was banished from

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Egypt. He spent a short time in Paris with al-Afghānī where they formed an organization called al-ʿUrwat al-wuthqā and published a newspaper under the same name. The organization and newspaper did not last very long, and ʿAbduh soon headed to Beirut to continue a career more directly engaged in teaching and law. He gave a series of lectures on theology which were later published as Risālat al-tawḥīd (The epistle of the unity of God – ʿAbduh 1368). In 1889, ʿAbduh was allowed to return to Cairo, and given a number of important juridical and teaching posts. His reformism and moderation seemed to have been appreciated by the Khedive of Egypt and his British overseers. Until his death in 1905, ʿAbduh devoted himself to the reform of education, religion, and law. It seems that he reconciled himself to colonial power, but still maintained to oppose foreign rule. In 1897, the well-known Damascene scholar and admirer of ʿAbduh and al-Afghānī, Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā, arrived in Cairo in order to begin a journal for reformist Islamic thought. The journal, al-Manār, began publishing in 1898 and continued until 1940. The articles in the first issues were mainly written by ʿAbduh. His various writings have established an intellectual foundation for Islamic reform. ʿAbduh defines religion as an innate, human quality that is difficult to erase from the human constitution and from human experience: ‘Dīn (religion) is a divine imprint (wadʿ ilāhī), its distinguishing mark and motivation for humanity’ (ʿAbduh 1989:15).

It is as if the human being, when he was a pure slate, the first to draw on him was religion, which then affected his deeds…It rarely happens that one rejecting his religion can ever escape its effects – it remains with him like the mark of a wound on the skin after it has been healed (ʿAbduh 1989:15).

Religion is both innate and experiential. It is given by God but experienced by humans in a deeply profound way. The negative and long-lasting impact of religion is noteworthy in ʿAbduh’s characterization. He adds two other aspects of religion that seems to come directly from Islamic theology: ‘Rational minds learn it from the prophets, and so it is acquired thus by those who do not receive revelation’ (ʿAbduh 1989:15); and the ‘sending (mission) of Prophets…is one of the perfections (mutammimāt) of human existence and among (the) important needs for his subsistence’ (ʿAbduh 1368:10794).

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Reason and prophets play an important role in the formation and perpetuation of religion. For ʿAbduh, they confirm the value of religion. The foundations of religion in creation, experience, prophecy, and reason could not be dissociated from its social value. Reason and religion, when they go together, produce progress:

Religion is that through which reason expands knowledge, and spreads over the world; and reaches the higher skies; (it aids reason) to ponder the signs of God, and to discover the secrets of his creation; or to derive his laws. All the sciences are pastures for minds to reap from them what they desire, and to reach pleasure to the extent that they like. But when religion stops, and absolute certainty takes over, then knowledge stops and its wind dies down. And this does not happen all at once, but follows the logic of history (ʿAbduh 1989:160).

Religion supports reason and development, but religion without reason leads to retrogression. Religion may also lead to chaos and destruction when abused for political ends, as it happened in the history of Islam, but ʿAbduh did not miss the abuse of religion in colonial projects:

I have mentioned religion among the elements of power because Mr. Hanotaux does not deny that Europe depends on religion for the politics of colonization. That the missionaries and religious associations are among the most important tools it has to prepare people to accept its authority when it suits them, and to prepare them to tolerate the power that bears upon them and envelopes them (ʿAbduh 1989:86).

Religion, reason, and social value are not too far from each other in ʿAbduh’s reflections. He develops this relationship between religion and progress more clearly in his opposition to a thesis promoted by Ernest Renan. Renan argues that Aryan religion promotes progress and civilization while Semitic civilizations and religions do the opposite. In response, ʿAbduh considers Aryan religion to be the root cause of the decline of society. He argues that religion as articulated in Semitic civilization was conducive to progress and development. ʿAbduh lies the blame for the decline of Muslims on non-Arabs and non-Semites for steering its simple Semitic roots towards an Aryan

22 Decolonizing the Study of Religions religion, but he is not always consistent, as he also produces counter-examples in the history of Buddhists (Aryan) and the Phoenicians (Semites) that contradict the value of this line of reasoning (ʿAbduh 1989:69). He is perhaps aware that the simple one-on-one relation between a religion and progress is difficult to prove conclusively. This is a very short summary of ʿAbduh’s ideas, but sufficient to show how he uses the idea of religion to think about the malaise of Muslim societies, the power of religion to effect change, and the complexities of such an approach. The discourse of religion in ʿAbduh creates a vision of the past, the present, and possible future. He thinks about Islam through the concept and definition of religion. This value of Islam as a social good became very common among large groups of Muslims in the 20th century. I now turn to Naṣr Abū Zayd who flourished one hundred years after ʿAbduh. Abū Zayd began writing on the Qur’an, commentary, and linguistics in the 1980s, and continued unabated until he passed away in 2010. He catapulted into the public sphere when his promotion to professorship was contested at Cairo University in 1993. When this attempt to block his promotion failed, his opponents approached the Egyptian courts to annul his marriage on the grounds that his work constituted apostacy. As that was a time when outspoken thinkers were targeted by assassins, Abū Zayd was forced into exile. He was critical of both the government and the religious groups in Egypt, which he presented in numerous articles, public lectures, and essays. He lived the next period of productive life in the Netherlands but was always engaged with scholars throughout the Muslim world (Abū Zayd 2001). There are two outstanding themes in Abū Zayd’s work, and religion stands out in both of them. He approaches the study of Islam through the linguistic and discursive trends that dominated the social sciences in the 1980s. I have found neither Asad nor Foucault in his work, but rather Ferdinand de Saussure (he died in 1913) on his theory of language. Abū Zayd embraces the distinction between the langue and parole in the working of a language – the first referring to the structure of a language and the second to its usage. The first theme in his work lies in identifying the discourse (langue) of the Qur’an – the semantic system that makes possible meaning of the text in its particular context. He calls this discourse of the first foundational texts of Islam its dīn. His second theme lies in the identification of the parole of the Qur’an in history. Dīn refers to a set of texts that appeared in history, and the Qur’an is its most prominent representative (Abū Zayd 1994:197). According to him, the

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Qur’an is a discourse to be read in the context and language of its time. He argues that not only is its meaning framed by Arab culture, but also by the experiences of the Prophet Muhammad:

The Qur’an as a mode of communication between God and man teaches us something more beyond ‘law’ and ‘politics’ in the narrow sense of the two terms. It teaches us that the literal interpretation means that we lock the Word of God in the moment of its historical annunciation. Put differently, we are taught to limit the meaning of the Qur’an to the first phase of its historical construction (Abū Zayd 2000:15).

Abū Zayd does not hereby argue that the Qur’an offers no fundamental values for its readers, or that the text is open to any reading. As an illustration of this subtle point, we may turn to an essay that he has written on justice in the Qur’an. He recognizes the particular meaning of justice in many verses but turns the attention to what he calls the ‘foundations’ of religion rooted in the covenant between God and humanity and in the innate nature of the human constitution (fitrah). He argues that justice, which for him means a careful and delicate balance, is central to the message of the Qur’an. It is, in other words, an essential meaning. Through the discourse of the Qur’an, human beings are reminded of this value. But the form in which justice takes shape in society, changes. A reading of the Qur’an in context therefore leads to a value and an appreciation of its contextual application. Justice as a value emerges in the discourse of dīn (Abū Zayd 2001). Is there a set of eternal values in the Qur’an? Sometimes it appears that this is so in Abū Zayd’s research, but he is aware of this problem in light of the hermeneutical framework he has adopted for his work. He does not forget the ideology at work in the reading of a book, including his own reading of the Qur’an (Abū Zayd 1988). In a comparative study of Qasim Amin and Tahir al- Haddad, Abū Zayd categorically rejects this possibility: ‘[T]he essence of Islam is not an immutable given but is one that is constantly subject to inference and to rediscovery in tandem with the growth and development of human consciousness’ (Abū Zayd 1999:219). One should therefore search for values, but they are not immutable and permanent, they are revealed in the act of reading. On this particular value of justice, Abū Zayd has also developed an argument first made by the Pakistani

24 Decolonizing the Study of Religions intellectual, Fazlur Rahman. For the latter, Qur’anic values are immutable while the contexts change (Rahman 1979:39). As Abū Zayd is suggesting that the deeper values themselves may change, he is treading a fine balance between a deep meaning and the effect that readers have on that change. Taking these statements all together, I am showing a discursive strategy in Abū Zayd working with religion and its values and essence, on questions of contexts, permanence, and change. For the second theme in his work, Abū Zayd makes a distinction between the values that he reads in the Qur’an in its first ‘annunciation’, and a critical stand that he expects from contemporary readers. The gist of his second theme is captured in the following statement:

(While) we are taught to limit the meaning of the Qur’an to the first phase of its historical construction…we have to be aware of the other phase(s) in order to grasp the dynamics, according to which the Qur’an has been able to form and shape the life of Muslims. Awareness of the essential characteristic of the religious language in general could protect us from being totally immersed in its indoctrinated atmosphere and thus lose our human identity (Abū Zayd 2000:15).

Abū Zayd recognizes the historicity of reading the Qur’an for its first generation, and the readings that were multiplied in later centuries. He expects a scholar to be aware of the differences in these interpretations and readings. In order to show this, he devotes considerable space to identifying and criticizing these various religious readings (al-fikr al-dīnī or al-khiṭāb al-dīnī). Following De Saussure, they are the parole of the Qur’an in history and in contemporary societies. He began his career with some insightful work on the hermeneutics of classical Islamic scholars and intellectuals like Hasan al-Basri, al-Shafiʿī, al-Ghazzali, and Qāḍī Abd al-Jabbār (Abū Zayd 1993; 1996a; 1996b). He showed how their ideological readings changed or subverted the meanings of the Qur’an for political and theological ends. Abū Zayd also showed the ideology and theology of Arabic grammar on which premodern scholars founded their varied disciplines (Abū Zayd 1988). After the early 1990s, when he was attacked by fellow citizens, he became more concerned of what he saw was the danger of religious politics in Egypt and in other Islamic countries. Thenceforth, he focused his attention on a new modern ‘religious thinking’ and outlined its key characteristics. He identified religious discourse

25 Abdulkader Tayob as one which refuses or hides human agency in the reading of a text, reduces or conceals causality in favor of the absolute agency of God, and uses terms to collapse the distinction between different periods of history (Abū Zayd 1994:81). He argues that this religious thinking, this new parole, pervades contemporary Muslim religious trends (Abū Zayd 1994:94). Like ʿAbduh, Abū Zayd employs the concepts of religion and the religious to develop a method of reading the Qur’an and contemporary challenges facing Muslims. He identifies dīn (religion) as a discourse that demands to be read with great care and circumspection, particularly with regard to its first enunciation. Reading the Qur’an in context does not mean abandoning its deep values. Focusing on its first ‘annunciation’ in context provides a basis for understanding its original meaning, but subsequent readings are open to misreadings that a reader must not forget. He identifies ‘religious thought’ (al-fikr al-dīnī) as ideological readings that call for a great deal of critical evaluation.

Concluding remarks: Islamic reform (Tajdīd) as discourse I have presented two examples of Islamic modernism that point to a discourse of religion employed to develop a critique and a vision for the transformation of society. Across time and geography, Muslim scholars in the modern world have debated the meaning of Islam, and they have used religion and its linguistic referents in this exercise. It may be compared with the discourse of religious studies, also using similar terms (religion, religious, ritual, myth, etc.) to create an intellectual discipline. The study of religion has been subjected to critical review, while Islamic reform and modernism has generally been approached as an object to be studied and represented. Religion became a constitutive term in the discourse, created and used by Muslim intellectuals since the 19th century. They provided the framework and the means through which values and projects were conceptualized and then employed in dialogue, exchanges, and politics. ʿAbduh turned to religion, its relation with reason, and its social value, to conceptualize a project of reform. This project was not a simple borrowing from the foundation texts of Islam, or earlier Muslim intellectuals, but included a reconceptualization of religion. This project was created in interaction with colonial interlocutors who wanted

26 Decolonizing the Study of Religions to show that Islam and Muslims were backward and worthy of colonization. ʿAbduh took some of these ideas and inverted them for his project. This gesture was not a tactic made for a fleeting encounter, but the beginning of a discourse, a self-reflective exercise in setting up definitions and values ascribed to religion and the religious. Abū Zayd showed us this discourse at the end of the 20th century, working with a refined definition of religion (dīn) as discourse that he developed from De Saussure. However, he did not follow a postmodernist trend, but a critical self-reflective stance that posited a distinction between dīn and al-fikr al-dīnī (religion and religious thought). I have offered a hint of an intra-Muslim exchange in this discourse, particularly evident in Abū Zayd’s discussion of Qasim Amin, Tahir al-Haddad, and Fazlur Rahman. Others have pointed to a critical exchange going on over the meaning, value, and function of religion over the course of the 20th century (Tayob 2009; Senturk 2009; Dressler 2015). It would appear that this discourse was a reflection of the Western intellectual hegemony that has dominated politics and the social sciences in general. This is the argument followed by Asad and others, and more widely in Dressler’s and Mandair’s edited work that documents how ‘religion- making’ dominated state formation on a global scale. The collection of essays by Dressler and Mandair shows how a Western framework of religion was imposed and adopted by statesmen and intellectuals in non-Christian religions in North American, Europe, and Asia (Dressler & Mandair 2011). Only one essay in this collection shows a resistance to this transformation, and that is the essay of Turner on how Buddhist monks resisted and rejected religion-making of the state (Turner 2011). It might appear that the distinction between the religious and secular has imposed itself on those working on the periphery in general, and on Muslim modern intellectuals in particular – a cursory knowledge of religious studies reveals the source of definitions and frameworks for religion used by these Muslim intellectuals. Terms like ‘religion’, ‘essence’, ‘function’, and ‘discourse’ might be traced to the founders of religious studies like Max Müller (1823-1900), Cornelius Tiele (1830-1902), Chantepie de la Saussay (1848-192), and Brede Kristensen (1867-1953), but there is no evident engagement with the Western discipline of religious studies. More importantly, the origins of the Western discipline as discussed in my review above, suggest that the earliest ideas of essence and function found in ʿAbduh and others in the 19th century were only beginning to emerge in the West. A strong case can be made that this new discourse may

27 Abdulkader Tayob be better thought of as a parallel or perhaps an intersecting development with the Western discourse of religious studies – with some distinct differences. Muslim intellectuals have reformulated uses of dīn among premodern theologians and philosophers. There are no direct references that indicate a conscious and deliberate reworking from this history among the intellectuals that I have studied, but there is no doubt that a reference to dīn (religion) as an abstract category can easily be found among some of the major thinkers in the history of Islam. For example, Ibn Rushd (he died in 1198) wrote on the relationship between religion (dīn) and philosophy (Hourani 1976). Ibn Khaldun, the great historian, considered the function of religion that maintained a political order (Ibn Khaldun 1967). The mystic, Jalāl al-Dīn Rumi considered the various meanings of religion and faith in his famous prose work Fīhī mā fihī (Rumi 1961). It may be argued that the intellectuals in the 19th century were implicitly drawing on these resources. It was not an invention as Jonathan Smith has argued for religious studies, but a term that was at hand and reformulated for a new purpose. The idea of tajdid offers a tempting name for this modern discourse. Before the 19th century, tajdid was formulated around an expectation of a reformer (mujaddid) and an appeal to an uncontested earlier prophetic model (Sunnah). There is a prophetic ḥadīth that predicted that a reformer (mujaddid) would appear at the end of every century to renew Islam (Moosa & Tareen 2012; Tayob 2014). The modern discourse of religion that I am discussing has more or less dispensed with the idea of a reformer, and the value and form of the Sunnah has been exposed to intense debate (Lee 1997). The Muslim discourse of religion turns around the value, form, and relevance of revelation, seen essentially as texts. Texts are approached and studied through definitions and assumptions of what are called religion, religious, and the secular. What is distinctive of the 19th century and then later the 20th century intellectuals, is the central role played by religion as a term to define, to work with, and to assume in formulations of what the meaning of texts are. In the next few decades, religion has become more than an idea, it became a discourse. Like other discourses, these latter definitions are not impervious to borrowing from contemporary Western and non-Western ideas, but still, foundational texts of revelation mark the limits of the discourse. The Islamic discourse is self-consciously religious, but there is no extensive discussion of a sacred presence or a sympathetic ‘bracketing’ of important beliefs and suppositions that one finds in the Western discourse of

28 Decolonizing the Study of Religions religious studies. The Islamic discourse is religious, but not engaged in ‘theological’ debates of the unseen, the sacred, or the reverential. There is no presence of a religion dissimulated in noumena, the essence of religion that must be assumed and bracketed, or patterns that the phenomena display. Much of the critical review of Eliade and other phenomenologists does not apply to this discourse. Rather than a theology or set of elusive patterns of spirit, the discourse is more clearly defined as politics. It is a politics of authenticity, identity, and moral values. It emerged at the height of colonial triumph, during a political era dominated by Europe and the West. There is some level of legitimation for the new modern state, as seen in the career of ʿAbduh in the colonial state. However, the discourse occupies a marginal role in state policies and in popular politics. The case of Abū Zayd provides a good example of how it falls between an obvious legitimation of the state, and popular religion. The discourse of Islamic modernism is not a cultural representation of the ‘other’, but a project of cultural, religious and political engagement, and renewal. It is not directed at the ‘other’ in whose image the self emerges triumphant or dejected under the critique of postmodernism and postcolonialism. It is a deeply engaged project of the self that is open for critical assessment and revision and is led by a demand for renewal rather than simply classification. What are the postcolonial and decolonial implications of this discourse? It is rejected from many sides. Cast as Islamic modernism or simply modernist, it is accused of being too Western by many Muslims, or too religious for its Western detractors. In the politics of identity and representation that pervade the public sphere, it suffers greatly. It has failed to claim authenticity because it works with the past and the present, with the local and global, with the self and the ‘other’. As I have shown, though, the modern discourse of religion by Muslim intellectuals over this period is testimony to an authenticity sustained over a long period of time. I have also shown that the discourse cannot be characterized as a pale reflection of a Western approach to religions. It has been innovative with regard to the terms drawn from the past and worked with terms that were either developed independently or in conversation with a broad Western humanistic and social scientific tradition. It is a creative project that merits more critical appreciation and engagement. Finally, for the study of religions, this discourse helps to turn attention to how religion has been used as a critical discourse of society and history in a different tradition. It is a discourse that is not merely subject to representation,

29 Abdulkader Tayob but that stands alongside the dominant discourse of religious studies engaging in similar exercises. Recognizing the parochial nature of the Western discourse, it behooves scholars of religion to turn their attention to such discourses elsewhere. One need not only refine the existing hegemonic tradition, but to critically appreciate discourses of religion elsewhere. The essay has hopefully turned attention to one such discourse of religion among Muslim intellectuals.

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Abdulkader Tayob Religious Studies University of Cape Town [email protected]

35

Race and Materiality in African Religious Contexts

Federico G. Settler [email protected]

Abstract This article intends to explore the various approaches to materiality and religion that have been used in the study of religions in Africa, and in South Africa in particular. It explores recent scholarship on materiality and religion advanced by David Morgan (2012) as well as Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer (2012), and then turn to David Chidester (2018), with some attention to Johan Strijdom (2014) to examine the framing of the debate in the Southern African context. The aim is to point out specific ways in which religion scholars privilege materiality of visuality, space, and ritual studies, at the expense of other ways of knowing and being. The article then advances some suggestions as to why or how these regimes are sustained and point out some problematics. It examines the use of everyday material objects in new religious movements in South Africa and interrogate their contested reception. The article moves to unpack how contemporary debates about the indigenous and new religious movements or cults in South Africa represent conflicts on what ‘things’ may possess sacred qualities and how they may be endowed with religious authority. In this regard, the article will focus on the taxonomies and afterlife of things in the work of Arjun Appadurai (1988, 2006) and its location in relation to the black body, to explore how black bodies are scripted and imagined in relation to material religion. Finally, it raises some questions on how local debates about religion and materiality – with respect to the embodied and things – represent not just disruptions over what constitute religion, but also about how contests over the use of everyday objects signal the emergence of indigenous ways of knowing and being in African religious contexts.

Keywords: race, materiality, things, body, senses

Journal for the Study of Religion 31, 2 (2018) 36-56 36 Online ISSN 2413-3027; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a2 Race and Materiality in African Religious Contexts

Introduction Since 2014, the events, rituals, and claims from a number of new religious or Christian movements have captured the interest of the government and the media in South Africa and beyond. Among these captivating reports is one of Pastor Lesego Daniel of Rabboni Centre Ministries who reportedly instructed his congregations to eat grass in early 2014 (News24 2014). It was reported in several national newspapers as well as in the UK-based Daily Mail, that ‘Pastor Daniel, who is based in Garankuwa, north of Pretoria, told dozens of followers to eat grass because “it will bring them closer to God”’ (Thornhill 2014). Later in the same year it was reported that the pastor who had previously used congregants as a human carpet, in October 2014 convinced his church members to drink petrol (Thornhill 2014). His particular brand of religiosity was echoed in the ministries of others such as Prophet Penuel Mnguni of the End Times Disciples Ministries in Soshanguve, Pretoria, who claimed that he turned rocks into bread and snakes into chocolate, before he fed it to his congregation (Maluleke 2015). Solomon Kgatle (2017) notes that Pastor Lethebo Rabalago, a protégé of Pastor Daniel, reportedly sprayed his congregants with Doom (an insecticide) in 2016, to demonstrate the protective power of the gospel and to cure them from ailments. Pastor Paseka Motsoeneng, also known as Pastor Mboro, of the Incredible Happening Ministry, not only offers the regular array of healing practices, but claims to hold special powers to heal infertility in women through placing his foot on them, and in 2016, he offered (for sale) pictures of himself having gone to heaven during an Easter church service. Kgatle (2017:3 of 8), drawing on the work of Van den Toren (2015), notes that ‘neo-Pentecostals take the power of amulets and fetishes with utter seriousness – and consequently reject them – but also provide alternatives in the forms of anointing oil, blessed water, calendars or handkerchiefs’. With their Pentecostal interest in healing, possession, and miracles, Kgatle (2017:3 of 8) suggests that their ‘movement of manifestations took different directions and acts of “miracles” further by bringing some extreme manifestations that have left the African Christian Church in wonderment’. Tenyiko Maluleke (2014) suggests that, despite one’s feelings about the ethics of the claims, these acts are symbolic gestures concerned with access to God or having an experience of the sacred. In response to the allegations of abuse and exploitation of belief – including the use of stones, leather belts, feeding rodents and snakes to

37 Federico G. Settler congregants, locking someone in a deep freezer, and driving over congregants – Pastor Rabalago, in an interview with a South African tabloid, Daily Sun, confirms that, for him, there is nothing special about Doom, except that he was instructed by the Holy Spirit to use it, and he asserts: ‘I use everything that the Lord directs me to use to heal people’ (Molobi 2017). This period saw a necessary response from government and religious authorities through an inquiry by the Commission of Religious, Linguistic and Cultural Minorities (CRL), that led to their report on the Commercialisation of religion and abuse of people’s beliefs systems (CRL Rights Commission 2017). In addition to the sensational reports by the media, cited above, the Commission also notes other examples: ‘Blessed water and oils are sold to congregants at a high marked-up price’ and ‘T-shirts, towels, and Vaseline are sold to congregants for good luck’ (CRL Rights Commission 2017:31). The purpose of drawing the attention to these events and reports is not to contest the merits of the claims, but to highlight the fact that much of the legal and theological debates are framed by the use of everyday things for religious purposes, or religious objects for social improvement. While the public debate represents the contestations over ecclesial boundaries and authority, the use of everyday objects in these African religious contexts represents the various ways that religious authority is initially manufactured and fought over on a local level. I want to argue that the sale of prayer towels, blessed water and oils, or the use of grass, fridges, snakes, and heavenly pictures, all predate the public debates about freedom of religion and exploitation of people’s beliefs. In the opening pages of his book, Religion: Material dynamics, David Chidester writes that the sacred is concerned with the ‘making, ordering and circulating of religious things’ (Chidester 2018:xii), and therefore I contend that these new religious communities and leaders are already engaged in processes of making and circulating religious things, and are now entangled in a contest over the ordering of these religious things. Chidester further suggests that ‘the study of material religion can retain the term (religion) to signal a terrain in which human beings engage in meaningful and powerful ways with the material constraints and animations of matter, the interplay of sacralising and desecrating’ as a way to not simply focus on religion but on the material conditions for negotiating the human (Chidester 2018:2-3). It would be disingenuous to suggest that the contestation about religious practice and authority, and what constitutes religions, has not often been coupled with the believers’ relationship to, and conceptions of the

38 Race and Materiality in African Religious Contexts material. While these recent events and contestations over the use of everyday objects and animals in religious rituals have captured the public imagination and media interests, the influence of objects on religious life – whether in worship, diagnostic or interpretive practices – is not new and has a long history in Southern Africa. A survey of Chidester’s work offers a particularly illuminating insights into the entanglement of religion with the material. I will cover some of his books that I consider most relevant for the argument that I seek to make in this article, with its focus on race, religion, and materiality in South Africa. This is not an exhaustive treatment of religion and materiality in the work of Chidester, as it does not incorporate his work that deals with the religion and popular culture in North American contexts. While Chidester (2000:378) argues that we ought to move beyond the focus on material objects to engage a political economy of the sacred through interrogating the ‘material conditions, forces, and relations’, I suggest that in Southern Africa, such conditions, forces, and relations are so historically entangled with racial schemas, that taxonomies of the sacred are invariably contested over what objects or things come to be regarded as sacred and religious, or not.

The material in Chidester’s work In his 1991 publication, Shots in the streets, Chidester discusses religion and materiality in the African religious context, by taking a look at the use of imphepho (the wild sage or liquorice plant used as a ritual incense for invoking the ancestors) and sacred oils as ancestral protection for fighters of the Pan African Congress in their armed struggle against the apartheid government. In his award-winning Savage systems (Chidester 1996) – essentially an archaeology of religion in the South African colonial frontier – Chidester explores the discovery of a ship’s anchor near the Keiskamma River around 1800, as an object or artefact through which protestants and the indigenous Xhosa made claims about the sacred. For the colonial observers in Savage systems, the Xhosa’s superstition relates to the dead and the anchor serves as evidence that the indigenous people lack religion (Chidester 1996:76), thus producing a speculative contest over what constitutes religion. While the indigenous people approached the anchor (this object and thing), with respect and awe, for the missionaries and travelers the ‘anchor stood as a monument

39 Federico G. Settler to the lack of religion among the indigenous people’ (Chidester 1996:86). Chidester is not unique in suggesting that conceptions of religion are mediated through its entanglement with the material at the colonial frontier. In terms of the colonial frontier, one might be able to extrapolate how various local or colonial objects, such as masks, fabric, spices, and soap have been embroiled in making and marking the imperial boundaries between savage, superstition, and religion (cf. McClintock 1995; Sweet 2002; Lincoln 2014). This essay on the material manifestations of religion on the colonial frontier of Southern Africa is an extension of Chidester’s earlier work on popular religion in the United States, where he uses other registers such as baseball, Tupperware, and Coca-Cola to explicate American ways of knowing and being religious. In the Southern African religious context, several strands of Chidester’s reflection on materiality and religion converge in his 2012 publication, Wild religion, where he brings together his earlier work on Credo Mutwa, the Zulu self-declared religious authority, and his sensory incorporation of everyday objects, of plants, and the environment to construct and explain a particular brand of indigenous religion. Wild religion also incorporates praise singing by imbongi, Zolani Mkiva, at the inauguration of President Nelson Mandela in April 1994 on the one hand, and the opening of the Football World Cup in June 2010 on the other, drawing attention to the sensory system in African traditional religion. Chidester’s exploration of objects and making of religion in Southern Africa culminate with the invocation of the vuvuzela – a replica of the traditional kudu-horn used during the indigenous religious ceremonies but commercialized for the 2010 Football World Cup fan cultures. He states that this sacred sound and noisy instrument represent indigenous sacrality, thus pushing back against colonial denigration of African cultures and religion (Chidester 2012:185). Duane Jethro (2014:180) asserts that vuvuzelas emerged as ‘material objects cast as heritage through sacralising practices that distinguished them as legitimate registers of the past for the “hailing” of collective identities’. Therefore, through drawing on both registers of the indigenous and contemporary narratives of nation building, these objects became central to the ‘inevitable contestation over ownership of the means, modes and forces of producing the sacred’ (Chidester 2012:5). While Chidester, in the above texts as well as in his book, Religion: Material dynamics (Chidester 2018) offers a well-articulated and variegated analysis of how the material plays out in colonial and postcolonial South

40 Race and Materiality in African Religious Contexts

Africa, he is not unique in trying to explain contemporary South Africa through using registers of the material. Jacob Dlamini, for example, in his book, Native nostalgia (Dlamini 2009), reflects on the post-apartheid social world through an exploration of the senses, and he variously offers sensory nostalgia for the smell of township smoke that signifies home, the social life of rats (Dlamini 2009:66), the weight and texture of money as indicative of it having value (Dlamini 2009:98), and the grainy 1980s television that evokes familial intimacies (Dlamini 2009:27) – all in an attempt to ‘upset the neat master narrative of the struggle in which blacks suffered and struggled the same’ (Dlamini 2009:67). In his exploration of sight, sound, and smell, Dlamini eloquently explains how, for example, the presence of rats around townships symbolize plenty of food. Similarly, Kerry Chance, in her book, Living politics in South Africa’s urban shacklands, draws on the elements, earth, water, fire, and air, to reflect and account for the feeling of discontent among black South Africans during the post-apartheid period. She notes that ‘where there is fire, there is politics’ (Chance 2018:25ff). Both Dlamini and Chance, like Chidester, disrupt the registers of the material that one might be inclined to draw on to explain what contemporary South Africans hold dear, whether through nostalgic reminiscence or discontent and protest. What is evident from their respective framings and analyses of social and religious worlds in South Africa, is that traditional taxonomies and explanations fail to fully account for the complex ways in which contestation over meaning plays out. In accounting for the persistent contestations over what is regarded as sacred, Chidester argues that the sacred ‘is produced through the labor of intensive interpretation and regular ritualization, which generates surplus meaning that is immediately available for appropriation, as people make the sacred their own, but is also vulnerable to contestations over who legitimately own and operates the sacred’ (Chidester 2012:ix).

Materiality and religion Strijdom (2014:1 of 7) suggests that ‘material religion’ constitutes a new way to reflect on the study of religion. He takes Houtman and Meyer (2012) as a point of departure to illustrate how material religion is primarily concerned with objects and spaces, as well as feelings and the senses (Strijdom 2014:1 of

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7). He goes on to argue that the ‘material turn in Religious Studies should not stop with the recognition that the sacred is necessarily present in concrete things in the world, but that it would still crucially need critical theory to assess the political, social and economic uses of these objects in religions’ (Strijdom 2014:2 of 7). The second useful contribution from Strijdom’s article is his discussion of the assertion of Houtman and Meyer that such terms as totem, idol, and fetish do not simply refer to ‘distinct types of material objects but rather to particular human attitudes toward and modes of using “things”’ (Houtman & Meyer 2012:14). In the end, Strijdom invites postcolonial scholars to engage the material as an analytical category about what constitutes religion, and he suggests that the material promises to offer new ways to interpret contemporary African religion and religious practice. Generally, religion scholars regard material religion, or the material turn in religious studies, as the shift from ritual studies and the study of religion’s preoccupation with institutions, beliefs, and practices, as well as religious actors’ engagement with it. In this article, I argue that the material turn in religion also marks the shift from institutional religion to the everyday religion – mundane routines and practices related to religion or religious beliefs enacted in the course of everyday life. Some scholars suggest that the very idea of what constitutes materiality should be interrogated in relation to immateriality (Barad 2007; Braidotti 2002), while others prefer to use such terms as ‘materializing’ with the view to privilege a more affect-centered approach to religion and materiality (Meyer 2008). The widely used assertion of Meyer, Morgan, Paine, and Plate (2010:209) is that ‘a materialized study of religion begins with the assumption that things, their use, their valuation, and their appeal are not something added to a religion, but rather inextricable from it’. In line with the embracing posture of the field, these scholars argue that this turn in religious studies also focuses on ‘what things and bodies do’ (Meyer et al. 2010:209), with the view to produce an epistemic and aesthetic paradigm that seeks to make sense of the sacred as social reality. Their coupling of things with the body, insists on the necessary relationship between the material and embodied or sensory engagements with the material. For them ‘[a] body consists of viscera, skeleton, musculature, and flesh, but also brain/mind, sensation, imagination, cognition, and the interface with the worlds around and within the body’ (Meyer et al. 2010:209), while things are the objects that the body apprehends.

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For them, things are symbols of the social body and they reflect ‘material economy at work in sacred things such as relics and books and icons’ (Meyer et al. 2010:209). In his reflection on the sacred life of things, Graham Harvey (2014) offers a changing notion of animism and suggests that animism becomes more than a belief that objects possess sacred power, but instead that it should be regarded as a set of procedures or relations between objects, humans, and other beings that ultimately endow agency on both the human and non-human (Harvey 2014). As such, ‘things’ placed in relation to each other (whether intentionally or otherwise), are able to produce an enabling environment for the social actors and for the artefact. In this way the bodily or sensory reception of the objects releases its productive power. David Morgan (2010) suggests that material religion introduces a welcome departure from the notion of religion as worldview or system of belief, and that frees scholars and religious actors from the dominance of institutional religion and makes possible an appreciation of everyday objects and practices. Morgan’s shift from what the object means to what the object does, draws the attention to the social life and presence of the object. This is a call to turn from a focus on beliefs and institutions to the social life of things in processes and techniques of religious practice – the ways that things assume sacred meaning interacts with and within a social environment. What emerges from the literature reviewed above is that the objects and the embodied reception of these objects, suggest that material things possess agentic potential to activate and transform meaning in the everyday life of the believers, and to disrupt the dominance of the institution.

The sacred life of things: Race and material religion in South Africa Religious studies have historically been concerned with belief and its relation to ritual and institutions of belief or non-belief – also in South Africa. However, as I have suggested above, when we apply Chidester’s work on religion and fetish in colonial and postcolonial South Africa, with Dlamini’s sensory nostalgia and Chance’s elemental framing of the social political environment, African traditional religion emerges as a disruptive category in religious

43 Federico G. Settler studies as well as in the socio-political life in South Africa. What these three authors demonstrate is the various ways that religion bleeds into the everyday life through the deployment of things – everyday artefacts – as well as the embodied experience of those things that give account of the sacred. As indicated in the introduction of this article, religion scholars, commentators, and policy makers in the past few years in South Africa have been concerned with the use of everyday material in religious ceremonies, the production of new economies of religion, and the regulation of and responsibility over seemingly new religious movements in South Africa. The coming to prominence of several supposedly new religious movements in this country and the figure popularly known as Pastor Mboro, alongside other similar religious actors, continue to fascinate everybody with their ability to entice the religious and agreeable, though not necessarily vulnerable or gullible people, through material and embodied engagement with religion (Kgatle 2017; Maluleke 2014). This offers the opportunity to not simply produce an analysis of media or legal articulations and contestations of these new religious movements (Frahm-Arp 2015), but to focus on the lived experience – the embodied realities of believers and the religious life of objects as discourses of the sacred in everyday life. Mboro and other religious actors like him are not a new phenomenon in South Africa, as suggested by some scholars who label them as new religious movements (Kgatle 2017). These new brands of Christian churches and institutions can be regarded as a contemporary manifestation of religious beliefs and practices that has previously existed in other forms, for example, it has for some time been quite common in South Africa to meet a vendor on the street that would hand passers-by a pamphlet offering a schedule of diagnostic and healing services by a designated religious leader (Mokgobi 2012). They generally claim abilities to diagnose and remedy both spiritual and material problems, often explicitly relying on the belief that there are religious and cultural solutions to the material and embodied problems that people experience. Similarly, within African traditional religion, it is precisely through the formal consultation of a sacred specialist – an inyanga or sangoma – that religious people seek both diagnostic and remedial services in exchange for a fee or tribute. It is for this reason that I suggest that the religious phenomenon of diagnosis and remedy, using everyday artefacts or plants, are not new within the broader religious context of South Africa. It is perhaps new, because these are Christian churches who use the material and the embodied

44 Race and Materiality in African Religious Contexts reception as the locus of their religious work and practices, and through which they contest and assert boundaries over what counts as sacred. It is for this reason that I propose that for a meaningful discussion on material religion in South Africa, one must recognize that the contests over sacred things and the embodied reception of these things are often, if not always, based on race and gender.

The religious life of things Since Appadurai’s seminal text, The social life of things, there was an increasing interest in the study of the social life (Appadurai 2006; Morgan 2009; Jenkins 2014) or the afterlife of things (Fennetaux, Junqua & Vasset 2014) – specifically in South Africa. Appadurai (1988) in particular points out that it has become commonplace in the politics of exchange between the imperial center and the colonial periphery that various commodities such as masks, spices, and blankets become sources of exchange, and that this also marks an exchange of value and meaning. Other than Chidester, Dlamini, and Chance with their use of the fetish, the sensory, and the elemental, the study of things have manifested in a varied interest in uniforms such as clothes, formal uniforms, and regalia. In Bruce Lincoln’s book, Discourse and the construction of society (Lincoln 2014), the uniformed colonist becomes incorporated into the annual fertility ritual concerned with reinforcing the power and authority of the Swazi king. Achille Mbembe (2001), though not a religion scholar, recognizes that the symbolic function of the military uniform in postcolonial Africa is a powerful trope associated with colonial and postcolonial violence against black people. Similarly, Haddad (2004) examines the African Methodist women’s (manyano) religious association with their uniform and suggests that the uniform of the manyano – representing mothering as it did – offers black women symbolic resources to construct mothering as survival and resistance to the violent mobilizations in the late apartheid period. For Nthabiseng Motsemme (2004) the same uniform also emerges an as ‘alternative sanctuary’ from the violence done to women every day. The question may be asked why I am indulging this side-discussion about uniforms in the African religious context. Although this discussion is not new, it helps to make two points: First, that a context of epistemic violence that accompanies or surrounds the black religious experience, is often dismissed,

45 Federico G. Settler excluded, vilified, or infantilized as superstition, and second, despite this history of exclusion and regulation of religion, Graham Harvey (2005:37), in his book, Animism: Respecting the living world, argues that some stones are just stones, and other stones are more than just stones. What this points to is that the contestation on how things get to possess religious meaning and are able to be endowed with religious meaning and authority, continues to persist in contemporary South Africa. An examination of the CRL Commission Report of 2017 not only reveals a public discomfort with the new forms of religion offered and practices advocated by religious actors like Motsoeneng, Daniel, and Mnguni, but it also signals an appetite for their particular brand of religious techniques and practices. Ultimately, their use, invocation, and deployment of everyday material artefacts in their religious work, while not uncommon to Southern Africa, is nonetheless at the heart of a public outcry against these religious practices. The CRL Rights Commission (2017:31) notes a range of everyday things, including prayer towels, ATMs, oils, stickers, and other amulets deployed in religious work as well as in the media, making congregants consume grass, drink petrol, semen, or soap, eating and using snakes in church, removing women’s underwear, the use of belts and caning sticks on the possessed, and the spraying of Doom (insecticide) on congregants. Further, what adds to the general discomfort regarding these religious practices, is that they occur outside regular religious calendars and sacred sites and produce new cartographies of the sacred. Notwithstanding the ethics related to the authority and claims about abuse of power in these new, or not- so-new religious movements, the social life of things in these churches or movements relies on and unleashes the material on various levels. While the artefact or thing is for sale as a commodity (for example, Mboro’s heavenly pictures), that allows the believer to enjoy proximity to the religious leader or the sacred community, while the thing also serves as a protective talisman or device that would bring good fortune. However, the problems with seeking to regulate a material expression of religion located in the everyday life is that the use of artefacts and their meaning could change, and new objects are likely to be introduced. Much of the critique of the CRL Commission and the public appears to rest on the very material activation of everyday objects like rocks, insecticide, and handkerchiefs as legitimate religious instruments and as possessing religious capital. Generally, the use of authorized materials such as oils, prayer towels,

46 Race and Materiality in African Religious Contexts holy water, candles, and incense are accepted, because these religious artefacts are believed to have been theologically justified (Clarke & Beyer 2009; Parsons 2006), and yet the use of other everyday objects has provoked widespread anxieties over what objects count as sacred, which ultimately raises questions over the classification of religious objects, beliefs, and behaviors (Masuzawa 2005; King 1999). While this anxiety over the sacred manifests or is articulated as concern for the gullible and exploited, poor believers (Chimuka 2018), we ought to nonetheless interrogate the discriminations between materialization of the sacred in local African contexts, • where new and contested everyday objects are activated and endowed with religious and sacred meaning; • where new actors, often non-experts, assume visibility and are endowed with the authority and sovereignty over religious communities; • where new avenues towards material and spiritual fulfilment are being created.

The public, political, and legal contestations over the use of everyday or household things in religious work among new religious actors have been discussed above. In 2016, Zimbabwean media reports that Prophet Tapiwa Freddy has claimed to have anointed soap, blessed by special angles, and that ‘God will be doing things through the anointed soaps’ (Dachen 2016). The BBC News (2016) reports that in neighboring South Africa, ‘[t]he country has seen a wave of practices where church members have been subjected to unorthodox rituals to receive healing’ after self-proclaimed religious leader, Lethebo Rabalago, sprayed his congregants with Doom and claimed that it can heal people. Similarly, in 2016, Prophet Rufus Phala from the Limpopo Province convinced his church members to drink Dettol, an antiseptic liquid soap, as a way to cure illnesses and ailments (Motau 2016). While the ethics of compelling religious followers to do something they might otherwise regard as harmful, is not dismissed, I am also not particularly concerned with contesting the truth-claims related to these events. However, I am curious about the fact that all these religious leaders draw on everyday artefacts to generate an aura of sacrality or intimate connection with the divine. Unlike the more publicized reports about pastors getting their

47 Federico G. Settler congregants to eat grass or snakes and rocks (transubstantiation), the invocation and activation of everyday items such as motor oil, fuel, detergents, insecticides, and soap are all endowed with sacred potential to protect, heal, and restore the believer. Each of these artefacts has a particular commercial and social history – the social life of things – as a commodity that assumes a range of values that are simultaneously material, commercial, and religious. Anne McClintock notes in her book, Imperial leather, that in the social history of soap, Africans have been subjected to the civilizing mission of cotton and soap to be covered and cleansed (McClintock 1995:31). While, as McClintock (1995:33) argues, ‘soap and cleaning rituals became central to the demarcation of body boundaries and the policing of social hierarchies’, in these religious movements soap has become central to what constitutes religion. Prophet Freddy and Prophet Phala variously rely on their congregants, drawing on alternatives to register the meaning-making that is more aligned with indigenous religion than with Christian normative practices. Having been blessed by special angels, Pastor Freddy’s soap, used in a regular way, is believed to possess healing properties with both bodily restoration and harmonious relations with one’s partners (a woman will be fertile and will find a husband). While it is easy to dismiss these claims and adherences as ludicrous or childish, it is not uncommon in indigenous religion, for example, for sacred specialists to utilize everyday things, such as pottery fragments, bones, glass, shells, or driftwood (Insoll, 2011; White 2015) to diagnose, and divine issues of personal or social discord or physical discomfort. The brand of religious work by Phala and Freddy is more consistent with the sacred specialists in African traditional or black religion, despite their self-identification as . Why therefore the huge public outcry and the government urgency to regulate these new religious movements and force them into a normative of what constitutes religion? There is a number of problems with both public and state compulsion to regulate religious associations and to protect gullible believers from exploitation. This is for many people an ethical concern, but with respect to the use of everyday ‘things’ in African social contexts, it creates new tensions and expands the concept of what might be regarded as religion through activating or invoking the agentic potential of everyday things; it asserts a new archaeology and taxonomy of religious objects premised on the need to incorporate and take seriously African or black religious ways of knowing and being, and not to simply dismiss it as naivety or exploitation/

48 Race and Materiality in African Religious Contexts abuse of religious beliefs; it requires suitable, indigenous methodologies for making intelligible these (new) invocations of the sacred in everyday things, instead of contesting, dismissing, and excluding or regulating these materializations of religion, as they spill into the postcolonial public domain. In a postcolonial African context, religious actors increasingly invoke everyday objects for simultaneously multiple purposes related to demarcating, asserting, and resisting competing conceptions of religion. As such we may provisionally conclude that the religious activation of everyday things is disruptive but productive; provocative but deliberative; and ultimately decolonial – in that it disrupts the knowledge and power matrix in religion – and postcolonial, because it draws on available, though contested, imperial taxonomies, archives, and artefacts to assert new meaning.

The black body in sensory and material landscapes Traditionally, the sociology of religion has been concerned with the study of ritual as embodied engagements with institutions of religion, and in this the senses have been perceived as an aspect of the corporeal. Invoking Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Abercrombie, Hill and Turner (2006:127) state that ‘the body is simultaneously an object that can be observed and a mode of being…that makes that observation possible’. Having developed this thesis about the intimacy between human bodies and their reception in the everyday experience, they conclude that embodiment is fundamentally a process of apprehension and perception. It is therefore not surprising that in the context of material religion, Houtman and Meyer (2012) have argued for a progression from an initial interest in a material or visual culture (reception of objects), towards the study of the body within social and cultural contexts, and the more recent exploration of the senses. The idea of the body in its social and historical context is hauntingly elaborated by Harvard historian, Walter Johnson (2013), in his book, River of dark dreams, where he suggests that to understand the black experience, one needs to focus on the ecology of the enslaved – the ecology of the everyday – wherein (black) bodies were regulated, carted, ordered, and whipped – basically governed. He further clarifies the idea of the black body as commodity by referring to the most rudimentary, biological aspects of plantation life which he terms ‘bare-life processes and material exchanges’ –

49 Federico G. Settler the sun and soil, semen and faeces, blood and milk. These are brought into sharp focus within the history of ‘slavery’ and ‘capitalism’ (Johnson 2013:9). If, as Johnson (2013:162) suggests that black existence is calculated and imagined in terms of the plantation ecology and economy, could we then not suggest that black religion or religious experiences emerge out of social histories, populated with regimes and rhythms that define the black body and experience through alienation, terror, incarceration, and death? In this regard, I find Dlamini’s sensory exploration of the black struggle in South Africa just as helpful as Chance’s, placing the body in a social context through exploring the elements. Chance (2018:21ff, 145) argues that black lives in South Africa are defined by contestation over water (amanzi), clean air (umoya), fire (umlilo), and land (umhlaba). It would be disingenuous to argue that the religious actors in the abovementioned new religious movements are not aware of the social conditions in which their congregants live. Maluleke (2014) argues that for the religious leaders and adherents, these acts are symbolic efforts concerned with access to the transcendent, or an experience of the sacred that may offer relief from the material conditions of life, or the nurturing of an alternative, imagined future. In early 2018, Pastor Mboro offered to pray for people that their land might be restored to them, and that those without homes would have houses to live in (Zeeman 2018). During recent years, many congregants offered their bodies for an experience of the sacred, for the remedy of an ailment, or as a declaration of faith (Mathunjwa 2017). While the CRL commission rightfully expresses concern about the possible physical and health risks to religious adherents presented by some of these supposedly religious acts, what is of interest is that offering one’s body is here regarded as gullibility and naivety, and deserving of state intervention. When Hindu yogis, for example, roll their body on the road from city to city, it is generally accepted to be a pilgrimage or sacred quest (Around the world in 800 days 2016), or when religious devotees push their bodies to the limit by walking on hot coals or machetes, or scar their bodies in a religious quest, it is celebrated as a sign of devotion (David 2009). Yet these supposedly neo-pentecostal churches’ use of everyday artefacts in religious quests and rituals are framed as exploitation by the religious experts, and gullibility by the religious followers (Kgatle 2017; Chimuka 2018). In the elaboration of its brief, the CRL Commission saw, among others, as its responsibility the task to ‘understand the deep societal thinking that makes some members of our society vulnerable and gullible on views

50 Race and Materiality in African Religious Contexts expressed and actions during religious ceremonies’ (CRL Rights Commission 2017:6). While this position reveals a colonial perspective on African religion or religious contexts, likely to result in the gullible grabbing of any fetish or superstition, it dismisses the agentic dimension and indigenous orientation of an embodied religion in these situations. The CRL Commission’s use of terms such as ‘experts’ and bona fide ‘religious practitioners’ (CRL Rights Commission 2017:1, 43), expose a possible bias against black or indigenous religious institutions, beliefs, and practices. One can therefore conclude that this need for a greater regulation that actually betrays the poor black people, is based on the fact that these practices are religiously unacceptable and that the embodied experience and the material in black religious practices are not constituted as legitimately religious. I therefore argue that the introduction of everyday material objects into religious ceremonies first necessitates an expanded idea about what constitutes religion, and what can be defined as Christian religious practices, and second, the need for an expanded register related to what objects and embodied experiences can be regarded as legitimate. If one is to follow the arguments of the CRL Commission that the use of everyday objects and embodied religious experiences are exploitation, then we risk agreeing that black religious bodies require greater regulation. This can be likened to Walter Johnson’s plantation ecology of everyday life, where black bodies are controlled through regulating them every minute, and in every mundane aspect of life – when to sleep, when to eat, when and where to have sex, who to have sex with, how much water to drink, what to eat, and where to sleep. This implies that black people cannot be trusted to determine what artefacts and what embodied experiences they wish to participate in and invoke as religious.

Conclusion In the documents of recent scholars on material religion – locally and abroad – one struggles to find an engagement with the body and the senses that is not almost entirely deracialized. Material religion claims to be concerned with not just objects, but also with the body in its social context. Our engagement with material religion in an African religious context must therefore, by necessity,

51 Federico G. Settler engage the imperial histories related to both religion and the objects deployed by religious actors. Similarly, the embodied and sensory experience of religious materials cannot be dehistoricized or deracialized because, as I have argued above, when a religion is practiced in Africa, or when a religious ritual finds a parallel expression in African religious contexts, it is easily dismissed as superstition or functionalist fabrications aimed at abusing and exploiting the believers. Chidester, like Dlamini and Chance, offers the scholar of religion ways to explain and give account of the emergence of new religions without dismissing the ethical and theological challenges that these may pose. While Chidester’s work on the material or social artefact offers a wide range of religious meanings, it nonetheless translates into a superficial treatment of the embodied and sensory system in a postcolonial environment. What do the acts of Dlamini’s cockroaches – as symbols of plenty – and Pastor Rabalago’s Doom spraying mean for religion and materiality in a postcolonial South Africa? It suggests that people are drawing on artefacts and meaning that exist in their social context and deploy it through their embodied and sensory systems to produce imaginative discourses of the sacred. Material religion in an African social context is serious about indigenous or local ways of knowing and being and renders as meaningful the notion that in this social context, people smell differently, see the world differently, imagine different horizons, and feel and move in it differently. The task of the scholar of religion is to interpret the local meaning and uses of everyday things and to interrogate (not judge) the deployment of the body, the senses, and elements in narratives of meaning related to the sacred.

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Masuzawa, T. 2005. The invention of world religions. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Mathunjwa, Z. 2017. Spraying Doom in the house of the Lord: The struggle to regulate SA’s churches. Huffpost: Lifestyle, 17 August 2017. Available at: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.za/2017/08/17/spraying-doom-in- the-house-of-the-lord-the-struggle-to-regulate_a_23080296/. (Accessed on 20 April 2018.) Mbembe, A. 2001. On the postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. McClintock, A. 1995. Imperial leather. New York: Routledge. Meyer, B. 2008. Materializing religion. Material Religion 4, 2: 227. Meyer B., D. Morgan, C. Paine & B. Plate 2010. The origin and mission of material religion. Religion 40, 3: 207-211. Mokgobi, M.G. 2012. Views on traditional healing: Implications for integration of traditional healing and Western medicine in South Africa. PhD Thesis, University of South Africa, Pretoria. Molobi, S. 2017. Pastor’s lawyer a fake! Daily Sun, 27 June 2017. Available at: https://www.dailysun.co.za/News/National/pastors-lawyer-a-fake- 20170627. (Accessed on 4 August 2017.) Morgan, D. 2009. The space between intimates and strangers. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Morgan, D. 2010. Religion and material culture: The matter of belief. New York: Routledge. Morgan, D. 2012. The look of the sacred. In Orsi, R.A. (ed.): Cambridge companion to religious studies. New York: Cambridge University Press. Motsemme, N. 2004. The mute always speak: On women’s silences at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Current Sociology 52, 5: 909- 932. Motau, K. 2016. Limpopo pastor gives congregants Dettol to drink. Eyewitness News, 9 December 2016. Available at: https://ewn.co.za/2016/12/09/ limpopo-pastor-gives-congre-gants-miracle-dettol-to-drink. (Accessed on 4 August 2018.) Parsons, T. 2006. The theoretical development of the sociology of religion: A chapter in the history of modern social science. In Kunin, S.D. (ed.): Theories of religion: A reader. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

55 Federico G. Settler

News24. 2014. SA pastor under fire over grass-eating followers. 13 January 2014. Available at: https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/ News/SA- pastor-under-fire-over-grass-eating-followers-20140113. (Accessed on 24 July 2018.) Strijdom, J.M. 2014. The material turn in religious studies and the possibility of critique: Assessing Chidester’s analysis of ‘the fetish’. HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 70, 1: 7 pages. Art. #2116. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/hts.v70i1.2116 Sweet, M. 2002. Inventing the Victorians. London: Faber & Faber. Thornhill, T. 2014. First he had his congregation eating grass to make them ‘close to God’, now controversial South African preacher makes his flock drink PETROL. MailOnline, 15 October 2014. Available at: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2794275/first-congregation- eating-grass-make-close-god-controversial-south-african-preacher- makes-flock-drink-petrol.html. (Accessed on 4 August 2018.) Van den Toren, B. 2015. African neo- in the face of secularization: Problems and possibilities. Cairo Journal of Theology 2, 1: 103-120. White, P. 2015. The concept of diseases and health care in African traditional . HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 71, 3: 7 pages. Art. #2762. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/hts.v71i3.2762 Zeeman, K. 2018. Pastor Mboro believes he can ‘help you get the land back’. Sunday Times: Times Live, 18 April 2018. Available at: https://www.timeslive.co.za/tshisa-live/tshisa-live/2018-04-18-pastor- mboro-believes-he-can-help-you-get-the-land-back/. (Accessed on 20 April 2018.)

Federico Settler School of Religion, Philosophy & Classics University of KwaZulu-Natal [email protected]

56

Frontier Zones and the Study of Religion1

Birgit Meyer [email protected]

‘The study of religion, as I understand it, is a critical and creative enterprise. While the criticism of religion, as Karl Marx proposed, is the beginning of all criticism, the creative enterprise of imagining religion as a human project opens new possibilities for understanding a diverse array of powerful discourses, practices, and social formations that are underwritten by claims on transcendence or the sacred’ (David Chidester 2018a:42)

Abstract This article focuses on the concept of the frontier zone as a central critical term in Chidester’s oeuvre. Understood as a site where difference is articulated, encountered, and governed, the frontier zone is a productive, insight- generating notion. Its usefulness pertains not only to the study of colonial settings in which scholarly knowledge about took shape via the introduction of religion as a category, but also to the study of religious

1 As a tribute to the work of David Chidester, this article is not intended to offer an extensive review of the notion of the frontier zone and the ways scholars have responded to it. It is rather envisioned as a kind of ‘think piece’ that aims to identify synergies between our respective works and to offer some ideas for an extended use of the notion of the frontier zone for postcolonial Europe. I would like to thank Johan Strijdom, Pooyan Tamimi Arab and two anonymous reviewers for their encouragement and useful comments on an earlier version, and Mitch Cohen for superb proofreading. I acknowledge the support for the research on which this article is based from the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research (NWO), the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University.

Journal for the Study of Religion 31, 2 (2018) 57-78 57 Online ISSN 2413-3027; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a3 Birgit Meyer plurality in contemporary European cities, which is here proposed to approach as new postcolonial frontier zones.

Keywords: David Chidester, frontier zone, anthropology and religious studies, plurality, translation, materiality, surrealism

I met David Chidester for the first time in October 2005, in the context of the conference Reasons of Faith organized by the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Even though we were both scholars of religion, I did not know his writings, except that I had heard about his Savage systems (Chidester 1996). My ignorance can be partly explained by the fact that we were working in different circles, he in religious studies and I in anthropology. While the two disciplines share a common history, nowadays they stand quite apart, so much so that scholars trained in one do not necessarily know about work relevant to their research in the other. As I became aware of the extent to which Chidester’s research interests and his impressive oeuvre resonated with many themes – the senses, authenticity, and materiality – that I was starting to discover and deploy at the time, I developed a keen interest in his work. In 2008, to my delight, I was able to persuade him to take part as an international advisor in a research project on heritage formation, where we co-supervised the thesis of Duane Jethro (2015) and took part in workshops organized by our program in Amsterdam, Accra and, of course, Cape Town2. My move in 2011 from a position in anthropology to one in religious studies prompted me to rethink the terms of the study of religion from a postsecularist, postcolonial, and material perspective. I then fully realized the brilliance of his idea to reconstruct the genesis of guiding concepts in the study of religion by tracing them back to the frontier zones of European imperial outreach. In this article in honor of his amazing work – driven by his ability to see the weird in what seems obvious, to write with dry wit and irony, to open up unexpected, twisting paths – I would like to concentrate on one particularly important concept in his thinking: The frontier zone. This is a productive, insight-generating concept,

2 One of the outcomes of that research project just appeared (Meyer & Van de Port 2018), which includes an essay by Chidester.

58 Frontier Zones and the Study of Religion not only with regard to the study of colonial settings in which scholarly knowledge about religion took shape, but also, as I will argue, with regard to the study of religious plurality in contemporary postcolonial European metropolises.

The frontier zone In his book Savage systems, Chidester situates the emergence of comparative religion as an academic discipline in Southern African frontiers, where it was ‘a discourse and practice that produced knowledge about religion and religions, and thereby configured knowledge about the human, within the power relations of specific colonial situations’ (Chidester 1996:2). As he points out, initial reports about Africa noted an absence of religion among the indigenous populations. This presumed absence was taken as an important legitimation for the depiction of African peoples as brutes and was both a barrier to European expansion and a rationale for their conquest. ‘Before coming under colonial subjugation, Africans had no religion. After local control was established, however, they were found to have a religious system after all’ (Chidester 1996:20), Chidester aptly summarizes his point. This ‘discovery’ of religion de facto meant the invention of religion as part of a new political-epistemic regime to organize and authorize the colonial governance of difference – not only with regard to people in Africa, but also other populations across the world. Gaining knowledge about the religions of others by comparison, presupposed the introduction of the category of religion from Western centers of knowledge production into the frontier zones of European imperial outreach. Knowledge about non-Westerners was couched in Western terms, which set the standard for translation and comparison and framed how the differences were understood. In this sense, the history of comparative religion as a discipline – just like anthropology – is much more imbued with the colonial project than many protagonists were – and possibly still are – prepared to admit (cf. also Van der Veer 2001). That ‘the imperial science of comparative religion had completely obscured its entanglement in global conquest’ (Chidester 1996:3) implied neglect of the context in which information about religion(s) was assembled on the level of theory formation. Actual encounters and conquests were stripped of their material and practical dimensions,

59 Birgit Meyer yielding a rather reductive concern with disembodied evidence of ‘mentality, whether that mentality was designated as religious, magical, superstitious, or primitive’ (Chidester 1996:3). The prime task for a critical study of religion is to throw light on this obscured history (cf. also Bergunder 2016). Unpacking the production and use of knowledge about religion on the Southern African frontier, Savage systems undertakes a critical retrieval of the science of comparative religion as a project entangled with colonialism. This is pursued in Empire of religion (Chidester 2014), which traces the process of ‘triple mediation’ – from so-called ‘natives’, to missionaries, to scholars – through which knowledge about religion was increasingly abstracted from the colonial context in which it was initially generated. The notion of the frontier zone is at the heart of this critical endeavor. Chidester (1996:20-21) defines it as follows:

I define a frontier zone as a zone of contact, rather than a line, a border, or a boundary. By this definition, a frontier is a region of intercultural relations between intrusive and indigenous people. Those cultural relations, however, are also power relations. A frontier zone opens with the contact between two or more previously distinct societies and remains open as long as power relations are unstable and contested, with no one group or coalition able to establish dominance. A frontier zone closes when a single political authority succeeds in establishing its hegemony over the area.

Introducing the frontier zone as a ‘region of intercultural relations’ in which indigenous and intrusive people interact, Chidester’s point is not to essentialize cultural differences. As his extensive analysis shows, for him frontier zones are first and foremost fluid and messy. Doing comparative religion in the frontier zone was a simplifying endeavor, geared to reduce complexity: ‘The conceptual organization of human diversity into rigid, static categories was one strategy for simplifying, and thereby achieving some cognitive control over, the bewildering complexity of the frontier zone’ (Chidester 1996:21-22). Rather than being pre-existent, different ‘cultures’ and ‘religions’ were an outcome of contacts in the frontier zone, and knowledge about them was essential to the colonial management of difference and control. This was instrumental for the governance of difference and the politics of belonging in the apartheid regime.

60 Frontier Zones and the Study of Religion

For Chidester, the point for a contemporary critical study of religion is not a mere break with this mostly occluded history, but a journey ‘back through the frontiers on which these categories were asserted, constituted, and contested’ (Chidester 1996:29). This makes it possible to assess how religious studies and anthropology help to produce categories to classify difference via schemes and typologies (cf. also Fabian 1983). This was a pressing concern articulated in the European centers vis-à-vis the dazzling diversity people encountered in the context of imperial outreach, and central for the development of policies for colonial domination. In history and anthropology, much research has been conducted on the imposition of colonial rule, but religious studies is only beginning to unearth the legacy of colonialism for the discipline’s own epistemological underpinnings. Chidester has played a central role in putting this on the agenda. Taking the frontier zone as a site where difference is articulated, encountered, and governed, is a productive entry point for research. Importantly, for Chidester, multiplicity and relationality precede categorization and are never fully contained by it – and yet, the simplifying work of categorization that occurred in colonial frontier zones has tangible consequences, as categories became real forces in the politics of world making, as is testified most disturbingly by the apartheid system of governance. Once one takes the frontier zones where differences were negotiated in the colonial period as a starting point for research, it is possible to make visible the complex processes of categorization – sustained by scholarship in religious studies and anthropology – and their incorporation into political domination and governance. This, though, is not all. Chidester insists over and over again that the frontier zone also entails possibilities for encounters and practices of mixing and creative synthesis. The final sentences of Savage systems express this lucidly:

As we have seen, a frontier zone is a zone of conflict, but it can also be a zone of reciprocal exchanges, creative interchanges, and unexpected possibilities. We might very well be faced with a frontier future. By going back through the history of situated comparisons to the frontier, it is possible that we might clear a space – perhaps even a postcolonial, postimperial, postapartheid space – where something new in the study of religion might happen (Chidester 1996:266).

61 Birgit Meyer

A focus on frontier zones is therefore not only important for retrieving the history of comparative religion and the orders established through categorization; it also serves as a constant reminder that messy multiplicity is the default out of which cultural and religious distinctions are formed, and as an invitation to spot unexpected possibilities, as exemplified most markedly in his work on Authentic fakes (Chidester 2005) and Wild religion (Chidester 2012).

Africanist resonances As noted, I discovered Chidester’s work rather late, long after I had embarked in the early 1990s on historical and ethnographic work on the activities of German Protestant missionaries of the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft (NMG) among the Ewe people in what is today Southern Ghana and Southern . With hindsight, I realize that I analyzed their encounters in ways resonant with Chidester’s approach to the frontier zone. Rather than study a traditional setting that was located as far away as possible from Western influences, the explicit aim was to explore the consequences of contacts between Westerners and Africans and their increasing entanglements under unequal power relations. This was part of a larger project of ‘re-inventing anthropology’ (Hymnes 1972), which entailed a critical reflection on ‘how anthropology makes its object’ (Fabian 1983) through at-first-sight neutral epistemological operations. Of crucial importance here, as Johannes Fabian argues, is the use of time and space as categories through which a distance between anthropologists and their interlocutors is affirmed and their ‘coevalness’ is denied. There is a strong resonance between this critical anthropology and Chidester’s approach, in that both combine constant critical interrogation of scholarly vocabularies and the underlying epistemologies with detailed historical and ethnographic research. Studying the missionary ethnographic work on ‘Ewe religion’ and the NMG proselytization activities, as well as the ways Ewe people appropriated Christianity and related to the colonizing mission (Meyer 1999), there is much inspiration in Talal Asad’s ground-breaking critique of the modern category of religion as being inflected with post-Enlightenment Protestant understandings (Asad 1993). This enabled me to spot the misrepresentations of ‘Ewe religion’

62 Frontier Zones and the Study of Religion entailed by analyzing it through the lens of a reductive, mentalistic approach to religion, according to which the relevance of practices, the body and the use of material things was downplayed or even dismissed as belonging to a ‘heathen’ religiosity that was to be surpassed in favor of Christian faith. In my work, I sought to not only problematize the epistemological limits of this modern category and its ideological use. Also, much in line with Chidester’s approach, I wanted to trace the implications of the introduction of the category of ‘religion’ to the Ewe, as well as to other people groups in the area and across Africa, and to explore how this introduction yielded understandings of ‘African traditional religion’ as a fixed and coherent system modelled on the example of Christianity (cf. De Witte 2010; Meyer 2015:252-287). In the process of reconfiguring myself as a scholar of religion, I re-read the historical materials of the NMG as refractory resources from the frontier zone, as defined by Chidester, that could be scrutinized for an alternative approach to religion from a material and corporeal angle (Meyer 2012). This has been central in my conceptual interventions since that time, my aim being a broader take on religion that is not reduced to its secularized, post- Enlightenment Protestant version, while being sensitive to the ways religion and associated terms were and still are employed in colonial and post- independence governance. The point is to follow the trajectory through which it was imposed, used, and popularized in global entanglements. Then past and present discourses about religion can be analyzed as resources that condense highly complex, contested encounters and troubled translations with regard to human-spirit relations in frontier zones of imperial outreach (cf. also Mbembe 2014; Tonda 2015). The widely used, casual expression ‘study of religion in Africa’, which I also long employed to describe my research, normalizes religion as part of African life. I think that it is time to study ‘religion from Africa’ (Meyer 2017)3, so as to acknowledge that the possibility to say anything about religion in Africa requires taking into account the conditions and consequences of the introduction of this very term in the frontier zone. This is all the more important as Africa has been framed as the ‘never secular’ (Luhrmann 2012:371) continent par excellence, and Africans are often regarded as naturally, notoriously, and even incurably religious (Platvoet &

3 Obviously, this resonates with the project of Theory from the south (Comaroff & Comaroff 2012).

63 Birgit Meyer

Van Rinsum 2002)4. Recalling Chidester’s point that initially Africans were found to not have religion (see above), the irony of this qualification cannot be missed. The rather positive reception of the missionaries by many Ewe might be likened to bringing in a Trojan horse, in that conversion had highly destabilizing repercussions that fundamentally shook traditional ways of living. Still, I have always found remarkable the initial preparedness of more and more Ewe to open up to the missionaries and allow – or even invite – them to set up posts with churches, schools, and trading posts. This may have been motivated by the striving to find out about and get access to hitherto unknown spiritual power resources in unstable times, as happened also in the case of the engagement with various cults coming from the north (Kramer 1993). This openness and preparedness to accommodate something from elsewhere, to the extent that priests destroyed their shrines and people fundamentally changed their lifestyle as a consequence of Christian conversion, testify to an intriguing attitude. It is at loggerheads with essentializing ideas about a pure ethnic, national or religious identity – alas very much en vogue in Europe at this moment – and works against efforts of simplification. While I do not want to idealize this attitude, which may also be described as ‘extraversion’ (Bayart 2000), I think that it deserves further reflection as an alternative strategy to engage the multiplicity of the frontier zone. Could this attitude be regarded as an African cultural repertoire that allows people to surpass or disregard boundaries, to the extent of giving up and breaking with things done and ideas held before? That this is a fruitful direction for further exploration is also proposed by Francis Nyamnjoh. Inspired by Kopytoff (1987), he views Africans as ‘frontier beings’ who are ‘deeply uncomfortable with bounded identities and exclusionary ideas of being’ and who ‘contest taken-for-granted and often institutionalised and bounded ideas and practices of being, becoming, belonging, places and spaces’ (Nyamnjoh 2017:349)5. However, anthropologists found it difficult to apprehend this

4 See the critique of Engelke (2015:86-100) that the characterization of Africa as ‘never secular’ and ‘incurably religious’ is grounded in the binary of secular and religious. As he argues, the understanding of religion in the framework of this binary fails to grasp what religion is and means in Africa today. 5 According to Nyamnjoh, this attitude is grounded in a recognition of incompleteness, which ‘opens the door for connectivity and interdependence,

64 Frontier Zones and the Study of Religion attitude and instead tended to ‘define and confine and to ignore the history of flexible mobility, encounters and fluidity of identities’ (Nyamnjoh 2017:351), thereby contributing to simplification, whereas the true challenge is to grasp a world in permanent flux. Clearly, as Chidester also observed, on closer inspection, the frontier zone enshrines various possibilities and strategic options for engaging with others and with new things and ideas. Therefore, for scholars of religion and anthropology it is an excellent site to learn not only about the imposition of order through closure and categorization, but also about how multiplicity and the presence of others offer occasions for something new, albeit in the context of hierarchical power relations. The importance of the notion of the frontier zone for scholarly analysis is not limited to spheres of European imperial outreach, such as Southern Africa or the West African coast, but also pertains to contemporary Europe, where especially the metropolises have become increasingly diverse. As I will argue in the next section, a scholarly attitude that is associated with studying religion and its analytic concepts from frontier zones – as embodied by Chidester – is greatly needed for a fresh exploration of the ‘bewildering complexity’ of religion in postcolonial European cities.

In-between spaces in European frontier zones If about twenty years ago, in my own professional experience, the study of and other regions seemed to be worlds apart, the historical and actual entanglements of these regions have become more and more apparent, as the current so-called European refugee or migrant crisis spotlights markedly6. In the meantime, North-Western Europe has developed a highly

active participation, mutual fulfillment and enrichment. It compels us as humans to broaden our perspectives, embrace the unknown and the unknowable, and to be open-ended, open-minded and flexible in our identity claims and disclaimers’ (Nyamnjoh 2017:340). Nyamnjoh discusses this attitude in relation to the possibility of new forms of research collaboration – in his case between African and Japanese scholars – that generate mutual enrichment and conviviality. 6 Since 2014, 1.8 million refugees have arrived in Europe, via various routes across the Mediterranean. A list assembled by the Dutch NGO United for Intercultural Action (UNITED), and published by the Guardian on the occasion of World

65 Birgit Meyer heterogeneous and diverse or plural religious environment: Unchurching occurs alongside articulations of staunch atheism, the search for new spiritualities and the return of Christianity as heritage (or even its ‘hijacking’ as a cradle of European identity – Marzouki, McDonnell & Roy 2016), as well as the rise of Islam, Pentecostalism, , and (Western forms of) Buddhism in increasingly self-consciously plural societies. Europe’s others, who were ideologically and conceptually distanced through colonialism and deemed to be far away, are now co-present with secular atheists, protagonists of Christian religion ‘as we know it’ and spiritual seekers. Although I have not yet conducted a detailed anthropological research on religion in Europe, I often act as supervisor of bachelor, master’s, and PhD theses, as well as postdoc projects on the changing religious environment and the public debates triggered by this process in the Netherlands (cf. Beekers 2014; Tamimi Arab 2017). Engaging with the work of colleagues studying the dynamics of religious diversity in European cities (e.g. Burchardt & Becci 2016; Hüwelmeier & Krause 2010) and the position of migrants and refugees from Africa therein (e.g. Butticci 2016; Knibbe 2011), I came to realize that my expertise as an Africanist studying religion from and in Africa is much more relevant than was the case some years ago for understanding the encounters and interactions in current frontier zones. Clearly, the coexistence of religious actors and organizations poses a challenge to the Western-centric concepts and theories that once were employed to arrange people and religions into hierarchized evolutionary schemes along temporal and spatial axes, and that constituted an earlier politics of ordering difference through hegemonic schemes. It is a mistake to rely on temporalizing frameworks according to which religion is a matter of the past and is supposed to vanish, and according to which certain religions are considered backward and not befitting an ideal modern society. Mobilized in public debates, such views should be subject to scholarly analysis, instead of driving it theoretically. The point is to resist describing plural religious environments in terms of the simultaneity of the

Heritage Day, reports 34,361 deaths (up to 5 May 2018) occurring over a period of 20 years, as migrants and refugees tried to enter Europe, with 2015 being the pinnacle of the so-called crisis (McIntyre & Rice-Oxley 2018). See the long article by journalist Daniel Trilling (2018), who deconstructs five myths that shape the public debate about refugees and migrants.

66 Frontier Zones and the Study of Religion non-simultaneous – ‘die Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen’. Doing so would resuscitate the simplifying and temporalizing use of the categories of time and space that underpinned the study of comparative religion in colonial frontier zones. The aim is to take the, at times uneasy, co-presence and entanglement of different religious and secular groupings and its ensuing dynamics as a starting point. In the aftermath of the rejection of secularization theory as the dominant analytical framework in the study of religion in modern societies, the question how to conceptualize and study religious plurality has become a pressing issue7. Analyzing plurality from a fresh perspective, demands intense conversations between scholars with expertise on religion in the Global South and on transnational migration on the one hand, and the sociology of religion in Europe on the other (as argued by Beekers 2015). There is a need for a reformed and synthesized study of society that includes sociology, anthropology, volkskunde (folklore studies, now called European ethnology), and religious studies. The old division of labor between sociology (as the discipline devoted to the study of modern societies in the West) and anthropology (as the discipline devoted to the study of non-Western cultures) that developed in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, has become obsolete in

7 The terms ‘plurality’ and ‘diversity’ have generated a great deal of scholarship and debate, and also figure in policy discourses and public debates. They are already part of attempts to come to grips with the dazzling multiplicity of religious forms and elements, and of modes of managing religious difference; in this sense, they have become part of the construction of the phenomenon to which they refer. I refrain from using pluralism as an analytical concept because of its strong normative connotations (cf. Bochinger 2013); and while I use both plurality and diversity, I have a slight preference for plurality, because diversity has been incorporated into policy more explicitly. Initially, I thought that ‘pluriformity’ might be a viable alternative term (also because of the attention called to the ‘form’ through which religion is expressed), only to realize that it is deeply embedded in Calvinist theology in the aftermath of Abraham Kuyper and has also been deployed in the racist politics of difference of the apartheid regime (Van den Hemel 2009:117-133). The fact that there is no neutral, merely descriptive term available to refer to the coexistence of multiple religious traditions and secular standpoints points to the political, social, and ethical stakes involved in this kind of research. My main concern here is to call attention to the shape and dynamics of the religious environment as a whole in terms of its relationality and entanglement.

67 Birgit Meyer the context of current global entanglements and millions of people on the move. Likewise, the differentiation of the study of cultures as classified under anthropology (if located far away) and opposed to European ethnology (at home), makes little sense in the face of the current complexity of cultural and religious diversity in Europe. Added to this, with the dismissal of the secularization theory as the master narrative for an increasingly disenchanted modern society, academic expertise about religion – in past and present, across the globe – is indispensable for grasping the largely unexpected resilience and even revival of religious matters. Developing new socio-cultural approaches to (religious) plurality in European societies involves major epistemological challenges. At stake is the production of knowledge beyond well-trodden universalistic (and yet de facto Western-centric) claims8. These claims are not only politically contested, but also subject to radical epistemological critique and calls to ‘decolonize’ academic knowledge production. Needed is a socio- cultural approach to plurality that is able to think about differences without putting them into simplifying categorizations or essentializing them as unbridgeable alterities (cf. Jullien 2017). Scholars working on contemporary religion from an anthropological perspective are well equipped to enter deep into the religious worlds of their interlocutors and discern more or less fundamental differences between Western and non-Western, secularist, and religious ways of being in the world9. However, even if one wishes to conduct a study of one particular religious group (as anthropologists are inclined to and certainly should continue to do), it is necessary to situate it in a wider social and political

8 This Western-centric universalism involves a totalizing aspiration that contains differences by putting them into hegemonic orders. A true universalism – for instance with regard to a shared humanity – cannot simply be imposed but is to be aspired to and negotiated through encounters across differences (cf. Jullien 2017:19-34; Mbembe 2014:25). 9 Nowadays, a number of them advocate a radical ontological orientation, which goes much further than the phenomenological ‘bracketing’ employed in religious studies. Deep insight into the particularity of religious traditions and non-religious stances is certainly necessary but should not stand by itself. The challenge to develop concepts and methods for the study of the coexistence of people embedded in various religious traditions or varieties of secularist worldviews, cannot be met by approaching religions – let alone cultures and societies – as separate ontological universes.

68 Frontier Zones and the Study of Religion environment. This requires moving beyond the edges and margins of religious (and secularist) groups, where they rub against each other in the limbo of an in-between space or Zwischenraum. Simmel has suggested in his seminal essay on space and spatial orders of society (Simmel [1908] 2016; cf. also Flickinger 2005), that Zwischenräume are the locations where different actors relate to each other. As the form through which experiences of distance and closeness, fixity and movement vis- à-vis others occur, space is the condition for social relations to exist. Simmel ([1908] 2016:688) aptly describes space as an activity of the soul (rather than being given). An in-between space – an interstice or third space (cf. Bhabha 1993) – is not fixed, but in flux and subject to continuous transformation. The difficulty of describing encounters in an in-between space without presupposing or reiterating identities as given, should not prevent one from trying to think about encounters as at least potentially open (for recent original work on Africa, cf. Janson 2016; Spies & Seesemann 2016). Intriguingly, the French philosopher and sinologist, François Jullien, proposes to conceive the ‘in-between’ not in terms of difference (which he associates with discourses that invest in fixing identities), but in terms of distance, which requires an awareness of some kind of gap and an activity of bridging between people, terms, or positions. The ‘in-between’ does not exist by itself but is a site where something happens. Taking it as the nodal point, it is possible ‘to disrupt the logic of belonging that was established through [the emphasis on] difference and to liquefy identities. Thus, it is necessary to leave behind the thinking of being (of ontology) in order to think of the in-between’ (Jullien 2017:42; author’s translation). The notion of the in-between space provides a promising entry point for an analysis of religious plurality beyond well-trodden lines. I understand Chidester’s notion of the frontier zone as an in-between space in this sense. It is a site where differences and distances are produced, negotiated and affirmed in the framework of identity politics (from above and below); our analysis will explore their implementation and operation. The point is to grasp how identities become real, without taking them for granted and vesting them with immortality. Working on the dynamics of frontier zones in European metropolises along these lines enables us to clear ‘postcolonial, postimperial, postapartheid spaces’ where, to invoke Chidester’s vision once again, ‘something new in the study of religion might happen’ (Chidester 1996:266, see above).

69 Birgit Meyer

Towards a ‘frontier future’: Three programmatic points In closing, I will highlight three programmatic points that may offer directions for working towards a ‘frontier future’ and that can be made fruitful for the study of religion and beyond. First, thinking about European cities – my own ideas are grounded in my experiences in Amsterdam and Berlin – helps sharpen our awareness of the extent to which the current religious plurality reverberates earlier, colonial categorizations generated in 19th-century frontier zones in Africa and other sites of European empires. People from these areas migrated and still migrate to Europe, especially to larger cities that are becoming more and more diverse. While diversity pertains to European societies at large, cities – and especially metropolises – are dense nodes of coexistence across manifold religious and other differences. Migrants often appear religious in ways many Europeans find difficult to accept, and that challenge established modes of accommodating religion through state policies, epitomized by the proverbial separation of church and state (which, of course, does not exist in pure form). While there is much commotion about the presence of Muslims and the material manifestations of Islam – mosques, halal food, Islamic dress – in public urban spaces across Europe, the religious practices and ideas of Christians from Africa, Latin America, and Asia receive much less public attention. If, from a mainstream Western secular perspective, Christianity has become a religion of the past, it is still somehow familiar and evokes fewer anxieties than Islam, which many take to be incompatible with a modern, secular order. At the same time, old colonial and racist stereotypes are frequently mobilized in claiming the superiority of modern Westerners to migrants and refugees from Africa. The latter are regarded as ‘backward’, not only because they are so staunchly Christian, but also for failing to adopt modern, emancipatory views on, for instance, same-sex relations and gender diversity and for falling prey to superstitions such as a belief in witchcraft10. Repercussions of older qualifications abound through which Europeans dealt with their ‘others’ who were long far away and are now nearby. Tracing current perceptions of religious ‘others’ back to colonial frontier zones and spotting how the scholarly vocabulary generated from there, as mobilized in current views on religious plurality, is important if we are to grasp everyday contemporary echoes of colonial categories and standpoints. A critical study

10 These issues are addressed in the research project led by Kim Knibbe (2018).

70 Frontier Zones and the Study of Religion of religion has much to offer in unpacking the transregional entanglements that shape contemporary, urban religious environments. This unpacking is what I understand a postcolonial approach to religion in Europe to be about. Second, Chidester’s analysis of the frontier zone as a zone of conflict in which a new order is imposed and negotiated, is well taken. The current European frontier zones are, though, not a reverse case in which the tables are turned. While populist propaganda may qualify Muslims as intruders who intend to Islamize Europe, and Africans as prone to racial mixing with white women, the truth is that the newcomers and people with a ‘migration background’ include large groups of formally colonized or otherwise deprivileged people, who are expected to practice their religiosity within the framework of an existing secular order. Asad (2003) has pointed out that in modern societies religion is positioned in a secular formation that underpins policies of regulating religious diversity (Mahmood 2015). This entails a modern, liberal understanding of religion, which is strongly tied to belief and supposed to exist beside, and to accept the authority of, the domains of politics, law, and science. This understanding of religion – modelled on Christianity – forms the normative base for policies dealing with religious newcomers, and shapes debates about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ religion in the public domain. While religious plurality as such is not new in Europe (Kippenberg, Rüpke & Von Stuckrad 2009), there is now a high degree of friction and a perceived difficulty to accommodate religion and manage conflicts within a secular framework, as numerous conflicts around religious dress, food, sounds, and buildings occur. In other words, the established accommodation of religion conditioned by the ‘secular truce’ (Achterberg, Houtman, Aupers, De Koster, Mascini & Van der Waal 2009) through which it is tolerated and even to a degree protected by the modern state, is challenged and prompts new policies and regulations (cf. Becci, Burchardt & Giorda 2016)11. As new frontier zones, large European cities in particular have to accommodate new manifestations of religion at a time when Christianity is in serious decline and, ironically, missionaries from the colonial mission field now seek to re-convert Europeans to Christianity (cf. Adogame 2013). There are many ways to investigate conflicts and tensions that arise in such new frontier zones. In line with Chidester, I regard a focus on materiality

11 Regulations regarding religion are of course also employed by states outside of Europe (cf. Burchardt 2018 in reference to South Africa).

71 Birgit Meyer as a productive entry point (cf. Strijdom 2014 for a discussion of our respective views). In 2016, I was able to set up a collaborative research project titled Religious matters in an entangled world (Meyer 2016). When approaching religion from a material perspective, the starting point is religious matters. These include both the tangible manifestations of religious forms – including images, objects, buildings, dress, food, and so on – in public spaces and matters of concern about this presence in public debate and policy. The regional foci are Africa, Europe, and their entangled history. The researchers involved in this project seek to contribute to developing fresh understandings of the dynamics of coexistence across religious and other differences in African and European societies (with special emphasis on urban areas). Like Chidester, we use ‘religion’ and ‘religious’ as problematic and yet unavoidable terms, and thus as terms that offer ‘occasions for critical and creative reflection on problems of interpretation, explanation, and analysis in the humanities and social sciences’ (Chidester 2018a:42). Third, doing research on religion in contemporary frontier zones in the spirit of Chidester means having a good sense of humor and finding paradox and irony. This dimension is strongly emphasized in his latest book Religion: Material dynamics (Chidester 2018b). Religion is usually taken as a serious mentality: ‘[T]he academic study of religion has inherited a humourless legacy’ (Chidester 2018b:68) and yet, the frontier zone is a prime site for laughter, as Chidester shows in many examples, for instance the Tswana response to the preaching of the missionary Robert Moffat that their ancestral spirits were actually demons, which they found completely ridiculous (Chidester 2018b:59). Laughter, according to Chidester (2018b:5), occurs in the slipstream of incongruity, which ‘appears in the gaps, but can also register in mixtures and mergers, in syncretisms and hybridities, in which disparate factors converge without synthesis’12. He even proposes to appreciate laughter as a form of comparative religion undertaken from an African perspective. The sense of incongruity between an intended order and an actual disorder can go in many directions, yielding puzzlement and surprise. We certainly also find it in current frontier zones in Europe, even though the commotions about religious and other differences are often grim and deadly serious.

12 ‘As both an unstable category and a destabilizing category, incongruity challenges all of the categories in the academic study of religion’ (Chidester 2018b:5).

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I think that Chidester’s attitude towards the incongruities in frontier zones that provoke laughter and ridicule, links up very well with the surrealist critique of European colonization and imperialism and of Eurocentric conceptual schemes for the representation of differences. Focusing on weird – ‘primitive’, heterogeneous, extraordinary – things and employing montage, collage, and fragmentation, the early 20th-century surrealists were in close contact with some (especially French) anthropologists, with Marcel Mauss as a central figure (Albers 2018:249). James Clifford (1981) points to the value and importance of surrealism as an alternative approach in the socio-cultural sciences. Especially the reversal of the gaze, through which the familiar becomes strange and the ‘modern’ and the ‘primitive’ are made to mirror each other, entails a sense of incongruity and alienation for beholders. By shifting the gaze, surrealists were able ‘to represent culture as something that can and must be subverted, parodied and transgressed’ (Albers 2018:248; author’s translation). Recently, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2018 – Berlin) featured the exhibition Neolithic childhood: Art in a false present, ca. 1930, which revisits the first decades of the 20th century, when the modern colonial order was established, tracing not only its impositions of ordering mechanisms, but also potentials for its reversal and possibilities for thinking differently. Such work at the interface of the arts and the socio-cultural sciences gives fresh impetus for the study of plurality and coexistence in current European frontier zones. And obviously, with his inclination towards the surreal, Chidester is a major figure in this project.

References Achterberg, P., D. Houtman, S. Aupers, W. de Koster, P. Mascini & J. van der Waal 2009. A Christian cancellation of the secularist truce? Waning Christian religiosity and waxing religious deprivatization in the West. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 48, 4: 687-701. Adogame, A.U. 2013. The African Christian diaspora: New currents and emerging trends in world Christianity. London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

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Albers, I. 2018. Ethnografischer Surrealismus. In Franke, A. & T. Holert (eds.): Neolithische Kindheit: Kunst in einer falschen Gegenwart, ca. 1930. Berlin: HKW, Diaphanes. Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of religion: Discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Asad, T. 2003. Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bayart, J.-F. 2000. Africa in the world: A history of extraversion. African Affairs: The Journal of the Royal African Society 99, 395: 217-267. Becci, I., M. Burchardt & M. Giorda 2016. Religious super-diversity and spatial strategies in two European cities. Current Sociology 65, 1: 73- 91. Beekers, D.T. 2014. Pedagogies of piety: Comparing young observant Muslims and Christians in the Netherlands. Culture and Religion 15, 1: 72-99. Beekers, D.T. 2015. Precarious piety: Pursuits of faith among young Muslims and Christians in the Netherlands. PhD thesis, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Bergunder, M. 2016. Comparison in the maelstrom of historicity: A postcolonial perspective on comparative religion. In Schmidt-Leukel, P. & A. Nehring (eds.): Interreligious comparisons in religious studies and theology – comparison revisited. London: Hurst. Bhabha, H.J. 1993. Location of culture. London: Routledge. Bochinger, C. 2013. Ist religiöse Vielfalt etwas Gutes? Pluralismus und Pluralität in der Religionswissenschaft. In Adogame, A., M. Echtler & O. Freiberger (eds.): Alternative voices: A plurality approach for religious studies. Essays in honor of Ulrich Berner. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Burchardt, M. 2018. Statecraft, witchcraft, God’s craft: Religious diversity and the forces of law in postcolonial South Africa. Journal of Religion in Africa 47, 2: 257-284. Burchardt, M., & I. Becci 2016. Religion and superdiversity: An introduction. New Diversities 18, 1: 1-7. Butticci, A. 2016. African Pentecostals in Catholic Europe: The politics of presence in the twenty-first century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Chidester, D. 1996. Savage systems: Colonialism and comparative religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Chidester, D. 2005. Authentic fakes: Religion and American popular culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chidester, D. 2012. Wild religion: Tracking the sacred in South Africa. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Chidester, D. 2014. Empire of religion: Imperialism and comparative religion. Berkeley: University of Chicago Press. Chidester, D. 2018a. World religions in the world. Journal for the Study of Religion 31, 1: 41-53. Chidester, D. 2018b. Religion: Material dynamics. Oakland: University of California Press. Clifford, J. 1981. On ethnographic surrealism. Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, 4: 539-564. Comaroff, J. & J.L. Comaroff 2012. Theory from the south: Or, how Euro- America is evolving toward Africa. Anthropological Forum 22, 2: 113- 131. De Witte, M. 2010. Transnational tradition: The global dynamics of ‘African Traditional Religion’. In Adogame, A. & J. Spickard (eds.): Religion crossing boundaries: Transnational religious and social dynamics in Africa and the new African diaspora. Leiden: Brill. Engelke, M. 2015. Secular shadows: African, immanent, post-colonial. Critical Research on Religion 3, 1: 86-100. Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the other: How anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University Press. Flickinger, B. 2005. Vom Umgang mit der Fremdheit. In Wladika, M. (ed.): Gedachter Glaube. Festschrift für Heimo Hofmeister. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann. Haus der Kulturen der Welt. 2018. Neolithic childhood: Art in a false present, ca. 1930. 13 April 2018. Available at: https://www.hkw.de/en/ programm/projekte/2018/neolithische_kindheit/neolithische_kindheit_ start.php. (Accessed on 12 August 2018.) Hüwelmeier, G. & K. Krause (eds.) 2010. Traveling spirits: Migrants, markets, and mobilities. Oxford, New York: Routledge. Hymnes, D.H. (ed.) 1972. Reinventing anthropology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Janson, M. 2016. Unity through diversity: A case study of Chrislam in Lagos. Africa 86, 4: 646-672. Jethro, D.H. 2015. Aesthetics of power: Heritage formation and the senses in post-apartheid Africa. PhD thesis, Utrecht University, Utrecht. Jullien, F. 2017. Es gibt keine kulturelle Identität. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kippenberg, H.G., J. Rüpke & C.K.M. von Stuckrad. 2009. Europäische Religionsgeschichte: Ein mehrfacher Pluralismus. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Knibbe, K.E. 2011. Nigerian missionaries in Europe: History repeating itself or a meeting of modernities? Journal of Religion in Europe 4, 3: 471- 487. Knibbe, K.E. 2018. Sexuality, religion and secularism: Cultural encounters in the African diaspora in the Netherlands. University of Groningen. Available at: https://www.rug.nl/staff/k.e.knibbe/projects. (Accessed on 12 August 2018.) Kopytoff, I. 1987. The African frontier: The reproduction of traditional African societies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kramer, F.W. 1993. The red fez: Art and spirit possession in Africa. London: Verso. Luhrmann, T. 2012. A hyperreal God and modern belief: Toward an anthropological theory of mind. Current Anthropology 53, 4: 371-395. McIntyre, N. & M. Rice-Oxley 2018. It’s 34,361 and rising: How the list tallies Europe’s migrant bodycount. The Guardian, 20 June 2018. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/20/the-list-europe- migrant-bodycount. (Accessed on 12 August 2018.) Mahmood, S. 2015. Religious difference in the secular age: A minority report. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marzouki, N., D. McDonnell & O. Roy (eds.) 2016. Saving the people: How populists hijack religion. London: Hurst. Mbembe, A. 2014. Kritik der schwarzen Vernunft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Meyer, B. 1999. Translating the devil: Religion and modernity among the Ewe in Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Meyer, B. 2012. Mediation and the genesis of presence: Towards a material approach to religion. Inaugural Lecture, 19 October 2012, Utrecht University, Utrecht.

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Meyer, B. 2015. Sensational movies: Video, vision and . Oakland: California University Press. Meyer, B. 2016. Religious matters in an entangled world. Available at: www.religiousmatters.nl. (Accessed on 12 August 2018.) Meyer, B. 2017. Studying religion in and from Africa. Lecture, November 2017, Bayreuth University. Meyer, B. & M.P.J. van de Port (eds.) 2018. Sense and essence: Heritage and the cultural production of the real. Oxford, New York: Berghahn. Nyamnjoh, F.B. 2017. Incompleteness and conviviality: A reflection on international research collaboration from an African perspective. In Gebre, Y., I. Ohta & M. Matsuda (eds.): African virtues in the pursuit of conviviality: Exploring local solutions in the light of global prescriptions. Bamenda: Langaa Research & Publishing Common Initiative Group. Platvoet, J. & H. van Rinsum 2002. Is Africa incurably religious? Confessing and contesting an invention. Exchange: Journal of Missiological and Ecumenical Research 32, 2: 123-153. Simmel, G. [1908] 2016. Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Gesamtausgabe Band 11. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Spies, E. & R. Seesemann 2016. Pluralicity and relationality: New directions in African studies. Africa Today 63, 2: 132-139. Strijdom, J.M. 2014. The material turn in religious studies and the possibility of critique: Assessing Chidester’s analysis of ‘the fetish’. HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 70, 1: 7 pages. Art. #2116. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/hts.v70i1.2116 Tamimi Arab, P. 2017. Amplifying Islam in the European soundscape: Religious pluralism and secularism in the Netherlands. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Tonda, J. 2015. L’impérialisme postcolonial: Critique de la société des éblouissements. Paris: Karthala. Trilling, D. 2018. Five myths about the refugee crisis. The Guardian, 5 June 2018. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jun/05/ five-myths-about-the-refugee-crisis. (Accessed on 12 August 2018.) Van den Hemel, 2009. Calvinisme en politiek: Tussen verzet en berusting. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Boom.

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Van der Veer, P. 2001. Imperial encounters: Religion and modernity in India and Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Birgit Meyer Religious Studies Utrecht University [email protected]

78

Can’t Help Lovin’: David Chidester’s Pop Culture Colonialism

Kathryn Lofton [email protected]

‘As we have seen, a frontier is a zone of conflict, but it can also be a zone of reciprocal exchanges, creative interchanges, and unexpected possibilities’ (Chidester 1996a:266)

Abstract This article examines the likability of hip-hop star Kanye West and champion Jordan Smith to explain the colonial terms for our pop culture taste. The writings of David Chidester establish the tie between religion and colonialism as an axiomatic one; he also argues that popular culture is a rich site for formations of religion. West and Smith offer an opportunity to argue the connection between these two strands of scholarly observance, showing the fractal effects of colonialism in Africa on the preferences of pop culture consumption in America. The attraction to West’s unlikability is the other side of the easy adoration for Jordan Smith: like those colonists who gave religion to those colonized subjects they dominated, pop consumers refuse to admit their intimate and needful connection to those idols who resist their control. Although organized by particular instances, this article seeks to encourage those in pop culture studies to see the erotic work of dislike; it seeks to encourage those in religious studies to see how pop subjects carry forward the classificatory imprints of colonial frontiers.

Keywords: colonialism, hate crime, hate watching, Jordan Smith, Kanye West, popular culture, religion, whiteness

Journal for the Study of Religion 31, 2 (2018) 79-104 79 Online ISSN 2413-3027; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a4 Kathryn Lofton

Introduction David Chidester established the study of religion as inextricably linked to the history of colonialism. One cannot think of ‘religion’ without also thinking about those who defined it on settler frontiers. For Chidester, religion is a category that does not belong solely to the academy, but it is ‘constantly at stake in the interchanges of cultural discourses and practices’ (Chidester 1996a:745)1. Academic thinkers have a part to play in these interchanges, but they are not alone, and their work is inconceivable without colonial territories. The majority of Chidester’s bibliography focuses on the African frontier. Yet his 1996 article evinces a secondary strand of interest in American popular culture and its peculiar relationship to religion. He has never written at length about how he understands the relationship between these two subjects. This article seeks to demonstrate the interrelation between colonialism in Africa and the pop culture in America. In tribute to Chidester’s gift for weird examples, I will not do this in the most obvious or easy way by exploring representations of African culture in American culture2. Instead, I take a roundabout route, pursuing an odd comparison: An American winner of The Voice, Jordan Smith, and an American hip-hop artist, Kanye West. This article aims to understand Kanye West through a critical assessment of the colonial apparatus from which he emerged and of which he is a constitutive component. Given his political presence since the 2016 election, for some readers it may be discomfiting to read an account of West that does not focus on diagnosing his mental illness or indicting his relationship to Donald Trump. Yet I have learned from the writings of David Chidester that our job as scholars is to think hard about the fractal consequences of colonialism. Included among those consequences is the present-day ways that race functions in popular culture. I do not offer an exhaustive consideration of the entirety of Kanye’s career or the global phenomenon of The Voice. Rather,

1 This is also published as chapter 2 of Chidester’s book Authentic fakes: Religion and American popular culture (Chidester 2005). 2 Such a study might look like Black Africans in renaissance Europe (Earle & Lowe 2005) or Representing African Americans in transatlantic abolitionism and blackface minstrelsy (Nowatzki 2010), and it might achieve the sort of conclusions found in Representing African music (Agawu 1992) or Representing Africa in American art museums: A century of collecting and display (Bickford & Clarke 2011).

80 Can’t Help Lovin’: David Chidester’s Pop Culture Colonialism through a comparison of two public pop figures, I want to underline how the particularly colonial inheritance of race determines our liking for pop things. This is intentionally written as a riff on that critical space which the jazz- infused writings of David Chidester inspire me to take. I seek to honor Chidester’s work not only through the focus on continuing an arc of his thought, but also the modality of my comparative and ranging discussion. Jordan Smith and Kanye West offer the opportunity to think about what makes a certain genre go global. The Voice is a television singing competition which has, since its origin in 2011, been adapted in 145 countries or regions. Hip-hop is a style of popular music dating from the 1970s and originating in black and Hispanic communities of the United States and now defining musical expression from Brazil to Beijing, from Senegal to Saudi Arabia. Hip-hop is rap with a musical backing: It is defined by the rhymes of its spitting artists and the production that situates their riffs in a specific sonic shape. Reality TV singing competitions rarely include rap and tend to default in simple backdrop music to accompany the karaoke-style cover choices of the competing contenders. Hip-hop artists get famous for what they say and how people cannot stop bobbing their head with them. Reality TV competitors get famous for singing the songs of others in a way that makes people vote for them over other hopefuls. In both genres there is a form that the culture can occupy so that the global becomes immediately local: There is an La Voz Mexico and The Voice Thailand, Japanese hip-hop and Nigerian hip-hop. Whether in Moscow or Mexico City, these forms of music become successful when people attach their liking to the artists. The audience needs to vote for a reality TV contestant and needs to buy the albums of the hip-hop star; they need to like what they hear. It is the nature of that liking that interests me, and the relationship between versions of like and the histories of colonialism that give rise to the genre. ‘America’s most original contributions to popular music – jazz, blues, rock, rap, and hip-hop – originated in Africa’, David Chidester (2005:150) explains. He then works hard to dispel the persistent notion that there is a genealogy of popular American music in which its rhythms offer a porthole to African religion. Instead, he demonstrates that the history of popular American music is not a history of African cultural origins and African American cultural survivals; he rather shows that throughout the 20th century there were ongoing exchanges between Africa and America that produced different forms of intercultural subjectivity and collectivity within religion and popular culture. Even when no actual exchange

81 Kathryn Lofton of a person or album between Africa and America took place, the memory of Africa defined much of the musical choices of innovating musicians (Chidester 2005:170). Using Chidester’s work, I want to assert that the intimately interpretive and comparative dynamic of colonial Africa is a conceptual backdrop to American popular culture. This is not a neatly joyful commemoration. Popular culture is not only about affirming something through one’s happy liking of it; it is also about liking the bad feelings something elicits from a person and liking feeling those bad feelings. Discomfort with and dislike of other people organize settler frontiers. It is also critical to the popularity of the cultures that descend from those same intercultural frontiers of exchange. This is how the history of colonialism feeds, connects to, and comprises the present-day affective structure of pop consumption: People define who they are not only by what they love, but also by what they do not love. To understand the present-day pop cultural, one needs to know the features of the pop culture colonialism that David Chidester has spent a career describing and defining. I conjure this neologism ‘pop culture colonialism’ to summarize how Chidester conceives of the role of culture in the insistence of empire.

Pop culture colonialism In regular academic application, colonialism tends to refer to the extension of one nation’s sovereignty over a territory beyond its borders. Colonizing nations often seek total control over the resources of that territory. This control is established through settler colonies, including administrative offices, educational institutions, and missionary operations. If colonialism is the direct intervention of a nation upon countries not in its established borders, imperialism refers to the more indirect routes of control, such as the forms of linguistic, religious, and social coercion that emerge from administrative offices, educational institutions, and missionary operations. Imperialism is the authority of influence and market pervasion; colonialism is the authority of overt political, military, and institutional control. Although often the result of economic need, colonialism is almost always publicly justified through an ideology of paternalistic superiority in which the colonizer is convinced that they have something to offer the colonized. This ‘something’ is usually the full

82 Can’t Help Lovin’: David Chidester’s Pop Culture Colonialism imperial package of better societies, better markets, better schools, and better gods. David Chidester enters this definitional frame. He does two things to this account: First, he amplifies the role of the colonized to observe how they function in dialogue with the colonizer; and second, he observes how the concept of religion is a definitional to the gradual hermeneutic process by which domination transpires. ‘As we review the history of the study of religion’, Chidester (2014:312) explains, ‘it is necessary but not sufficient to assert that the general idea of religion is a constructed category and that all kinds if ideas about specific religions have been invented’ (emphasis added). In the case of occupied Africa, several different ideas about religions were invented, and – as he repeatedly demonstrates – this invention was never a one- sided proposition. Colonized subjects were always finding ways to squeeze between the cracks of dominating systems in order to twist the disciplining particulars and claim forms of authority. Describing this dialectic is a consistent subject within every work by Chidester: He wants his readers to know that nobody in any place in human history ever said a simple ‘yes’ to the classification affixed over their name, their tribe, their community, or their culture. Individuals squirm beneath subjection and will not let themselves stay so conceived. To summarize, Chidester sees on the colonial frontier a three-part hermeneutic process: First, the colonizers observe the colonized, and describe them as possessing no religion; second, the colonizers observe the colonized further, and produce a raft of information about their local culture, comparing the colonized against the colonizer in an effort to prove morphological commonalities while retaining hierarchical distinctions befitting a developmental rendering of human difference; and third, the colonizers decide the colonized have a religion, and that they can practice that religion, as long as it remains within the bounds described in their definition. This sequential process mirrors the plot of material domination itself; the less the colonizers feel to be in total control of the local population, the less religion they designate to the colonized. The more the colonizers control the colonized, the more the colonized are allocated a religion. Frontier comparative religion was, in Chidester’s brilliant framing, ‘a human science of local control’ (Chidester 1996a:2). Before coming under colonial subjugation, Africans had no religion. Once the colonizers came, they began to capture interpretively the observed territorial communities in ways to make them ‘coherent, integrated, and

83 Kathryn Lofton bounded’ in distinct cultures and communities (Chidester 1996a:3). After these communities had been so bundled, local religious systems could be described; therefore, ‘the discovery of local religious systems in southern Africa can be precisely correlated with the establishment of local control over Africans’ (Chidester 1996a:3). I will now move from Chidester’s encapsulation of colonial modernity to 21st-century icons of a late settler colonial empire. As I do this, I want to retain the memory of this circuit. I want to recall how much emphasis Chidester places on the first stage – on the denial of religion – in the establishment of colonial strength. This ‘long history of denial’ will produce ‘a multilayered discourse about otherness that identified the absence of religion with images of indigenous people as animals or children, as irrational, capricious, and lazy, as both blankness and barrier to European interest’ (Chidester 1996a:20). To be clear: I am interested in how this kind of designation is a kind of obsessive dislike. The colonizer cannot stop looking at the indigenous and cannot stop labeling that looking as a comparative lack. Their liking is a dislike that is a liking. As we turn now to Jordan Smith and Kanye West, I want us to think about the figures – national and international – that capture our attention. How are the things that unite us also, now, a form of global control? How is our liking itself a taste not wholly in our hands, coerced through authorities that interpret on our behalf? And where are the cracks into which the dialectic can squeeze?

Liking in popular culture I observed that Chidester has not explicitly examined the connection between colonial Africa and American popular culture. This is not exactly right. He does briefly suggest their connection, focusing on the kinds of comparative work people do when looking at themselves relative to others. ‘The study of religion and religious diversity can be seen to have originated in the surprising discovery by Europeans of people who have no religion’, Chidester (1996b:759) has written.

Gradually, however, European observers found ways to recognize – by comparison, by analogy, and by metaphoric transference from the

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familiar to the strange – the religious character of beliefs and practices among people all over the world. This discovery did not depend upon intellectual innovations in defining the essence of religion, it depended upon localized European initiatives that extended the familiar metaphors that were already associated with religion, such as the belief in God, rites of worship, or the maintenance of moral order, to the strange beliefs and practices of other human populations. In the study of religion in American popular culture, I would suggest, we are confronted with the same theoretical dilemma of mediating between the familiar and the strange (Chidester 1996b:759).

To begin this particular act of comparison, I want to contrast two video clips that mark the entrance of specific figures, Smith and West, into the pop stratosphere. In one, a contestant in The Voice begins to sing. As with every contestant’s blind audition, the judges initially cannot see them; all they hear is the voice. If they decide the voice is good enough for them to coach, they press a buzzer and swivel around, allowing them to see the contestant. The camera work of the show follows the movements of the judges, not revealing the appearance of the singer to the home audience until one of the judges decides their voice is worthy of potential investment. In this now-famous blind audition, the voice is a dulcet androgynous one covering Sia’s pop hit, Chandelier – a song that has a quick beat but a poignant lyric in which the singer is relating their rationalization of their partying, possibly alcoholic, life. In the video one watches as the four coaches listen with interest and then, in quick order, all press their buzzers, revealing, as they swivel, a smooth-faced portly white man with a conservative haircut and large glasses singing his heart out in a cardigan and plaid shirt (The Voice 2015). The judges’ shock, as well as the audience’s, is palpable: How did this smooth extraordinary sound come from that person? The second video is also one drawn from a televised music event: It is from an award presentation at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. In it, two lesser celebrities give the award for Best Female Video to pop star Taylor Swift. She, shocked in a way familiar to her fans who have seen her frequently experience surprise at winning awards, goes to the stage to make a few ‘oh gosh, I can’t believe it’ comments. She is a tall, thin, white female, and blonde American in a sparkling column white sequined dress. She offers a few sentences of gratitude, thanking everyone. Suddenly a man comes up to the

85 Kathryn Lofton stage, perhaps from backstage. He is a black American in a black top wearing black sunglasses. He grabs the mic from her, and says, ‘Hey Taylor, I’m really happy for you, and I’m going to let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!’ The man hands the mic back to Swift, who now awkwardly holds it at an angle, uncertain as to whether the award she had just received is still hers (Alessandro 2013). The man is Kanye West. Each text introduces its surprise subject differently. The first appearance is a typical exhibition of wonder: The voice from the sky brought down to earth. The second is a stereotype come to national life: The black man offends the white woman as she goes about her daily business of winning. In each instance there have been many internet views of the disruptive moments their star individuals create. Let us look at the content of the liking of both the videos, insofar as millions of views evince some notion of ‘liking’ more deeply. Jordan Smith, a 21-year-old The Voice contestant from Harlan, Kentucky, attended an evangelical college in Tennessee. From his first moment on national television, Smith produces an aesthetic confusion. His genderless and expansive voice cannot quite be reconciled with his physicality. Why are the judges and the audience so shocked? We assume it is his embodied form: Pale and doughy, a bit hunched, wearing glasses that contract his eyes into wet- looking seeds (to quote Showler, a culture reporter). At his first audition, The Voice coaches asked if Smith would mind ‘sharing his story’. ‘Obviously, my voice is different,’ Smith said, ‘I’ve had to learn that being different is actually what makes me special. It’s my gift. This is an amazing opportunity to share that it’s okay to be different, and it’s okay to be yourself. Because you’re made that way, and that’s how God intended you to be’ (Showler 2015). If the turn to God seems odd, it is not. The Voice is no stranger to such religious messaging, starting with its title. In the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, references to the disembodied voice of God proliferate, almost always with a remark upon the profound quality of its sound. Across geographies and throughout recorded history, sounds from invisible sources have been attributed to heavenly sources. The entire setup for The Voice re- enacts this trope, in part to negate the inevitable prejudice visual cues can foster. ‘People may be unlikely to recognize or admit that visual displays can affect their judgment about music performance, particularly in a domain in which other signals are deemed to be more indicative of quality’, cognitive

86 Can’t Help Lovin’: David Chidester’s Pop Culture Colonialism scientists have explained, showing how the visual can dominate our decision making, no matter the other available sensory data (Tsay 2013). The Voice allows everyone to be seen for their spirit, first, and their physical person, second. However, these are not the only religious invocations on the show: Many contestants of The Voice profess to having developed their instruments, singing in their church choirs, and the language of ‘being saved’ abounds in the moments when contestants know they will not be cut. Note how an evangelical culture slips into the secular of a network singing competition without a scrape or a smudge. See how easy it is to make something secular into something evangelical, and something evangelical into something secular. This is neither the dualist evangelicalism of the Left Behind series in which everyone you meet is categorized into the saved and the damned, in which dehumanization is a required feature of Christian practice, nor is this the friendly pastor using the Da Vinci Code in an Easter sermon to draw the congregation into listening (Haskell, Paradis & Burgoyne 2008:139- 156). This is something else. In a 2016 article called Domesticating otherness: The snake charmer in American popular culture, Racy states: ‘Alienness takes many forms. The very concept of charming…tends to connote magic, a phenomenon assumed to exist beyond the rational realm ‘(Racy 2016:199, 200). As Racy explains, the very notion of charming through music is quite familiar to Westerners. Often cited is the proverbial adage, ‘music has charms to sooth a savage beast’. The use of music to placate supernatural beings appears in Greek mythology; recall the story of Orpheus using his lyre to charm the gods of the underworld in order to bring back to life his wife, Eurydice, who – interestingly, in this case – had died of a snakebite. In the North American Pentecostal ritual of snake handling, the participants individually hold one or more different poisonous snakes, while dancing to highly buoyant musical accompaniment, believing that their strong faith will empower them to evade the snake bites or to overcome their lethal effect. The snake charmer, the lyre-playing charmer – these are exotic images. In the West, exoticism has embraced various, often oppositional, attitudes toward the ‘other’, wanting the ‘other’ to be both empty-headed and wholly dangerous, ignorant and wily. Interpreting Jordan through this divided tradition, one can see him, simultaneously, as an alienated dorky everyman and a potentially marginalized white man. Who is Jordan charming when he sings? Who does he slay with his unidentifiable sound?

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In his rumination on what ‘black’ is in ‘black popular culture’, Stuart Hall makes this observation: ‘I have the feeling that, historically, nothing could have been done to intervene in the dominated field of mainstream popular culture, to try to win some space there, without the strategies through which those dimensions were condensed into the signifier “black”’ (Hall 1993:110). Kanye’s disruptions might thereby be seen as his practice of blackness: He is the person one has already decided him to be. However, disruption is what he has come to epitomize in his role as an artist who treats celebrity as one of his artistic mediums. This is demonstrated clearly in the moment when Swift was giving her acceptance speech for her video, ‘You belong with me’ (Swift 2009). West leaps onto stage and interrupts her, stating that Beyoncé had a better video. West references Beyoncé’s music video for ‘Single ladies (put a ring on it)’ (Beyoncé 2009). As West stands onstage, the cameras cut to Beyoncé, who looks shocked, and we can see her saying, ‘Oh, Kanye. Oh, God’ (Alessandro 2013). She loves him, she is worried about what he is doing. Meanwhile, West is booed by the audience. Later we learn that backstage Swift was seen hysterically crying. According to Rolling Stone (Kreps 2009), when her mother confronted West about his interruption, he gave ‘a half-hearted apology in which he added he still thought Beyoncé’s video was superior’ (Kreps 2009). After Beyoncé won Video of the Year for ‘Single Ladies’ later in the same award show, she acknowledged her experience winning her first VMA with Destiny’s child at the age of 17, and called Swift back to the stage, hugged her, and let her finish her speech. During the commercial break, singer Pink walked by West and reportedly shook her head in disgust. West was later removed from the remainder of the show. He subsequently wrote an apology on his blog (which he later removed). Various celebrities and industry figures spoke out about the incident through Twitter and other outlets, condemning West for the verbal outburst. Then real estate mogul, Donald Trump, called for a boycott of Kanye West (Kreps 2009). Who was the victim in this crime? Many said Taylor was, focusing on the masculinist bullying of Kanye’s actions. Others said Beyoncé was, focusing on her repeated dignity in the context of losing awards. Nobody could imagine that Kanye could be a victim. He was the perpetrator, the unlikable one. Several years later, an interviewer would ask then President Barack Obama: ‘Kanye or Jay-Z’?, whereupon Obama answered definitively: ‘Jay-Z’. The interview continued:

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‘Although I like Kanye’, Obama continues, with an easy smile, ‘he’s a Chicago guy. Smart. He’s very talented’. He is displaying his larger awareness of the question, looking relaxed, cerebral but friendly, alive to the moment, waiting for me to get to the heart of the matter. ‘Even though you called him a jackass’?, I ask. ‘He is a jackass’, Obama says, in his likable and perfectly balanced modern-professorial voice, ‘but he’s talented’ (Samuels 2012).

This is the basic conclusion about Kanye. He is a talented person, but he is a jackass: He assaults a white woman onstage and coopts every moment for his message. The question is whether his crime against Taylor Swift was precisely assault, and if it was, what kind? Was it a hate crime? In the popular rendering of hate crimes, they are a form of ‘stranger danger’, i.e. a random act, involving a perpetrator and victim who are complete strangers to each other. This image of the criminal as a stranger has been effectively challenged in a number of empirical studies. These studies indicated that in only a very small number of crimes (5%) the perpetrator was a stranger to the victim. The same study found that 90 percent of the incidents took place near or at the victim’s home and 10 percent took place near or at the victim’s workplace. In short, as with recorded allegations of hate crime as a whole, recorded allegations of racial and homophobic harassment take place in locations that are very much a part of the victim’s daily life and ordinary activities, or, as Stanko, Kielinger, Paterson, Richards, Crisp & Marsland (2003:31-32) put it, ‘[H]atred is often found closer to home and too often directed at the intimate partner, neighbor, friend or acquaintance’. Watching Kanye on a stage intervening upon an equally elite star in the celebrity firmament, one is struck by the intimacy of the trio, of Taylor, Kanye, and Beyoncé. In violence, in colonialism, in hate, intimacy is the frame in which the worst transgressions occur. We do the worst kind of things against servants and wives, neighbors and friends. The term ‘hate crime’ refers to criminal behavior motivated by prejudice. In this sense, the term ‘hate crime’ is a bit of a misnomer: It may not be obvious that prejudice itself is a form of hate. Generically hate crime is meant to distinguish criminal conduct motivated by prejudices from criminal conduct motivated by other hateful feeling (lust, jealousy, greed, etc.). Unlike theft, burglary, or assault, hate crime emphasizes the offender’s attitudes, values, and character (Jacobs & Potter 1997:2). If we consider this element of a hate crime’s diagnosis, we may broaden the potentially indicted: Who in this

89 Kathryn Lofton scene is the most prejudiced – Kanye or Taylor? This may seem a bit of a leap, even a bit of victim blaming. After all, Taylor was the one who was embarrassed, as she was the woman who was interrupted by a man yelling about another woman on an international broadcast. However, I seek to see – what Chidester would ask us to see – the colonial histories that shaped that onstage encounter between superstar and superstar, black man and white woman.

Racial hate in popular culture The history of the United States is a lengthy and bloody story of European invasion and the systematic domination and subjugation of non-European peoples. The creation of white European privilege was brought about by means of invasion of the Americas and the taking of social, economic, and political power by force from indigenous subjects and through the use of enslaved labor. In a book titled Internal colonialism, Michael Hechter argues that once privilege was wrested by force, it becomes institutionalized: ‘The superordinate group, now ensconced as the core, seeks to stabilize and monopolize its advantages through policies aiming at the institutionalization and perpetuation of the existing stratification system’ (Hechter 1975:39). This stabilization of stratification is also known as institutional discrimination; institutional discrimination is built into the existing structure of societal institutions such as schools, banks, and hospitals (Martinez 1997:266). Institutional discrimination in this sense is just a continuation, a further gentrification, of colonial forms of administration, education, and incarceration. On September 2, 2005, four days after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans with devastating impact, NBC gathered celebrities from TV, film, and music to raise money for the victims. A concert for hurricane relief drew 8.5 million viewers and raised a reported $50 million, but that is not what, ten years later, this telethon is remembered for. Instead, the benefit, hosted by then NBC mainstay morning journalist, Matt Lauer, and featuring the Hollywood actors, Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, Glenn Close, and Lindsay Lohan, will go down as an important page in the Katrina story for one moment: When Kanye West, channeling a nation’s frustration at the federal government’s failure to

90 Can’t Help Lovin’: David Chidester’s Pop Culture Colonialism help storm victims, looked straight into an NBC camera and said, on live TV, ‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people’. In this instance, West again disrupted a pop genre (here, a telethon). Like the moment at the VMA awards, he made discrimination a subject of pop attention. ‘I hate the way they portray us in the media’, he said. ‘You see a black family it says they’re looting, and if you see a white family they are looking for food’. He related many of the people who could help were elsewhere at war, and that the military had been given permission to shoot black people. He then stated that he would ask his business manager how much he could feasibly give the Red Cross to help in their relief efforts (West 2006). In the years since, West stood by his remarks and George W. Bush called it the ‘all-time low’ point in his presidency. West subsequently expressed his regret, and Bush forgave him (Chappell 2010)). Comedian Mike Myers, who stood in bewilderment alongside West as he went wildly off script, now says that he agrees with the essential message – that the government would not have failed a wealthier city with more white people in the same way – but one would not have known that from the look on his face at the time. If one watches the clip, Myers looks frustrated by West and confused by the off-script turn. Solidarity is not the word that comes to mind when looking at the face of Myers in that nationally-televised moment (Grow 2014). The vast majority of reported hate crimes are not committed by organized hate groups and their members. They are, therefore, hard to track by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Instead, they are committed by teenagers, primarily white males, acting alone or in a group. The NYPD Bias Unit found that 63.84 percent of hate crime offenders were under the age of nineteen. The most common hate crimes are intimidation, vandalism to property, and simple assault (Jacobs & Potter 1997:19-20). When profiling victims of hate crimes, researchers have found that in general the emotional responses of hate crime victims are the same as that of ordinary crime victims. Only one significant difference in hate crime victims’ emotional reactions is that they experience less emotional injury. ‘A major difference in the emotional response of hate crime victims appears to be the absence of lowered self-esteem. The ability of some hate violence victims to maintain their self-esteem may be associated with their attribution of responsibility for the attacks to the prejudice and racism of others’ (Jacobs & Potter 1997:31-32; emphasis added). If you are hit by someone for reasons beyond your control, it seems less devastating than if you could have done something to make yourself less vulnerable to the wound.

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The braggadocio in rap might here be seen as the confident rejoinder of a community to the mass hate crimes against people of color: They have hurt us, but they cannot keep us from standing. West shows up to white concert events and white telethons and refuses to be a civil representative of the colonialism that produced his ire. He is at these events a hero to some and a ‘jackass’ to others (cf. Samuels 2012). There is a dreary cliché that states, ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’. To say this is not to deny the consequences of terrorist actions. It is to realize the heresy that is at the heart of any bid for true bravery. Daniel Cottom argues that ‘art cannot be described without raising the issue of misanthropy’ and there is ‘no way that misanthropy can be described…that will triumph over the question of heresy…art teaches us that we live in the company of misanthropes’ (Cottom 2002:129). Kanye has, from the beginning of his career, defined himself as an opposition artist who uses people’s dislike of him as a component of his artistic self-creation. We know now that rap is art, and as a form of art it functions as a form of oppositional culture in the face of institutionalized discrimination, racial formation, and urban decay. The development of resistant stances to domination is never a simple, straightforward process for subordinated groups. Theresa Martinez comments on rap, stating that the relationship between dominant and subordinate groups encourages, enforces, fosters, and even coerces a full continuum of moves, countermoves, negotiations, protests, submissions, struggles, neutralities, alliances, accommodations, and resistances (Martinez 1997:269). As Chidester would describe relations on the African frontier, complex and contradictory relations emerge which result in a web of interactions that make ‘resistance’ itself a contested arena of discourse. In recent years, the term ‘hate-watching’ has been increasingly applied to the thing people do when they consume something in pop culture they do not like, but they keep watching. Early uses of the term focused on watching a television show like Studio 60 on the sunset strip or Smash. Invariably the thing being hate-watched was something about privileged white people; invariably the hate was described as distinct from a guilty pleasure in that the object being hated (while being watched) was not lowbrow but ambitious; invariably the thing being watch with (perhaps self-)hate was a TV series with high ambitions that features a certain amount of aesthetic gloss to the proceedings. Emily Nussbaum, TV critic for the New Yorker, justifies this as an edifying practice:

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Studio 60 was a show that people loved to hate-watch, because it was bad in a truly spectacular way – you could learn something from it, about self-righteous TV speechifying and failed satire and the dangers of letting a brilliant showrunner like Sorkin run loose to settle all his grudges in fictional form (Nussbaum 2012).

Nussbaum here sounds like she is saying that watching something you hate helps you observe excess in general. And given the racial profile I have observed of the use of ‘hate-watch’, it seems like a monitoring of something inside the viewer, too, that they seek to curb – that Nussbaum is suggesting, by watching Studio 60, she curbs herself in her flights of fancy or excess (Nussbaum 2012). There is an eerie echo between hate-watching TV and Hatewatch, the investigative unit of the Southern Poverty Law Center that monitors and exposes the activities of the American radical right. When I am watching high- concept television that I know is trying to be good, but I know it is bad, how am I mirroring the work of Hatewatch, which reports on identity extremists, anti-Muslim activists, and a variety of hate crime trials? What Sartre said about the anti-Semite (Sartre 1944), or Fanon about the colonist (Fanon 1961), apply to the despised ‘other’: If they do not exist, one would have to invent them. Is hate-watching a TV series the effort by a left technocratic elite to conjure the ‘other’ they must hate (because hate-watching is an inevitable feature of human life)? Added to this: Is that ‘other’ those who they believe (unconsciously accuse) of perpetuating the aesthetics of white power – the very white power, that (in other hands, in other castes) leads to Tiki torches and hate crime trials, or, in the hands of Chidester, perpetuates the obsessive interpretations of the colonial apparatus? Who hate-watched more than the colonizer looking at the colonized? Hate groups have established an electronic community of hate through the web, taking advantage of the ease of communication and the possibility of communicating directly, instantaneously, and inexpensively. One of the primary goals of hate groups is to develop a public for their views, to get those views into the mainstream and, perhaps thereby, to make them more acceptable. Experts are increasingly concerned that the rise of hate in cyberspace and on the airwaves will cause people to become more tolerant and accepting of messages that were once considered unacceptable and extreme (Borgeson & Valeri 2004:101).

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Social psychologists agree that an individual develops an identity in order to provide a sense of cohesion to their life. This can be achieved by focusing one’s identity into a singular passion such as power, destruction, or hate. The awareness of the self requires the individual to have an effect on or accomplish something. Social theorist Lauren Langman argues: ‘A feeling of powerlessness activates a desire to overcome the feeling of inferiority when one has little effect on others which then leads the self to act aggressively in order to create the desired effect of having control or power over others. Sadism and destructiveness thus empower the self’ (Langman 1998:173). When we watch Kanye West, we are watching his empowerment as well as ours. Domination through interruption is not just the act of a jackass – it is a defining feature of colonial persistence.

Whiteness coming Sadism and destructiveness in self-building seem clear in the archive of West – it is harder to see in Jordan Smith. What sadism can be found within such a harmless fellow? Bidding for Jordan Smith to choose him as his The Voice coach, Maroon 5 front man Adam Levine told him, ‘I think that not just the show, but the world needs a person like you. I think you’re the most important person we’ve ever had on the show’ (Showler 2015). A few weeks later, Levine went further: ‘You’re not a singer – you’re a figure. You’re a person that everyone draws this amazing energy from. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my life, and I’m just honored to be a part of it’ (Showler 2015). It is not coincidence that health-and-fitness obsessed Levine transforms doughty Jordan into an icon. A man’s relationship with his body reveals the way race shapes masculinity more than any other object of study. Black men, because of their race, never had the luxury of not having their bodies examined. Race is a bodily discourse, and in its, black bodies were viewed as ugly and inhuman and were treated as proof of their inferiority to whites. As a long chain of scholarship on whiteness and masculinity has shown, white men have fought to align their bodies – ideal, heroic, fit bodies – with civilization, and have conducted these arguments not only over black bodies but also over other bodies, like fat bodies, disabled bodies, bodies rendered as ‘other’ because they’re marked as the wrong white ethnic (the Jew,

94 Can’t Help Lovin’: David Chidester’s Pop Culture Colonialism the Pole, the Irish). Here Jordan Smith gets lifted up from the scrum of dismissal by Levine as a figure, because his (Jordan’s) body is the confusion that proves his spirit. We know Jordan is godlike precisely because nothing else about him is, except, of course, his able whiteness. Writing about 21st-century game shows, David Bosworth has observed that the ultimate prize of these contests is the ‘dramatic transformation of one’s social and psychological status’. Every game is, at its heart, a simulation of the media’s ‘fame game’ in which the contestants’ ‘adventure in celebrity’ is the central subject (Bosworth 2006:126-127, 128). Deliberating on colonial writings about religion, David Chidester observes that there is no ‘real’ religion for the colonizers to find, since the ‘very terms religions and religions of the world were products of the colonial situation’ (Chidester 1996a:16). The only thing scholars can track is the practice of invention ‘which knowledge about religion and the religions of the world was fashioned on colonial frontiers’ (Chidester 1996a:16). I link the work of Bosworth and Chidester to observe how the process of celebrity-discovery in which Jordan Smith found himself a televised star was not unlike the process of religion-discovery in which African subjects found themselves as relentlessly diagnosed individuals. In both instances, the story concludes when the subject has been squeezed of their freedom; when the star is no longer individuating with spirit and instead submitting to the system. According to Chidester (1996a:26), ‘When a frontier closed, indigenous resistance was broken or contained, and European hegemony was more or less established, a religion, or a religious system, was discovered that could be defined and inventoried’. This is not a racially neutral process. As Chidester explains, colonials established white supremacy throughout Southern Africa by delimiting groups as ‘tribes’ and sequestering those communities (often through reservation systems) in order to interpret them (Chidester 1996a:26). Richard Dyer argues that racism is not simply the ascription of racial inferiority to non-whites; racism is a detailed assessment procedure in which certain subjects are found to have properties, and others are found not to have it. Dyer demonstrates that whiteness is the organizing, invisible voice: ‘The white man has attained the position of being without properties, unmarked, universal, just human’ (Dyer 1997:38). I am suggesting that our attraction to West’s unlikability is the other side of our love for Jordan Smith. We love Smith because his voice is a universal whiteness; we dislike West because he would not stop telling us why

95 Kathryn Lofton his body, and those with a body like his, are the real thing with which to contend. Smith is the white man whose specific Christianity, conveyed in the gospel songs he performed on a network reality competition, is crafted into our secular safety. Who could imagine this person could do anything else but wish us all well? The title of this essay, Can’t help lovin’, is taken from one of the more famous songs in the Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein 1927 musical Show boat. The song, written in a blues tempo, is sung in the show by several characters, but is most closely associated with the character, Julie, the leading lady of the titular show boat ‘Cotton Blossom’. In the musical’s plot, the song is supposed to be familiar to African Americans for years, and this provides one of the most dramatic moments in the show. When Queenie, the black cook, comments that it is strange that light-skinned Julie knows the song because only black people sing it, Julie becomes visibly uncomfortable. Later, we learn that this is because Julie is ‘passing’ as white – she and her white husband are guilty of miscegenation under the state’s law. She can’t help lovin’ in two ways: She cannot help that she loves this music, and she cannot help the race that she loves. She is drawn to certain things, certain sounds, and certain communities of songs, and she knows that being drawn to this African American song is what will, eventually, expose her. Humming with black workers, humming to herself, she will be seen for her desire. The music shows the truth of what she is, how she likes the very thing that could exile her from her audience’s liking.

Christian universalism In the history of hate-watching, there is perhaps no greater hate-watcher than Theodor Adorno. He hated a lot of things and a lot of popular music, because he felt it fell short of its aspirational ideal to unify society through meaningful reconciliation. He watched things he hated to understand how music works, and how bad things could be appealing. For him, music was only good if it could reproduce, in its inner relations, the possibility of individuals changing and being changed by each other in socially productive relations from which a social whole or totality is always emergent. He listened to bad music to understand good music, to understand what kind of music, oriented toward

96 Can’t Help Lovin’: David Chidester’s Pop Culture Colonialism reconciliation, could lead toward the production of a larger, more inclusive whole (Witkin 2000:148). David Chidester has no apparent normative vision for the good a form of culture could do. He was not disinterested in wholes; however, he was as intrigued as Adorno in the possibility of a space of communion. Following Durkheim, he calls such commons ‘church’. In his work on popular culture, Chidester looks for institutions that maintain ‘the continuity, uniformity, sacred space, and sacred time of American life’. In his work on African colonialism, Chidester does not look for churches. In that geography, he looks instead for the tug-and-pull of defining religion as a tool of imperial social discipline. Something about American popular culture allows him a space to describe a common – he finds it in baseball (Chidester 1996b:745). Jordan Smith’s octave-bending version of Beyoncé’s Halo prompted The Voice judge Pharrell Williams to tell the singer: ‘Literally, it’s totally true that God has signed your voice’. Gwen Stefani jumped in to concur: ‘All I can think of is God when he sings’ (Showler 2015). And Adorno would say: ‘You have got to be kidding me’. He would listen to Smith and say: ‘You think this is reconciliation, but this is just part of your bourgeois self-deception’. Adorno believes that the claim to reconciliation is a lie in that the bourgeois society never did meet these conditions in reality; quite the contrary. He would have dismissed Pharrell Williams and Gwen Stefani’s praise of Jordan Smith as sheer ideology, while Chidester would have seen in Smith a settler frontier figure – someone who heard the native songs and loved them, just loved them. It must be made clear that Jordan Smith is consistently portrayed as an exceptional figure on The Voice. Although others testify to church pre-histories and Christian feelings, only Smith is so physically non-normative as to command from viewers a regular sympathy. His exceptional aesthetic presentation becomes his point of entrance into the multiculturalist frame of contemporary mass media in which every figure has to sell a story of disidentification – to borrow from the work of José Esteban Muñoz (1999:25) in order to seem like one of the gang. Every participant in a show needs to mark themselves as distant from the presumptively normative audience (white, heterosexual, middle class) so that regular Americans can imagine them as a hero rather than grossly-fortunate Eddie Haskell’s heel. Thomas Sarmiento has written in reference to the TV series, Glee, that ‘superficial representations of social difference have become the new normal’ (Sarmiento 2014:213); and Muñoz argues that ‘disidentification can be understood as…the hermeneutical

97 Kathryn Lofton performance of decoding mass, high, or any other cultural field from the perspective of a minority subject who is disempowered in such a representational hierarchy’ (Muñoz 1999:25). Yet this disidentification with the norms of American society do not diminish its sway. If anything, such a disidentification only lays bare the traces of empire: As every contestant and guest star and public figure needs to distance themselves from a normative middlebrow whiteness, this very whiteness is only affirmed as the dominating structure of our self-interpellation (Sarmiento 2014:229).

Concluding cracks In this essay I aimed to expose how this realization of the settler compulsion to religion is not only a definitional project of diagnosis, but also an affective feeling that drives us into our contemporary cultural consumptions. I am wary, of course, that making any single diagnosis of culture only affirms a clarity that Chidester worked hard to undermine with his repeated observation of ‘reciprocal exchanges, creative interchanges, and unexpected possibilities’ (Chidester 1996a:266). Chidester is not alone in his effort to diffuse any grand theorizing of culture. The great historian of black expressive culture, Lawrence Levine, once wrote that ‘popular culture does not present us with a single face or an orderly ideology…one has to look not for an unvarying central message but for patterns of meaning and consciousness across the genres and among different segments of the population’ (Levine 1992:1399). Even then, he argues, will we have to deal with the fact that ‘whatever patterns we find exist alongside the inconsistencies, tensions, and cacophony of voices that help, far more than any putative unanimity and harmony, to reveal [our] cultural complexity’ (Levine 1992:1399). Levine and Chidester sound like interpretive kindred. To be a historian is to know that worries is variable, filled with crevices. Can we retain the historian’s sense of multiplicity alongside Adorno’s adjudication of bourgeois self-deception? To be clear, Adorno remains true to that ideal in the face of the impossibility of its realization in the late capitalist society. He loves the music, even though most of it is worth his, or our, hate. Watching Jordan Smith with Chidester and Adorno allows us to ask if this is all the art settler frontiers can afford. Will we always have some things we like and some things we do not,

98 Can’t Help Lovin’: David Chidester’s Pop Culture Colonialism and will those always be mapped racially? Will the things we like always be borrowing from blackness and will the things we do not like always be demonstrating its frontier threat? Social media has provided a prime testing field for a longstanding subject of religious studies interest, namely that of mimesis. It is said that one’s personality is the average of their five closest friends, but when it comes to Twitter, the people one follows determine how they act. According to researchers at Indiana University, Twitter users tend to tweet in line with the emotions expressed by the people they follow. Therefore, any angry, hateful, or negative Twitter users one follows, make them more likely to tweet similar sentiments. Users who are exposed to a disproportionate number of negative tweets are more likely to post negative messages on the social network, and the effect is even greater with positive tweets, the researchers found, terming the effect ‘emotional contagion’ (Ferrara & Yang 2015). This research reiterates what theorists of religion have already explained, namely that people can go crazy in congregations. This is why there is no pure artist (no pure art) that cannot be prone to the slide of emotional contagion. Hip-hop cannot save us any more than the judges on The Voice can save their contestants. Each of these forms is just another bid for creation, engagement, exchange, and seeing. Kanye West, like almost everyone in hip- hop, is prone to the gender paradigm of his self-promotions and the ignorant pomposity of the monomaniacal artist. Rap can seem to endorse non- hegemonic modes of embodiment, but it also is in service of the hegemonic goals of controlling women and displaying capitalist success (Randolph 2006:200-217). Once again, Stuart Hall gets to the crux of the matter:

If the global postmodern represents an ambiguous opening to difference and to the margins and makes a certain kind of decentering of the Western narrative a likely possibility, it is matched, from the very heartland of cultural politics, by the backlash: the aggressive resistance to difference; the attempt to restore the canon of Western civilization; the assault, direct and indirect, on multiculturalism; the return to grand narratives of history, language, and literature…[and] black popular culture is not exempt from that dialectic (Hall 1993:107).

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Kanye West exemplifies this dialectic: He used the opening pop culture provided to forge new spaces of expression; he also used his bully pulpit to reject people’s idea of his assimilation. In 2018, West returned to the public sphere after a brief hiatus, supposedly fueled by a mental health crisis. His reappearance included a new album, simply titled ye, and a firestorm of Tweets in which he showed respect for President Donald Trump and claimed that slavery was a choice. Longtime fans of West did not see so much incongruity in these social media moves – not only because West is a provocateur who knows how to sell an album through the adventure of his celebrity; not only because he has a long history of disrupting our comfortable expectations of media forms; not only because he has rapped before about free-thought, slavery, and his general resistance to our liberal pleasure; but also, as Ta-Nehisi Coates states, because West knows his pop culture colonialism:

There is no separating the laughter from the groans, the drum from the slave ships, the tearing away of clothes, the being borne away, from the cunning need to hide all that made you human. And this is why the gift of black music, of black art, is unlike any other in America, because it is not simply a matter of singular talent, or even of tradition, or lineage, but of something more grand and monstrous. When [Michael] Jackson sang and danced, when West samples or rhymes, they are tapping into a power formed under all the killing, all the beatings, all the rape and plunder that made America. The gift can never wholly belong to a singular artist, free of expectation and scrutiny, because the gift is no more solely theirs than the suffering that produced it (Coates 2018).

There is no pop power without colonial power; there is no colonial power without religion. Chidester’s theory for the study of religion is one in which we are not allowed to forget the conjunction of pain and play that defines our entertainments and organizes our churches.

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References Agawu, K. 1992. Representing African music. Critical Inquiry 18, 2: 245-266. Alessandro, R.C. 2013. Kanye West interrompe Taylor Swift no VMA 2009. YouTube. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= RvaakT52RjQ. (Accessed on 12 January 2018.) Berzock, K.B. & C. Clarke (eds.) 2011. Representing Africa in American art museums: A century of collecting and display. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Beyoncé. 2009. Single ladies (put a ring on it). YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eREH27Zc7NY. (Accessed on 12 January 2018.) Borgeson, K. & R. Valeri 2004. Faces of hate. Journal of Applied Sociology 6, 2: 99-111. Bosworth, D. 2006. Auguries of decadence: American television in the age of empire. Salmagundi 152: 126-127; 128. Chappell, B. 2010. ‘Bush says Kanye West’s attack was low point of his presidency; West agrees’. NPR, 3 November 2010. Available at: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/11/03/131052717/ bush-says-kanye-west-s-attack-was-low-point-of-his-presidency. (Accessed on 12 January 2018.) Chidester, D. 1996a. Savage systems: Colonialism and comparative religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Chidester, D. 1996b. The church of baseball, the fetish of Coca-Cola, and the potlatch of Rock ‘n’ Roll: Theoretical models for the study of religion in American popular culture. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, 4: 743-765. Chidester, D. 2005. Authentic fakes: Religion and American popular culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chidester, D. 2012. Wild religion: Tracking the sacred in South Africa. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Chidester, D. 2014. Empire of religion: Imperialism and comparative religion. Berkeley: University of Chicago Press. Chidester, D. 2018a. World religions in the world. Journal for the Study of Religion 31, 1: 41-53. Chidester, D. 2018b. Religion: Material dynamics. Oakland: University of California Press.

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Coates, T. 2018. ‘I’m not black, I’m Kanye’. The Atlantic, 7 May 2018. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018 /05/im-not-black-im-kanye/559763/. (Accessed on 12 January 2018.) Cottom, D. 2002. To love to hate. Representations 80, 1: 119-138. Dyer, R. 1997. White. New York: Routledge. Earle, T.F. & K.J.P. Lowe (eds.) 2010. Black Africans in renaissance Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fanon, F. 1963. Wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press. Ferrara, E. & Z. Yang 2015. Measuring emotional contagion in social media. PLOS ONE 10, 11. Article ID e0142390. Grow, K. 2014. Mike Myers supports Kanye West’s Katrina statement, years later. Rolling Stone, 22 May 2014. Available at: https://www.rolling- stone.com/culture/culture-news/mike-myers-supports-kanye-wests- katrina-statement-years-later-81099/. (Accessed on 12 January 2018.) Hall, S. 1993. What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture? Social Justice 20, 1/2: 104-114. Haskell, D.M., K. Paradis & S. Burgoyne 2008. Defending the faith: Easter sermon reaction to pop culture discourses. Review of Religious Research 50, 2: 139-156. Hechter, M. 1975. Internal colonialism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jacobs, J.B. & K.A. Potter 1997. Hate crimes: A critical perspective. Crimes and Justice 22, 1-50. Kreps, D. 2009. Kanye West storms the VMAs stage during Taylor Swift’s speech. Rolling Stone, 14 September 2009. Available at: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/kanye-west- storms-the-vmas-stage-during-taylor-swifts-speech-83468/. (Accessed on 12 January 2018.) Langman, L. 1998. I hate, therefore I am. Social Thought & Research 21, 1/2: 151-183. Levine, L. 1992. The folklore of industrial society: Popular culture and its audiences. American Historical Review 97, 5: 1369-1399. Martinez, T.A. 1997. Popular culture as oppositional culture: Rap as resistance. Sociological Perspectives 40, 2: 265-286. Muñoz, J.E. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Nowatzki. R. 2010. Representing African Americans in transatlantic abolitionism and blackface minstrelsy. Baton Rouge: LSU Press. Nussbaum, E. 2012. Hate-watching ‘Smash’. The New Yorker, 27 April 2012. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/hate- watching-smash. (Accessed on 12 January 2018.) Racy, A.J. 2016. Domesticating otherness: The snake charmer in American popular culture. Ethnomusicology 60, 2: 197-232. Randolph, A. 2006. ‘Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful’: Black masculinity and alternative embodiment in Rap music. Race, Gender & Class 13, 3- 4: 200-217. Samuels, D. 2012. American Mozart. The Atlantic, May 2012. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/american- mozart/308931/. (Accessed on 12 January 2018.) Sarmiento, T.X. 2014. The empire sings back: Glee’s ‘queer’ materialization of Filipina/o America. MELUS 39, 2: 211-234. Sartre, J.-P. 1944. Anti-Semite and Jew. New York: Schocken Books. Showler, S. 2015. The Voice from above. Slate, 14 December 2015. Available at: https://slate.com/culture/2015/12/god-religion-and-jordan-smith-on- the-voice.html. (Accessed on 12 January 2018.) Stanko, E., V. Kielinger, S. Paterson, L. Richards, D. Crisp & L. Marsland 2003. Grounded crime prevention: Responding to and understanding hate crime. In Kury, H. & J. Obergfell-Fuchs (eds.): Crime prevention: New approaches. Mainz: Weisser Ring. Swift, T. 2009. You belong with me. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuNIsY6JdUw. (Accessed on 12 January 2018.) The Voice 2015. Jordan Smith – Chandelier, Full Blind Audition. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMK4NsiNmYc. (Accessed on 12 January 2018.) Tsay, C.-J. 2013. Sight over sound in the judgment of music performance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110, 36: 14580-14585. West, K. 2006. Bush doesn’t care about black people. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIUzLpO1kxI. (Accessed on 12 January 2018.) Witkin, R.W. 2000. Why did Adorno ‘hate’ Jazz? Sociological Theory 18, 1: 145-170.

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Kathryn Lofton Religious Studies, American Studies, History, and Divinity Yale University [email protected]

104

Fakecraft

Paul Christopher Johnson [email protected]

Abstract The essay defines and explores the dimensions of ‘fakecraft’. It unpacks authenticity in relation to problems of identity, the aura of the original, and commodification. It then shows how notions of authenticity and the fake generate centers and peripheries in the study of religion. The essay explores how traditions of African descent in the Caribbean and Brazil have long been marginalized in the study of religion as lacking depth or authenticity. The essay then takes up a specific example of fakecraft and its prolific work, namely in early modern Christianity’s process of purification and self-definition through evaluations of demonic possession as ‘real’ or ‘fake’, terms that were then applied to the west coast of Africa. In the broadest terms, the article argues that fakecraft – discourses of the real versus the merely mimetic – is basic to religion-making.

Keywords: fake, fakery, authenticity, African religions, demon possession, mimesis, religion, Christianity

Fakes disguise their tracks. Their origins are uncertain. The term ‘fake’ may be related to the folds of nautical lines and sails, or to street slang for theft. As a verb it at one point implied ‘to clean away’. To ‘fake someone out and out’ in the early 1800s meant to kill them. In every sense the term conveyed transformations, though of diverse kinds. Much later, in the 20th century, jazz musicians used ‘fake’ to play notes other than those on the printed sheet – to improvise. Jazz artists kept their own dossiers of chord changes for standard tunes, called fakebooks. Another variation still active in the dictionary but otherwise retired is ‘fakement’ – an early term for an efficacious forgery.

Journal for the Study of Religion 31, 2 (2018) 105-137 105 Online ISSN 2413-3027; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a5 Paul Christopher Johnson

Despite the range of uses, all the etymologies suggest doubling, a visible effect pointing to a reality below. Every forgery points toward an original, like a visible fold of rope that implies many coils beneath the surface, of unknown reach. Every improvisation riffs on and calls to ear the notes of an absent musical score, even when only the fakebook is visible on the stand. Some of the old glosses related to the fake are faded or gone, but others (‘fake news’) have sprung to life. ‘Fakelore’, first penned by Richard Dorson in 1950, was coined as an inversion of folklore. Dorson (1950:336) called the stories of ‘fake lore’ inauthentic because they were produced by entertainment industries like Disney, or by states rather than living communities. Dorson’s fiery invective was directed especially against a post-WWII spate of popular Paul Bunyan books, and against nationalist claims invoked through such works and their overlarge footprint that buried the tracks of more genuine backwoods hero-tales, like those of French Canadians, Finns, North Michiganders, Poles, Chippewa, or of labor groups like lumberjacks (Dorson 1950:336-337). More distantly, Dorson was concerned with fascism’s use of fake lore. Authentic folklore, Dorson insisted, must be alive, told by actual people in groups (Dorson 1950:342). Abstractions like nation-states do not sit rapt around a fire, or even any longer (one can imagine Dorson saying) in the shared glow of a television. By 1959 he joined the term, fake lore, into one, ‘fakelore’ (Dorson 1959:4). David Chidester (2005:191) points out that fakelore, like fake religion, produces real effects in the world. In Alan Dundes’ diagnosis, for example, it fills a national psychic need in times of crisis when folklore fails, or in the face of national insecurity (Dundes 1989:50-51). Dundes adds the intervention that fakelore is material and spatial as much as verbal or textual, and that fakelore can easily become folklore. Just so for Chidester, who argues that fake religion veers easily into ‘real’ religion in its effects. This is largely in keeping with the ‘invented tradition’ idea (Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983), pointing to the functions of allegedly age-old histories of only recent coinage. Only think of how versions of the home depicted in Laura Ingall Wilder’s Little house on the prairie – a work of fiction only loosely drawn from her own life – are now the most visited historical sites in the middle U.S. (McClellan, In Press). While Ranger and Hobsbawm, like Dorson and Dundes, were concerned with the nationalist risks of invented traditions – the ways they use ritual to impose ‘tacitly accepted rules’ to ‘inculcate certain values’ (Hobsbawm 1983:1) – one might also think of fakery in relation to play. In the

106 Fakecraft lighter terms of pretend or fabrication, and following the lead from jazz, one can also see fakes as improvisations. Children are terrific fakers, including of ritual. Children in Cuba ‘fake’ Santería possession events as a way of marking aspiration and their future trajectory (Palmié 2013:296). Children play at ritual as a way of learning it, including faking spirit possession, all over the African Americas (Landes 1947:174; Richman 2012:283; Segato 2005:103; Opipari & Timbert 1997; Halloy & Naumescu 2012), just as elsewhere they play at Mass or masking (Caillois 1961:62). There is a dark side to the question of the fake – say, the fascist invented traditions of Aryanism, or the ‘epistemic murk’ blurring of truth and fiction that births a culture of terror (Taussig 1984:192- 193). And there is a lighter side, presented in the creative play of children working out the craft of ritual. This lighter side is often apparent in popular culture too. Still, as Adorno writes, it is precisely the appearance of superficiality that can make popular culture dangerous, including religion – astrology, like racism, provides a useful ‘short-cut…bringing the complex to a handy formula’ (Adorno 1994:61). Chidester (2005:2) signals the relation between the serious work of religion, engaging the sacred, the transcendent and questions of ultimate meaning, and the ‘comparatively frivolous play of popular culture’. Elsewhere he blurs the line between the sacred and play, by noting that ‘religious’ work is also done by popular culture (Chidester 2005:231), whether in the form of baseball, rock ‘n’ roll, or Burning Man. His point can even be taken further in order to say that religion itself is often quite unserious. The play and the pop even within devoted ritual practice is part of its modus operandi and its appeal. Adorno (2000:78-79) went so far as to call this constitutive of the ‘religious medium’ as such, whose ‘sentimentality, blatant insincerity and phoniness’ are part and parcel of good performance. These qualities fulfill the ‘longing of the people for “feigning” things’. Here Adorno steers toward the longing for the fake. We need not fully indulge Adorno’s cynicism to nevertheless pursue the point: People like to play, blur categories of performance, and suspend disbelief. So much is this the case that the lines dividing play or pretend from ‘real’ ritual are difficult if not impossible to discern. From this perspective, the crafting of ritual scenes and procedures that undo the distinctions of fake and real ritual is a central part of the work of making and maintaining a religion, as ‘the play of presence’ (Taussig 1999:142). It is a refined art, a techne in

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Heidegger’s nomenclature; the art of bringing forth, of causing something new to appear (Heidegger 1977:184). The first half of this essay explores key dimensions of what I call ‘fakecraft’, including the way it plays on and against issues of authenticity. Authenticity is unpacked in relation to problems of identity, the aura of the original, and commodification. The ways in which notions of authenticity and the fake have generated centers and peripheries in the study of religion, are also considered. Traditions of African descent in the Caribbean and Brazil, for example, have long been marginalized in the study of religion as lacking depth or authenticity – as syncretic – though that has by now begun to change. The second half of the essay then takes up a specific example of fakecraft and its prolific work, namely in early modern Christianity’s process of purification and self-definition through evaluations of demonic possession as ‘real’ or ‘fake’.

I. Fakecraft Fakecraft is basic to religion-making. The term ‘craft’ in the conjunction is suggestive for my purposes because it joins at least three meanings from its Germanic etymology and its English vernacular use: 1) a power wielded and deployed (Kraft); 2) a skill that is honed and practiced; and 3) a vessel of transport. These three senses – as power, skill, and transport from one bodily state to another, or one vision of the world to another, usefully summarize the kinds of work often gathered under the usefully fuzzy term ‘religion’. Fakecraft gestures toward the craft of making multiplicity visible – the forgery that implies a real; the top of a coiled rope or sail that conveys many more loops or folds below; the improvisation that plays off – always imply an absent written score. Note, though, that religious traditions constitute their notions of fakery, as well as the margins and terms of opacity and indecipherability, in very different ways. For example, the notion of the fake as a lack of sincerity – the mismatch between external appearance or words and a putative internal state – has a distinctly Protestant character, both in the nature of the question and in its particular linguistic form (Keane 2002). The centrality of sincerity to Protestant ideas of the fake even poses severe challenges for Protestant

108 Fakecraft expansion in New Guinea and elsewhere. There, the effort to intentionally know the internal states of others is considered terribly impolite and improper. This is the ‘opacity of mind’ problem (Robbins & Rumsey 2008). In other traditions, meanwhile, a ‘fake’ is someone who does not enjoy proper authorization (Chidester 1996:33). This particular notion of fakery requires a level of bureaucratic rationalization perhaps typical of only a narrow range of religious groups. African diasporic traditions in Brazil and the Caribbean, meanwhile, are often oriented around discerning authentic and fake claims of deep African knowledge, or valid spirit possession performances in ritual compared with those deemed mere ‘acting’. This is because spirit possession events always suppose a gap between the forensic claim of a god’s true presence and the inchoate means and measures of determining authentic presence. The possibility of the fake is ever-present. However, while accusations of fakery may be intended to deauthorize or discredit spirit possession, they also help to constitute spirit possession as eventful, through the ‘interpretive ferment’ (Wirtz 2007) its opacity marshals and calls into being. The ambiguity and uncertainty of genuine spirit-presence lend frisson to the ritual gathering. Working in the Cuban city of Santiago, Kristina Wirtz explored what she calls the ‘aesthetics of sensibility’, the ways practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions develop particular techniques of discernment, and skills of perception beginning with bodily sensations like shivers or prickling on the skin and ascending to full-blown sensations of possession (Wirtz 2007:130- 135). ‘To discern spirits’, Wirtz writes, ‘requires being inculcated into a culturally-specific phenomenology in which the material effects of immaterial agencies become sensible experiences’ (Wirtz 2014:100). In addition, Afro-American religions and elsewhere are often heavily invested in questions of spatial authenticity, or proximity to a putative original in what one might call, following Benjamin (1970), an auratic mode. Is it genuinely ‘African’? The question sometimes is attached to racial authenticity. Thus, Roger Bastide, writing on mid-century Brazil, sees commercialized and ‘whitened’ Afro-Brazilian ritual events as necessarily ‘fake’ (Bastide 1978:230):

I am not speaking of the fake candomblés or macumbas opened up nowadays to exploit tourists, sanctuaries that live on the superstition of whites and concentrate on expensive magic rituals for sensation seekers and night club patrons. Although these centers may be directed

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by mulattoes and offer their sophisticated clientele a ballet performed by girls who are quite likely to be black, culminating in simulating African rites, they represent white rather than black religion.

Bastide saw fakeness and authenticity in candomblé in racial terms, and presumably he was not alone, though it is by now clear that the question of Africanity may or may not be tethered to social Blackness (Palmié 2002:197; Johnson 2007:217-219).

II. Authenticity Let’s turn now to authenticity, a term Chidester foregrounds as indispensable to the problem of the fake (Chidester 2005:xii). Chidester observes that fake religion does ‘authentic’ religious work (Chidester 2005:vii) and, citing Lawrence Grossberg, that there can be (and indeed the U.S. may be essentially characterized by) ‘authentic inauthenticity’, public and even prideful artifice rather than covert fraud or dissimulation. As Chidester (2005:3) notes, authenticity can work under various guises: As transparency, or as a cipher for earnest earthiness (rather like terroir for wine), the latter a burden under which especially so-called ‘primitive’ societies, and perhaps African societies in particular, have long labored. Many groups compete for prestige in those or similar terms. Scholars of religion played a heavy hand in reinforcing this kind of status competition over African authenticity. Melville Herskovits (1941; 1945) famously invoked a dubious comparative register called ‘the scale of intensity of New World Africanisms’. In Herskovits’ dangerous game, the Maroons of Suriname won first prize, followed by those of Guiana and, in third place, practitioners of Haitian Vodou. Many scholars in Brazil as elsewhere, similarly, endorsed the Yoruba-derived practices in the New World as ‘more authentic’ than Kongo-descended ones, often based on specious Eurocentric analogies of the Yoruba pantheon, or sculpture, to those of classical Greece or Rome (Johnson 2007:205-214; Capone 2010:206-210; Dantas 1988). While it is true that this version of authenticity is recurrent in the African Americas, it seems also typical of diasporic situations in general. The lurking question of the fake (as adjudicated in relation to the alleged distance

110 Fakecraft from an ‘original’) always hovers over and around replicant Sikh temples, Catholic grottos, and traveling Zen masters. Are they real enough? And by what criteria? Corrosive accusations are likely, especially when there are venues of both touristic and ‘actual’ ritual performance (Chidester 2012:115, 202; Capone 2010:206; Johnson 2002:9, 177), genres that, at least in the African Americas, in fact are often merged (Hagedorn 2001; Van de Port 2011; Wirtz 2014). The idea of authenticity gauged as legitimate replication of an original model is perhaps less at issue, though, for so-called ‘world’ or overtly ‘mission’ traditions – classically, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity – which necessarily imagine their traditions as replicable and detachable from spatial versions of the authentic local. They embrace artifice as part and parcel of their global extension. In this sense, Jonathan Smith describes the Reformation as first and foremost a shift in how ritual makes and communicates meaning in detachable ways. Ritual for the 16th-century reformed Christians was not ‘real’ in a literal, material, and spatial sense; it was rather a matter of ‘signification’ (for Zwingli), or ‘metonymy’ (for Beza). A wedge now divided symbol and reality in Christendom (Smith 1987:100). It narrowed the gap between the fake and the real with a bridging middle term, ‘the symbolic’. The point to reinforce here is that different traditions summon distinct versions of authenticity, and attribute authenticity with varying levels of value. In so doing they inscribe particular contents and edges of the inchoate, in relation to given ritual processes. In spite of this diversity, though, one should not lose sight of a key comparative hinge: Potential fakery is part of the furniture of every religious enactment. In fact, it is a necessary prop, the empty box in the middle of the stage. The box is built to different specifications depending on the tradition. Learning how the box is built is part and parcel of understanding and interpreting a given religious practice. There are at least two parts to this hermeneutic problem: One is learning how specific versions of fakecraft help to make and maintain insider definitions of shared terms of a tradition; the second is seeing how the different constructions of the box are used to mark and patrol the boundaries between religions.

Identity Let’s consider several versions of authenticity available for activation in religious practice. One kind of authenticity is continuity over time between

111 Paul Christopher Johnson something in the present and in the past (Is that authentically Victorian? Is this truly biblical?), or a relative identity across space (the authentic Turkish song; the genuinely African initiation). Either something now is sufficiently like it was then, or something here is sufficiently like things there. Authenticity may also describe the relative degree of conformity between outside appearance and an actual internal veracity. On that score, Lionel Trilling calls Wordsworth’s protagonist in the poem ‘Michael’ a first exemplar of literary authenticity (Trilling 1972:93): As he sits grieving the death of his son, he radiates nothing but grief. There is no dissimulation or distraction, no mask. He is transparent, authentic, ‘truly himself’. All of the above senses of authenticity-as-identity raise the question of the relative continuity of an object, idea or person with an original (Benjamin 1970:220). Yet even that notion of ‘originality’ is fluid. Raymond Williams, to wit, describes the key transition from the term ‘original’ as denoting a point in time from which all things arose, to the denotation of that which is singular – a shift that took place in the late 17th century (Williams 1983:230). Williams shows how singularity carries both temporal and spatial connotations. It marks a thing, person or event as utterly discrete, as thoroughly situated. Such notions of singularity, originality, and realness are expressions of spatial power; they found and justify ‘centers’ and ‘peripheries’ (Long 2004:92). Authenticity as originality or as singularity supposes a need for continuity maintained across time and space by reference to singular beings and spatial centers. As a discourse, however – and to follow the familiar foucauldian argument – it presupposes rupture, a crisis of continuity overcome only with the labor of memory and language. Authenticity is a noun that only thinly veils a question or a wish.

Aura Another vector of the fake and the authentic applied in religions is the question of sufficient likeness or, in other terms, the adequacy of mimesis (Taussig 1993). Walter Benjamin’s essay, The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (1970) remains the touchstone essay on this problem. The essay treats the dislocation of art objects from a denotation of situated, local things to a series of reproducible and transmissible images. Benjamin’s primary data was the move from the painting to the film, but here I seek to draw an analogy

112 Fakecraft to the move from indigenous to diasporic styles of ritualization, vis à vis Benjamin’s problematic of the aura. In Benjamin’s description, ‘the presence of the original [object] is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity…The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced’ (Benjamin 1970:220-221). (This is roughly what Max Weber referred to as ‘authentic transmission’, delivered ‘by a closed chain of witnesses’ – Weber 1954:206.) Benjamin’s argument proceeds: With the dislocation of paintings from the sites where they were embedded, in a given church for example, to reprints, authenticity shifts from being a relatively given temporal essence to something achieved and authorized. It becomes a special effect. The crisis that may result, derives from the fact that even as authentic objects must now be authorized to achieve their effects, ‘history’ itself is anchored by nothing but those once-authorizing objects – objects that authorize history by virtue of their singular originality – such that history and authenticity comprise a dialectical relation. ‘Historical testimony’ suffers when substantive duration, or temporal authenticity, ceases to matter. When historical testimony loses value, the authority of objects (in what Benjamin calls their cult-value) declines as well (Benjamin 1970:221). The special effect of authenticity is all that remains, an aura that guides a sense of history, but now only as a present absent. The aura of a thing, then, is its authenticity. A thing is authentic in so far as it generates an authoritative effect of duration in time, in relation to a place and moment of origin. History, as the sense of continuity in time, must rely upon the aura acquired by authorizing procedures, whether by carbon dating or by tradition; hence the danger posed to ‘history’ when aura is reduced to a special effect. It is this vulnerability that gives a palpable sense of loss to Benjamin’s essay. History is rendered dangerously surreal, from his view, as indeed it had already become when Benjamin penned the essay in 1935. Still, the tone of irretrievable loss is not one-sided. If the mechanical reproduction of authoritative objects, based on a desire to overcome distance and hold uniqueness near, diminishes aura, it also brings a democratic ‘emancipation’ of the object from its original place and ritual meaning (Benjamin 1970:223- 225). Ritual gains its capacity to be resignified against new diasporic horizons (Johnson 2007). It is able to generate new histories. For Benjamin, the image’s mechanical reproducibility in mass media leads to the auratic decline of its authoritative temporal force. Paradoxically, it

113 Paul Christopher Johnson is at that juncture that ‘the authentic’ becomes fetishized as a social and historical need. The temporal authentic – the question of continuity in time – is eclipsed by the authentic artist or author – the question of an object’s original, situated authorship. Authenticity from this point entails a persistent need for its persuasive effect in the social process. There is, then, a triangular relation here linking the aura of uniqueness, the historical sense of embeddedness in time and space, and the use of objects in social practice (Benjamin 1970:223-224). When the located, ritual quality of objects loses ritual force, it may become mobile in space and re-embedded in another kind of political or ideological practice (Benjamin 1970:224). The problem of authenticity is related to the condition of exile; the copied object, detached from any single location, now meets its users in their own particular situations, reactivating the object in infinite new ways (Benjamin 1970:221). The reproduced object links and distinguishes its users. It links them in a shared orbit of practice. At the same time, it distinguishes them through distinct procedures and terms applied to the same object.

Religion, Inc. One of the dominant terms of the mass-reproduction of the art-object is as a commodity. On this front, many scholars have extended Benjamin’s insights to analyze the ways ‘cultures’ or ‘religions’ have become saleable. In Ethnicity, Inc., John and Jean Comaroff point out the tension between the commonly held idea of ‘cultural identity’ as inalienable, the essential aura of a given society, and the plain evidence of its commodity value and merchandized production (Comaroff & Comaroff 2009:22-23). Adorno’s reflections on authenticity are, they argue, turned into a farce. Adorno’s 1973 The jargon of authenticity casts authenticity as a linguistic fetish utterly detached from objects. If it once expressed genuine location in place – cultural homelands – now it is words, or jargon, that bestow the aura of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), as compensation for the loss of a real sense of history and place. In Adorno’s view, just as Benjamin invoked aura when it was cast into crisis, so the existentialists’ discourse of authenticity invokes its absence. Adorno casts the post-World War II jargon of authenticity as a subjective mystification, a reification of emptiness, and itself a form of alienation. Authenticity is a quixotic quest for origins when none can be found.

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In the assessment of David Harvey (1990:87), ‘the preoccupation with identity, with personal and collective roots, has become far more pervasive since the early 1970s because of widespread insecurity in labor markets, in technological mixes, credit systems, and the like’. Harvey’s comment helps explain why today, when perusing a Pottery barn catalogue, consumers gain unlimited historical opportunities: There is the Weathered wood table and file cabinet: ‘The appeal of vintage painted farmhouse furniture lies in its rustic simplicity and the subtle wear patterns created by years of use’; or the Nostalgic diner chair: ‘American diners of the 1950s seated a steady stream of families on chairs just like ours’; or the Vintage map: ‘This map of North America was reproduced for us from an original dated 1864, when work on the Transcontinental Railroad had just begun’. Don’t forget the Manhattan leather collection: ‘New York nightclubs of the 1930s had opulent furniture that was rich in comfort and style’. It is not only history that is regained in such purchases, but space: ‘No vacancy’ rustic sign: ‘Straight off the old highway, a weathered, timeworn sign evokes long drives across rugged country’. This is not just authentic leather chairs for sale. As John and Jean Comaroff write, authenticity is now ‘the specter that haunts the commodification of culture everywhere. If they have nothing distinctive to alienate, many rural black South Africans have come to believe, they face collective extinction’ (Comaroff & Comaroff 2009:10). This authenticity- stress produces ethnicity in the forms of ‘real’ and ‘fake’ Bushmen (Comaroff & Comaroff 2009:52, 92, 143). The authenticity market at the Religion Hall is surely no less cutthroat than at the Ethnicity Store. It is only by being recognized as an authentic religion, after all, that subaltern traditions can gain legal rights. This requires marketing work. As examples, consider the practitioners of Santería in Hialeah, Florida, who made themselves into the ‘Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye’, founded in 1974. This rebranding helped them win their U.S. Supreme Court case on animal sacrifice in 1993 (Palmié 1996; Johnson 2005). Similarly, Amerindian peyote users sought incorporation in certain states in 1918 by renaming their group as the Native American Church. Becoming a ‘church’ helped these groups gain authenticity and then legitimacy. They became ‘real religions’ through the adept mimicry of U.S.- style churchness (Johnson, Klassen & Sullivan 2018:4-8). This work of multiplicity, of selective mimicry, is a kind of agency. Judith Butler describes agency as ‘the double movement of being constituted in and by a signifier, where “to be constituted” means “to be compelled to cite

115 Paul Christopher Johnson or repeat or mime” the signifier itself’ (Butler 1993:167). But it is also to then be able to apply that citation to new acts, in what Butler calls the ‘hiatus’ of iterability. Similarly, William Sewell defines agency as ‘the capacity to transpose and extend schemas to new contexts; the actor’s capacity to reinterpret and mobilize an array of resources in terms of cultural schemas other than those that initially constituted the array’ (Sewell 2005:142). In so doing, one becomes ‘capable of exerting some degree of control over the social relations in which one is enmeshed…to transform those social relations’ (Sewell 2005:143). The most sophisticated analyses of agency always invoke its doubleness, the taking of a schema from one scene and transposing it in another. The agentive performance points to two sites at once: A current iteration and an ‘original’ elsewhere – much like fakecraft. The trick, though, is that the agency gained in fakecraft can break in different directions. Subaltern groups use it to shape themselves into ‘churches’ and carve out a space in which to work. Colonial agents applied discourses of fakery – another genre of fakecraft – in order to discredit African and Afro-American religions, as is shown below.

Caribbean authentic If the ‘authentic’ does well in sales, it is also ever-present in language, as an intentional adjective that always begs the question of positionality and intentionality: ‘Authentic in relation to what?’ In African diasporic religious communities, that question motivates much wringing of hands and internal dialogue. For if such questions are typical, even constitutive, of diasporic situations tout court, they have especially been important in the Caribbean, a polyglot, multiracial region allegedly lacking roots or enduring identity. In the history of the study and teaching of religion, after all, the Caribbean was for decades pressed into service primarily as a site of absence: A void of authentic, deep-rooted religious traditions. That void – marginal even to the categories of order/utopia/savage (Trouillot 1991) – was so-called syncretism. In Hamlet, Polonius famously admonished, ‘To thine own self be true’. But what would Polonius’ advice have meant to Prospero’s slave, Caliban, in The tempest, who neither enjoys the pleasure nor suffers the burden of any ‘true’ self at all? Caliban is written by Shakespeare as a synecdoche of the Caribbean, ‘a freckled whelp, hag-born, not honour’d with a human shape’ (Caliban Act I, Scene II). The figure of Caliban shows the Caribbean’s

116 Fakecraft inauthenticity from the view of 17th-century Europe in both racial and cultural terms: The Caribbean was sinister because of primitiveness, but even more because of its promiscuous mix1. Any ‘deep Caribbean’, in the bodies of the indigenous Ciboneys, Tainos, and Caribs, succumbed to diseases delivered by the European landing. Thereafter it was all Calibans on the stage, Africans and Europeans and Asians; Black Caribs, Creole metissages, and gente de color – turtles all the way down. Caliban is indexical of the exogenous inauthenticity of the Caribbean, both standing for it and comprising part of it. Such inauthenticity begins with the chronic lack of roots, as described by Fernando Ortiz under the neologism of ‘transculturation’ (Ortiz 1995:97-103, 153). Ortiz’s term ‘transculturation’ was born of Cuba. It took account of the experiences of exile and loss, rather than long duration and deep tradition, as constitutive of Caribbean-ness2. One might pose transculturation and authenticity as opposed if related terms. They rub against each other. If the invocation of ‘authenticity’ points to a sentiment of loss (Benjamin 1970:244; Adorno 1973:9; Trilling 1972:93), transculturation hails and celebrates a distinct Caribbean singularity. African diasporic religious communities in Brazil and the Caribbean wager claims of African authenticity, then, with high stakes in play. They must grow roots from a land seen as lacking in subsoil. Much depends on their claims’ success, in terms of the reputation that attracts devotees, in the legitimacy conferred by the state, as ‘heritage’ or in other forms bestowing resources along with cultural capital, and, not least, in the particular African diasporic experience of religious meaning. The claims are also notoriously competitive. Articulating a tradition’s ‘authenticity’ is a means of finding a voice and presenting a public face. But the need to do so, often incurs from the posture of a minority group of color in a plural society, as Chidester proposes is the case for many African religions. Subaltern groups, one might say, are

1 Frantz Fanon wrote of ‘the Prospero complex’ (Fanon 1967:33, 83, 107), citing Dominique Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban: Psychology of colonization (Manonni 1964). Invoking the same founding problematic is Paget Henry’s Caliban’s reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean philosophy (Henry 2000). 2 ‘I am of the opinion that the word transculturation better expresses the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is what the English word acculturation really implies, but the process also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture’ (Ortiz 1995:102).

117 Paul Christopher Johnson forced to perform their authenticity, to ‘emit signs’ (Foucault 1979:25; Bourdieu 2000:173). Moreover, subaltern religious communities must perform authenticity in terms recognized by the state and its publics. This by necessity leads to distortion and static. As Pierre Bourdieu puts it, ‘experiences undergo nothing less than a change of state when they recognize themselves in the public objectivity of an already constituted discourse’ (Bourdieu 1977:170; original emphasis). This idea of distortion caused by translating a tradition into ready- made formulas was already proposed by Max Müller in 1862, albeit for quite different purposes, as Chidester (2004) reminds us. According to Chidester (2004:75-76), Müller wrote that the ‘continual combustion’ of language becomes bound by ‘literary interference’. The context was different – in our time the ‘literary interference’ includes religion’s commodity-value, which is material as much as literary, economic, or linguistic – but his broader point on the risks of translation still stands. While religions of the African diaspora have had to perform the authentic to find and defend a place (legal, spatial, social) whatsoever against accusations of shallow mimicry and mélange – of being mere derivative and syncretic copies – colonial religions deployed discourses of the real and the fake to patrol, police, and purify their own boundaries. Christianity did so, in part, by exiling demon possession from Europe to Africa and the African Americas.

III. Fakecraft and inter-religious boundaries: Or, how Christianity cleansed its soul Fakecraft works internally by establishing a tradition’s parameter of the given and the unknown, and the discursive terms of debate about the inchoate remainder at the center of every ritual event. Afro-American traditions have a developed internal fakecraft. Internal discourses of the real and the fake are part of the lifeblood of Candomblé, Umbanda, Santería, Palo Monte, Vodou, Garifuna, and other communities. As mentioned above, the objects of debate are often related to the authenticity of spirit possession. In 1938, Zora Neale Hurston wrote of the abundant fakecraft in Haiti, in which people spoke in the idiom of being possessed – Parlay cheval ou (‘Tell my horse’) – in order to

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‘express their resentment general and particular’ (Hurston [1938] 2009:221). The dancer Katherine Dunham (1969) describes a U.S. Marine, Doc Reeser, who remained in Haiti after the occupation, who ‘set himself up’ as a horse of the Vodou deity (lwa) Guedé, governor of the dead and the cemetery, and performed a ‘seeming state of trance’. ‘It was convenient for Doc because he could drink as much clairin – raw white rum – as he wished and indulge in certain extravagances of behavior and obscenities which most of the gods of the pantheon would not tolerate in their mounts’ (Dunham 1969:19). Cuban santeros distinguish santos, the legitimate presence of possessing saints (orichas), from santicos, ‘little saints’, here meaning fakes (Wirtz 2007:124). Jim Wafer describes false trance as a familiar phenomenon in Brazilian candomblé, known as equê, ‘a type of theater’ (Wafer 1991:34). Many more examples of internal fakecraft in the Afro-American traditions could be cited. Without any central authority or canon, authenticity is an ongoing social process. Yet there is an ample consensus about what to disagree about: Spirit possession, roots, Africanness, commodification, respect, hierarchy, orthopraxy, or the efficacy of a given ritual event. The shared terms of fakecraft and debate form and constitute the religious community. Note what the terms are mostly not about in this set of traditions: Belief, the soul, sincerity, institutional authority, the afterlife, or the text. If every tradition applies discourses of the fake and the real, they apply that hinge to different sets of concerns – to different doors and windows, so to say. To continue the metaphor, the doors and windows open out to religious worlds pocked by distinct landscapes of value, aspiration, and healing. These varying notions of the fake and the authentic also constitute and maintain boundaries between religions.

Christian fakecraft How has fakecraft been applied to making and maintaining boundaries between religions? The ways early modern European Christians wrote about their own fakecraft were consequential for African and Afro-American religions. Elsewhere I have given close attention to the transfer of European ideas of demonic possession to the idea of Africans as possessable and enslavable (Johnson 2011). Here, the early modern English and French Christian fakecraft are discussed, in order to better understand the terms in which they first read

119 Paul Christopher Johnson and classified African religions in relation to possession, and African persons in relation to their ‘porousness’ or permeability (Taylor 2007). If the possibility of sham was integral to the making of the category of ‘religion’ whatsoever, the problem of deciphering internal spiritual states was a key part of the spread of Christianity in particular. What did the Apostle Paul mean in Galatians 2:20, when he wrote, ‘it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’? The sentence seems to acknowledge multiple possible interior guides. At the very least two agents in one body are named: A self and another being. Chidester shows how the control over (bad) spirits, as well as the difficulties of working out doctrines of flesh and spirit, were central issues in the founding and expansion of the early church (Chidester 2000:19-22). Indeed, early texts stabilizing and disseminating the term ‘religio’, like Augustine’s Of true religion, made the question of spirits plain. Augustine works out ‘true’ religion not only vis à vis Manichaeism – his stated target – but also in relation to the ambiguity of interpreting human internal states – ‘crowds of phantasms’, and ‘the things which deceive dreamers and madmen’ (Augustine 1953:50, 258). The issue of spirits and internal discernment recurred. St Ignatius, writing between 1522-1524, was shaken to his core by the challenge of recognizing the diabolical spirits and the angelic spirits at work in his own body. In Rules for the discernment of spirits, he described the capacity of the evil spirit for duplicity: To console, and even to disguise itself as an angel of light (Ignatius of Loyola 2000:119). This is an example of divine fakecraft, and there are many others. Jean Bodin’s Démonomanie (1580) observed that ones who write to protect those accused of being possessed by Satan are themselves probably possessed. Yet, as his enemies noted, that statement itself could have been ventriloquized to throw even careful observers off-track. Bodin, a public alarmist against demonic possession, was himself suspected of witchcraft, and his home searched for incriminating objects on 3 June 1587. As Stephen Greenblatt puts it, ‘If Satan can counterfeit counterfeiting, there can be no definitive confession, and the prospect opens to an infinite regress of disclosure and uncertainty’ (Greenblatt in Almond 2004:12). Thus, Milton’s Paradise lost has Satan impersonating a good angel in the world, and indeed, the story is a constant confusion of spirits in matter (Milton 1667). The radical uncertainty inspired fear. The porous self could always be taken over and possessed (Taylor 2007:35-36). It also motivated the refining of diagnostic tools and terms. Cotton Mather wrote that, in one case,

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‘enchantment’ by evil spirits seemed to be growing very far towards an actual ‘possession’ (Mather 1684:9). ‘Possession’ and ‘obsession’ were distinguished during the same period. It was during the 17th century, argues Ernst Benz (1972), that the beatific versus demonic notions of possession were firmly divided, Ergriffenheit/Bessenheit (pneuma/daimon). Through the refinement of terms interpreting and evaluating the body’s surface, true possession was distinguished from the counterfeit. The problem of spirits in Christianity peaked in the 17th century (Thomas 1971; Gibson 1999; Caciola 2003; Sluhovsky 2007; Ferber 2013). During that period, debates about possession and fakery circulated widely in so-called ‘possession pamphlets’, which established a clearly delineated demonic paradigm, script and template (De Certeau 2000:21). According to that script, the problem of fake versus real possession was central. Being legitimately possessed was not merely a subjective experience. It had to properly persuade. Through the refinement of terms and techniques to determine its authentic presence, or not, possession as a phenomenological object was interpolated from the beginning through the prospect of the counterfeit. Indeed, fakery had to be part of its discourse, not least because possession required matching thoroughly underdetermined symptoms whose source was finally unverifiable against a scale of judgment. For Ignatius of Loyola, it was only by the closest observation of the after- effects of spirits’ comings and goings in his own soul that it could be determined whether the visitation had been evil or good3. For Puritans, reading possession against scripture was the proof-test. Thus the convicted Puritan pastor, Darrell, in his pamphlet defense of the ‘genuine’ possession of William Sommers, concedes after his long summation: ‘It followeth not that he is possesst, because he is not counterfeyte, and this will we do out of the Scriptures, for by them only can we discerne, and know when one is possessed’

3 Fifth Rule, Greater discernment of spirits: We ought to note well the course of the thoughts, and if the beginning, middle and end is all good, inclined to all good, it is a sign of the good Angel; but if in the course of the thoughts which he brings it ends in something bad, of a distracting tendency, or less good than what the soul had previously proposed to do, or if it weakens it or disquiets or disturbs the soul, taking away its peace, tranquility and quiet, which it had before, it is a clear sign that it proceeds from the evil spirit, enemy of our profit and eternal salvation (Ignatius of Loyola 2000:65).

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(Darrell 1599, image 31; emphasis added)4. In Catholic France, by contrast, it was typically the number and status of witnesses, the ‘large number of Gens d’honneur and de piété’, that defined and justified approved possession events (Aubin 1693:51). Multiple codes for authorizing authentic versus fake possessions were in play, and in competition. The most frequent method of establishing legitimate possession, though, and which crossed sectarian bounds, was by reading the surface of the victim’s body to verify a set of symptoms. Was the patient diseased, or fraudulent? (Schmidt 1998:30). How to know if they were truly possessed? The diagnoses focused especially on the skin, eyes, and mouth. Verification procedures were onerous, including the burning of flesh, or presenting the embodied demon with fake holy objects, in order to gauge the bodily response. Only a fake demon would offer a visceral reply to a fake holy object, or flinch at burned skin. Through such physical tests, often spectacularly public, the cues for an authentic possession became widely known. They included a standard set of symptoms marking the body’s perimeter. Symptoms were concentrated on the border dividing interior from exterior; the visceral drama of the body marked and defined the just-visible edges of the hidden soul. In a series of well-documented examples from England, for example, the skin and the mouth were key foci of interpretation. The skin would sometimes turn black in places (Darrell 1599) or reveal a moving lump just beneath its surface. A captive spirit’s force within sometimes pressed outward to reveal the outline of a cross on the skin, as in the case of Joyce Dovey (Dalton 1646:3). The skin’s surface was often unusually sweaty (Barrow 1664), or emitted a foul odor (Hooper, Hooper, Sky, Eglestone, Westgarth & Egleston 1641), or felt cold to the touch (Barrow 1664; Darrell 1599). In some cases, the evidence for true demon possession lay in the fact that the skin neither bled when pierced nor burned when held to the fire (Darrell 1599; Dalton 1646). Torture was important in determining authentic possession, because it established deviance from ‘normal’ skin’s reaction to burning and piercing. As to the mouth of the authentically possessed, it foamed (Hooper et al. 1641),

4 The statement is also noteworthy because it expands our purview from merely the really possessed and the fakers, to include those who truly believe they are possessed but who are misguided. They are credible persons, but not credibly possessed persons.

122 Fakecraft produced bizarre variations in voice, or was incapable of emitting speech whatsoever, remaining mute (Kirby 1693). The mouth of the truly possessed could make sounds without moving the lips, perfectly ventriloquized (Darrell 1599), but it could not say certain words at all – like ‘Christ’, in the tale of Thomas Sawdie, instead producing animal sounds liking neighing, or the croaking of a frog (Anonymous 1664; Barrow 1664). The loss of humanness, as indicated by convincing animal sounds, was key to determining a demon’s occupation of the body. Striking on this score were observations of the tongue in the mouth of the possessed: The tongue was always very large or could be doubled (Barrow 1664); sometimes hanging out (Kirby 1693), sometimes immovably fixed inside, or in other cases completely retractable into the throat (Darrell 1599; Kirby 1693), like the tongue of a frog or eel. There were additional physical signs that traced the line of the internal and external, like those of bodily waste or clothing: Urine containing black dust and rags of brown paper (Anonymous 1664), for example, or the unexpected removal or tearing of clothes (Barrow 1664; Anonymous 1664). Next, genuine possession was often reported to have begun after physical contact with a mysterious figure. Several cases described an exchange with a man in black offering money (Anonymous 1664:5; Kirby 1693). One case included an allegedly demonic figure who posed as a Master of Arts offering quick and easy comprehension of difficult topics, and admission to the University of Padua (Dalton 1646:5). Other possession narratives described contact with persons or animals of a specific color, usually black, increasingly the patina of possession par excellence – ‘an ugly black man with shoulders higher than his head’ (Thomas 1971:480) – or, also common, as a black dog (Kirby 1693). The proper manifestation of bodily codes was key to verifying real possession, but bodily comportment after a given episode of exorcism was often remarked in case descriptions. Following the cessation of demonic signs, true victims appeared reliably calm, rational, reverent, and self-possessed: After the spirits that had afflicted him were cast out, observers described Thomas Sawdie as ‘demeaning himself soberly and modestly’ (Anonymous 1664:14). Following the departure of a fifth spirit, the possessed boy in Barrow’s account ‘sat very still, with a very sober countenance, lifting up his hands and eyes, as though he had a matter of praise on his mind’ (Barrow 1664:16).

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Despite the detailed criteria for the physical verification of real possession, exorcists were aware that many patients exhibited symptoms that merely appeared demonic, but were not, and that the discernment of true fakes was key to their own reputation and status: One exorcist recounted that,

the Doctor told him, he could take him up into his Chamber, and shew him the appearances of Spirits: I desired the Doctor he would do so, and I would stay-below; but, to put me off, he called for a Latine Bible, and read some words in Latine to him; with that he told me, that thereby he knew he [the patient] dissembled, because he did not roar as at other times, when the word God is read in Latine (Barrow 1664:12; emphasis added).

The possibility of sham was integral to discernment, and this seems to have added a quality of theater and spectacle to the entire process. Accounts of discernment circulated widely, as a class of popular literature called ‘possession pamphlets’ (Gibson 1999; 2015; Almond 2004). Such pamphlets were often penned by exorcists, who invoked accusations of fraud precisely to defend against them. They countered with detailed descriptions of their own evidence, and lists of named witnesses to the possessions and exorcisms. The circulated stories’ hearsay status only added to their value, as revealed gossip. James Dalton’s letter to his brother on 14 December 1646 offers a glimpse of how this market worked. In reference to the case of Joyce Dovey he wrote, ‘It is the property of humane nature to desire newes’ (Dalton 1646:1), even if that news is ‘received at the second or third hand’ (‘yet by such persons, as I nothing doubt the truth of’). If the purpose of the pamphlets was in many cases a defense against accusations of fabrication, such defenses merely opened further questions: Who, exactly, was taken to be dissimulated: The victim? The exorcist? The pamphlet’s author? The publisher? The devil? Accusations of fraud and fakery were lodged against all of the above, and legal claims levied against all but the devil himself. For Protestants especially, exorcists were something like witches themselves, frauds applying the same kind of magic as the afflicted (Thomas 1971:478, 485). There were charges levied against simulating victims, as well against fraudulent exorcists accused of seeking to enhance their own reputations (Thomas 1971:482-483, 492). Puritan pastor John Darrell was convicted of training his patients to appear possessed, in order to best

124 Fakecraft showcase his power over demons. The printer of the pamphlet defending Darrell’s dramatic dispossession of Thomas Darling was likewise imprisoned for confirming and amplifying such theatrics with his pen (Thomas 1971:483- 484).

Purification: Controlling possession When the Anglican Church dismissed possession whatsoever, in 1604 (Canon 72), with the position that the biblical ‘age of miracles’ was past, accusations of fakery still circulated widely, now typically turned against ‘sect’ Protestants, especially Puritans and . The proliferation and relative standardization of the possession narrative made particular cases dubious even to those who in principle accepted their veracity. Thus did the begin to regulate and standardize possession and exorcism techniques in the Roman Rite of 1618. The star exorcist of the Loudun possession spectacle, Father Surin, was withdrawn and reprimanded by the Jesuit superior general in 1636 for ‘giving himself over to spiritual inventions’ (De Certeau 2000:212). While different branches of the Christian church restricted and rationalized possession, states did too. In the wake of the massive possession cases at Aix-en-Provance, Loudun, and Louviers in France, official support – including payment of a royal pension to its enactors – for possessing spectacles waned after 1634. Spirits continued to be manifested in British North America for at least another half-century, most famously that of Salem (Boyer & Nissenbaum 1974), and indeed they continued perforce everywhere, but never with the same public weight as before. As a spectacle of the public sphere, démonomanie – to take Jean Bodin’s title of 1580 – was losing its sponsors and its audience. The popularity of possession cases had grown by ricocheting between performance, representation, repression, and defense. Possession as a phenomenological object was interpolated through the foil of its testing and the prospect of counterfeit. It was in light of this insurmountable indeterminacy, Foucault suggested, that the progressing medicalization of demonology engendered a novel hermeneutics of the self. Determining who, and what, possesses you, required an articulated system of interior life (Foucault [1962] 1999:76). Here we near the inaugural moment of the ‘modern’ individual, where Descartes began his 1641 Meditations with the question of his own possession: ‘There is some unidentified deceiver…who is

125 Paul Christopher Johnson dedicated to deceiving me constantly. Therefore, it is indubitable that I also exist, if he deceives me’ (Descartes 1641:24). Alongside the standard Cartesian quip, ‘I think therefore I am’, we must take account of this other Cartesian line of thought: ‘I may be deceived, therefore I am’.

Into Africa Outside of Europe, on new colonial frontiers, possession was everywhere found and floridly described, and this was especially true in Africa and the Americas (e.g. De Léry [1578] 1990; De Marees [1602] 1987). The transfer and translation of European demon possession to spirit possession phenomena encountered on faraway shores was a complex operation of colonial semiotics. It required pivots or hinges to link otherwise disparate phenomena of indigenous Amerindian or African ritual procedures to familiar if polemically disparaged rites in Europe. One way the linkage and transfer were made was through the codes of color. As mentioned above, European demonic events were in various ways narratively coded as ‘black’. Many famous possession cases, widely circulated in Great Britain, described an exchange with a man in black, offering money (cf. the Thomas Sawdie case, Anonymous 1664; Kirby 1693). Others described contact with persons or animals, usually black, the patina of possession par excellence. In fact, the color black was central to persuasive possession narratives: The tongue turned black (Aubin 1693:79), urine turned black, and the skin turned black. The skin would turn black in places (Darrell 1599). Black dust and rags are named, along with the sight of a black dog, a black bird (Baddeley 1622:50, 65), or contact with a man in black, a black man or black child. In British America, Increase Mather documented that many in the Morse family, in Newberry, Massachusetts, reported seeing a ‘Blackmore Child’ while hearing spirit voices (Mather 1684:153-154). In Flanders, 1649, Antoinette Bourignon witnessed 32 cloistered girls with ‘a great number of little black children with wings’ flying around their heads, a sure sign of their compact with the devil (Hale 1693:24). Demonic blackness as a mark of possession was simultaneously discerned on the west coast of Africa, sometimes in non-human signs and ciphers, sometimes in the skin-color of Africans themselves. Pieter de Marees’ 1602 description of West Africa described dancing, drumming, and other possession-like ‘antics’, during which a black dog appeared (De Marees [1602]

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1987:66, 71), recapitulating a standard prop of the European mis-en-scene5. The French cartographer, Reynaud Des Marchais’ account repeats the appearance of the black dog by the ‘fetich tree’. He asserted that the Marabous tell the people that this is their God (who is black) (Labat 1730:341). Describing possession required attending to possession’s components – a proper story with key elements for recounting and dissemination and comparison. That is to say, possession was scripted. As script, it was mobile and could be carried around the world to match local ritual action to its conventions. It could also be fantasized and imposed, according to prismatic conventions that governed not just ways of writing, but even ways of seeing. By the mid-18th century, according to some of the earliest proto- anthropological texts that generated a vocabulary for comparative religion, such as Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751-1759) or Charles de Brosses’ Du culte des dieux fétiches ([1760] 1970), possession had become a freestanding, objective morphological class that could be applied to the purpose of advancing comparisons of rituals and beliefs across groups, and yoked to the task of defining religion as such. These proto-anthropological descriptions usually marked the alterity of African practices. It is equally important, though, to recall possession’s use as a hinge with which others’ ritual practices were first named real religions whatsoever, by being routinely classed as similar to Christian ritual practice – especially via Protestant- Catholic polemics on the status of magic and ritual – and so drawn into a comparative field. The chief merchant of the Dutch West Indies Company, Willem Bosman, summed up this translation in describing the port of Ouidah in West Africa: ‘To conclude the Subject of their Religion, I must add, that they have a sort of Idea of Hell, the Divel, and the Apparition of Spirits. And their Notions, concerning these, are not very different from those of some People amongst us’ (Bosman 1705:384), or elsewhere: Their priests exorcise demons ‘like a Pope’ (Bosman 1705:123). Noteworthy is how Bosman’s discovery of African ‘religion’ depends first of all on locating its likeness with European practices. He found a resemblance in their overlapping repertories of spirits, demons, apparitions, and exorcisms. If possession signaled Africa’s ultimate difference (e.g. Atkins 1735:34), spirit possession also provided a

5 Also the color black: ‘[T]hey say their God is as black as they are, and is not good…We answered that our God is as white as we are, is good, and gives us many blessings’ (De Marees [1602] 1987:72).

127 Paul Christopher Johnson shared intersubjective domain of truth. Des Marchais’ report, another key text used in De Brosses’ classic, stated that

the inhabitants of the Gold Coast say that their God is black, and their Marabouts assure that he often appears at the foot of the fetish-tree in the figure of a great black dog. They have learned from the whites that this great black dog is called the devil; one needs but say that name before them and add some imprecation such as ‘may the devil take you and ring your neck’, to make them tremble and faint (Labat 1730:341)6.

Texts like Bosman’s and Des Marchais’ serve as a reminder of how comparative categories misrecognize and distort, even as they are necessary to the constitution of meta-frames like ‘religion’ whatsoever. I’ve described the emergence of a possession script that was applied as a hinge term for the colonization of the Americas and the African coast. ‘Possession’ as a comparative category was forged at the crossroads of early modern demonology, the proto-anthropological colonial descriptions of the ritual practices of ‘others’ – above all Africans and Afro-Americans – and, not least, the prospect of the fake. West European Christian fakecraft produced a purified occidental idea of the rational individual, on the one hand, and possessed Africa, on the other. The two projects were closely bound up together.

IV. Conclusion: Fake Africa From the early modern period forward, ‘religion’ was increasingly defined in relation to Africa, as Chidester (1996; 2014) has vividly described it. One of the oft-registered features of African religions was ‘spirit possession’. The trope of the possessed person was transferred from European to African shores

6 ‘Les habitans de la côte d’Or dissent que leur Dieu est noir, et leurs Marabous assurent qu’il leur apparoît souvent au pied de l’arbre des Fetiches sous la figure d’un grand chien noir. Ils ont appris des blancs que ce grand chien noir s’appelle le Diable; il ne faut que prononcer ce nom devant eux et y joindre quelque imprécation, comme le diable t’emporte et te torde le col, pour les faire trembler et tomber en défaillance’.

128 Fakecraft by around the year 1700. The geographic shift marked the move toward Africa, and then the African Americas, as the possessed places par excellence. The extension of the possession script to colonial shores created further problems of distinguishing between real and fake, between authentic possession and its fraudulent enactments. Western travelers’ descriptions of African phenomena of spirit possession were almost always accompanied by the question of authenticity. As European Christians were purified, or subjected to rationalized procedures of spirit-presence, the profile of allegedly permeable African persons only became clearer. S/he was analogous to ‘fetish-gold’, composed of unknown and potentially false contents (Pietz 1988). The guts of persons, like the value of metals, could only be measured through the technology of outer signs – by scales and filters – and, of course, through discourse about the fake7. Even though possession was taken to be bizarre, dangerous, primitive, and ultimately ‘false’ as a religious practice, observers of Africa also detected true and untrue falsehoods, real and faked fakery. The distinction between them lay in the attribution of intent: Intentional chicanery versus unknowing error. The confusion stemmed in part from the problem of the fetish, again linking economic considerations (gold of unknown internal content; the fetish as an object used to seal business deals; the fetish as a form of property – Atkins 1735:84); aesthetic ones (‘fetishing’ women – Atkins 1735:61)8, and ‘religious’ ones – random objects or sites attributed with special powers, both personal and public (Pietz 1988).

7 De Marees’ 1602 description of the Gold Coast already closely allies false gold, false religion, and untrustworthy business partners: ‘We once imprisoned a Black or Negro in the Ship to atone for bringing false Gold. Every morning he took a Tub of water, washed his face in it, then scooped up handfuls of water and threw them over his head, saying many words to himself, spitting in the water and doing a lot of Monkey-buffoonery. We asked him why he did this. He answered that he was praying to his god that it might rain and that his people might find much Gold, so that they would come to ransom him and he might soon go home’ (De Marees [1602] 1987:73). 8 Atkins reports that the women in Sierra Leone, for example, love fetishing, ‘setting themselves out to attract the good Graces of the Men’ (Atkins 1735:61; cf. 88, 95); and that, at Cape Apollonia, the Natives are ‘better fetished than their Neighbours’ (Atkins 1735:73).

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Charles de Brosses’ 1760 work carried extraordinary influence for the comparative study of religion. De Brosses, crucially, located spirit possession as closely proximate to fetishism and dubiously permeable personhood. For De Brosses, fetishism became a stage in universal human progress, presaging the well-known narratives of Comte and then Tylor. Yet in this universal progress of necessary deceptions, Africa was exemplary. Within Africa, it was the serpent cult at the slave port of Ouidah that represented fetishism par excellence. It was here that De Brosses described the faking of possession (‘hysterical vapours’) by women otherwise under the control of men (De Brosses [1760] 1970:26). His gloss, derived from Bosman’s description, reads as follows:

He being a Stranger to the Religion of this Country, had a Wife of this Nation, which fell Mad and pretended to be seized by the Serpent: But he instead of sending her to the Snake-house, clapt her in Irons; which so enraged this She-Devil…that she privately accused her Husband to the Priests; who not willing to make any publick Attempts on him, because he was a Gold-Coast Negroe who differed from them in Religion; yet secretly Poison’d him (De Brosses [1760] 1970:375- 376).

What is worth noting here is that Bosman goes well beyond the fakery of possession to note the imposture of the woman – thus, faked fakery – and even the presence of those who know that ‘this is all nothing but a pure Cheat’ (De Brosses [1760] 1970:375) but act otherwise. Thus Bosman gives us nothing less than Africans performing faked belief in faked fakery. This is offered here as an apposite concluding example of how Europe honed its ‘possessive individualism’ (MacPherson 1962) over against its ‘discovery’ of African spirit possession and imagined fickle, porous persons.

* * *

Marcel Mauss’s classic 1938 essay, Une catégorie de l’esprit humaine: La notion de personne celle de ‘moi’ (The notion of the person Mauss [1938] 1985), suggests a sequence in which the personnage, a traditional role that

130 Fakecraft possesses a tribe-member9 then (after detours to China and India), yields to the legal category of the persona or citizen (as in Rome), and then to the Christian ‘person’ – a being combining both civil status and interiorized conscience. His story’s protagonist is the human spirit itself, moving from the so-called primitive to the citizen, to the Christian person, and finally the psychological being, a ‘self’ with metaphysical and moral value; a body inhabited by a bounded, buffered soul. Mauss locates himself and his readers among the heirs and protectors of this special heritage: ‘Nous avons des grands biens à défendre. Avec nous peut disparaître l’Idée’ (We have great possessions to defend. With us the idea could disappear). In this fable, human consciousness ends its journey magically evacuated of social and material relations and possessed of the Idea10 – powerful fakecraft indeed.

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9 Mauss characterizes the personnage as including ecstatic ‘danse et possession’. The English translation adds the adjective, demoniacal, hence demoniacal possession, but for Mauss that qualifier was not necessary in the original. 10 The original French has ‘Idea’ capitalized (cf. Mauss 1938:281).

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Paul Christopher Johnson Department of Afroamerican and African Studies Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History University of Michigan-Ann Arbor [email protected]

137

‘Everything is Plastic’: The Faith of Unity Movement and the Making of a Post-Catholic Religion in Uganda

Asonzeh Ukah [email protected]

Abstract One of David Chidester’s long-term fascinations in the academic study of religion is his nuanced scrutiny of the sensorial features of contemporary religious life. Chidester uses an approach of multi-sensorial imagination of matter to investigate the plasticity and elasticity of religion to innovate and accommodate changing religious and spiritual desires and how such adaptions ensure the popularity of religious participation in a contemporary, technology- saturated society. Based on an ethnographic investigation of a new religious movement in Uganda, this essay mobilizes some of the analytical concepts developed by Chidester to think through the material dynamics of African religious life in the context of changing socio-economic, cultural, and political contexts of Africa.

Keywords: David Chidester, Owobusobozi, Faith of Unity, post-Catholic, material religion, African religion

Journal for the Study of Religion 31, 2 (2018) 138-160 138 Online ISSN 2413-3027; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a6 ‘Everything is Plastic’

Introduction For David Chidester, in the scholarly study of religions in contemporary societies, ‘the imagination of matter’ matters1. The critical study of the phenomenon of religion provides an interpretive framework and insight that guides scholars of religion in the attempts to understand the changing interaction between humans and the sacred. In doing this, the material forms of being sacred and performing religion are important. In the long career of Chidester, this is what drove him on in his intense scholarship on religion and society. Mapping and reconstructing the religious through historical imagination are key in understanding how he engages with religious persons, organizations, and institutions. It is helpful to employ similar methodologies in understanding the African sociohistorical environment which brittles with intense religious imagination, producing equally intense and varied new religious personalities and movements. Sociologically, a new religious movement is an organization or a community that exists to produce or prevent change in the religious life of a society or an organization (Bainbridge 1997:3). The generation or prevention of change in the religious consciousness of a society requires the (re)negotiation of identity and the meaning of the sacred. In this sense, Chidester (2003:xi) characterizes a new religious movement as a ‘utopian community’, the studying and understanding of which demand ‘reconstructing the worldview’ that animates the movement. A movement’s worldview constitutes its public discourses about what is important and what not; reconstructing the social history of a religious movement is as much reassembling its social world as it is discursively reconstituting its worldview. It maps out the distinctive characters that structure the discourses, practices, and performances that define ‘the parametres of a worldview’ within which a group or community of faith participate and live their life (Chidester 2003:xiii). A worldview, whether religious or not, functions ‘through classifying persons and orienting persons in time and space’ (Chidester 2003:xviii). Specifically, a religious worldview classifies persons, time, space, and things into sacred and profane, in the Durkheimian sense (Durkheim [1912] 1995:303-311) and orients believers towards a relationship not only to non-empirical entities, but to material things with special meanings and signification (Allen 2013:109). The articulation of the internal coherence and consistency in the discourses and

1 John Modern, in the blurb of Chidester’s latest book, Religion: Material dynamics (2018).

139 Asonzeh Ukah practices of a movement is an important method in making sense of its worldview. It offers an interpretation of the movement and the material and discursive ways in which it produces its worldview. Such interpretation, Chidester (2003:xv) maintains, ‘opens up a body of material to new possibilities of meaning, significance, and understanding’. The sociocultural landscape of Africa pulsates with religious imagination and new religious movements. To understand religion in this context would be to adequately describe how it works in enabling believers to make sense of their quotidian experience and anxieties as well as how it generates the disgust of tension, conflict, and violence. While Chidester was particularly interested in the evolution and social history of American religions, some of his analytical tools for understanding these movements could enable the present enterprise of understanding a new religious movement in Africa that has achieved both social following and political presence in parts of Africa. That a new religion attracts and retains followers implies that its unique message resonates with the believers who subscribe to its worldview, who participate in it, and in so doing reproduce and sustain it. As Chidester (2003) observes regarding Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, the participation in the worldview that a new religion or a religious personality creates, indicates a received message. The reception of the messages as well as material cultures of new religions address how concrete social anxiety is in a society to which the religion targets its discourses and performances of ‘making sacred’. Some of the interpretative and theoretical insights which Chidester deploys in his study of the Jim Jones and Jonestown disaster hold significant promise in investigating a myriad of African new religions. The rest of this article provides an analysis of the Faith of Unity religious movement in Uganda and how its material cultural production articulates a coherent and meaningful interpretation of the world according to the material experience of the founder and majority of his followers, an articulation that points to the production of a post-Catholic religion.

The Faith of Unity religion Scholars of religion in Africa, especially anthropologists and theologians, are quick to assert that Pentecostalism, that subset of Christianity that emphasizes the power and gifts of the Holy Spirit in bringing to spiritual birth a new person

140 ‘Everything is Plastic’ with a new destiny, is the fastest growing religion on the continent (Gornik 2011; Jacobsen 2011; Wilkinson 2012; Afolayan, Olajumoke & Falola 2018). Relying on projections and estimates (in fact, guesstimates in many cases), the case is made that Pentecostal Christianity is transforming Africa, not just in the sphere of religious world-making, but in material terms of producing wealth and health, transforming the educational sector as well as political behavior of sub-Saharan Africa. Nigeria, Zambia, Kenya, and the Ivory Coast are usually used as indications of how the newfound Pentecostal religious culture has reworked the social and spiritual life of most of the people of these countries (Drønen 2013; Asamoah-Gyadu 2013; Wariboko 2014; Lindhart 2015; N’Guessan 2015; Gaiya 2015; Heuser 2015; Zurlo & Johnson 2016; Ilo 2018). In Uganda, however, the most popular and fastest growing religion is neither a branch of Christianity nor of Islam, but the Faith of Unity (FoU) religion. The country is not a stranger to new religious movements, especially considering the violent death of 924 worshipers that occasioned the finality of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (MRTCG) in March 2000 (Cesnur 2000; cf. Walliss 2005). Similarly, the Holy Spirit Movement of Alice Auma continues to be a source of concern for the security of life and property of the population in Eastern Uganda as well as Central Africa in general (Le Sage 2011). Yet, even in the face of these recent experiences of new religious movements associated with violence of apocalyptic proportion, the FoU continues to attract massive numbers of converts to its vision and version of religious experiments in the production and dissemination of the sacred in the affairs of people. The organization, formally called the Faith of Unity Religion, used to call itself in the official Runyoro language, Itambiro ly’Omukama Ruhanga Owamahe Goona Ery’Obumu (‘The Association for the Healing Place of God of All Armies’)2. It has transmuted from an ‘association’ into a full-fledged

2 Two phases of ethnographic fieldwork in the FoU was done in 2016 and 2017 in , Kapyemi, Munteme, and Kihuuru – all in Uganda. The author acknowledges funding support from the John Templeton Foundation through Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity project on ‘Religious Innovation and Competition: Their Impact in contemporary Africa’, sub-project, ‘Miracle Cities: The Economy of Prayer Camps and the Entrepreneurial Spirit of Religion in Africa’ (ID: 2016-SS350). The author thanks Omukama Ruhanga Owobusobozi Bisaka for granting permission to research the FoU as well as Livingstone Akugizibwe, elder Tumuheire, and Dr Janice Desire Busingye for assisting during fieldwork in

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‘original African religion’ as described by one of the elders of the movement3. The FoU is a deliberately reclusive and world-avoiding organization – at least this was the case during the nascent years of its establishment. Founded in a village far removed from the glittering neon lights of Kampala and national gaze, FoU is located in Kapyemi, a village on the cusp of a hill in Muhurro town, with a population of 20,000 residents in the district of Kagadi, Western Uganda, some 251 kilometers from Kampala. Kapyemi also serves as the headquarters of the FoU, and its most important sacred space and sight. Until 2016, Kagadi was subsumed under the Kibaale district, which, together with the Hoima, Kiryandongo, Kakumiro, Masindi, and Buliisa districts constitutes the Bunyoro homeland. According to the National Population and Housing Census of 2014, which was released in 2017 (Uganda Bureau of Statistics 2017:8), the population of Bunyoro is estimated around 2.02 million people distributed in 1,998 households, nearly 90% of who are rural-based and practice different forms of agriculture and animal husbandry. The staple crops include bananas, millets, potatoes, and cassava. As an agrarian community, land was the primary and most important economic resource for both wealth generation and status creation (Akugizibwe 2012:11). The language of Bunyoro is Nyoro or Runyoro. Historically, the present Bunyoro is the leftover or remnant of the ancient empire of Bunyoro-Kitara, founded in the 15th century and renowned for its feudal system of governance under a (hereditary) king known as Omukama, who combined both sacred and secular functions in his person (Kiwanuka 1968a; 1968b; Doyle 2006). The prosperous kingdom went into a steep decline because of its encounter and confrontation with the British colonialists, who perceived the kingdom ‘as a bastion of the slave trade and Islam and a threat to peace and civilization’ (Doyle 2000:437). The FoU was founded by Dosteo Bisaka, popularly known and called Owobusobozi by both his followers and detractors. To the followers of Bisaka this honorific title means ‘Almighty God’ in Runyoro (Ndyabahika 1997:206). The primary source material for the reconstruction of the biography of the founder and the early history of the movement is the founder himself and the

Uganda and with translation from Runyoro to English. Finally, thanks to the two anonymous reviewers of JSR for their comments and suggestions; the usual caveats hold. 3 Personal interview with Omukwenda Sabomu Walugembe, Kapyemi, Kagadi, Western Uganda, 12 September 2016.

142 ‘Everything is Plastic’ written records and documentation he produced in the course of the establishment of the movement. The key text the group uses, is their scripture, written by Bisaka, titled, The book of God of the age of oneness (1987)4. Understanding the context of his birth and upbringing is necessary in reconstructing the sort of worldview which Bisaka designed the FoU to produce, sustain, and reinforce among followers and neighbors. This worldview is intricately forged by careful and creative intermingling and reconstitution of elements from the Bunyoro indigenous religion and culture, its missionary Christianity, and especially its Catholic strand. Bisaka was born on 11 June 1930 in the Kitoma Kiboizi village, in Buyanja county, Kibaale district in Western Uganda. His parents were Petero Byombi and Agnes Kabaoora. Both of them were staunch members of the local Catholic parish of Bujuni (Bisaka 1987). According to Bisaka, he spent little time with his parents, as he lived and grew up with his grandparents from the age of eight years. His father was a Catholic catechist, as was his grandfather, Alifonsio Wenkere, who was a pioneer convert at Bujuni Catholic parish. His grandmother, Martha Nyakaka, was also a Catholic convert and a captive in the palace of Mengo, where she witnessed to the martyrdom of Charles Lwanga and 21 other Ugandan martyrs in the 19th century (Ateenyi 2000:67-68). While his grandfather was occupied with church activities at the local parish, young Bisaka was tutored in Catholic teachings and doctrines by his grandmother, whose spiritual life formed a backbone and religio-moral compass for her grandson. As would become evident later in Bisaka’s life, his grandmother did not only transmit the Catholic doctrines of the time to him, but also her experience of horror, conflict, violence and intolerance, and divisiveness which missionary Christianity heralded at the time in their local communities.

The grandmother’s experience of the religious intolerance and violence in the Kingdom of Buganda, especially under the reign of Mwanga II of Buganda (who was the Kabaka of Buganda from 1884- 88; 1889-97), must have left an indelible mark in the mind of young Bisaka to influence the emphasis on religious unity which is the distinctive doctrine of the FoU (Ukah 2018:15).

4 In 1985, the original scripture was written and published in Runyoro, the ritual and official language of practice of the FoU.

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According to Bisaka’s own testimony, ‘this woman…used to teach him a lot about the goodness of God. The words he was taught stayed in his mind for a long time’ (Bisaka 1987:7). The socio-religious and political consequences of the upheaval surrounding the complex martyrs of Uganda will continue to reverberate in the formation of Ugandan polity, Catholic community formation, and local religious consciousness such as the establishment of the FoU (Kassimir 1991). Bisaka grew up and attended Mugalike school where, in 1944, he applied to enrol into the Catholic seminary where local priests were being trained. Failing to be admitted to the Catholic priesthood training program, he went to Nsamizi Teachers College, Mityana, where he was trained to become a teacher. On graduation, he was employed at Muhorro Catholic Primary School, where he taught for 35 years. Like his father and grandfather who were catechists in the local Catholic parish, Bisaka was a prominent member of the local church and leader of the parish laity. He was parish council secretary, a position that gave him access to a high-level decision-making platform in the management of the ritual life of the church. Because the ecclesiastic leadership noticed his fervent devotion, he was also appointed as the advisor to the group known as the Legion of Mary Mother of Grace Confraternity. Here he had to guide the members of the laity in their devotion to Mary, the mother of Christ, as well as teach the group elements of Catholic doctrines and liaise between the group’s leadership and parish and diocesan leadership of the Catholic Church. Significant in Bisaka’s future ambition and mission was his musical gifts and skills which led to his appointment into the Catholic diocese of Hoima’s liturgical committee. As the choirmaster of the parish in Muhorro, he was a composer of liturgical hymns for the church beyond the parish level – a practice that soon brought recognition and popularity to him, but also a grudge: The Catholic diocese of Hoima made use of his hymns in its rituals without adequately remunerating him for it (Bisaka 1987:8-10)5.

5 According to the Vicar General of Hoima Catholic Church, Msgr. Mathias Nyakatura, representing the local and official Catholic opinion on Bisaka and his FoU, claims that Bisaka was after self-enrichment: ‘He wanted money because he was not being paid well. He tricks people to get money, but we pray for him and his followers to repent’. If Bisaka ‘was not being paid well’, it was the fault of the Catholic Church that exploited him for his labor and underpaid him (Mugerwa 2012).

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While Bisaka’s sacred hymn composition started in 1966, it was not until 1975 that a radical change occurred that would ultimately precipitate the formation of the FoU. He claimed to compose sacred music through inspiration: ‘What resulted from composing of hymns was that in composing a new one, he would not search for it. Instead he would receive special inspiration until he would write it down, accompanied by its melody (Bisaka 1987:9-10). In 1975, Bisaka composed a hymn, Nkaikiriza Ruhanga Murungi (My God is good). As the lyrics of this song indicate, it is theologically meaningful and cheerful – hence its popularity within and outside the Catholic Church in East Africa as far away as Rwanda6.

Nkaikiriza Ruhanga Murungi My God is good7 1. Ruhanga wange murunga My God is good 2. Ruhanga wange mugonza. My God whom I love 3. Ou nyijuka omu businge Whom I remember in peaceful times 4. ou nyijuka omu busasi Whom I remember when I’m in pain 5. Akampanga kumba muntu Who created me to be a person 6. Atanfole kintu buntu. He didn’t create me to be a mere thing 7. Obu ndwara nyesiga ogu When am sick I trust in him 8. Obu ntunga nyesiga ogu When am rich I trust in him 9. Obu nseega nyesiga ogu. When am poor I trust in him 10. Akampanga kumbazaaga. He created me to talk about him 11. Ee leka mbaze nimuhaise Let me talk as I praise him 12. Eri Izooba Iya Ruhanga Today is God’s day 13. En‘ okwezi kwa Ruhanga. This month is for the Lord 14. Eby’akabihanga habwange. He created all of this for me 15. En’ensi enu kakagimpa He gave me this earth 16. E Ruhanga wange nkole nta? O my God, how do I do it?

6 In Africa, religions, music, singing, drumming, and dancing act as an important prelude to a healer going into trance or possession and gaining access to the sacred. Through music the sacred is invoked or awakened, and a fresh revelation about the causes and remedies for specific illnesses is revealed. In the history of the AICs, we have many church founders who started off as composers of church music. Isaiah Shembe of Nazareth Baptist Church is one such leader (Echtler 2015; Sithole 2016; cf. Cox [1995] 2001:139). 7 The English translation is provided on 5 May 2018 by Dr Janice Desire Busingye, the DVC/AF, Kampala International University, Kampala, Uganda.

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17. Ka ninkusaba ompe obu manzi I pray you (to) give me courage 18. Nukwo mbazeege kurungi So that I talk nice things 19. Nsingule amasitaani And I defeat satan 20. Ruhanga wange yaganba My God told me 21. Mwana wange kihurre My child listen to me 22. Ebinkagamba obikwata. Learn what I say 23. Abantu boona obagonze. Love all people 24. Nukwo oikale iwe oli wange. So that you remain mine.

It is claimed that from the time this song was first used in Catholic liturgy, Bisaka started experiencing unusual vibrations in his hand: ‘[T]here started coming in his arms a special kind of power whenever he would sing it [Nkaikiriza] in church’, a phenomenon that increased with time and became noticed by a large circle of church members including some of the clerics, who attributed it to the ‘composing of the hymn, Nkaikiriza’ (Bisaka 1987:10). After five years of trying to understand the spiritual and bodily change that he was experiencing, Bisaka claimed to have heard a voice: ‘[T]here came a voice of God commanding him, “You shall heal people by touching them”’. For three months Bisaka was hesitant, even afraid and unsure of what to do, but the voice was repeatedly insistent as well. The effective date for the establishment of the FoU is 22 February 1980, the day Bisaka reluctantly touched a young woman suffering from severe and debilitating feverish conditions (generally) associated with malaria. She was instantly healed and restored to health8. The news of the event quickly spread to the nearby communities and villages resulting in people bringing many sick people to him to be healed, by physically touching them.

8 Personal interview with A. Livingstone, Kampala, 8 September 2016. Since the malaria diagnosis was not performed through clinical tests, it is safe to understand it as conforming with local, cultural knowledge and interpretation about illness conditions (Sogolo 1993:91-118; Westerlund 2006:165f).

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Figure 1: Scripture reading moment during Faith of Unity in Worship. (Photo taken in September 2016, Kampyemi. Personal archive.)

Doctrines and self/social construction Over the nearly four decades since the formation of FoU, Bisaka has gathered a large following; he is explicitly believed by followers (Omwikiriza, singl: Abaikiriza) to be ‘God in the flesh’. The core doctrine of the FoU is about the divinity of Bisaka. Soon after his healing activities started, Bisaka had another spiritual experience, which is described by some elders of the movement as a trance-like event where ‘he went to see the Lord of hosts’; it was an experience that lasted for three days9. From this experience emerged a tripartite conception of the deity of which Bisaka was elevated into godhood with a full title of Omukama Ruhanga Owobusobozi Bisaka, loosely translated as ‘the Lord God of the power of God’ (Bisaka 1987:54). The remaining two personalities of the deity are the Lord God of hosts and the Lord God of holiness. His sacred duty is to fight satan and unify humankind through preaching unity, using healing to draw people together and capture their attention. Another key doctrine of the group is to be found in its motto, Obumu nigo mani, the Runyoro for ‘Unity is power”. It is a pointer to the primary

9 Interview with senior elder of the FoU, 10 September 2016, Kapyemi, the HQ of FoU.

147 Asonzeh Ukah organizational goal of the association, which is the dissolution of disunity and materialization of ‘the age of oneness’. Healing is a strategic instrument for drawing people together for Bisaka – imbued with ‘the power of the Lord God of hosts’ – to disseminate the message of unity. While unity is abstract and intangible, often imperceptible, healing is directly relevant and perceptible to Bisaka’s followers. Primarily, Bisaka heals by physical contact (see Figure 3 below), but there are claims that the sick can even be healed when he appears to them in dreams and visions10. Healing by touch is a strong and significant symbolism of the unity of the sacred and the material; the body is the site of sacred inscription and analysis. To be touched by a god is a powerful motivation for followers of Bisaka. The FoU, who characterizes themselves as healers of disunity, both in the human body and among humanity, prides itself on being a (completely?) new religion. ‘We are new and indigenous’, says one of the elders with pride. With its own unique written scripture, the FoU has an unapologetically (even aggressively) antagonistic, anti-Christian (more appropriately anti-Catholic)11, anti-Western, and anti-neoliberal market ideology12. Although incorporating and claiming to restore original African religio-cultural values (such as polygyny13, the use of single names, and

10 According to an informant, Bisaka possesses an enormous pharmacological knowledge and expertise which is often deployed clandestinely in healing people with protracted illnesses such as HIV positive people and those suffering from insanity. For these and similar cases of illness, herbal medicinal preparations are made and offered to them at a cost. They are instructed to keep both the source of medicine and the cost secret as a condition for their healing. 11 Although the FoU claims to be anti-Christian, it is more appropriate to argue that the Catholic Church is the liturgical and doctrinal palimpsest upon which Bisaka worked out his new religion. 12 Personal interview with Omukwenda Sabomu Walugembe, 11 September 2016, Faith of Unity Camp, Kapyemi. 13 Men are permitted to have as many wives as they can take care of. According to elders of the FoU, this practice is in accord with African tradition and it is also necessary to stem the consequences of prostitution. ‘Restricting a man to marrying only one woman so that many women go without, is to encourage prostitution. This is because those who remain without have to roam about, looking for support. As a result of this promiscuity, many of them contract dangerous diseases some of which are difficult to cure. They may even transmit such diseases to the married ones if any one of them contacts them’ (Bisaka 1987:arts 200, 201; original emphasis). As single ladies are not permitted to refuse marriage advances from

148 ‘Everything is Plastic’ kneeling before elders as a form of social respect)14, the FoU is unabashedly critical of significant aspects of African indigenous religious practices and values (such as the use of charms and the honoring of local deities)15. These features make FoU a new religion in its own right, with new ideas, new scripture, new rituals and ritual economy, new sacred functionaries and vocabulary, new processes of structuring divine-human encounters, and negotiation produced in the crucible of ‘sacral trauma’ (Kaczyński 2012), resulting from the interaction between Roman Catholicism and the Bunyoro religious culture16.

men, according to female informants, the possibility of acquiring women as wives is a strong attraction of FoU to men. 14 Kneeling is also a sign of submission, the acknowledgement of another’s worth and superiority and public humility. In this respect, Roy Rappaport (1979:199) maintains that ‘[f]ormal postures and gestures may communicate something more, or communicate it better, than do the corresponding words. For instance, to kneel subordination, it is plausible to suggest, is not simply to state subordination, but to display it, and how may information concerning the state of a transmitter better be signalled than by displaying that state itself?’ 15 Claiming to be ‘indigenous’ does not imply here that the FoU is part of the complex of African indigenous or traditional religion. It will be a categorical mistake to group the FoU with the Bunyoro indigenous religious culture, because this new religion is evidently opposed to and critical of indigenous religious ideas and practices, as their scripture recommends its followers to be aware of and avoid it. Members are meant to answer a list of 23 questions before every service. These questions deal with a renunciation of indigenous Bunyoro religious practices and ideas (Bisaka 1987:55-56). 16 The theory of sacral trauma explains the emergence of new religious movements in Africa as a response to individual and collective problems and conflicts demanding solutions, which are not offered by existing religio-cultural systems. Religious movements, such as FoU, are social movements responding to collective trauma caused by the disruption of the African worldview and its way of life by the violence of missionary religions (Christian and Islamic) and European imperialist and colonial interventions.

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Figure 2: Omukama Ruhanga Owobusobozi Bisaka in full cleric regalia with staff of office during worship service at Munteme, Hoima, 19 September 2016. (Personal archive.)

The national and international center of the FoU is in Kapyemi, a hilltop village in Muhorro town. Because of the role of healing in this religion and the large crowds of people who throng the venue each week, it is morphing into a healing city in its own right. The healing city of Owobusobozi is characterized by greenness, serenity, and near-absolute absence of any world reference with the exception of the majestic palace, which is the residential quarters of the leader and his wives17. With a sitting capacity of about 1,500 worshippers, the Itambiro, the hall of healing, is marked by an interior of white paint, austerely decorated with floating white and yellow ribbons and flowers – white and yellow/gold are the corporate colors of the organization (see Figure 1 above). Yellow (or gold) symbolizes heaven18.

17 Ugandan lawmakers are proposing to formally designate the palace as a tourist attraction in order to draw visitors to the interior, thereby opening it for business. 18 Personal interview with Magezi. Even though members of the FoU deny any relationship with Christianity, it is important to note that the Vatican flag is a vertical bicolor of gold and white, with the red coat of arm imposed on the white portion of the flag. It is no accident that the liturgical reconstitution of the FoU is a hallowing out, a remaking and reinterpretation of Roman Catholicism.

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Rank and social status are important in the FoU; they help to facilitate order, peace, and the efficient performance of duty. Similarly, the color white and its significance (holiness, beauty, being set apart, purity, and elegance) are important to the FoU. To signify their new heightened awareness of the ‘age of oneness’, which the birth of Bisaka heralded in 1930, members change into their liturgical white robes, called , girded with a waist sash called kitara (a girdle symbolizing ‘the believers’ sword to fight omwohya, the Runyoro for the tempter or satan)19. They wear this white robe once they have gone through the ritual confession and spiritual scrutiny that Bisaka performs at the beginning of every worship event. Only Bisaka, who also dresses in a long white robe reminiscent of white cassock or soutane that Catholic bishops use, wears shoes or sandals on the campground. He alone wears a robe of silk; others wear robes made of cotton. The leader’s kitara is designed differently: It is a look-alike of a Catholic bishop’s cincture, and it is broad, elegant, made of silk, like his soutane, and knotted on the right-hand side. To crown his role and position as the inaugurator of a new ritual world and order, Bisaka carries a white crozier – a pastoral staff – symbolizing his kingship and power. This instrument of authority, made of a straight piece of stick, about 3.65 centimeters in diameter and 1.5 meters long, is only in use during liturgical services (see Figure 2 above). The social world of the FoU encapsulates continuity and change, tradition and innovation, and a careful blending of the old and the new, in restructuring both ritual aesthetics, movement, time, and space. FoU membership is ordered and organized into four categories: • Abakwenda (messengers of God, elders, and enforcers of norms; their kanzu has two buttons on the chest as a distinguishing mark; a special sacerdotal order of wo/men who teach and ‘do not dig’20); • Abaheraza (servants of God; their kanzu has two knots in front instead of buttons); • Abakiriza (those recently incorporated into the group; new converts); • Abandeya (children)21.

19 Personal interview with senior elder, Tihumuwire Munteme, Hoima, 19 September 2016. 20 Personal interview with Omuhereza Byamukama, Kapyemi, 13 September 2016. ‘Digging’ is the euphemism for farm work. 21 Personal interview with Orac N. Kagadi, 23 September 2016.

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Those outside the group are called omutali, the unconverted/unbeliever in Owobusobozi. The sitting arrangement in the Itambiro is ranked and color-coded; the leader sits on a throne chair, with his three wives sitting on decorated white plastic chairs to his left-hand side in order of seniority. Bisaka’s children sit on white plastic chairs on the left-hand side of the leader farther away from the wives. The senior leaders of the group (abakwenda) sit on blue plastic chairs. Teachers and workers at FoU schools sit on green plastic chairs. Finally, guests or visitors sit on orange-colored plastic chairs. All other members outside these categories sit on the bare floor covered with pieces of cloth they bring from home. The facility symbolizes restful, pure, elemental simplicity and is open to all. On campground, members walk barefoot because the site is holy, and it is a sign of respect not to wear shoes or hats in the presence of the holy. Building a city that responds to, and satisfies Africa’s deep-seated spiritual roots and needs, is a fundamental function which contemporary African cities often ignore but taken up by ritual entrepreneurs like Owobusobozi. Through the healing rituals performed at the Camp – mainly long hours of singing, dancing, and laying on of hands by Bisaka on all present – the FoU aims to reconstitute its members’ self-understanding and perception of the world around them and its immediate environment, and from there to the larger society and world, by creating a new religio-cultural system and worldview that are based on divine imperative, direction, and intervention22. This new

22 The FoU is a politically active organization. Because of the presence and activities at the FoU HQ in Kapyemi, the Muhorro Town Council is now designated as ‘Kihereza town’ (or ‘Local Council 1’), ‘FoU believers’ town’, a new geopolitical entity recognizing the socio-political power of Owobusobozi and his followers. According to Bisaka, his organization and the political party in power in Uganda (the National Resistance Movement [NRM]) share the same objectives of bringing unity, development, and security to the people of the country (personal interview with Bisaka, 12 September 2016, Kapyemi). During Bisaka’s eighty-ninth birthday celebration, the , hailed the religious leader for this vision and political alignment of his organization with the ruling party’s National Resistance Movement’s policies. Museveni’s message read in part: ‘Owobusobozi, we thank you for faithfully serving God for all the years. You have touched many people’s lives and enabled many to come back to God. You have inspired many by your servanthood spirit…Owobusobozi, we wish you many years

152 ‘Everything is Plastic’ worldview is undergirded by the supernatural insurrection in the epiphany of Owobusobozi – a metasocial construction that supplants Euro-Christian modernity (cf. Lofland & Stark 1965).

Figure 3: Bisaka healing a sick child by touch. (Photo taken in October 2016. Personal archive.)

Religious plasticity: FoU as a Catholic palimpsest It is important to understand why a complex religion such as the FoU is flourishing in the context of Uganda which has experienced a great deal of violence connected with new religious movements. Despite coming under official government prohibition between 1989 and 1995, and the founder being persecuted by both the state and strong and powerful religious institutions such as the Catholic and Anglican churches in Uganda, twice jailed for fear of spreading unorthodox religious ideas, the FoU has more than seven million followers in seven countries (Ukah 2018:362). During an Orubung (official visit) of Bisaka to the Munteme community in Hoima on 19 September 2016, Bisaka initiated more than 800 new converts in their white flowing kanzu,

of happy returns and good health. Happy birthday celebrations’. The present was represented at the celebrations in Kapyemi by his Prime Minister, Dr Ruhakana Rugunda, who also presented Bisaka with presidential gifts of UGX10million (ca. US$2,690.00) (Kusosha & Musingusi 2018).

153 Asonzeh Ukah waving copies of The Book of God (which is a symbol of stepping into revelatory light and right) over their heads, into the religion in one single night23. The expansion of the religion is not only in rural Uganda, it is also growing in urban and peri-urban environments, often as a challenge and an interrogation of mainstream religions such as Islam and Christianity. In his recent book, Religion: Material dynamics (Chidester 2018), Chidester offers useful and dynamic insights into researching and understanding religion in contemporary society by stressing how religious things are put into motion, into circulation and order, and how such behavior is inherently implicated in the social construction of religion. Such an insight clarifies how the FoU mobilizes ‘religious things’ in constructing a new worldview as well as a social world to which converts recreate their mode of being in the world, their self-realization. Chidester (2018:177) identifies ‘plasticity’ as a feature of contemporary religion which ensures that it endures and reinvents its relevance: ‘Plasticity signifies everything important in the imagination of matter’. On several levels and dimensions, the FoU demonstrates the cultural, social, theological, and organizational plasticity. Such elasticity enables the FoU to fabricate a dense social world necessary for the creation and maintenance of a religious worldview. According to David Unruh (1980:277), ‘social worlds are amorphous and diffuse constellations of actors, organizations, events, and practices which have coalesced into spheres of interest and involvement for participants’. Social worlds are made of smaller units, namely imageries, processes, interactions, and relationships. For Unruh, social worlds produce worldviews which encapsulate and permeate ‘practices, procedures and perspectives’ and are marked by voluntary identification, partial involvement, and multiple identifications – for example, a participant can be a tourist or a visitor/stranger, a regular member or an insider (Unruh 1980:272, 283). The FoU is attractive to numerous people, partly because it offers a new worldview and pushes out old colonial and missionary religions such as

23 Bisaka conducts official ecclesiastical visits, called Orubung in Runyoro, to remote communities in Western Uganda. A typical Orubung lasts from late evening, say 7 pm, till the next morning, say about 5 am. During such visits, new converts are welcomed into the organization and the sick are brought from neighboring villages, and in some cases, hospitals and clinics, to be touched and healed by Bisaka (a fieldnote made on 19 September 2016).

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Roman Catholicism. As a former catechist of the Catholic Church, Bisaka was routinized in Catholic doctrines and rituals. These formed the ingredients with which he reinvented himself, a new worldview or social world, and a new religion. The metamorphosis from ‘the association for healing’ to ‘the Faith of Unity is itself scriptural: Ephesians 4:13 speaks of ‘the unity of faith and knowledge of the son of God’. The Faith of Unity is the oneness of faith necessary ‘to be a perfect man’ (Eph. 4:13b NKJV). The Catholic doctrine of the Trinity is reproduced with Bisaka as a replacement for God, the Son and Savior. The kanzu is a near replica of Catholic vestment or clergy attire such as the habit, and the cincture. The FoU is scriptural: The Book of God is doctrine, history, autobiography, hymnal, testimonial and polemics, and an important instrument for the scribal management of the members. Healing by touch or religious tactility resonates powerfully with some of the healing narratives of the Christian gospel. It indicates the intimacy between the sacred and the embodied or the material. The liturgical gowns, the healing city on the hill at Kapyemi, the vibrant rituals, singing and dancing, colorful environments, and unique doctrines and practices – all these are significant elements that create the FoU worldview where a new identity is made for members and communities of believers. The FoU, as a sacred worldview, is also a government for its believers: It is a power structure of creedal identity in dialogue with the values of the past – a point Kwame Anthony Appiah (2018:65-67) has recently made. As Chidester (2003:160) so succinctly says of the Jim Jones tragedy, new religious movements are individually a ‘religious experiment of being human’. This human experiment is made possible through the process of ecclesiastical and theological plasticity which is evident in the FoU, where Catholic liturgical and doctrinal culture are emptied and remade in the image of the Bunyoro. Evident within the FoU is the critical analysis and strategic reversals of Catholic ritual performance, aesthetics and materiality of religion. From the vestment to the color of ritual gowns, to the staff of office, rectangular design of the Itambiro and altar, the Catholic Church and its ritual world and performativity are the palimpsest with which the FoU experiments with religion and being human in the world.

155 Asonzeh Ukah

Conclusion The FoU frames its message and product as ‘good news’, the message of salvation from disunity which sickness and disharmony bring, a message to prepare humanity for the end time24. Bisaka is an apocalyptic figure with a new ethical vision and practice for humankind. For the FoU and its founder, religion and the quest and desire for the supernatural present a template of religion that frames and materializes what normality is; it shows that the deviance/normality conundrum is relative to society and the sacred. One reason why the FoU has defied serious academic study until recently, is its entrenched and pervasive public perception as a cult, a dangerous, deviant, even mysterious and risky organization with religious vestiges and pretensions. Town residents and neighbors furnish legends of diablerie about the FoU and its leaders that forewarn non-members to be permanently on their guard against possible entrapment or bewitchment. Even while researching the movement, many neighbors and academics in Uganda describe the group as an evil and ‘satanic’ organization that did not merit the investment of academic rigor and time in understanding or explaining. The history of the FoU indicates that even in the presence of deviance or unorthodoxy of faith, is salvation, a redemptive rethinking and reorientation to human destiny and the myriad of things that threaten order and meaning in human experience. The FoU qualifies as a new religion, albeit an alternative and marginal articulation of how humans may sanely and safely approach the divine and relate with the potential threats of disorder/disunity with time, which illness and death inexorably bring to the fate of being human. This type of empathetic analysis is one of the orientations David Chidester’s entire scholarship brings to the study of religious unorthodoxy as an experiment at being human.

24 The Book of God opens with the following declaration: ‘THE GOOD NEWS OF THE LORD GOD OF HOSTS; WRITTEN BY OMUKAMA RUHANGA OWO- BUSOBOZI BISAKA ABOUT THE ITAMBIRO LY’OMUKAMA RUHANGA OWAMAHE GOONA ERY’OBUMU’ (Bisaka 1987:7). This beginning is closely framed after Mark 1:1.

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References Afolayan, A., Y.-H. Olajumoke, & T. Falola (eds.) 2018. Pentecostalism and politics in Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Allen, N.J. 2013. Durkheim’s sacred/profane opposition: What are we to make of it? In Hausner, S.L. (ed.): Durkheim in dialogue: A centenary celebration of the elementary forms of religious life. New York: Berghahn. Appiah, K.A. 2018. The lies that bind: Rethinking identity – creed, country, colour, class, culture. London: Profile Books Ltd. Asamoah-Gyadu, K.J. 2013. Contemporary Pentecostal Christianity: Interpretations from an African context. Oxford: Regnum Books International. Ateenyi, M.P. 2000. New religious movements in post-independent Uganda. PhD thesis, Department of Religious Studies, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda. Akugizibwe, J. 2012. Social impact of Owobusobozi Bisaka’s religious movement on Nyoro culture: A case study of Muhorro sub-county, Kibaala district. BA dissertation, Department of Social Anthropology, Makerere University, Uganda. Bainbridge, W.S. 1997. The sociology of religious movements. New York: Routledge. Bisaka, O. 1987. The book of God of the age of oneness: We are one in the Lord God of Hosts – Disunity has ended. Kapyemi: Faith of Unity Press. Cesnur. 2000. Centrum for studies om new religions. Available at: https://www.cesnur.org/testi/uganda_004.htm. (Accessed on 28 February 2018.) Chidester, D. 2003. Salvation and suicide: Jim Jones, The Peoples Temple and Jonestown. Rev. ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chidester, D. 2018. Religion: Material dynamics. Oaklands: University of California Press. Cox, H. [1995] 2001. Fire from heaven: The rise of Pentecostal spirituality and the reshaping of religion in the twenty-first century. Cambridge: De Capo Press. Doyle, S. 2000. Population decline and delayed recovery in Bunyoro, 1860- 1960. Journal of African History 41, 3: 429-458.

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Doyle, S. 2006. Crisis and decline in Bunyoro: Population and environment in Western Uganda, 1969-1955. Oxford: James Currey Publishers. Drønen, T.S. 2013. Pentecostalism, globalisation, and Islam in Northern Cameroon: Megachurches in the making? Leiden: Brill. Durkheim, E. [1912] 1995. The elementary forms of religious life. Fields, K.E. (trans. with an introduction). New York: The Free Press. Echtler, M. 2015. Shembe is the way: The Nazareth Baptist Church in the religious field and in academic discourse. In Echtler, M. & A. Ukah (eds.): Bourdieu in Africa: Exploring the dynamics of religious fields. Leiden: Brill. Gaiya, M. 2015. Charismatic and Pentecostal social orientation in Nigeria. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 18, 3: 63-79. Gornik, M.R. 2011. Word made global: Stories of African Christianity in New York city. Cambridge: William Eerdmans. Heuser, A. (ed.) 2015. Pastures of plenty: Tracing religio-scapes of prosperity gospel in Africa and beyond. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Ilo, S.C. (ed.) 2018. Wealth, health, and hope in African Christian religion: The search for abundant life. New York: Lexington Books. Jacobsen, D. 2011. The world’s Christians: Who they are, where they are, and how they got there. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Kaczyński, G.J. 2012. Religious movements in Africa as expression of the sacred trauma: The explanatory approach reconsidered. Hemispheres: Studies on Cultures and Societies 27: 5-19. Kassimir, R. 1991. Complex martyrs: Symbols of Catholic Church formation and political differentiation in Uganda. African Affairs 90, 360: 357-382. Kiwanuka, M.S.M. 1968a. Bunyoro and the British: A reappraisal of the causes for the decline and fall of an African kingdom. The Journal of African History 9, 4: 603-619. Kiwanuka, M.S.M. 1968b. The empire of Bunyoro Kitara: Myth or reality? Canadian Journal of African Studies/La Revue candaienne des études africaines 2, 1: 27-48. Kusosha, I. & I. Musingusi 2018. Museveni hails Bisaka. New Vision (Kampala), 11 June 2018. Available at: https://www.newvision.co.ug/ new_vision/news/1479498/museveni-hails-bisaka. (Accessed on 30 November 2018.)

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Le Sage, A. 2011. Countering the Lord’s resistance army in Central Africa. Strategic Forum 270: 1-16. DOI: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/ fulltext/u2/a546468.pdf Lindhart, M. (ed.) 2015. Pentecostalism in Africa: Presence and impact of pneumatic Christianity in postcolonial societies. Leiden: Brill. Lofland, J. & R. Stark 1965. Becoming a world-saver: A theory of conversion to a deviant perspective. American Sociological Review 30, 6: 862-875. Mugerwa, F. 2012. Owobusobozi Bisaka: The self-styled god in Bunyoro region. Daily Monitor, 12 May 2012. Available at: https://www.monitor.co.ug/SpecialReports/Owobusobozi-Bisaka--The- self-styled-god-in-Bunyoro-region/688342-1403840-jjbokk/. (Accessed on 28 November 2018.) N’Guessan, K. 2015. Côte d’Ivoire: Pentecostalism, politics, and performances of the past. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 18, 3: 80-100. Ndyabahika, J.N. 1997. The attitude of the Anglican to the new religious movements and in particular to the Bacwezi-Bashomi in South Western Uganda: 1960-1995. PhD thesis, Department of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town, Cape Town. Rappaport, R.A. 1979. Ecology, meaning, and religion. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Sithole, N. 2016. Isaiah Shembe’s hymns and the sacred dance in Ibandla LamaNazaretha. Leiden: Brill. Sogolo, G. 1993. Foundations of African philosophy: A definitive analysis of conceptual issues in African thought. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press. Uganda Bureau of Statistics. 2017. The national population and housing census 2014 – national analytic report. Kampala: The Government of Uganda Press. Ukah, A. 2018. Emplacing God: The social worlds of miracle cities: Perspectives from Nigeria and Uganda. Journal of Contemporary African Studies 36, 3: 351-368. DOI: 10.1080/02589001.2018.1492094 Unruh, D. 1980. The nature of social worlds. Sociological Perspectives 23, 3: 271-296. Walliss, J. 2005. Making sense of the movement for the restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 9, 1: 46-66.

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Wariboko, N. 2014. Nigerian Pentecostalism, Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press. Westerlund, D. 2006. African indigenous religions and disease causation: From spiritual beings to living humans. Leiden: Brill. Wilkinson, M. (ed.) 2012. Global Pentecostal movements: Migration, mission, and public religion, Leiden: Brill. Zurlo, G. & T. Johnson 2016. Religious demographies on African Christianity, 1970-2025. In Phiri, I.A., D. Werner, C. Kaunda & K. Owino (eds.): Anthology of African Christianity. Oxford: Regnum Books International.

Asonzeh Ukah Department of Religious Studies University of Cape Town [email protected]

160

‘Senses’: Assessing a Key Term in David Chidester’s Analysis of Religion1

Johan M. Strijdom [email protected]

Abstract The purpose of this article is to illustrate and assess Chidester’s use of the ‘senses’ as an analytical term in his study of religion. Under ‘senses’ Chidester includes not only the five conventional senses of Aristotle, but also analyzes metaphorical uses of the senses in religious discourse, the visions and dreams of mystics and shamans, and eventually new media as extensions of the human senses. Chidester’s analysis of the senses in European Christian discourses on the one hand, and in colonial and postcolonial African indigenous religion and imperial religious studies on the other hand, is compared and assessed. Although he does not offer a systematic comparison of these case studies, I argue that his analysis lends itself to an explicit comparison of the senses as material aspects of religion and show how his contextualized and historically nuanced analysis of the senses in religion and religious studies informs a critical study of religion. Since critical assumes judgment, values need to be explicated in terms of critical theories, which in my view need further elaboration.

Keywords: senses, visions, dreams, media, analytical terms in religious studies, critical theory, interior senses in medieval European theories and practices, African indigenous religions

1 I would like to thank the two anonymous peer-reviewers, whose constructive comments helped me to refine aspects of this article.

Journal for the Study of Religion 31, 2 (2018) 161-179 161 Online ISSN 2413-3027; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a7 Johan M. Strijdom

Introduction In theorizing ‘the senses’ as an analytical category in the study of religion, Birgit Meyer and Jojada Verrips (2008:20-30) have briefly traced the Western genealogy of the term ‘aesthetics’. The Kantian legacy in Western modernity, they argue, has limited the meaning of the concept of aesthetics to the rational comprehension of beauty and the sublime. It prioritized the mind/reason and high art for the elite few, and relegated to an inferior position the body and the senses, popular art labeled as ‘kitch’, and religion conceived of as irrational which was supposed to gradually decrease in importance due to modern secularization. Against this narrow definition from the Enlightenment that limits aesthetics to beauty, stands Aristotle’s broader conceptualization of aesthetics as involving the five senses of the body. The recovery and development of this view, particularly in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception in the late 1940s, has influenced the agenda of a number of researchers in the humanities, which has opened the possibility to account for the role of the body, the senses, and objects not only in high art but also in the everyday life of people, and furthermore to produce innovative knowledge on their role in religion and in the academic study of religion. It would be crucial, they emphasize, to include a socially and culturally sensitive contextual analysis of ‘ways in which the tuning of the sensorium has undergone actual transformations under the influence of the invention of new technologies’, such as audio cassettes, radio, television, photography, and cyberspace that have profoundly impacted the formation of modern subjectivities (Meyer & Verrips 2008:24). Although a great deal of recent research on the senses in religion has focused on visual media (e.g. the bodily and affective engagement with Jesus pictures in American popular Protestantism, or with mass-produced images of deities in Indian villages to render the power of the gods present), the impact of auditory media on the emotional and moral formation of subjects has also received attention (e.g. the shared listening of young Muslims to mass- produced cassette sermons)2. In taking the body and the senses as points of departure, they conclude, the intention is not to replace the modern binary hierarchy with a new one that would simply prioritize the body and the senses over the mind, or practices

2 See the discussion of Morgan (1998), Pinney (2004), and Hirschkind (2006) in Meyer and Verrips (2008:25-26).

162 ‘Senses’: Assessing a Key Term in David Chidester’s Analysis of Religion over beliefs, popular art over high art, and religion over art, but to understand that the mind in a very concrete way always involves the body and the senses. The task, therefore, is to see the mind as embodied and grounded in matter, and to study religion by integrating ritual practices and beliefs, the senses and thought, the ‘body and mind as an undivided whole’ (Meyer & Verrips 2008:29), and importantly, to understand as inextricably intertwined the individual self and social collectivities that are formed by means of shared aesthetic practices3. In summary, Meyer and Verrips (2008:27-28) highlight three overlapping aspects in this paradigm shift in the study of religion: • the encounter with the divine and each other is necessarily mediated through the physical senses, while the specific, legitimate ways in which the senses mediate the encounter with the transcendent are authorized by religious traditions; • the individual self is formed through habitual uses of the bodily senses (not only of seeing and hearing, but also of touch, smell, and taste); and • groups in which people feel at home, i.e. collective identities, are formed by shared uses of the embodied senses (e.g. by looking at images in a certain way, or singing the same songs), which also play a key role in their appearance in public, secular spaces – an aspect, they note, that needs further investigation in future.

The role of the senses in religion and comparative religious studies, as part of what would become known as the material turn in the academic study of religion4, has preoccupied David Chidester for almost forty years in his study

3 Houtman and Meyer (2012) insist that part of this move is the realization of the role of religion in public life (rather than limited to the inner life of the individual as modernity has constructed its role). 4 Drawing on Houtman and Meyer (2012), I listed in an article (Strijdom 2014a) the following as aspects to be studied under material religion: • objects like relics, amulets, dress codes, painted or sculpted images, written words and architectural spaces; • feelings and sensory experiences like seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching; and • bodily performances in specific gestures, rituals, ceremonies, and festivals.

163 Johan M. Strijdom of religion – a theme that he not only pioneered in his doctoral thesis in the late 1970s, but has also developed since then. My purpose is to use the theorization of ‘the senses’ by Meyer and Verrips in their mentioned article5 as frame of reference to articulate ways in which Chidester’s attention to ‘the senses’ in selected case studies from his oeuvre illustrates his innovative contribution, and to indicate a way in which his analysis may be taken further. Under ‘senses’ as analytical category, Chidester examines not only views of the five senses of Aristotle, but also the metaphorical uses of the senses in religious discourse, the visions and dreams of mystics and shamans as extraordinary ‘internal/interior senses’, and new media as extensions of the human sensorium6. To theorize the concept of ‘the senses’ in more depth, Chidester engages in Word and light, published in 1992 as the revised version of his doctoral thesis, with theories of the body and ‘the senses’ – particularly of seeing and hearing – in the work of, amongst others, phenomenologists (Merleau-Ponty and Hans Jonas), anthropologists (Lévi-Strauss and Mary

Marx’s insight that religion is materially based is crucial to the material study of religion in Chidester (2018:10): ‘The material dynamics of categories, formations, and circulations reveal different dimensions of Marx’s rendering of the “spiritual intercourse” of human beings as an “efflux of their material condition”’. Tracing the genealogy of the concept of material religion a bit further back to Feuerbach, Chidester (2015:374) underlines that for Feuerbach ‘human consciousness is not an independent spiritual essence, aloof from the material world of objects’, but that ‘[a]gainst any idealist rendering of humanity, Feuerbach argued that human beings were constituted by their reciprocal engagements with material objects’. Far from neglecting the transcendental in his study of religion, Chidester takes it very seriously as a human construct with a material base that has real consequences in the world – as he has demonstrated extensively in his case studies of religion under colonial and postcolonial conditions. The potential of using material terms to produce innovative knowledge in the academic study of religion is emphasized by Chidester (2000b). 5 In this article I do not engage with developments of the theme elsewhere in the oeuvre of Meyer and Verrips. My strategy limits itself by focusing only on this specific article by them in order to introduce my discussion of the senses in Chidester’s work and highlight his contributions in terms of their article. 6 Marshall McLuhan (1964) is usually credited with conceptualizing the media as extensions of the senses.

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Douglas), and literary theorists and philosophers (Northrop Frye, Walter Ong, Derrida, and Foucault). From Word and light (Chidester 1992) up to a recent introduction to articles by a number of his postgraduate students in the Journal for the Study of Religion (Chidester 2013), Chidester has consistently maintained that our best hope to produce new knowledge about religion and religions probably depends on the application of theorized key concepts to selected case studies7. In this paper I will engage with Chidester’s theoretically informed application of ‘the senses’ as an analytical category to case studies from • European Christian discourses until the Protestant Reformation; and • South African indigenous traditions, notably 19th-century indigenous Zulu dreaming under colonial conditions and its interpretation in imperial theories of religion, as well as contemporary Zulu neoshamanism within a global context8.

7 In his most recent Religion: Material dynamics, Chidester (2018) demonstrates how he has in his academic career given key terms theoretical depth and applied them to case studies to yield innovative insight in the academic study of religion. One of the anonymous reviewers of this article commented that my statement might create the impression of ‘a top-down approach, from theory to case studies’, and wondered whether ‘Chidester also thinks that case studies help to produce theory’. From my reading of Chidester, it seems clear that he begins with broad definitions of key concepts and considers prominent theories of a concept, then refines them as he applies them to case studies. See, for example, Chidester’s statement in the concluding chapter of Religion: Material dynamics (Chidester 2018:208): ‘Certainly, these generalizations about classifications and orientations in the dynamic materiality of religion are painted broadly, with a very broad brush. The specific cases we have engaged in this book, dwelling in detail, have suggested some ways in which the brushstrokes might be refined. However, in the art of studying religion, we all benefit from critical and creative reflection on the categories we employ for thinking about religion’. 8 For the first case study, Light and word: Seeing, hearing and religious discourse (Chidester 1992) and Christianity: A global history (Chidester 2000a) will constitute the primary sources, and for the second case study Authentic fakes: Religion and American popular culture (Chidester 2005), Wild religion: Tracking the sacred in South Africa (Chidester 2012), Savage systems: Colonialism and comparative religion in Southern Africa (Chidester 1996), and Empire of religion: Imperialism and comparative religion (Chidester 2014).

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Although Chidester does not offer a systematic comparison of these case studies, I will argue that his analysis does open the possibility to develop a critical comparison of the role of the senses as material aspects of religion in these cases from different times and locations. His contextualized and historically nuanced analysis of the senses in religion and in religious studies, I will argue, may inform a critical approach to the academic study of religion. However, since critical assumes judgment on the basis of normative values rather than contentment with a mere phenomenological description, I will in conclusion argue that these values, particularly regarding social boundaries and economic exchange, need further explicit and consistent elaboration9.

First case study: The ‘senses’ in European Christian discourses until the Protestant Reformation In Word and light, Chidester (1992) argues that metaphorical uses of seeing and hearing in religious discourses10 are closely related to the physical senses of seeing and hearing themselves and to ways in which they are conceptualized and given meaning in cultural traditions11. ‘Within this dialectic in the symbolic discourse of the body’, he maintains, ‘perceptual metaphors are

9 Chidester, in Word and light and often elsewhere in his work, tends towards a phenomenological description and refrains from critical judgment. In other cases, however, he does make normative judgments, e.g. in his application of the term ‘sociality’ to exclusionary and inclusive boundary formations in the old and new South African system of religion education, or in his application of the term ‘exchange’ to Rock ‘n’ Roll in Authentic fakes (Chidester 2005). My argument is that scholars of religion should not be content with a phenomenology of religion that pretends to offer neutral descriptions but should explicate their normative frameworks and consistently apply these to their analyses. 10 Chidester (1992:xii) emphasizes that his analysis in Word and light deals mostly with discourse and not with ritual practices, institutions, and politics. The latter aspects of religion receive extensive attention in his later works. 11 Although Chidester’s focus in Word and light is on the Christian tradition, in its conclusion he does remark on the relevance that a phenomenology of perception may have for the analysis of perceptual metaphors in , Islam, Hinduism, Ch’an Buddhism, Chinese popular religion, and Daoism (cf. Chidester 1992:135- 143).

166 ‘Senses’: Assessing a Key Term in David Chidester’s Analysis of Religion generated by the body, articulated in discourse, but always forced back again to their physiological ground in the lived experience of the body’ (Chidester 1992:128). To analyze uses of ‘the senses’ and perceptual metaphors in European Christian discourses, he therefore develops a theoretical framework that draws on ancient Greek theories of the senses which have profoundly influenced European Christian discourses, as well as on insights from 20th-century phenomenologists, anthropologists, literary theorists, and philosophers. He concludes, on the basis of his survey, that the physical senses of seeing and hearing connote two different orientations to the world, which necessarily inform different associations that their uses as metaphors convey in expressing a relationship between humans and the divine. If, on the one hand, ‘seeing’ tends to be associated with spatial continuity, immediate presence, co- presence, and contemplation, ‘hearing’ on the other hand tends to connote temporal discontinuity, change, difference, indirect representation, and action. In applying this framework to selected case studies from European Christian discourses until the 16th century, Chidester identifies two fundamental patterns: One of conflict, and another of synesthesia. Uses of metaphors of hearing and seeing in the Trinitarian controversy of the early 4th century exemplify for Chidester the first pattern. Whereas Arius emphasized the Logos as divine Word, Athanasius prioritized Phōs as divine Light. With the latter position being victorious, one consequently finds in the Nicaean Creed only ‘Light from Light’ with no mention of the Logos. The one side insisted on verbal discontinuity (homoiousios) and the other side on visual continuity (homoousios). The perceptual metaphors used by the two groups thus served to express the theological conflict between the two factions. ‘The contestants’, Chidester (2000a:50) concludes, ‘appropriated one or the other of those models in order to claim legitimate ownership of a symbolic universe in which both word and light operated’. The other pattern, characterized by synesthetic metaphors that disrupt language to express an intense experience of mystical union with the divine, is for Chidester exemplified by Philo and Augustine. In Philo, God’s Word is seen at the crucial moment when Moses receives the Torah12. Also in

12 Another example of synesthesia is found among 4th-century Christian monks in the Egyptian desert, whose senses of hearing and seeing fused in an intense spiritual experience. As if drunken, they saw their founder, Pachomius’ words flying from

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Augustine, Chidester finds at crucial moments a synthesis of perceptual metaphors to express the individual’s encounter with God, although he notes that whereas the early Augustine within a monastic environment focused on contemplation associated with sight, he later came to prioritize the hearing of God’s Word in the city due to his confrontation as bishop with the harsh realities of his congregation in Hippo. In his early reflection on the senses, Augustine importantly distinguished between the five senses, an ‘interior sense’ and reason, above and beyond which was God as eternal truth. The ultimate goal, he thought at that stage of his life, was the rational vision of God guided by faith, ‘the conjunction of seer and seen’, where ‘seeing God was…to enter into the being of God’ (Chidester 2000a:130). His Christian epistemology maintained at that stage that hearing words alone was not sufficient to convey information, but that one would learn only ‘by seeing directly the things to which the words referred’ (Chidester 2000a:131; emphasis added). Concerning an interior sense, he held that this was crucial for intellectual vision or insight. ‘The mind’, he argued, ‘required an inner teacher, the interior magister, who would display the truth [i.e. Christ] directly to the eye of the mind’ (Chidester 2000a:131). Christ was thus teaching within the human mind. For Chidester, the respective views of the role of the senses in education by Bonaventure and Melanchthon illustrate two opposite trajectories in which Augustine came to be appropriated. Whereas the 13th-century monk prioritized seeing and being illuminated by God’s Light through contemplation, the 16th-century reformer and rhetorician emphasized hearing God’s Word and action. In Word and light, Chidester’s analysis of the senses of seeing and hearing and their metaphorical uses in European Christian discourses is clearly structuralist, phenomenological, and descriptive, but it is always historically and culturally nuanced. He summarizes his approach at the time as follows:

A phenomenology of perception must be sensitive to the ways in which the senses were understood to operate within specific historical and cultural contexts. Culturally constructed assumptions regarding the operations of the senses, the ways in which they structure information,

his mouth like birds made of precious stones entering the ears of those who listened carefully (cf. Chidester 1992:20; 2000a:119-120).

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and the ways in which they orient human consciousness, are particularly important in a historical phenomenology of perception (Chidester 1992:2).

In Christianity: A global history, published in 2000 (eight years after Word and light), Chidester does not use ‘the senses’ as an organizing category of analysis. A close reading of this later work nevertheless shows the extent to which this aspect plays a role in his reading of Christian history. I will mention a few instances from late-medieval Eastern Greek Orthodox and Western Latin Catholic traditions, in which he pays particular attention to the visions of mystics of the period. From the 10th to the 14th century, the , drawing on the mystical theology of the 6th-century Dionysius the Areopagite and the 4th-century Cappadocian fathers, developed an elaborate theory and practice of the soul ascending to be united with God as the ultimate Light. By cultivating in monasteries a personal, inner contemplation through ritual techniques of the body (such as a sitting physical posture accompanied by repetitive silent prayer coordinated with rhythmic breathing), monks would induce a mystical experience understood as a deification (theōsis) of the soul during which God as the Light (the Phōs) was directly seen. Although the practice of hesychasm (silent prayer) accompanied by the beard resting on the chest with the eyes focusing on the navel was ridiculed as superstitious ‘navel- gazing’ by the 14th-century Baarlam of Calabria, the defense of the technique by the monk, Gregory Palamas of Athos, was accepted by the 14th-century Orthodox church councils. If Baarlam argued on the basis of Dionysius the Areopagite that God was hidden and could not be seen directly by humans, but could only be known indirectly through the Scriptures, sacraments, and tradition, Gregory Palamas, on the basis of the same source, held that though humans could not grasp the essence of God, they could directly experience the energy of the divine Light ‘in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence’ (Gregory Palamas, quoted in Chidester 2000a:247). By means of the bodily techniques of hesychasm, the Orthodox church continued to maintain that body and soul could journey upwards to see and be united with God as the ultimate Light. The sense of sight, specifically as an internal contemplative sense, was thus cultivated in late-medieval Greek Orthodox monasteries through specific bodily techniques to mediate a mystic union with God who was conceived of as Light.

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In the Latin West, in 12th-century France, within a monastic context of monks, Bernard of Clairvaux developed Dionysius the Areopagite’s mystical theology by using metaphors of intimate erotic passion, based on an allegorical reading of the biblical Song of Songs, to theorize the ascent of the individual soul to its deification in an ecstatic, direct union with Christ. Driven by love in its upward movement through the three stages of confession, devotion, and contemplation, he held, the soul first kissed the feet and then the hands of Christ in preparation for the ultimate kiss on the mouth of Christ, the Divine Lover. ‘By loving, desiring, and adhering to God in this passionate embrace, Bernard concluded, the soul achieved the vision of God’ (Chidester 2000a:240). In contrast to Bernard and other monks of the 12th and 13th century who only theorized by means of erotic metaphors the soul’s ascent to and unification with Christ without claiming to have actually seen extraordinary visions or to have heard supernatural voices themselves, female mystics expressly claimed such intimate, spiritual experiences. After establishing a convent, Hildegard of Bingen recorded and elaborated in a mystical theology what she saw and heard during her intense personal encounters with God, and composed hymns claiming that ‘the divine light’ entered her ‘spiritual ears as music, as heavenly singing, as a divine symphony, as a celestial harmony’ (Chidester 2000a:243). Outside the context of the convent, living in ordinary houses in cities in 13th-century Belgium, the Netherlands, the Rhineland, and Northern France, unmarried women known as Beguines, cultivated an erotically charged mystical practice and theologia negativa of the soul’s ascent that challenged and attempted to reverse the church’s system of patriarchal domination. When these women opened their mouths to kiss Christ their bridegroom, melting with him, falling into an abyss and annihilating their individual identities at the apex of the ascent of the soul, Chidester (2000a:250-251) remarks, this intense intimacy and experience of nothingness in their spiritual visions and direct union with Christ subverted the church’s prescription of closed mouths and bodies for women. In the case of the French Beguine, Marguerite Porete, the defiance of male ecclesiastical authority on the basis of her mystical theology of nothingness resulted in her condemnation by the ecclesiastical court as ‘an unrepentant heretic and a “pseudo-woman”’ and being handed over ‘to the secular authorities of Paris to be burned on June 1, 1310’ (Chidester 2000a:253).

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More than a century later, in the 15th-century Renaissance Florence, Christian Platonists, particularly Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, sponsored by wealthy de Medici patrons, drew inspiration for their thinking about ‘the senses’ not only from Platonist and Neoplatonist philosophers13 due to an encounter with contemporary Byzantine scholars, but also from earlier Muslim interpretations of Aristotle by the 11th-century Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and the 12th-century Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Pico, in addition, drew on Kabbalah traditions, which led to his condemnation as heretic by the church. Foregrounding the sense of immediate ‘sight’, Ficino insisted that words alone are not sufficient to exhort human beings to a moral life. What was needed was an image of virtue ‘placed before the eye’, of which meditation on Botticelli’s paintings of Venus understood as an allegory of the humane virtues of love, dignity, modesty, etc. could have served as model (Chidester 2000a:293-294). Within his tripartite concept of the self, thought of as harboring the heavenly bodies with their conflicts and harmony, a spiritual faculty in the middle of the self was conceived of as having the capacity to move upwards to heaven ‘toward supra-intelligible things’, or downwards to earth ‘[giving] birth to the charm of sensible things in matter’ – a process symbolized by an allegorical understanding of Venus (Ficino, quoted in Chidester 2000a:295). This view of the self clearly drew on a Platonic dualism, but the Christian Platonists also developed medieval interpretations of Aristotle by Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd which combined elements from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Based on these Muslim interpreters of Aristotle, it was generally accepted that humans had three souls: • at the lowest end, a vegetative soul that gives life to the body by letting it grow and reproduce; • at the highest end, an intellective soul where information is first received from the senses by a passive intellect and then transformed into rational concepts/ideas by an active intellect; and • between these two souls, a sensitive soul that consists of faculties that interact with both the lower and higher souls.

13 Of particular importance was their appropriation of the 3rd-century Neoplatonic corpus hermeticum, with Hermes, Orpheus, and Zoroaster as crucial figures, that they thought of as ancient wisdom going back to Moses.

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This intermediate sensitive soul, in its interaction with the vegetative soul at the lowest end, was considered not only to govern movements of the body, but also to govern and be driven by the basic emotional desires of sex and aggression. In its interaction with the intellective soul at the highest end, the sensitive soul was considered to contain faculties of perception that not only include the five external senses through which objects are perceived, but crucially also, internal senses that enable humans to perceive in their imagination objects that are absent. It is these latter higher ‘imaginative capacities of the sensitive soul’ that the Christian Platonists of the Renaissance referred to as ‘spirit’ (Chidester 2000a:303). By the end of the 15th century, the monk, Savonarola, invited to Florence by Lorenzo de Medici, based his apocalyptic sermons on his own visions of divine anger and divine mercy. On the one hand, God was ready to destroy the world with his anger centered on Rome, but his sword also raised over Florence. The need to repent and reform Florence was urgent. On the other hand, Savonarola also saw a radiant, golden cross centered on Jerusalem, which symbolized God’s mercy for the world. If the first vision announced purifying punishment, the second promised subsequent peace – a pattern that was clearly derived from the book of Revelation. However, when the king of France entered Florence in 1494 and got rid of the Medicis, Savonarola established a theocratic government with Florence as chosen city and the French Charles VIII as divine king – a political program that Savonarola based on a new vision, according to which he ascended to paradise, where he met several women and was led to the throne of the Virgin Mary, who intervened with the Trinity on behalf of Savonarola and Florence. It is thus clear that Savonarola not only developed ‘basic Christian millennial themes’, but also showed himself to be ‘adept in the rhetorical use of powerful visual imagery. His preaching was based on mobilizing imagery’ (Chidester 2000a:309). Although he agreed with Christian Platonists in Florence on the importance of visual imagery, he differed from them by insisting that artists should only depict Christian images, and organized the burning of books and paintings of nude men and women that he considered obscene. When political conditions again changed in Florence, with French support failing to arrive, Savonarola was left vulnerable. He was excommunicated by the pope and burned on May 23, 1498 in the same public square where he had earlier burned those books and paintings. In the case of Savonarola, the political function of visions, conceived of as a form of internal sight, is clear.

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With the advent of the new medium of print, apocalyptic visions could be distributed more widely. When, in 1522, ‘a deformed fetus was found in the uterus of a cow in the German region of Saxony’, the news was widely publicized in Italy, where a journalist of Modena interpreted it as ‘a sign of the disturbances, evil, and heresy that could be expected at the end of the world’, specifically as a representation of ‘a friar…Martin Utero, who…preached heresy in Germany’, referring of course to ‘the reformer Martin Luther, who…was actively mobilizing a religious revolution in Germany’ (Chidester 2000a:311).

Second case study: The ‘senses’ in South African indigenous traditions In the concluding chapter of Word and light, Chidester (1992:131-134) notes Foucault’s thesis in The order of things, that the modern era radically broke with the Middle Ages by separating the synesthetic unity of the senses of sight and hearing. According to Foucault, two modern epistemologies can be distinguished on the basis of different perceptual orientations: In the 17th and 18th centuries, the emphasis was on knowledge obtained from seeing, institutionalized in the modern prison, clinic, and asylum that subjected human bodies to visual observation (‘the tyranny of the eye’); in the 19th century, the focus shifted to knowledge acquired through hearing, which characterized emerging 19th-century disciplines with their focus on the study of historical change and theories of evolutionary progress. Even if one has reservations about the validity of generalizations such as these, Chidester holds, they prompt us to focus on the role of the senses in our study of religious traditions within specific historical and geographical contexts. This attention to the senses should include not only an analysis of their metaphorical uses in religious discourses, but also of their mediating role in the performance of ritual practices to unify a group and of the negotiation of their ownership in power struggles among contending groups and their legitimization by dominant institutions (Chidester 1992:142-144). As we turn to Chidester’s analysis of indigenous religions in South Africa and their interpretation by imperial theorists, in which ways does his concern with ‘the senses’ as key term throw new light in this case?

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In Empire of religion (Chidester 2014), he argues that the 19th-century anthropologist, E.B. Tylor’s evolutionary theory of the origin of religion was based on a decontextualized and distorted reading of the data. According to Tylor, religious belief emerged in the mind of primitive human beings who were unable to distinguish between dreams and reality (‘waking consciousness’). When they saw dead relatives in their dreams, they simply assumed that they were still alive as spirits. As evidence of the survival of this primitive mentality of animism, Tylor used reports on Zulu dreaming in Henry Callaway’s Religious system of the Amazulu (1868-1870), highlighting specifically the instance of a Zulu diviner who described himself as having been overwhelmed by visions of ancestral spirits to such an extent that his body had become a ‘house of dreams’ (Chidester 2005:112). In 1871, Callaway himself, the colonial missionary among the Zulu, read a paper in London, in which he explained and illustrated dreams and visions with reference to the Zulu, as a subjective ‘brain sensation’ in which the brain, ‘without external causes in operation, is attended by feeling, hearing and sight, just as it would if there were external causes in operation, capable of producing such sensations’ (Callaway, quoted in Chidester 2014:119). In dreams and visions the brain thus has sensations of sight and hearing, as if they really enter through the eye and ear – a condition of the brain that Zulu diviners were, according to Callaway, quite apt at cultivating by ‘self-mesmerism’. Callaway’s analysis too, Chidester (2014:120) holds, ‘did not do justice to his data’. To do justice to the data, Chidester insists, one must interpret the report on Zulu dreaming in Callaway’s Religious system within its colonial context. The report on the Zulu diviner in Callaway is actually given by his Zulu convert and assistant Mpengula Mbande, who was himself struggling with his ambiguous position as Christian. Most importantly, the Zulu diviner stated that in becoming a ‘house of dreams’ the ancestral spirits came to kill him. Under colonial conditions, due to dispossession of cattle and dislocation from ancestral land, it became increasingly difficult for descendants to heed the demands of ancestors in dreams for sacrifice and to perform rituals in which the spirits of deceased ancestors were to be brought home. Special rituals were therefore developed in an attempt to prevent demanding and threatening ancestral spirits from appearing to descendants in dreams. Under contemporary global conditions, Chidester (2012:112-131) proposes in Wild religion, on the basis of an analysis of several Zulu

174 ‘Senses’: Assessing a Key Term in David Chidester’s Analysis of Religion neoshamans (including Credo Mutwa and so-called white sangomas), that these traditional elements of sacrificial exchange and territorial orientation are echoed, but they have changed in crucial ways. By examining the role of the human senses and electronic media as extended senses in a ‘new Zulu dreamscape’, Chidester (2012:114-115, 131) argues that although Zulu neoshamans occasionally see the five senses and new media as limiting the potential to dream and have visions of the ancestors, they have come to optimally exploit their potential for intense sensory experiences and authentication of their practices. Importantly, contrary to 19th-century attempts by Zulu speakers to turn off or block ancestral dreams as a ‘sensory medium’, contemporary Zulu neoshamans cultivate ‘a sensory extravagance, an overabundance of sensory engagements with things that are not there’, but that they regard as real and engage accordingly (Chidester 2012:130-131). Sacrificial exchange is now located ‘in the dilemmas posed by the global economy’, which is ‘not only defined by the increased pace and scope of the flows of money, technology, and people’, but also by ‘new mediated images and ideals of human possibility, including the possibility that occult forces are both shadow and substance of global economic exchange’ (Chidester 2012:114). Credo Mutwa, for example, came to ‘deal with these dilemmas of the global economy by identifying aliens from outer space as the nexus of a sacrificial exchange into which he has entered by eating extraterrestrial beings in a sacramental meal and by being their sacrificial victim’ (Chidester 2012:114). The traditional spatial orientation of bringing ancestors home has, however, developed differently for Mutwa on the one hand and white South African sangomas living in North America on the other hand. Although Mutwa tried to relocate his ancestral home to several places in South Africa, he eventually found a home on the internet that has given him access to a global network of neoshamanic and New Age enthusiasts (notably David Icke who found in Mutwa confirmation of his conspiracy theory of the Illuminati). The white Zulu neoshamans in North America, however, found in the internet a new global medium to come home to Africa by conceiving of their dreams as calls by African ancestors helping them to overcome their previous alienation from Africa due to the apartheid system.

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Conclusion What have we, in terms of the framework of Meyer and Verrips14, learned from Chidester’s analysis of religion, that is new? And how can we take Chidester’s analysis further? • Sensorial metaphors: Like Meyer and Verrips, Chidester insists that the experience of the sacred is mediated through the bodily senses. However, on the basis of his case studies from the Christian tradition, his argument extends theirs not only by positing that sensorial mediations structure our orientation to the world differently, depending on whether the sense of sight or hearing is prioritized, but also by demonstrating how the meanings/connotations/associations that cultures attribute to and construct around these physical senses, constitute the basis of their use as perceptual metaphors. • Inner senses of mystics and shamans: Like Meyer and Verrips, Chidester insists on the importance of examining not only elitist and dominant, but also popular and marginal forms of religion – illustrated notably by his focus on the role of dreaming and electronic media in Zulu neoshamanism. By considering the visions and dreams of mystics and shamans as interior senses that should be considered part of the bodily mediation of religion, though, Chidester foregrounds a point that is mentioned only in passing by Meyer and Verrips. • Historical contexts and the possibility of critique: Chidester would agree with Meyer and Verrips that the individual self is formed through habitual uses of the senses, and that legitimate ways in which the senses may mediate an encounter with the sacred are determined by religious authorities. However, his analysis of historical and contemporary examples focuses on changing roles of the senses in religion within changing historical contexts in a way that a synchronic analysis does not offer.

14 I emphasize again that, in this essay, I have only used this article by Meyer and Verrips without engaging with their development of the themes elsewhere in their work. The purpose is to use their article as a frame of reference to highlight issues that Chidester has elaborated on in his work, without denying that Meyer and Verrips might have done so in their own ways elsewhere in their oeuvre.

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At this point I would like to raise two considerations regarding power relations in the use of the senses in religion for further attention. Meyer and Verrips note that collective identities are formed by the shared uses of the senses, but that this aspect needs further investigation. In Authentic fakes, published in 2005, Chidester indeed employs the term ‘sociality’ to forms of popular culture that function like religions, and considers critiques of the drawing of exclusionary and inclusive collective boundaries. In previous publications I have argued that his argument in these cases has not been consistent and calls for making explicit the normative framework from which one judges boundary formations by groups (cf. Strijdom 2012). In the same book, Chidester applies the term ‘exchange’ to a selection of forms of popular cultures, but here too his critical engagement with economic systems is not consistent. On the one hand he seems to be quite sympathetic with the Rock ‘n’ Roll ideology of sharing resources, but on the other hand, in his analysis of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa as functioning like a religion, he seems to consider Bataille’s view of the sacred as the excessive waste of resources as necessary for a culture to be creative and thrive. Again, an explication of a normative framework and its consistent application in developing a critique would be necessary (cf. Strijdom 2014b). In the Preface to Word and light, Chidester (1992:xiii-xiv) notes that he started his exploration of the senses and perceptual metaphors ‘in a more innocent time’, in which he focused on metaphors of seeing and hearing as the most important perceptual metaphors in religious discourse. His move from the USA to the harsh realities of a violent South Africa, however, has forced him to redirect his research from the meaning of symbols to their power, in which attention to tactile metaphors of ‘opposition and resistance’ became more pressing. In his subsequent work, Chidester indeed does not hesitate to critique the systemic injustice of apartheid and colonialism, as well as the complicity of religious studies in these projects. In this article, I have not only shown ways in which Chidester has continued to explore the senses in religion, but also hinted at ways in which his analysis has not been consistent and calls for further thinking.

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References Chidester, D. 1992. Word and light: Seeing, hearing, and religious discourse. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Chidester, D. 1996. Savage systems: Colonialism and comparative religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Chidester, D. 2000a. Christianity: A global history. London, San Francisco: Penguin & HarperCollins. Chidester, D. 2000b. Material terms for the study of religion. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68, 2: 367-379. Chidester, D. 2005. Authentic fakes: Religion and American popular culture. University of California Press: Berkeley. Chidester, D. 2012. Wild religion: Tracking the sacred in South Africa. Oakland: University of California Press. Chidester, D. 2013. Postgraduates producing knowledge. Journal for the Study of Religion 26, 1: 5-7. Chidester, D. 2014. Empire of religion: Imperialism and comparative religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chidester, D. 2015. Material culture. In Segal, R. & K. von Stuckrad (eds.): Vocabulary for the study of religion. Vol 2. Leiden: Brill. Chidester, D. 2018. Religion: Material dynamics. Oakland: University of California Press. Hirschkind, C. 2006. The ethical soundscape: Cassette sermons and Islamic counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Houtman, D. & B. Meyer (eds.) 2012. Things: Religion and the question of materiality. New York: Fordham University Press. McLuhan, M. 1964. Understanding media: The extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT Press. Meyer, B. & J. Verrips 2008. Aesthetics. In Morgan, D. (ed.): Key words in religion, media and culture. New York: Routledge. Morgan, D. 1998. Visual piety: A history and theory of popular religious images. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pinney, C. 2004. ‘Photos of the gods’: The printed image and political struggle in India. London: Reaktion. Strijdom, J.M. 2012. Problems with indigeneity: Fragmentation, discrimination and exclusion in post-colonial African states. Image & Text 19: 24-32.

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Strijdom, J.M. 2014a. The material turn in religious studies and the possibility of critique: Assessing Chidester’s analysis of ‘the fetish’. HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 70, 1: 7 pages. Art. #2116. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/hts.v70i1.2116 Strijdom, J.M. 2014b. Uses of social theory in comparative religious studies: Assessing Chidester’s sociological analysis of ‘Wild religion’ in post- apartheid South Africa. Journal for the Study of Religion 27, 2: 10-24.

Johan M. Strijdom Religious Studies University of South Africa [email protected]; [email protected]

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TV is the Devil, the Devil is on TV: Wild Religion and Wild Media in South Africa

Lee-Shae S. Scharnick-Udemans [email protected]

Abstract In keeping with trends in the academy and the rapidly increasing presence, power, and persuasion of digital and electronic media on the African continent and in the global economy, the study of religion and the media in South Africa has become a flourishing field of intellectual inquiry. The expanse of the field in terms of approaches, both methodological and theoretical, demonstrates the multiple and complex interactions between religion and the media in a diverse range of societies and settings. In light of its recent history of apartheid and transition into democracy in the middle 1990s, when paradigmatic constitutional and political changes took place in which the relationship between religion and the media was reconstituted, the South African context, in particular, is ripe for exploring media technology and practices in relation to the political economy of the sacred. This essay pays tribute to David Chidester by testing the possibilities of his theory of ‘wild religion’ against two vignettes of wild media in South Africa. The first, characterized as TV is the devil explores the apartheid government’s pre-emptive religiously saturated ban on television. The second example, described as the devil is on TV assesses viewers’ responses to the television program, Lucifer. I argue that when read with Chidester’s theorization of the ‘wild ambivalence of the sacred’, these examples evoke the hitherto under-explored wild character of both religion and the media.

Keywords: wild media, political economy of the sacred, religious diversity, media politics

Journal for the Study of Religion 31, 2 (2018) 180-197 180 Online ISSN 2413-3027; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a8 TV is the Devil, the Devil is on TV

Introduction In 2008 I had just graduated with an undergraduate degree majoring in Religious Studies and Media from the University of Cape Town. With very little experience but riding the coat tails of the ivy league(ish) credentials that an education from the University of Cape Town provides, I was employed as a research coordinator by a television production company. My job was to provide research support for a children’s television program about religion in South Africa. The material I gathered would be used by scriptwriters to create dialogue for the program’s main characters. The stars of the show were two puppets, shocking pink Dudu and florescent green Musa. Every Saturday morning, they fulfilled the national broadcaster’s mandate to provide non- confessional educational religious programming to South African audiences. Astonished at my newly minted status as a gainfully employed religious studies graduate, I immediately informed David Chidester, the professor I most wanted to impress. After listening to me relay the absurdities of television production, he referred to the puppets as scholars of religion, and the whole enterprise of public broadcasting and religion as a project of the political economy of the sacred. Thoroughly disturbed and intrigued by Chidester’s incisive reading of the new context within which I found myself, I quit my job less than a year later, registered for postgraduate studies, and the rest, as they say, is history. Chidester has designated a theory of ‘wild religion’ that has emancipated religion from conventional definitions that are primarily determined by its proximity to ‘specialised institutions dealing in transcendence’ to a more nuanced understanding of ‘religion as an open set of resources and strategies for negotiating a human identity’ (Chidester 2012:8- 9). In his estimation, the sacred is produced, not only in opposition to but also in relation to the wild. Both the wild and the sacred remain unstable categories that are defined and redefined in response to the dynamisms of human societies. In his book, written in 2012, he revisits and highlights an enduring question present throughout his work: Who owns the sacred? This question can be further unraveled by asking who holds the authority to determine what is sacred and what is not, under what conditions this authority is dispensed, and what this all could mean for the ways in which religion is defined and for the ways in which the presence of religion is negotiated in religiously diverse societies.

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An exceptionally large and varied corpus of work on the topic of religion and the media has emerged from scholars working within often complementary and sometimes competing disciplines, including media studies, religious studies, cultural anthropology, psychology, political studies, and sociology. The depth and breadth of the literature and research undertaken in relation to religion and the media as an area of sustained scholarly concern and attention, are evidence to the prevalence of these concepts and their complex relationships to each other and to other crucial aspects of human experience. Hackett proposes that adopting the media as a central category of analysis in studies of religion can provide fresh perspectives on many of the core concepts in the social sciences (viz. power, agency, practice, representation, embodiment, identity, citizenship, authority, community, diaspora, transformation, and the making of [religious] subjects/publics/ counter-publics) (Hackett 2014:67). The adoption of the media as a category of analysis, particularly in a study of religion within the context of a new and emerging nation, provides one with the opportunity to evaluate the history of religion in South Africa through exploring the ways in which religion and the media as categories have been configured within changing socio-political contexts. Chidester’s penchant for the popular is a hallmark of his scholarship. In his 1996 essay, The church of baseball, the fetish of Coca-Cola, and the potlatch of Rock ‘n’ Roll’, Chidester borrows from a baseball player, an eclectic author who has written books on Coca-Cola and coffee, and a rock critic’s interpretation of the 1963 song Louie, Louie, to establish the concepts ‘church’, ‘fetish’, and ‘potlatch’ as theoretical models for the study of religion in American popular culture. While wielding the authority of the popular in an extended exploration of baseball, Coca-Cola, and Rock ‘n’ Roll, Chidester submits these concepts to theoretically rigorous critique. He does this in order to show their potential and utility for ‘our understanding of the character of religion, and the ways in which the very term “religion”, including its definition, application, and extension, does not in fact belong solely to the academy but is constantly at stake in the exchanges of cultural discourses and practices’ (Chidester 1996:745). Furthermore, the article, later expanded in the book, Authentic fakes (Chidester 2005), suggests that popular culture is a valid epistemological site for observing and engaging the ongoing issue of defining religion and its complexity in an increasingly mediatized world. Chidester’s

182 TV is the Devil, the Devil is on TV penchant for the popular, albeit entertaining and memorable, is neither arbitrary nor vacuous. In acknowledgement of Chidester’s invitation to track the sacred through unconventional strategies and resources, following this broad and productive approach to both, the definition of religion, and the location of knowledge about religion, this essay attempts to do three things: It explores ‘the wild ambivalence of the sacred’, the appearance of the sacred as ‘fundamentalisms’, as well as its dual dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, and ‘exorcism and domestication’, especially as it relates to the relationship between religion and television during apartheid and democracy (Chidester 2012:8-9). In light of Chidester’s question and provocation, ‘Who owns the sacred?’, this essay is particularly interested in reflecting on some of the consequences of the media’s stake in the ownership of the sacred. In order to pursue this line of analysis, this essay conceptualizes the media’s participation in the political economy of the sacred in two ways.

The media and the political economy of the sacred The media can be understood to be in conceptual and material opposition to religion. However, the antagonism that this formulation of religion and the media is predicated upon, is not considered static. It is subject to technological, substantive, and contextual shifts that may work to reinforce or contest this arrangement. Furthermore, foregrounding the conflict that plays a role in defining the relationships between religion and the media does not dismiss the position that religion and the media do not necessarily occupy separate theoretical and operational domains, but that they can be viewed as conceptually and organizationally similar and mutually constitutive (Morgan 2011; Stolow 2013). A scholar on religion, media, and technology, Jeremy Stolow, has thoroughly scrutinized the relationship between religion and technology by revising ‘the very supposition that religion and technology exist as two ontologically distinct arenas of experience, knowledge, and action’ (Stolow 2013:2). As with wild religion, the dialectical dualism that emerges when considering the historical and operational tension between religion and the media is not in need of resolution. Instead, it may be viewed as a productive point of departure for considering the multiple ways in which the political economy of the sacred has been implicated in the political economy of the media.

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Second, the media acts as sites for the production and circulation of images and discourses that contain representations of religious traditions and religious diversity. This conception of the media is supported by a body of scholarship on ‘the media politics of religious diversity’ (Eisenlohr 2012:37) and encompasses issues related to the representation of images and discourses of religious tradition and religious diversity. However, it also speaks to the ways in which the ‘media and media practices are a generative force in producing diversity and its particular shapes’ (Eisenlohr 2012:37). Mirroring ‘wild religion’, wild media operates outside of the control of traditional religious settings and outside of the auspices of traditional figures of authority. Wild religion in its interaction with wild media is subject to processes of mediatization that are crucial to the operational and ideological character of media technology (Hjarvard 2016). In terms of form and content, religion in the media is constantly defined and redefined by media-makers, users, audiences, and critics. In this way the media, as conduit of information about religion, and in compliance to its institutional norms through the particularity of its modalities of production and circulation, also constitutes a threat to those who consider its generative and interpretative functions in relation to religion as inappropriate (Hjarvard 2016; Meyrowitz 1993). Non-religious media sources and sites are able to portray religion in ways that might challenge traditional or acceptable religious and theological sensibilities in ways that are not necessarily approved of by religious authorities and constituencies. Since the political economy of the media necessarily works to mold religion to meet its institutional modus operandi, wild media presents interpretations of religion that are unpredictable and unauthorized.

Television as the devil The National Party government considered television a credible threat to the social order of apartheid. The government’s position was underwritten by wild religiopolitical moral discourses and sentiments. Before its introduction, the National Party worked hard to justify the absence of television. The government pleaded poverty – that the state could simply not afford the fiscal strain on the state coffers that would be incurred by introducing a television service. They argued that the country had more pressing matters needing attention and that it would take a lot of work to materially implement separate development for a technology they considered frivolous at the time. However,

184 TV is the Devil, the Devil is on TV religion, particularly Christianity as interpreted through the lens of Afrikaner nationalism and the Dutch Reformed Church, played a prominent role in bolstering the National Party’s anti-television stance to both the members of parliament and the public. The deeply religious, Christian nationalist approach that the National Party government sought to permeate every facet of life, was crucial to the banning and unbanning of television. Bernard Cros (1996) observes, from the House of Assembly debates from the 1950s to the late 1960s, that television was considered an idol – a god located within the household, with the ability to hypnotize the viewer – thus transgressing the first of the Ten Commandants. Alluding to both the financial and apparently moral cost of a television, a member of the National Party declared in parliament: ‘We dare not sell our national soul and that at the high cost of introduction and maintenance of television’ (Hansaard 1963:6517). At a time when television was a commonplace commodity in most parts of the world, South African politicians were in the throes of debating whether, in addition to radio, television was in fact necessary (Nixon 1994; Bevan 2008; Krabill 2010). Television was perilous to the National Party’s vision of Afrikaner hegemony. Unlike English programming, which was readily available for purchase, screening, and viewing, programming in Afrikaans was non-existent and would need to be developed from scratch. Its introduction threatened to undermine the hard-won gains made to elevate the status of the Afrikaner language and culture. Television threatened the very basis of the apartheid ideology and policy, and divinely inspired separate development. The government blamed racial mixing in other contexts on the availability of television and sought to protect South Africa from a similar fate. According to Orlick (1970:2),

[a]n official of the Broederbond (a supra-political secret society devoted to the promotion of Afrikaner values) pointed out that although the struggle against Anglicisation from without had been won, the struggle against the enemy from within had just started and must succeed in stopping non-Afrikaner influences based on English and American ways of life which were infiltrating the Union through the radio, cinema, and popular press.

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Therefore, it was prudent for the National Party government to temporarily dismiss the propaganda potential of television and delay the establishment of a television service during the early years of its power. As a result, South Africa would become one of the last countries in the world to introduce a television service. The moon landing of 1969 represented the proverbial last straw for many white South Africans, with one journalist, echoing the public sentiment, observing that ‘the situation is becoming a source of embarrassment for the country’ (Cape Times 1969). The National Party, however, remained steadfast in its anti-television position. Although, as popular demand for television increased by the 1960s, in the face of a mounting political opposition and the threat of new technology such as satellites, television’s introduction became inevitable. The parliamentary opposition to the National Party, the United Party (UP), determined that its constituency’s desire to be associated with this modern technology was so strong that, as a part of its election campaigns, the UP promised the introduction of a television service. In response, the National Party fortified its opposition, stating that ‘inside the pill (of television) there is the bitter poison which will ultimately mean the downfall of civilizations’ (Hansaard 1966:5287). The Minister of Post and Telegraphs, Albert Herzog, had declared television, the ‘devil’s own box for disseminating communism and immorality’ (Hansaard 1959:5020). In 1960, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, in his inaugural address, declared television a ‘spiritual danger’ and compared it to the physical threat of an atom bomb (Hansaard 1960:3002). The head of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), Piet Meyer, in contradistinction to television, spoke of radio with the highest esteem, claiming that ‘radio distinguishes itself [from television] by the fact that it does not enslave and does not want to enslave the human spirit’ (SABC Annual Report 1968:7). Together, Albert Herzog, Hendrik Verwoerd, and Piet Meyer were the anti-television triumvirate (Nixon 1994). Although perceived as a spiritual danger that sought to undermine the Christian national character of the nation that the apartheid state had labored to construct and maintain, television sets themselves were not banned. According to Herzog, ‘There is nothing to prohibit the television as long as the set is not used’ (Hansaard 1963:2312). The National Party government was not opposed to the little black box as a material object but worried about what the activation of this device through a television service would mean for the culture

186 TV is the Devil, the Devil is on TV of apartheid. However, when the development of satellite technology meant that the potential for the transmission and reception of unauthorized viewing was becoming a real threat, the apartheid government coordinated television’s transformation from sinful to righteous. With the advent of satellite technology, for those who could not wait on the state to make a decision one way or the other, an aluminum kitchen mixing bowl served as a makeshift satellite dish which could, if weather conditions were favorable, intercept international programs, bringing snowy images and crackling sounds into the home. Television’s transformation from foe to friend was swift. Within two years of the moon landing, the Commission of Inquiry into Matters relating to Television would propose the introduction of a television service. Headed by Piet Meyer, the Commission was widely considered the government’s mouthpiece. After the Commission presented its findings, the apartheid government declared that a television service that gave ‘direct and unequivocal expression to the established Christian, Western set of norms and values that are valid for South African society in all spheres of life’ – which would also ‘strengthen and enrich [the] religious and spiritual life’ of the nation – would be introduced (Meyer 1971:16). After decades of being at the center of controversy, television was redeemed of its subversive intentions and absolved of its treasonous potential. The SABC was earmarked as a crucial means for solidifying apartheid and churning out propaganda that would ensure that all South Africans, regardless of race, class, or gender would be subjected to broadcast material that was authorized by the National Party. With the rise of the National Party, the SABC became a government institution, managed by Afrikaner nationalists who interpreted broadcasting policy and instituted broadcasting practice through the lens of apartheid (Meyer 1971). However, the SABC was still bound, at least in principle, to public broadcasting ideals, inspired by John Reith, Director-General of the British Broadcasting Corporation, which dictated that the principles of objectivity and impartiality could only be suspended during times of crisis or war. In 1961, after the Sharpeville Massacre, the head of the SABC shifted the meaning of the term ‘crisis’ in the broadcasting code to mean hostility toward the republic, essentially providing the SABC with the right to only broadcast material which positively represented the National Party (Hayman & Tomaselli 1989). The SABC annual report of 1961 justifies this practice:

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Political reports are regarded as contentious and are only broadcast when they are of a factual and/or authoritative nature, or if they consist of a positive policy or statement by a political party represented in Parliament and do not contain comparisons with, or comments on, the declared policy or conduct of other South African political parties (SABC Annual Report 1961:8).

Television broadcasting would be subjected to the same censorship measures as radio. The result was that the ‘SABC became the ideological repository of and chief apologist for Apartheid, offering a broadcasting policy characterized by an unabashedly pro-government stance and programming for the white majority’ (Mzamane 2006:2). In analyzing the apartheid government’s pre-emptive ban on television, Nixon proposes that censorship and nationalism overlapped in a range of ways that shed light on the various manifestations of political projects and state authority. Following what can be considered a theory of social- identity formation, Nixon argues that nationalism constructed and articulated group identity primarily around criteria of exclusion. The nexus of nationalism was based on sameness and difference. By the same token, according to Nixon (1994:61), censorship set the specific conditions, under which the permissible was separated from that which was deemed impermissible. In South Africa, Afrikaner nationalism as a political ideology had a complicated liaison with a particular Christian national ethic that was informed and legitimized by the Dutch Reformed Church. The National Party government’s suspicion of the new mass medium of television was defined by a basic binary separation of the sacred from the profane, assuming that religion and media technology operated in conflicting domains and were subsequently incompatible. The religiopolitical character of the National Party located the sacred and perceived threats to it in multiple places. The lines between the state and church were blurred and interchangeable. While it is not within the scope of this paper to explicate the deeply rooted theological underpinnings of apartheid in general, it is evident that religion was used by the National Party to make sense of the absence and subsequent introduction of television to South Africa. In relation to the television question, the wild ambivalence of the sacred can be identified in the wilderness of apartheid religion which saw itself as the bastion of both social order and social ordering through the separate development of races.

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The early history of television in South Africa illustrates how the National Party’s attitude towards television was characterized by a suspicion of the technology as cosmologically incompatible with the religiously legitimated political and social order of apartheid. For the apartheid government, the relationship between religion and technology was determined by the view ‘that religion and technology can be parcelled out as two discrete dimensions of the cosmos’ (Stolow 2012:4). In the case of the apartheid government’s pre-emptive ban on television, technology was regarded as more than just technical devices that made communication possible. The essential nature of television technology was considered harmful to the existing social order. The wildness of the media is patent in this example. Between the sacred national values of racial separatism and the profane possibilities of Anglicization and miscegenation that television brought, it was media’s potentially destructive attitude towards established values and norms that was emphasized (Orlick 1970). Television was the symbol of the kind of integration that would usurp the Afrikaner as well as their language, religion, and culture of its normative omnipotence in South Africa.

The devil on television In January 2016, M-Net, South Africa’s subscription-funded television channel, screened the Fox-produced American fantasy police procedural drama, Lucifer. Set in contemporary Los Angeles, Lucifer tells the story of satan on an extended sabbatical from his regular duties as lord of the underworld, experiencing life away from hell. Lucifer is cast as a generically attractive, fashionable, wealthy, thirty-something white male with a British accent, that is apparently an aphrodisiac for every mortal woman he encounters, save for a beautiful but tough and jaded police officer and divorced single mother, Chloe Decker. To give the show a predictably ‘unpredictable’ twist, Lucifer, in response to the murder of a lover, inserts himself as an unwelcome but useful consultant to the Los Angeles Police Department. In the United States, reviews for the show were mixed. According to one reviewer, ‘[t]he devil is hot…[but] his cases not so hot’ (Slezak 2016). Another reviewer commented: ‘Lucifer starts hot, cools quickly’ (Slezak 2016; Bianco 2016). One critic summed up what appears to be the overall consensus: ‘Lucifer is as fun and flashy as its promotions have promised. Just don’t go into this one expecting anything more extraordinary’ (Rawden 2016). Lucifer

189 Lee-Shae S. Scharnick-Udemans is cast as a typically defiant anti-hero following in the footsteps of the many others in Batman, Daredevil, and Deadpool. Reviewer Chris Cabin (2016) of Slant Magazine made the following scathing comment on the character:

He never does anything that truly suggests a moral complexity beyond an interest in threesomes, jazz piano, and good scotch. The character isn’t so much evil, or even a particularly bad person, as he’s a showy, attention-hungry douche, the sort of guy who thinks every woman alone at the bar is secretly waiting for him to talk to her.

Reviews aside, the American Family Association in the United States so thoroughly disapproved of the show that it managed to secure a petition of over 140,000 signatories demanding that Lucifer be cancelled, threatening its corporate sponsors with boycotts. In South Africa, Lucifer was warmly received, but not in a hospitable way. After the screening of the first episode, the dominant headline on news and review sites described the reaction of Christian viewers to the show: ‘Lucifer gets viewers fired up’ (Ferreira 2016a). An Afrikaans newspaper reported, ‘Hel los ná “Lucifer” se eerste episode’ (Hell breaks loose after Lucifer’s first episode) (Pekeur 2016). Errol Naidoo, a popular evangelical minister and self-proclaimed leader of the ‘Christian voice in government and the media’, issued an urgent call to subscribers of the Christian lifestyle magazine, Joy. In this call to action, Naidoo implored Christians to stand up for righteousness and to take action against the show by complaining to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa (BCCSA) and the Chief Executive Officer of the broadcasting network. Naidoo declared, ‘The program is obviously targeted at youth – hence the early broadcast schedule. When the personification of all that is evil is given a positive spin by Hollywood – then you and I must not only pray – but act decisively!’ (Naidoo 2016). Whether of their own accord or incited by Naidoo, Christian viewers asserted their right to freedom of religion and to the pursuit of administrative justice by lodging almost one hundred separate complaints – the most ever received by the BCCSA for any broadcast. Below is a selection of the complaints:

It is completely unacceptable to me that an offensive series like Lucifer be televised…I would suggest that DStv contribute to the cultivation of this country and community and not break it down and let it fall into

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sin – from pornography to Satan worship. It is unacceptable to say the least. We find the new series Lucifer distasteful. It’s being aired in a prime slot in the evening and we feel it promotes Satan as something intriguing which we find offensive. If it must be aired then it should be aired in a late off-peak slot or on the DStv Explora. DStv is broadcasting this series on Wednesday evening, that actively portrays Satan/Lucifer as a hero to innocent people who might not know better. Has he succeeded in deceiving DStv and South African Christians, to believe that this is an innocent fable as well? In the meantime I cannot support DStv while they are actively spreading Satan’s word. I find it most disturbing that this kind of series is aired during family time (19:00). It goes against any grain of Christianity to project Satan as a caring and helpful ‘person’. Children especially will be giving contradicting messages when allowed to watch this. I know one can block it or remove the channel but that is not the point, what has become of morality and values? (Ferreira 2016a).

The registrar of the BCCSA declared the series a bona fide drama and did not prescribe any sanctions for the broadcaster. One BCCSA official reported receiving hate mail after the decision was made public (Abraham 2016). Although the program was not revoked by the broadcasting authority, a barrage of complaints from Christian viewers who threatened to cancel their subscriptions to the channel ensued shortly after the first episode. A new headline emerged: ‘M-Net shifts satan to TV hell after Lucifer complaints’ (Ferreira 2016b). Within a matter of days, Lucifer was moved from a primetime 19:00 time slot with an age restriction of 13 years, to 23:00 on the least watched day and time slot with an age restriction of 18, accompanied by no less than three pre-broadcasting warnings. Despite this action on the part of the broadcasters, some Christian viewers were still unsatisfied. A collective of evangelical Christian leaders thanked the broadcaster for the time slot change and the age restriction intervention but felt that this action was not enough to mitigate the potential harm that the program could cause the impressionable youth. This is an extract of their arguments:

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The Lucifer series, whether intentional or not, portrays Satan – the personification of all that is evil – in a sympathetic manner. This is highly dangerous especially to impressionable youth in our nation…The program portrays Satan as a cool and misunderstood individual. Again, whether intentional or not, the impression one gets after viewing the program is that Satan, whom the Bible calls the ‘father of lies’ is not such a bad guy after all. Lucifer, then, is given a Hollywood makeover and becomes more appealing…We further believe the trendy portrayal of the devil in the ‘Lucifer’ series will mainstream evil behaviour. The popular media has historically been used to either humanise or dehumanise people to great effect. The ‘Lucifer’ series humanises the personification of evil to the extent that evil becomes trendy…Evil, or the personification thereof must be strongly condemned and discouraged not positively and sympathetically portrayed in the popular media. We trust that M-Net will put people before profit and will act swiftly to protect our youth from negative and damaging influences on national television in South Africa (Admin 2016).

A number of inferences about the history, politics, and regulation of religion on television in South Africa can be made in response to the complaints, reviews, and replies from the broadcaster regarding the fallout with Lucifer. First, considering the loss of revenue that would be experienced by moving the show to a less lucrative time slot, it could be argued that M-Net’s advertising revenue would have less of a fiscal impact than the potential loss of revenue from the cancelled subscriptions of upset Christian viewers. This would not be the first time that a South African corporation has capitulated to the demands of Christian consumers. In 2010, under pressure from Christian groups, retailer Woolworths reversed a decision to remove Christian magazines from the shelf in a matter of days. Commercial power, therefore, is an important factor in religion and public broadcasting. Second, as evidenced in the complaints, are insights into how South Africans consider the role of television at a national level, as a place for the dissemination of values and morals, and not merely entertainment, echoing a demand for Reithian (cf. John Reith above) ideals, even on subscription television. The opinions of viewers draw attention to the perceived influence of television in South Africa, as the complaints indicate – not only outrage that

192 TV is the Devil, the Devil is on TV the religiously offensive material was broadcast, but also concern about the perceived purpose and the potential outcomes that screening Lucifer could have on the youth of the country. The complaints underscore the willingness on the part of concerned Christians to engage the media institutions in order to have their religious sensibilities protected and their religious interests advanced. While this example shows that religion is clearly entangled in its authority to regulate broadcasting, it also shows how the media programming has the ability to interpret familiar scripts according to different standards. In the case of Lucifer, religion is mediated through the entertainment agenda of the media. Given the current popular affection for the anti-hero through this interpretation, the ultimate ‘bad guy’ of evangelical Christianity is represented as not so bad.

Wild religion and wild media The reflection of Chidester (2012:88) on fundamentalism as the ‘wildest of wild religion’ is particularly helpful for making sense on the relationship between and attitudes towards religion and the media, as it has unfurled within the context of the television question in apartheid South Africa and more recently, in the post-apartheid era. The concept of ‘fundamentalisms’ as suggested by Chidester, is a ‘recurring but shifting sign of a crisis of religious authenticity’. He affirms that religiously inspired responses to perceived affronts about the established social order, although a constant feature of the historical landscape, are always ‘situational and relational’ (Chidester 2012:87-89). The enduring question of ‘who owns the sacred’ is once again posed, toyed with, and rigorously assessed. As both examples of wild media show, the political economy of the sacred in the media is not only determined by the dynamics of production and circulations which enable the dissemination of images, sounds, and discourses that represent interpretations of religious traditions, religious information, and religious diversity, it is also shaped by the ways that the processes and products produced by the media are engaged and negotiated by the multiple audiences and stakeholders. As Chidester warns, the situational and relational character of fundamentalism emphasizes the significance of perspective. The National Party government clearly did not consider or care about the effects of its exclusionary religiopolitical policies on all members of the population. Exclusion, through discourses, political policy, and practices, was a feature that

193 Lee-Shae S. Scharnick-Udemans was necessary to secure the sacred Afrikaner destiny. In general, the religiopolitical policies of apartheid were excellent for the beneficiaries of the system and incomprehensibly bad for those whom the system sought to conquer. For some, apartheid was a sacred social order which conquered the threat of Afrikaner subservience and racial equality, while for others it was a vast wilderness of suppression and oppression. The Christian controversy over Lucifer belies a disregard for freedom of expression as a necessary hallmark of democratic societies and implies a demand for the privileging of Christian sensibilities and sensitivities on the basis of numerical strength, moral superiority, and perhaps even economic power. Like the apartheid government did when they excluded and then strategically introduced television, the desire of these viewers turned critics to exorcise television, quite literally, of the devil, conveying an attempt to domesticate both wild religion and wild media.

Conclusion Finally, who owns the sacred? Between puppets, broadcasters, media-makers, policy-makers, politicians, viewers, critics, religious leaders, scholars of religion, scholars of the media, and everyone else, perhaps all of them do – and if they do, then things are bound to get messy. I would, however, venture to argue that, according to Chidester, this might be the point: Wild religion provides us with strategies and resources for understanding the generative chaos that this reality creates. The potential of ‘wild religion’ for thinking about the political economy of the sacred in the media and for theorizing and evaluating the fluctuations of wild media in contexts of religious diversity and socio-political dynamism lies in its characteristic ambivalence. The strength of Chidester’s framing of ‘wild’ goes beyond its inherent analytical value for considering the definition and position of religion in modern societies. It inspires us, as scholars of religion, to think more expansively and creatively about the field of research as well as the sites thereof. However, in this strength also lies its weakness. Chidester’s characteristic narrative style, on the one hand, leaves one intrigued, provoked, and theoretically challenged, yet on the other, leaves one wanting, at least in the methodological sense. How do we study wild religion? If we follow Chidester, we can observe the sacred across time and space through film, literature, political speeches, school curricula,

194 TV is the Devil, the Devil is on TV heritage sites, news reporting, ethnographic reports, and a host of other locations and sources. The possibilities appear endless. Again, that might be the point.

References Abraham, V. 2016. Devil TV series uproar continues with flood of hate mail. Available at: https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/the-citizen- kzn/20160213/281681138929257. (Accessed on 5 December 2018.) Admin. 2016. Church leaders urge M-Net to cancel Lucifer series. Available at: http://gatewaynews.co.za/church-leaders-urge-m-net-to-cancel- lucifer-series/. (Accessed on 5 December 2018.) Bevan, C. 2008. Putting up screens: A history of television in South Africa, 1929-1976. Master’s dissertation, University of Pretoria, Pretoria. Bianco, R. 2016. Review: Lucifer starts hot, quickly cools. Available at: http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/columnist/2016/01/24/review- lucifer-startshot-quickly-cools/79117832/. (Accessed on 22 June 2016.) Cabin, C. 2016. Lucifer: Season one. Available at: http://www.slantmagazine. com/tv/review/lucifer-season-one. (Accessed on 22 June 2016.) Cape Times. 1969. Television on the horizon? Cape Town: Argus Press. Chidester, D. 1996. The church of baseball, the fetish of Coca-Cola, and the potlatch of Rock ‘n’ Roll: Theoretical models for the study of religion in American popular culture. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, 4: 743-765. Chidester, D. 2005. Authentic fakes: Religion and American popular culture. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Chidester, D. 2012. Wild religion: Tracking the sacred in South Africa. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Cros, B. 1996. Why South Africa’s television is only twenty years old: Debating civilisation, 1958-1969. Trade Winds 12: 118-129. Eisenlohr, P. 2012. Media and religious diversity. Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 37-55. Ferreira, T. 2016a. Lucifer gets viewers fired up. Available at: https://www.channel24.co.za/TV/News/lucifer-gets-viewers-fired-up- 20160210. (Accessed on 22 June 2016.)

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Ferreira, T. 2016b. M-Net shifts satan to TV hell after Lucifer complaints. Available at: http://www.channel24.co.za/TV/News/m-net-shifts-satan- to-tv-hell-after-lucifercomplaints-20160202. (Accessed on 22 June 2016.) Hackett, R.I.J. 2014. Interview: Rosalind Hackett reflects on religious media in Africa. Social Compass 61, 10: 67-72. Hansaard. 1959. Hansaard 101: Union of South Africa, col 5020. Pretoria: Government Printers. Hansaard. 1960. Hansaard 104: Union of South Africa, cols 2983-3030. Pretoria: Government Printers. Hansaard. 1963. Hansaard 7: Republic of South Africa, cols 2312-2315. Pretoria: Government Printers. Hansaard. 1966. Hansaard 18: Republic of South Africa, cols 5287-5290. Pretoria: Government Printers. Hjarvard, S. 2016. Mediatization and the changing authority of religion. Media, Culture & Society 38, 1: 8-17. Hayman, G. & R. Tomaselli. 1989. Ideology and technology in the growth of South African broadcasting, 1924-1971. In Tomaselli, R., K. Tomaselli & J. Muller (eds.): Currents of power: State broadcasting in South Africa. Bellville: Anthropos. Krabill, R. 2010. Starring Mandela and Cosby: Media and the end(s) of apartheid. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Meyer, P. 1971. Report of the commission of inquiry into matters relating to television. Pretoria: Government Publications. Meyrowitz, J. 1993. Images of media: Hidden ferment – and harmony – in the field. Journal of Communication 43, 3: 55-66. Morgan, D. 2011. Mediation or mediatisation: The history of media in the study of religion. Culture and Religion 12, 2: 137-152. Mzamane, M. 2006. Celebrating thirty years of television in South Africa. Available at: http://www.tvsa.co.za/user/blogs/viewblogpost.aspx? blogpostid=10908. (Accessed on 27 July 2016.) Naidoo, E. 2016. Urgent!!! Raise up a standard of righteousness in South Africa. Available at: http://www.joydigitalmag.com/news/urgent-raise- up-a-standard-of-righteousness-in-sa/. (Accessed on 5 December 2018.) Nixon, R. 1994. Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood: South African culture and the world beyond. New York: Routledge.

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Orlick, P.B. 1970. South Africa: How long without TV? Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 14, 2: 245-258. Pekeur, S. 2016. Hel los ná ‘Lucifer’ se eerste episode. Son, 11 February 2016. Available at: https://www.son.co.za/Alles-wat-mal-is/Gossip/hel-los- na-lucifer-se-eerste-episode-20160210. (Accessed on 22 June 2016.) Rawden, J. 2016. Lucifer review: Fox new series is fun and flashy. Available at: http://www.cinemablend.com/television/Lucifer-Review-Fox- Series-Fun-Flashy112737.html. (Accessed on 22 June 2016.) SABC Annual Report. 1961. South African broadcasting corporation annual report 1961. Johannesburg: SABC. SABC Annual Report. 1968. South African broadcasting corporation annual report 1968. Johannesburg: SABC. Slezak, M. 2016. Lucifer review: The devil is hot – his cases, not so much. Available at: http://tvline.com/2016/01/25/lucifer-review-fox-drama- tom-ellis-devil/. (Accessed on 22 June 2016.) Stolow, J. (ed.) 2013. Deus in Machina: Religion technology and the things in between. New York: Fordham University Press.

Lee-Shae S. Scharnick-Udemans Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice University of the Western Cape [email protected]

197

Tracking the Indigenous Sacred, Chidester-style

Rosalind I.J. Hackett [email protected]

Abstract The article evaluates David Chidester’s Wild religion (2012) for what it teaches us about tracking and studying the ‘indigenous sacred’ in contemporary South Africa, and, by extension, in Africa more generally, and the diaspora. By adopting a more dynamic and open-ended approach to religion as a set of resources and strategies, Chidester provides critical insights on the production, appropriation, and interpretation of indigenous religious myths and rituals in the post-apartheid setting.

Keywords: indigeneity, traditional religion, South Africa, symbols, heritage, dreams, media, education, politics, methodology

Despite the richness and complexity of the David Chidester oeuvre, I had no hesitation in deciding on my focus for this special issue. I wanted to celebrate one of Chidester’s later works, Wild religion: Tracking the sacred in South Africa (Chidester 2012) that, in my estimation, deserves wider readership. Many colleagues of mine, whether Africanist or not, know Savage systems: Colonialism and comparative religion in Southern Africa (Chidester 1996) to be a landmark text, but not so many have tackled Wild religion. Perhaps they were turned off by the quirky title (as I was initially, but then remembered that adage about books and covers) or did not encounter the type of advocate that Charles Long was for Savage systems. So, my role here as ‘cheerleader’ is to assess the book for what it teaches us about tracking the ‘indigenous sacred’ in

Journal for the Study of Religion 31, 2 (2018) 198-208 198 Online ISSN 2413-3027; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a9 Tracking the Indigenous Sacred, Chidester-style contemporary South Africa, and, by extension, in Africa and the diaspora. My primary reason for choosing this adventurous work is linked to the fact that I find myself in a phase of scholarly re-engagement with indigenous and traditional forms of religious belief and practice, thanks to being a core member of the Indigenous Religion(s): Local Grounds, Global Networks (INREL) project at the University of Tromso/The Arctic University of Norway (UiT n.d.). Additionally, because of my longstanding interest in the regulation of minority religious groups in the African context, the recognition, or lack thereof, of African indigenous religions is very much on my radar these days (Hackett 2015). Finally, the politics of African religious studies these days is not favoring research and teaching on indigenous religions, due to the increasing dominance of Christianity and Islam in most African national settings, let alone the conservative religious impulses that frame traditional religious heritage as, at best, irrelevant, or, at worst, ‘satanic’. Perhaps Chidester’s insightful analysis of the salience of indigenous religious worlds as they articulate with different aspects of contemporary South African society may direct fresh attention to the transformations of the religious dimension of African social and political life more generally. While Savage systems and Wild religion deal with different periods of South Africa’s history – the 19th-century colonial frontier and the post- apartheid state respectively – they both treat religion and religious diversity from a relational and intercultural perspective, with strong emphasis on the production, appropriation, and interpretation of religious myths and rituals in the South African context. The later book, Wild religion, under discussion here, tracks the sacred in contemporary South Africa from the advent of democracy in 1994 to the euphoria of the Football World Cup in 2010 (Chidester 2012:viii). From the outset, Chidester stresses that his primary objective is to explore the ‘wild, surprising creativity’ of indigenous religion as it moves ‘between rural and urban spaces to produce a migrating sacred, finding a home in the city by creating a hybrid sacred and assuming national significance’ (Chidester 2012:ix). By the same token, he offers an exploration of religious diversity in post-apartheid South Africa, adopting an approach to religion that is not predicated on religious communities and institutions, but rather one that treats religion as ‘an open set of resources and strategies for negotiating a human identity, which is poised between the more than human and the less than human, in the struggles to work out the terms and conditions for living in a human place oriented in sacred space and time” (Chidester 2012:ix). This

199 Rosalind I.J. Hackett generative definition justifies his focus on the dynamics of the ‘sacred’ (his preferred operative term) and its production in the now globalizing conditions of the country he has inhabited since the 1980s. It also opens the door for him to consider how ‘wild religion’ can be regarded as good (heritage and dreams), bad (wild space, violence or terror) or ugly/messy (sex, sovereignty, and festival) (Chidester 2012:5), in ways that are ‘all mixed up’, as in the case of religious tourism that has the potential for new forms of religious engagement, but also desecration (Chidester 2012:ix-x). To boot, Chidester wants to challenge the national narrative of oppression and liberation by facilitating the emergence of different stories about religion and society in South Africa. It is to some of these stories that we now turn to understand Chidester’s central thesis that the sacred is produced in relation to wild forces. He explains this as follows: ‘Sacred space and time, sacred roles, rituals, and objects, are created by both excluding and incorporating the wild. This dual dynamics of the sacred, excluding and incorporating, exorcising and domesticating, is inherent in the duality of the wild’ (Chidester 2012:2). Thus, the wild presents an obstacle to maintaining, as well as energy for creating sacralized social order (Chidester 2012:3). I have chosen to concentrate on select chapters that are particularly instructive for appreciating Chidester’s analytical insights, as well as their value for stimulating new and arguably more relevant approaches to the study of indigenous and traditional religions in Southern Africa and beyond. Reluctantly eschewing his wild tour of the Cape Town religious scene in chapter two (‘Mapping the sacred’), the imbrications of South Africa’s violent history with religious positions in chapter three (‘Violence’), his review of the encroachment and negative impact of religious fundamentalisms in South Africa since the 1970s in chapter four (‘Religious fundamentalisms’), the controversy over the then president, Jacob Zuma’s fathering of a child outside of his traditional polygamous marriage and his recourse to religious (Zulu traditional and evangelical Christian) and political (modern constitutional rights) legitimation in chapter seven (‘Purity’), and chapter nine (‘World Cup’) on the local, wild rituals (in 2010) of the religion of global football, I will concentrate on chapters five (‘Heritage’), six (‘Dreamscapes’), eight (‘Power’), and ten (‘Staying wild’). Chidester begins his fifth chapter on heritage by discussing the development of South Africa’s National Policy on Religion and Education in 2003, which, in contrast to the Christian indoctrination of the apartheid regime, affirmed the importance of educational engagement with religious diversity

200 Tracking the Indigenous Sacred, Chidester-style

(Chidester 2012:92-93). He alludes to his own involvement in the process of policy development and the opportunities for religion studies in the development of new forms of national, cultural, and global citizenship as part of post-apartheid nation-building initiatives1. He explains how this new policy related to former South African President, Thabo Mbeki’s plan for cultural rebirth, an African Renaissance, along with moral regeneration and economic growth. Chidester explains how the new national coat of arms, that uses visual imagery drawn from Bushman rock art and a national motto of Unity in Diversity written in the extinct language of the /Xam Bushmen, was intended to signal a transformation of space and time and symbolize both African and universal truths. This evocation of the distant past means ‘bringing the dead back to life’, as ‘these national symbols were formulated in the extinct language of an extinct people’, namely the Khoisan people who were victims of colonial genocide (Chidester 2012:99). Chidester further observes how the new national symbols were posited by President Mbeki as ‘natural’ in that they served ‘to revitalize an indigenous harmony between human beings and the environment’ (Chidester 2012:100), ‘ancestral’ for they drew South Africans back to the precolonial era when people built their life on the ‘enduring relationship between the living and their ancestors’ (Chidester 2012:100), and ‘universal’ in that the birth of South Africa was linked with the evolutionary origin of all human beings. In addition to considering how national symbols evoke an ancestral imaginary, Chidester looks at the new heritage sites consecrated by the post- apartheid state. He contends that in renegotiating their relations with the past, both the state and the market are ‘dealing in the sacred’ (Chidester 2012:101). Astutely combining Durkheim’s definition of the sacred as that which is ‘set apart’ and Régis Debray’s claim that a nation is ‘made out of sacred stuff’ (Chidester 2012:101), Chidester adds that ‘we must also recognize the ways in which the sacred is “set apart” at the center of social relations, providing highly charged terms for both social cohesion and social conflict’ (Chidester 2012:101), and that this is a critical element of ‘the political economy of the sacred in nation building’ (Chidester 2012:101). The large-scale project known as Freedom Park is particularly interesting to Chidester as it ‘was built out of nothing, a new development on vacant land, carefully constructed to draw

1 ‘Religion studies’ is the preferred term for the academic, non-confessional approach in the South African context.

201 Rosalind I.J. Hackett sacred resources into a monumental, memorial, and ritual complex’ (Chidester 2012:103). As with the national policy for religion and education, this heritage project links the present to a distant past and an open future. The myth of origin (Southern Africa’s 3.6 billion years of history) informed the park’s dedication to ‘memorializing all who had sacrificed their lives in the struggle for humanity and freedom’ (Chidester 2012:103). Chidester explains that the pile of stones from around the country at the shrine (Isivivane) in the center of Freedom Park was reminiscent of the use of stones in Southern African rituals of transition, when someone might add a stone to a pile at the start of a journey or on return. However, as an ambitious nation-building project, Freedom Park was constructed to exercise centripetal and centrifugal force, to draw in the entire nation and even the diaspora, as well as to sponsor and dispatch ‘interreligious delegations to all of the provinces and neighboring countries of South Africa to perform rituals of cleansing, healing, and reconciliation’ (Chidester 2012:104). Tourism has also served to market heritage, using indigenous cultural villages revived from the apartheid era or freshly created for the ‘rainbow nation’ of the new South Africa, such as the Rainbow Cultural Village (Chidester 2012:104). Casinos and corporations also mobilized new resources for heritage development, in the form of advertising and theme parks. Chidester argues that these initiatives and the revised policy for religion and education were part of a new ‘public pedagogy of national heritage’ that celebrated ‘linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity while forging national unity’, as well as more inclusive forms of South African citizenship (Chidester 2012:107). He addresses the criticisms levelled at this new public pedagogy, identifying two main problems, namely creating an artificial, imaginary uniformity and focusing on ‘extraordinary events of heroism, sacrifice, and loss’ (Chidester 2012:108). He sounds a warning note for those working on religion education in schools, lest ‘creative and critical thinking about the multiplicity of religious identities and the negotiation of religious differences…be subsumed in the artificial manufacture of consensus’ (Chidester 2012:108). As for the privileging of the extraordinary, Chidester underscores the importance of balancing this with attention to everyday places and events that may be even more effective in citizenship education. Religion education, especially, needs to resist a ‘world religions’ model that teaches that all religions are constituted by extraordinary revelations or hierophanies, and recorded in extraordinary texts. For our purposes, he opines that this

202 Tracking the Indigenous Sacred, Chidester-style privileging of the extraordinary not only distorts the character of religious life, but ‘it has forcefully excluded indigenous religious forms of life from the world of religions’ (Chidester 2012:109). Given that such a model of world religions no longer obtains in the history of religions or religion education, he remains hopeful that teaching and learning about religion and religions will remain grounded in the ‘ordinary’ (Chidester 2012:109). However, in chapter six, entitled ‘Dreamscapes’, we travel into what may be unexpected and not very ordinary realms for the student of African indigenous religions. Benefitting from his extensive knowledge of the South African indigenous religious scene, David Chidester leads us into the Zulu dreamscape that has been expanded and transformed by electronic media. Under these globalizing conditions, he informs us that global claims are being made on Zulu dreams just as indigenous Zulu dreams are going global2. These transformations of African indigenous religion are exemplified by the Zulu witch doctor, sangoma, sanusi, and now shaman, Credo Mutwa, who, according to Chidester, ‘has emerged in the global circuit of neoshamanism as the ultimate spokesman for African indigenous authenticity’, underwriting a range of projects associated with New Age spirituality, alternative healing, and encounters with aliens from outer space (Chidester 2012:113; cf. also Chidester 2002, 2008). Lest we are tempted to view a modern-day interest in Zulu dreams and dreaming through film, video, and musical CDs and DVDs as a departure from traditional African divination and dream life, Chidester perceptively reminds us that in these new media, ‘we can find echoes of the nineteenth-century Zulu energetics of dreams that was based on sacrificial exchange and ancestral orientation’ (Chidester 2012:113-114). The new dispensation of the global economy brings both perils and possibilities, and Chidester discusses how Credo Mutwa has dealt with them by ‘identifying aliens from outer space as the nexus of a sacrificial exchange into which he personally has entered by eating extraterrestrial beings in a sacrificial meal and by being their sacrificial victim’ (Chidester 2012:114). In addition to recounting these experiences in his various books, notably Song of the stars: The lore of a Zulu shaman (Chidester 1996), Mutwa has also found a home on the internet, boosting his credibility, just as some New Age

2 For similar trends, see Douglas Falen’s work on the reinvention of vodun, notably in relation to preoccupations with witchcraft in the contemporary Benin Republic (Falen 2018a, 2018b).

203 Rosalind I.J. Hackett enthusiasts in the West, including some of South African origin, were also availing themselves of the global network of neoshamanism and coming home to Africa by entering the ‘house of dreams’ as a Zulu shaman. In what follows, Chidester provides an engaging account of some of the leading Euro-American white shamans, such as David Cumes, Ann Mortifee, James Hall, and David Icke, who represent, in his estimation, an emerging trend in which these shamans turn to ‘African traditions as a source of authentic dreams, visions, and connections’ (Chidester 2012:120). Chidester takes our understanding of such trends to a higher level by analyzing Zulu neoshamanism as material religion, addressing the role of the human sensorium and electronic media. By approaching Zulu dreams as embodied, sensory media and as material productions, he can explore how ‘indigenous sensory repertoires for arranging (and deranging) the human sensorium merge with the limits (and potential) of electronic media’ (Chidester 2012:115). As exemplified in the case of Credo Mutwa, who is known internationally as the keeper of Zulu tradition and a source of purer, indigenous African authority, while locally he is often termed a fake or a charlatan, questions of authenticity understandably matter in what Chidester describes as the ‘imaginative terrain that has opened between global exchanges and local homecomings’ (Chidester 2012:115). He identifies three ways of dealing with senses and media that represent registers of authenticity. The first way approaches the human senses as limiting and inadequate. Similarly, electronic media can be inimical to awareness. Credo Mutwa advises avoidance of electronic media because their inaudible sounds can block the psychic powers of aspiring sangomas. For that reason, he recommends rural areas for developing extrasensory perceptions. The second way considers the senses and media as having potential for extraordinary perception, as described by Mutwa after he claimed he ate the meat of an extraterrestrial or in James Hall’s account of his synesthetic experience of visceral percussion, sound, and sight (Chidester 2012:126). The third way treats the senses as validation for shamanic initiations, and electronic media as ‘metaphors for spiritual perception’, as well as ‘enduring forms for transmitting indigenous spiritual wisdom’ (Chidester 2012:127). Mutwa even claims that the content of some Hollywood films serves to validate ancient Zulu tradition. In closing this (academic) mind-altering chapter on ‘sensory extravagance’ in a modern-day Zulu religion, Chidester offers an excellent summation, ‘[a]s both dreamscape

204 Tracking the Indigenous Sacred, Chidester-style and mediascape, Zulu neoshamanism is emerging within a new energetics of global exchange and global orientation’ (Chidester 2012:131). In searching for the sacred in contemporary South Africa, notably the ‘recovery of indigenous religion’, Chidester’s eighth chapter (‘Power’) turns to the question of political leadership. As in the previous chapter, his account is anchored in the story of a protagonist. In this instance, it is Mathole Motshekga, a leading lawyer, politician, and proponent for recovering the integrity of indigenous African traditions of religion, culture, and identity. Born a Lobedu, the ethnic group associated with the realm of Modjaji, the rain queen, he began studying the esoteric traditions of hermeticism in Germany in the 1980s and was subsequently influenced by Afrocentric philosophers who looked to ancient Egypt as their starting point. As observed by Chidester, Motshekga has positioned himself between ‘modern politics and traditional royalty’ in South Africa’s emerging democracy (Chidester 2012:155), serving as chief whip of the governing party, the ANC, and as legal advisor to the Royal Council of the rain queen. Motshekga’s efforts to restore African traditional leadership, history, and spirituality have taken shape through the Kara Heritage Institute that he founded and continues to direct (Kara Heritage Institute 2018). Chidester helps us understand the entanglements of Motshekga’s religious and political journeys and how this leading spokesperson for South African indigenous religion has used both media and political channels to advance his message that African religion, with its ancient Egyptian origin, is both the ‘shared heritage and common spirituality of all Africans in the region’ and the ‘religious foundation for a new South Africa’ (Chidester 2012:155). Chidester draws out two new emphases of Motshekga’s public presentations, namely the theosophy of his heritage, which begins with an ancient Egyptian cosmogony, through an exposition of the zodiac of the heavens and the sacred calendar of festivals on earth, and ends with an account of an African personality that is believed to be divine but in ‘need of recovery through the practice of the reciprocal African ethics of ubuntu and the performance of indigenous rituals of yoga’ (Chidester 2012:155). In addition to this new attention to self- knowledge, Motshekga talks of the theocracy of this heritage and the need to recover and revitalize divine kingship in Africa. Chidester muses over how such religious claims can operate within a democratic polity and identifies three different possibilities in Motshekga’s advocacy – theocracy, democratic pluralism, and civil religion. He regards Motshekga’s commitment to theocracy as surprising given the latter’s roles in

205 Rosalind I.J. Hackett a democratically elected government, but understandable given his theosophical insights and interests as legal advisor to the Royal Council of the rain queen during a trying time of transition. Moreover, Motshekga will have to position his theosophically oriented African indigenous religion in a religiously diverse society, which may be challenging, in Chidester’s estimation, given that Motshekga’s understanding of ancient Egyptian theosophy requires a divine kingship, merging religion, and politics. Chidester also wonders if Motshekga, in seeking to mediate between theocracy and democracy, might be trying to develop a new civil religion for South Africa. Chidester, however, flags the tensions between a religion that is premised on secret wisdom traditions from ancient Egypt, via hermeticism, rosicrucianism, freemasonry, and theosophy in Europe, and a ‘civil religion’ that is also supposed to function as a shared religious orientation in a democratic dispensation. Chidester spares no effort in tracing the roots of Motshekga’s interpretation of ancient Egyptian religion, its links with ‘white African’ and neoshamanic appropriation of indigenous spirituality, its goddess orientation and claims of spiritual mastery and mediumship, along with other Afrocentric initiatives. He alerts us to the controversies surrounding Motshekga and the transmission of his theocratic tradition in a capitalist economy. Citing the work of Jean and John Comaroff (2009) on ethnic entrepreneurship in a market-driven economy, he notes that Motshekga celebrates these new possibilities, believing that exploiting ethnicity is critical for economic development, especially if ‘ethnicity can be linked to divinity’ (Chidester 2012:167). However, Chidester also records how Motshekga has angered other religious communities in various ways, not least by calling on all South Africans to observe the African sacred calendar with its origin in ancient Egypt, when even other contemporary leaders of African religion do not share his religious orientation. Chidester also sees the risk of Motshekga’s civil religion taking on the guise of a religious nationalism, that, with his political role, might ‘serve to sacralize the prevailing government as it has sacralized divine kingship’ (Chidester 2012:174). Recalling the work of Robert Bellah by way of conclusion, Chidester contends that ‘a civil religion, in any form, requires an aura of authenticity for its collection of symbols, beliefs, and rituals to be incorporated in a social collectivity’ (Chidester 2012:175). Arriving at his final chapter, Chidester is keen to remind us that in the ‘wild and indeterminate terms of the colonial encounter, both Christian religion in Africa and African indigenous religion were made’ (Chidester 2012:191).

206 Tracking the Indigenous Sacred, Chidester-style

Religion was both a ‘mark of difference separating the civilized from the wild’ and ‘a wild arena in which new forms of the sacred were being produced’ (Chidester 2012:191). Rather than representing African indigenous religion as a stable religious system or perennial spiritual mentality as John Mbiti and others have been wont to do, Chidester prefers to characterize African religion as ‘an open set of resources and strategies for sacralizing’ (Chidester 2012:192). He also stresses the importance of tracking the vast range of constructions of indigenous religion by scholars, as well as adherents and advocates, through the colonial era into post-apartheid South Africa. Furthermore, scholars and students of indigenous religions in Africa need to take a leaf out of this Chidester book and understand the capacity of these religions to transact, creatively and strategically, whether with colonial powers, traditional authority, the capitalist economy, or the modern state. Each example chosen by Chidester underscores the ‘wild’ and relational nature of these transactions and their entanglement in a changing world. In other words, ‘indigenous religion is a wild religion, not because it is practiced by wild savages, but because it is engaged with modernity’ (Chidester 2012:198). Drawing from the wellspring of his longitudinal, lived experience and knowledge of the South African religious and political scene, Chidester supplies some telling examples of attempts to block transactions in the interests of protecting one’s own religious heritage. He cites the cases of evangelical Christians objecting to the inclusion of indigenous African religion in the new educational policy, Xhosa sangoma Dr. Nokuzola Mndende’s campaign to prevent the initiation of white sangomas, and the debates over the dangers of pornography to Zulu maiden festivals, and extra-marital affairs and same-sex marriage to African tradition. Happily, in Chidester’s estimation, many of these contestations were resolved during the ‘ultimate festival’ in South Africa that was the 2010 FIFA World Cup, with all its attendant religious ceremonies (Chidester 2012:206). However, some readers may be left wondering how indigenous religion advocates might find Chidester’s overall emphasis on wildness, complexity, fluidity, and constructedness rather challenging to mobilize in more formal, legal contexts. As someone currently engaged in tracking the transformations of indigenous and Uganda, Wild religion offers all sorts of critically important angles to think with, not least in terms of the permutations and entanglements of the sacred in rapidly changing political and urban contexts. Surely there are many other parts of Africa crying out for such

207 Rosalind I.J. Hackett analysis. How this bold, insightful, and playful work by one of our most influential colleagues in the field of (African) religious studies might usefully ‘disrupt’ my anthropology of religion class next spring is now uppermost in my mind.

References Chidester, D. 1996. Savage systems: Colonialism and comparative religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Chidester, D. 2002. Credo Mutwa, Zulu shaman: The invention and appropriation of indigenous authenticity in African folk religion. Journal for the Study of Religion 15, 2: 65-85. Chidester, D. 2008. Zulu dreamscapes: Senses, media, and authentication in contemporary neo-shamanism. Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 4, 2: 136-158. Chidester, D. 2012. Wild religion: Tracking the sacred in South Africa. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Comaroff, J.L. & J. Comaroff 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Falen, D.J. 2018a. African vodun in the age of globalization. Anthropology News, 11 September 2018. Available at: http://www.anthropology- news.org/index.php/2018/09/11/african-vodun-in-the-age-of- globalization/. (Accessed on 12 September 2018.) Falen, D.J. 2018b. African science: Witchcraft, vodun, and healing in Southern Benin. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Hackett, R.I.J. 2015. Traditional, African, religious, freedom? In Sullivan, W.F., E.S. Hurd, S. Mahmood & P. Danchin (eds.): Politics of religious freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kara Heritage Institute. 2018. Welcome to the Kara Heritage Institute. Available at: http://www.kara.co.za/. (Accessed on 12 September 2018.) UiT. n.d. Indigenous religion(s) (INREL). The Arctic University of Norway. Available at: https://en.uit.no/forskning/forskningsgrupper/gruppe?p_ document_id=383890. (Accessed on 12 September 2018.)

Rosalind I.J. Hackett Department of Religious Studies

208 Tracking the Indigenous Sacred, Chidester-style

University of Tennessee [email protected]

209

Ironies of Christian Presence in Southern Africa

Sibusiso Masondo [email protected]

‘Indeed, it can be argued that the modern missionary movement from the West, along with other developments within Western Europe, played a significant role in bringing about the crumbling of Western Christendom, though this outcome may not have been intended’ (Bediako 2000:316).

Abstract Christianity was meant to be one of the most potent weapons in the armory of European Imperialism. John Philip characterized mission stations as the cheapest and the best military posts any wise government can employ to defend its frontiers against the predatory incursions of savage tribes (Villa-Vicencio 1988:44). Christianity was meant to colonize the conscience and consciousness of the colonized in ways that would make them lose their indigenousness. It was meant to ‘make’ or ‘create’ the colonized in the image of the colonizer. The irony of this situation is that, among other things, it created conditions for the desire among the colonized to be free; it contributed to the emergence of African Nationalism through notions like ‘brotherhood’ and ‘oneness in Christ’. It became a serious problem for the Christianized and educated natives to find themselves excluded from the Christian family on the basis of their ethnicity. David Chidester’s work on the history of religion in Southern Africa provides a very useful background for exploring the ironies of Christian presence in Southern Africa. Lamin Sanneh’s observation about the role played by indigenous religions to enable both Islam and Christianity to take root is invoked in this context. Christianity became part of the complex that laid the foundations for African nationalism and the pan-Africanist ideology. It provided a platform in mission stations and mission schools for the forging of

Journal for the Study of Religion 31, 2 (2018) 209-231 209 Online ISSN 2413-3027; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a10 Sibusiso Masondo a unified African identity. Education, given to Africans to become ‘civilized’ and alienated from their African compatriots, instead, helped in creating a consciousness for liberation among the oppressed Africans.

Keywords: missionaries, Christianity, African Traditional Religion

Introduction The history of religion in Africa did not start with the advent of Christianity or the arrival of European settlers and missionaries (Sindima 1990:206). When the Europeans arrived in Southern Africa, Africans had been practicing their own religion from time immemorial. Religion had sustained Africans and their way of life, and they were able to build communities and political systems. The history of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa is full of ironies. First, the primary task of the missionaries was to introduce Christianity to the ‘dark’ continent and convert the ‘savages’. Such an endeavor was accompanied by colonial desires to ‘civilize’ the natives. In other words, the aim was to introduce Western European forms of civility and enforce it as superior to African notions of being in the world. Christianity was accompanied by education and health – the African was perceived as a blank slate on which Europeans could write and reproduce themselves. In this endeavor, ‘African values of industry, sanctity of life, respect of persons, and community were all undermined’ (Sindima 1990:192). Second, the only way Christianity was able to take root in Africa was through the infrastructure of indigenous religions. Such was accomplished through the translation of some of the Christian practices and concepts into the local idiom. The role of lay African church workers is often under-emphasized. Hlonipha Mokoena’s work on the relationship between Magema Fuze and Bishop Colenso is a good example of how lay African workers participated in the processes of not only spreading Christianity but defining it as well. Third, Christianity was converted into an indigenous religion through the efforts of Africans within the mainline churches and the emergence of African Indigenous Churches (AICs). Fourth, Christian resources were used to fight colonialism and oppression. It provided both space and intellectual resources for the conceptualization of African nationalism and other political movements that sought liberation from colonialism. Charles

210 Ironies of Christian Presence in Southern Africa

Villa-Vicencio (1988:42-43) states that ‘the church socially transformed the proselytized, in turn, although to a lesser extent, carried their values into the church’. The non-conformist missionaries were Protestants, whose faith emanated from rebelling against the Roman Catholic Church dogma and orthodoxy. However, there was failure to appreciate African discontent with the established church and the eventual formation of the AICs. Infantilization of Africans by missionaries and Europeans in general, was one of the central reasons for the early wave of African Christian independency.

European perceptions of Africa Jan Platvoet (1996) points out that traders, travelers, slavers, missionaries, military men, colonials, and administrators objectified and undermined Africa and Africans. For Villa-Vicencio (1988:44), ‘the Gospel of the missionaries was linked to the ideology of British colonialism’. All these people developed their views on Africa based on their European worldview. Their worldview determined how they analyzed what they saw. Given their backgrounds, they were unable to empathize with the African. Their mind was flooded with images of difference – difference in this case was seen as inferior. Ideologies of otherness were developed by the use of Judeo-Christian templates as a standard to understand non-Western religions. For Horton (1984:403), ‘Judaeo-Christian religious discourse…celebrates the primacy and centrality of the supreme being as against all lesser spiritual agencies’. This became clear in the terminology that became part of the colonial discourse, i.e., non- Europeans, non-Whites, etc. David Chidester (1996) recorded responses of missionaries at different periods to Africans as people and their social systems. In fact, ‘early Western Studies of world religions divided the history of religious practices into three evolutionary phases’ (Greene 1996:122). On initial contact, Africans were said to be a people without any religion – true or false. The implications of such a determination were that Africans were not humans and could therefore be enslaved and deprived of human dignity. Later on, the presence of religion was acknowledged but it was deemed inferior. Africans were said to be in the early stages of evolution or Fetishism, meaning that they were at the point where Western religions were hundreds of years ago. In other words, they did not

211 Sibusiso Masondo belong to the modern era – this was a creation of the superhuman, the human, and subhuman categories. There are serious implications for saying that people do not belong to an era or are inferior. HF Verwoerd applied this principle in his justification for Apartheid where Blacks were said to be only good for providing labor and nothing more. In fact, the National Party ‘stood for the “Christian guardianship” of the European race over the non-white races’ (Venter 1999:422). Western biases created the following images of Africans and their beliefs, called primitive superstition: They are rife with bloody sacrifices, human sacrifices, evil witchcraft, black witchcraft, voodoo, and cannibalism (Owomoyela 1994; Villa-Vicencio 1988). Such Western biases were supported by scholars like Georg Hegel. According to Kuykendall (1993), Hegel characterizes Africans as unhistorical and having contributed nothing to human civilization. Their spirit was undeveloped and still involved in the conditions of mere nature. In other words, Africans had not evolved or made any progress. Africans were devoid of morality, religion, and political constitution, therefore providing a good justification for subjugating and enslaving them. The African was a ‘natural man in his completely wild and untamed state’ (Kuykendall 1993:580). He was still influenced by nature and responded to its rhythms. Hegel’s work clearly disrespects Africa’s contribution to civilization and grossly misinterprets Africa’s place in world history. In fact, ‘Hegel’s philosophy of history is a philosophical treatise that disrespects Africa’s contribution to civilisation’ (Kuykendall 1993:580).

Indigenous religion and religious pluralism African Traditional Religion (ATR) did not pass judgment on other religions. It recognized the fact that they were telling part of the story of human interaction with the universe and Divinity. Ghanaian scholar Kofi Opoku invokes an Akan proverb that ‘wisdom is like a baobab tree, a single man’s hand cannot embrace it’ (Opoku 1993:67), in his attempt to demonstrate the openness of the African worldview to other interpretations of reality. As a result, Africans did not mind borrowing aspects of Christianity in their journey through life. Indigenous religion played a crucial role in molding Islam and Christianity in West Africa – this can also be applied to other parts of the

212 Ironies of Christian Presence in Southern Africa continent. The ATR provided an intellectual and conceptual infrastructure for both Islam and Christianity to make inroads among Africans, as the latter were able to understand and identify with religious concepts from the two religions from the perspective of their understanding of indigenous concepts. Islam and Christianity would have found it very difficult to operate in the absence of the indigenous infrastructure. The two religions found aspects that they approved and disproved in the ATR. In developing her thesis on the Supreme Being in Africa, Sandra Greene (1996) has noted that there was much movement and interaction between various groups in Africa. These interactions were for purposes of trade, establishment of strategic alliances, as well as wars. Through these interactions, information was shared. Kalu (2013:17) makes a very good point, arguing that ‘[t]he irony in nationalist historiography is that while condemning missionaries, the authors fail to see that their own people, the Africans, were the real agents who spread Christianity’. One can boldly say that African converts and church workers practiced comparative religion. They were able to see aspects that were similar and made sense of them in their context. These church workers interpreted Christianity in ways that made sense to indigenous people. Deborah Gaitskell (2000) significantly captures another group of African church workers – the Biblewomen – who promoted Christianity in people’s homes. Colenso also believed in taking the Gospel to where people lived. In fact, he ‘became infamous and was eventually excommunicated’ (Mokoena 2008:313) for confessing that his interactions with converts convinced him that the Bible should not be taken as the literal truth.

Christian Independency According to Lamin Sanneh (1993), a question that occupied people toward the end of the 19th century in West Africa, was not whether Christianity would survive as a religion, but what form it would take going forward. At this point, Christianity had been firmly planted on African soil. However, it must be pointed out that this was made possible by a partnership between European missionaries and their African converts. Increasingly, Africans were given more responsibilities in the affairs of the church. African evangelists traveled from village to village promoting Christianity. There was always reluctance to

213 Sibusiso Masondo ordain African ministers. Oosthuizen (1990:103) makes this point very well, saying: ‘Only in the early 1960s did John Xaba’s Anglican Church, with its so- called liberal stance, induct the first African Bishop, the Venerable Alpheus Zulu. The reluctance to accept African leadership at the highest level in this church was due to racial prejudice’. There were also economic and political forces that undermined traditional institutions and ideas. Modern education introduced aspects that contradicted local knowledge. Edward Berman (1974:527) elaborates: ‘Missionaries, as agents of European churches, constructed schools because education was deemed indispensable to the main purpose of the Christian denominations – the spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Missionaries recognized that the school was, in the words of one commentator, “the nursery of the infant Church”’. During this critical time in history, missionaries and African religious practitioners engaged in what Jean and John Comaroff (1991) call a ‘conversation’. It was a negotiation between two worldviews or systems of thought. Missionaries challenged indigenous ideas on social organization and food production. Some missionaries got involved in debates over the effectiveness of indigenous ideas on social organization and food production. Others involved themselves in debates over the effectiveness of indigenous rainmaking rituals to the extent that they became rainmakers. Rev. Broadbent told the Tswana rainmaker that only God can make rain. The rainmaker failed to make rain a few times and Broadbent went on to pray. After the prayer the rain came down and the place was flooded. He interpreted those events as indicating that God was not pleased with the way the Tswana people were conducting themselves. Local people began to see him as a rainmaker. Broadbent was identified according to the results he achieved in the rainmaking contest. In the eyes of the local population he was a sacred specialist with mystical powers, the ability to make rain being one of those powers. Furthermore, Norman Etherington points out that in Natal some women sought refuge in mission stations in order to avoid their calling as diviners, whereas missionaries ‘advertised themselves as agents of countervailing spiritual power’ (Etherington 1976:597). Missionaries used interesting agricultural metaphors to demonstrate what their mission was doing. In describing this process, Robert Moffat of the London Mission Society stated that missionaries ought to put their hand to the plough in preparing the stony African ground for a ‘rich harvest of souls’ (Comaroff 1991:12). Agriculture would cultivate the worker as the worker

214 Ironies of Christian Presence in Southern Africa cultivated the land. In fact, the production of new crops and a new kind of selfhood went together in the evangelical imagination. The African social organization posed a problem for this vision. African gender relations did not align with those of the missionary establishment. The two patriarchal systems had different views on the roles and responsibilities of women. In the African context, the domain of women extended from the domestic domain to food production, as they were responsible for agriculture, food production, and gathering. According to Sean Hanretta (1998:391), ‘women were located at the very source of power within that society; agricultural production’. Men were responsible for hunting of game and animal husbandry. In the missionary imagination, informed and influenced by the Victorian era ideals, a woman was supposed to have lordship over the domestic space, creating a homely environment, raise children, and cook for her husband as well as all other domestic chores. The man was supposed to use his physical strength in agricultural production and generally providing food for his family. The idea of a man as a provider for his family was firmly established. The introduction of animals drawing a plough as an important agricultural tool posed a paradox for Africans as it traversed previously separated male and female domains. There were prospects for higher yields and surplus, as men became interested in agriculture. First, women were not allowed to handle animals. Second, surplus products were sold at the market. Here one can already see signs of the disruption of the traditional social organization. Women had some influence in this area, but it was taken away from them. Terence Ranger (2003) demonstrates that African women were responsible for agricultural production and the development of many fertility cults. Isabel Mukonyora (1999) is of the view that the idea of Mwari presented in most studies on Zimbabwean religion, is from a male perspective. In this perspective, Mwari is a territorial divinity who defends it against invaders (a prerogative of males). Her view is that when Mwari is seen as a fertility god, one is able to see the contribution of women in conception. Mwari’s praise name, Zvivaguru (great pool), indicates that she has to do with fertility. A pool is a fountain of life, in the same way as a woman’s womb. Women were in touch with nature on an ongoing basis (collecting vegetables, wood, and water). Rivers and pools are places where women met and taught each other on sexuality and performed initiation rites.

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Put another way, women in traditional Shona culture fulfilled roles that can explain the development of earth-centred myths, folk stories, and associated religious beliefs…but when we consider the daily activities of women on the land in growing crops, looking for water to drink, fetching firewood, spending time at the pools and rivers carrying out initiation rites, etc., it is clear that women had time to develop a more intimate relationship with nature than men (Mukonyora 1999:281).

It was this strength that women possessed that was used against them. They were dismissed on the fact that being closer to nature was making them inferior to men. During the colonial era, white control began to be seen as indispensable to the effective management of the church. Africans were removed from positions of influence. This act did not set off an immediate reaction from the African population. Literature on the encounters between missionaries and Africans suggest that for the majority of missionaries, Christian conversation required disowning African religious and cultural practices and then accepting Christianity together with Western cultural practices. Beidelman (1982) was of the view that missionaries were an important part of the colonial project whose aim was not simply to dominate politically, but culturally as well. Furthermore,

Christian missions represent the most naïve and ethnocentric, and therefore the most thorough-going, facet of colonial life… Missionaries invariably aimed at overall changes in the beliefs and actions of naïve peoples, at colonization of heart and mind as well as body. Pursuing this sustained policy of change, missionaries demonstrated a more radical and morally intense commitment to rule than political administrators or businessmen (Beidelman 1982:5).

Missionaries cast African culture, tradition, and customs in a negative light, according to Simensen (1987). They spent huge amounts of time in their teachings and sermons defining sin in narrow personal terms, thus individualizing sin and salvation. Such definitions of sin ignored the structural and systemic issues that caused harm on people. As a result, ‘[m]ost aspects of Zulu culture came under the definition of sin, based not only on Christian but also on specific European cultural criteria. This naturally kept the cost of

216 Ironies of Christian Presence in Southern Africa religious change high in terms of conflict with family and local society’ (Simensen 1987:96). Among the AmaXhosa in the second half of the 19th century, missionaries insisted that their members should have nothing to do with any of their traditional customs, otherwise they could face the possibility of being expelled. Mills (1995) points out that the missionary campaign against customs like circumcision (male initiation), lobola (bride-price), intonjane (a girl’s puberty rites), and polygamy promoted ‘deception, breaches of discipline, disobedience of children and hypocrisy’. For example,

Revd J.J.R. Jolobe said that he and his brothers had all, under the guise of visiting relatives, arranged to be circumcised and had been successful in hiding the fact that their father, Revd James Jolobe, did not learn about it until years later. Mr Zizi Mazwai said that he and his brothers had also quietly arranged operations at hospitals, in spite of the Revd Ambrose Mazwai’s denunciation of the custom (Mills 1995:165).

Why did these young men take a risk to defy their parents and perform such procedures? It had something to do with societal pressure and a desire to be accepted. It says something about the value placed on such practices by their practitioners. There is a widely held notion among the AmaXhosa that any male who had not been through initiation is still regarded as a boy. Such males are touted and teased especially at gatherings and ceremonies. There were serious moral problems faced by African converts as a result of the banning of puberty rituals in Natal. Deborah Gaitskell (1982) pointed out that the formation of the mother’s prayer group, isililo (wailing), in the Congregational Church in Natal, was a direct consequence of the upsurge of teenage pregnancies among mainly Christian children at the turn of the 20th century. She attributed this to the discontinuation of puberty rituals without any replacement. During these rituals, girls were taught about intricacies of sex and proper ways of behavior. Missionaries expected girls’ mothers to take over the role of sex educator, while such expectations were in direct contrast to African beliefs and customs. Traditionally, sex education was the responsibility of adults other than the parents of the said children. During the pre-Christian era, parents were not responsible for this type of education for their children. Sindima (1990:193) makes a very good argument, stating that

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‘to abolish ritual practice was to do away with critical and transforming moments in personal and communal life’. Simensen (1987) recalls another example of dishonesty by a man called Isaac, as a result of an anti-African culture missionary policy. Isaac came to the mission station where he acquired business skills and became a successful businessman. He was baptized and confirmed into the church. After acquiring some wealth, he became successful and decided to take a second wife.

One tempting opportunity to convert profit into status based on the criteria of Zulu society was to take several wives. At his cattle farm Isaac entered into a relationship with a girl who was to become his wife number two. To deceive Oftebro and the congregation he brought along this girl to Eshowe and registered her as a school pupil. He declared himself free from sin, and joined in Holy Communion as usual. When the truth was brought home to Oftebro through rumours and reports from other Christians, Isaac defended himself by pointing to the polygamous practice of Abraham and Isaac in the Old Testament (Simensen 1987:98).

Such an argument is a direct consequence of translation of the Bible into indigenous languages coupled with mission schooling. Missionary Jon Kirby (1994) reports that missionaries in Ghana did not want to understand African religion institutions and culture. A veteran missionary told him not to bother learning native languages because he had to continue speaking English in order to help Africans improve their command of English. Christianity, as presented by the missionaries, carried with it a baggage of Western culture, practices and values, and these were presented to Africans as part of the furniture of Christianity. In other words, Africans had to be European before they became Christian – a practice reminiscent of the demands made by Judaizers in the early church, that all Gentiles must be circumcised like the Jews (Ac 15:1-29).

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Christianity and translation In his provocative book Whose religion is Christianity?, Lamin Sanneh (2003) points out that, unlike Islam, Christianity does not have a language of revelation, and its sacred texts are not in the language of the founder. In fact, from its very foundation it has been translated into various languages: ‘The fact of Christianity being a translated, and translating, religion places God at the center of the universe of cultures, implying free coequality among cultures and a necessary relativizing of languages vis-à-vis the truth of God’ (Sanneh 2003:105). The translation of was in two processes that were not mutually exclusive, that is, linguistic and cultural. African evangelists and church workers were largely responsible for translating the message of Christianity into the local idiom. Christianity permitted the use of indigenous languages for both self- understanding and the appropriation of Christian religion. The use of local languages in the conception and promotion of Christianity undermined its foreign character. The translation of the Bible ushered in a fundamental religious revolution: The Bible as a religious resource became accessible to Africans in their own languages. Local concepts, idioms, and religious categories were used to understand and mediate the Christian message and experience. According to Sanneh (2003:99), ‘Christians became pioneers of linguistic development with the creation of alphabets, orthographies, dictionaries, and grammars’. African rites and practices were converted into vehicles for the spread of Christianity – they were cleansed for the purpose of the use in the church, for example, initiation for baptism. There was mass participation in this process. The god of the ancestors was assimilated into Yahweh of ancient Israel, and God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The power of the witches was compared to the power of Jesus: The concept of mystical powers possessed by the indigenous specialists was used to understand and make sense of the power of Jesus. Some missionaries began to appreciate the depth and richness of African religion and culture. Hastings comments that not all missionaries supported the colonial project in its totality. There were those that he identified as rebels who did not follow the line of missionary societies on some issues. Among such missionaries he identifies Colenso and Livingstone as ‘intellectual princes of the nineteenth century missionary movement [who] were both rogue elephants, too independent in mind for the movement to

219 Sibusiso Masondo contain them’ (Hastings 1994:265). Colenso did not agree with the position of the church by forcing men in polygamous marriages to leave all their wives but the first one. He felt that such a move was not pastoral and would result in abandoned children. According to Kaplan (1986), Colenso advocated for such men to be accepted in the church and communion, but not to hold church office. Jones (2011:399) reminds us that Colenso ‘did not promote polygamy, or think that it was an ideal, but argued for toleration of polygamy until an ideal could be reached’. Unfortunately, such views were only held by a minority, while the majority of missionaries continued to deny men in polygamous marriages membership in the Christian community. Kaplan (1986:168) also confirms that there was no unanimity at the 1888 Lambert conference on the non-baptism of polygamous men. Jones, furthermore, laments the absence of the voices of women in the debate on polygamy. Translation was central to the revitalization of indigenous societies through the invocation of local paradigms. For Sanneh (cited in Gilmour 2007:1769), ‘Missionary translation was instrumental in the emergence of indigenous resistance to colonialism. Local Christians acquired from the vernacular translations confidence in the indigenous course. While the colonial system represented a worldwide economic and military order, mission represented vindication for the vernacular’. Colonialism and Christianity intended to produce a particular type of African who was a mirror image of their colonial masters, but it had unintended consequences. The process of conversion involved what Norman Etherington (2002:436) called ‘outward and visible signs’. African converts were given new names after baptism. Such names were of notable biblical figures and some prominent missionaries. The aim for such an exercise was to obliterate the previous identity. Jesse Mugambi (2003:53) argues, ‘While mission schools instructed their African pupils and students to accept, obey, and copy their colonial masters, these learners at the same time acquired knowledge and skills which were to become essential tools in the nationalist struggles for self-determination’. According to Sanneh (1996:123), ‘Local Christians apprehended the significance of world events, and as such the purposes of God, through the familiar medium of mother tongues, with subject peoples able to respond to colonial events in light of vernacular self-understanding’. Furthermore, Kiernan (1990:13) observes that Africans ‘responded to the missionary message through the filter of their own culture’. The translation of the Bible had some unintended consequences. Indigenous filters for understanding the

220 Ironies of Christian Presence in Southern Africa gospel were developed. Some aspects of African culture rejected by missionaries were justified as locals had access to the Holy Scriptures in their mother tongues. In most cases, they found in the Bible, especially the Old Testament, communities that were similar to theirs. It also became the major catalyst behind the formation of the AICs. According to Gosnell Yorke (2004:154), scholars like Sanneh and Bediako ‘have shown that there is a clear correlation between the translation of the Bible into indigenous African languages and the cultural renaissance that we see at work in the rapidly proliferating African Independent, Instituted or Indigenous Churches’. Ethiopian churches are the pioneers of the AIC movement in South Africa. These churches were founded for and by urban educated blacks who were increasingly being sidelined by the white missionary establishment. Their heydays were between 1880 and the 1920s. The breakaway from the mission churches was meant to ensure African control on ecclesial matters. Ethiopian churches in the late 19th century were founded as a protest against (a) white domination, (b) the ceiling imposed by white domination of the aspirations of African church workers, (c) the ease with which Africans were expelled from the church, especially for plural marriages, and (d) growing segregation between black and white congregations. A very clear disjuncture between the concept of oneness in Christ and the practice of a mission-controlled church became a major concern of this group. Ethiopian churches rejected white control and domination. However, they accepted the core of missionary teachings, that is (a) the retention of the doctrines and the practices of the mission, and (b) the promotion of values like character-building, hard-working, discipline, capital accumulation, morality, education, and industry. This is an indicator that the problem was not ecclesiastical but political. Ali Mazrui’s insights are helpful in this attempt to analyze the symbol of Ethiopia as a Pan-African symbol for all Africans. He said that ‘Pan-Africanism is based on a positive false memory – that Africa was divided by colonialism and was previously one’ (Mazrui 2000:90). In fact, ‘missionary teaching…played an important part in encouraging the growth of nationalism among the kholwa. The truly revolutionary idea that Africans were all one people regardless of ethnic origin was preached vigorously in southeast Africa’ (Etherington 1976:604). The idea of brotherhood in Christ transcended ethnic differences especially at mission stations, and as such, it became one of the factors that enabled the formation of the African National Congress in 1912.

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According to Chidester, various white governments distrusted the Ethiopian movement. In fact, ‘[i]n spite of its basically middle-class morals, values and aspirations, however, the Ethiopian movement was perceived by government as a threat simply by virtue of its independence from white control’ (Chidester 1992:119). Various commissions were set up to investigate the activities of these churches, but they found no evidence to support the claim that they posed a danger to the state. The white establishment saw these churches as a threat. Such initiatives by Africans were said to represent ‘a Christian heresy, a political threat, and…a foolish desire to get rid of the white man’s control’ (Chidester 1992:119). One of the reasons for the emergence of the Ethiopian spirit was the perception that the missionaries were involved in the colonial schemes that subjugated Africans. Simensen (1987) points out that some Norwegian missionaries in Natal identified African independence as an obstacle to Christianization. They joined their English colleagues in supporting efforts to undermine Zulu independence using force. Sindima (1990:191) indicates that in other parts of Africa missionaries instigated and even participated in colonizing areas.

Pentecostalism The bulk of literature on Pentecostalism insists that the initial founders of this movement were foreign missionaries. However, the phenomenon was adapted to local conditions by some of the initial converts to address African needs. Allan Anderson (1992) points out that Azusa Street became a focal point of Pentecostalism and it produced missionaries who went out and spread the Pentecostal messages in fifty countries in two years. Soon after the Azusa Street Revival of 1906, a large number of missionaries went to different parts of the world, including the African continent. People like John Lake, his wife, and three other friends came to South Africa in 1908 where he founded the Apostolic Faith Mission (Nel 2015:149). Pentecostalism started as an interdenominational and multiracial movement, and it appealed to black and white people in South Africa. Marius Nel (2015:156) reports that John Lake reprimanded those in his audience who were against him embracing Elias Letwaba. He did not take kindly to the overt

222 Ironies of Christian Presence in Southern Africa racism that was displayed by some white members of the congregation in Johannesburg during his first sermon in South Africa. In fact, ‘[t]he broad character African Pentecostalism is very ecumenical, against ethnicity or tribalism while effecting a new unity in Christ among Christians of various hues’ (Kalu 2002:129). However, racism and discrimination against Blacks has been the feature of South African Pentecostalism since its inception. Anderson (2000) records a number of incidents where white people sought to sideline black people from the work of the ministry. After the formation of the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM) in 1908, its white dominated council passed a declaration that during baptismal services, natives had to be baptized after white people. As early as 1910, black and white people were holding separate annual conferences. In fact, ‘churches were separated along racial lines and black Pentecostal churches were intentionally disempowered’ (Nel 2015:158). The white AFM council supported discriminatory and racist ideas advocated by the National Party, and that became official government policy in 1948. Pentecostalism has evolved into a very powerful force across the African continent. The emergence of charismatic churches led by powerful individuals who claim to have divine powers to heal, exorcise evil spirits, help people to become rich, and predict the future, became a prominent feature of Christianity in Africa. Paul Gifford (2004), in his article titled Persistence and change in contemporary African religion, argues that charismatic churches present an ideology that is consistent with a traditional African worldview that mission churches had disapproved. In the traditional worldview there is no separation between the physical and the spiritual realm. The spirit, according to Mbiti (1969), infuses all aspects of life. In other words, anything happening in the physical realm is explained in terms of what is happening in the realm of the spirit. In fact, ‘natural causality is to be discerned primarily in the spiritual realm’ (Gifford 2004:172). Gifford makes reference to the Winner’s Chapel in Nigeria and other Charismatic churches where the ‘success’ and ‘prosperity’ in the ‘here’ and ‘now’ are prominent messages. The notion ‘success in the here and now’ is consistent with the ATR’s this-worldly orientation. The ideology of success here and now is re-enforced through testimonies. Individual members testify to the group about their ‘successes’, because of their attachment to the group and following the teachings of the leader. Some of the testimonies are used on flyers and other media to promote the group. Furthermore, Gifford (2004:173) suggests that ‘Africa’s new Christianity promises the this-worldly blessings of traditional religion (as

223 Sibusiso Masondo expected, heaven and hell are seldom mentioned)…herein lies the secret appeal’. This is very ironic as the major aspects that were rejected by early missionaries are the ones that are used to draw people into these new forms of Christianity in Africa. The irony is aptly put by Richard Gray (1982:64) that

African Christianity is not the result primarily of a massive campaign of brain-washing by foreign missionaries. Whatever the missionaries may have thought, Africa was no tabula rasa. Aspects of Christianity were eagerly accepted and transformed by Africans because this faith was seen to meet not merely the exigencies of modernization but also at least some of the long-standing spiritual needs and demands of African societies. Christianity in Africa was never synonymous with the missionaries’ understanding of the faith; the encounter with Africa involved a process of interaction in which Africa’s distinctive characteristics and contributions have become ever increasingly prominent.

African theology African theology emerged as a critique of traditional ways in which theology was done, especially with regard to the place and role of Africa in the narrative of salvation. It sought to place Africa at the center of the theological enterprise. According to Justin Ukpong, African theology is the ‘conscious engagement of European Christian thinking and African religious thought in serious dialogue for the purpose of integrating Christianity into the life and culture of African people’ (Ukpong 1984:501). For Desmond Tutu it ‘has given a lie to the belief that worthwhile religion in Africa had to wait the advent of the white man…African Theology has done a wonderful service in rehabilitating the African religious consciousness’ (Tutu 1987:53). The negative portrayal of Africa, African people, and their religious heritage in the writings of mainly European commentators prompted African scholars to respond. In such studies, Africa was presented as backward and having had no contribution to world history. Winds of change blew across Africa in the 1950s and 1960s with a number of African countries getting their independence from colonial

224 Ironies of Christian Presence in Southern Africa governments. The idea of Pan-Africanism and nationalist ideologies had some influence on the development of African theology. Post-colonial governments put pressure on the church to Africanize. The post-colonial leadership wanted to demonstrate that they were different and had respect for African heritage. The church had to respond to socio-political changes, becoming relevant. John Mbiti is of the view that religion among Africans has permeated into all departments of life so fully that there is no easy or possible way to isolate it. Both Christianity and Islam flow into the overall history of African religion. For him, all religions except Christianity constitute in the highest ideals, ‘a praeparatio evangelica’ (cf. Bediako 1989:60; Kalu 2002:113). In other words, African indigenous religions were only useful as a stepping stone to a more superior form of religious expression that came with Christianity. For Mbiti, Christianity provided an African with freedom, maturity, selfhood, and fulfilment. Almost a century before Edward Blyden, he already stated that Christianity is the highest form of religious expression. In other words, Africans must acquire it in order to be progressive and lead a fulfilled life. The assumption is that indigenous religions were not looking ahead and could not help Africans to advance and participate meaningfully among the family of nations in the world. Many of the kholwa leaders, like John Dube at the turn of the 20th century in South Africa, were of the view that Christianity and education were the only ways to advance development in Africa. Pre-Christian reflections about God were contained in wisdom sayings, myths, ritual pronouncements, and prayers. There are striking resemblances to biblical ideas, especially the Old Testament. Leaders like Isaiah Shembe, at the beginning of the 20th century, were quick to establish the resemblances between people in biblical stories and their own communities. Mbiti, having observed the workings of the ATR and its methods of generating ideas, concluded that adherents of the ATR will almost be negligible by 2000 CE and will bequeath the riches of African religiosity to Christianity. Christianity was said to supersede the ATR by introducing dimensions they lack – stuff not opposed to traditional religiosity. The Bible became a very important source for the justification of resistance against racial discrimination and other injustices meted out to African people. There was a general appeal to Christian teachings and values to support the liberation project. Christian nationalist leaders like Chief Albert Luthuli (1962) drew heavily on the Bible to justify his actions. The title of his book Let my people go, drew its inspiration from the book of Exodus where

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Moses had discussions with the Pharaoh about the liberation of the Hebrews. The liberation motif of the book of Exodus inspired him to put more effort in the struggle for the liberation of African people in South Africa.

Conclusion The aims of those who brought Christianity to Southern Africa were for it to take root and for indigenous people to be re-formed in their image. According to Ranger (1991), Protestant missionaries were committed to Christianity, commerce, and civilization, and they saw African religion as anti-progress and a force that they needed to fight and defeat. The main aim of colonization and evangelization was to alter the consciousness of African converts. Jean and John Comaroff (1991:268) perceptively point out that ‘any attempt to understand the southern Tswana past and present keeps being drawn back to the colonization of their consciousness and their consciousness of colonization’. Everything around African converts reflected alien symbols. African converts were removed from the community and placed in mission stations, where missionaries attempted to alter their worldview to Christianity or Western ways or sekgoa. The term for an African convert, ikholwa, has evolved from something that is despised, to something acceptable and even desirable. Early African converts were regarded as traitors (amambuka) for having deserted their people and their communities, especially their ancestors. The attitude of early converts was that Christianity and Western civilization were bringing light to a dark continent. The desire of most African converts was to be assimilated into the white colonial community and economy as equals. The refusal of the colonial establishment to accord these educated African Christians equality with whites made them realize that they needed other black people to fight colonial injustices. Christianity gave space for the creation of a consciousness for liberation among Africans. Such a consciousness was manifested in African nationalism that inspired a number of liberation movements across the continent, including the AICs. These churches were expressions of the desire of Africans for freedom and human dignity. However, the most important statement that was made through the formation of these churches is that Christianity was converted from an alien religion into an

226 Ironies of Christian Presence in Southern Africa indigenous one. It is no longer alien because it is now expressed and experienced through the local idiom. The most interesting irony is that a religion that sought to transform an African worldview was also transformed to serve the interests of an African worldview. It is indeed ironic that for Christianity to survive and thrive, it needed the very religion and culture that it sought to destroy.

References Anderson, A. 1992. Bazalwane: African Pentecostals in South Africa. Pretoria: UNISA Press. Anderson, A. 2000. Zion and Pentecost: The spirituality and experience of Pentecostal and Zionist/Apostolic churches in South Africa. Pretoria: UNISA Press. Bediako, K. 1989. The roots of African theology. International Bulletin of Missionary Research 13, 2: 58-65. Bediako, K. 2000. Christianity on the threshold of the third millennium: The religious dimension. African Affairs 99, 395: 303-323. Beidelman, T.O. 1982. Colonial evangelism: A socio-historical study of an East African mission at grassroots. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Berman, E.H. 1974. African responses to Christian mission education. African Studies Review 17, 3: 527-540. Chidester, D. 1992. Religions of South Africa. London: Routledge. Chidester, D. 1996. Savage systems: Colonialism and comparative religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville, London: University Press of Virginia. Comaroff, J. 1991. Missionaries and mechanical clocks: An essay on religion and history in South Africa. The Journal of Religion 71, 1: 1-17. Comaroff, J. & J.L. Comaroff. 1991. Of revolution: Christianity, colonialism, and consciousness in South Africa. Chicago, London: Chicago Press Corporation. Etherington, N. 1976. Mission station melting pots as a factor in the rise of South African black nationalism. The International Journal of African Historical Studies 9, 4: 592-605.

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Etherington, N. 2002. Outward and visible signs of conversion in nineteenth- century KwaZulu-Natal. Journal of Religion in Africa 32, 4: 422-439. Gaitskell, D. 1982. ‘Wailing for puberty’: Prayer unions, African mothers and adolescent daughters, 1912-1940. In Marks, S. & R. Rathbone (eds.): Industrialisation and social change in South Africa: African class formation, culture and consciousness, 1870-1930. Essex, New York: Longman. Gaitskell, D. 2000. Hot meetings and hard kraals: African Biblewomen in Transvaal Methodism, 1924-60. Journal of Religion in Africa 30, 3: 277- 309. Gifford, P. 2004. Persistence and change in contemporary African religion. Social Compass 51, 2: 169-176. Gilmour, R. 2007. Missionaries, colonialism and language in nineteenth- century South Africa. History Compass 5, 6: 1761-1777. Gray, R. 1982. Christianity, colonialism, and communications in Sub-Saharan Africa. Journal of Black Studies 13, 1: 59-72. Greene, S.E. 1996. Religion, history and the supreme gods of Africa: A contribution to the debate. Journal of Religion in Africa 26, 2: 122-138. Hanretta, S. 1998. Women, marginality and the Zulu state: Women’s institutions and power in the early nineteenth century. The Journal of African History 39, 3: 389-415. Hastings, A. 1994. The church in Africa, 1450-1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Horton, R. 1984. Judaeo-Christian spectacles: Boon or bane to the study of African religions? (Les lunettes judéo-chrétiennes: aubaine ou fléau pour l’étude des religions africaines?). Cahiers d’Études Africaines 24, 96: 391-436. Jones, T.W. 2011. The missionaries’ position: Polygamy and divorce in the Anglican communion, 1888-1988. Journal of Religious History 35, 3: 393-408. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9809.2011.01077.x Kalu, O.U. 2002. Preserving a worldview: Pentecostalism in the African maps of the universe. PNEUMA: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 24, 2: 110-137. Kalu, O.U. 2013. Introduction: The shape and flow of African church historiography. Available at: https://repository.up.ac.za/bitstream/ handle/2263/21579/002_chapter1_p001-023.pdf?sequence=3. (Accessed on 1 June 2018.)

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Kaplan, S. 1986. The Africanization of missionary Christianity: History and typology. Journal of Religion in Africa 16, 3: 166-186. Kiernan, J. 1990. African and Christian: From opposition to mutual accommodation. In Prozesky, M. (ed.): Christianity in South Africa. Bergvlei: Southern Book Publishers. Kirby, J.P. 1994. Culture change and religious conversion in West Africa. In Blakely, W.E., A. van Beek & D.L. Thomson (eds.): Religion in Africa: Experience and expression. London, Portsmouth: James Currey, Heinemann. Kuykendall, R. 1993. Hegel and Africa: An evaluation of the treatment of Africa in the philosophy of history. Journal of Black Studies 23, 4: 571- 581. Luthuli, A.J. 1962. Let my people go. New York: McGraw-Hill Education. Mazrui, A.A. 2000. Cultural amnesia, cultural nostalgia and false memory: Africa’s identity crisis revisited. African Philosophy 13, 2: 87-98. Mbiti, J.S. 1969. African religions and philosophy. London: Heinemann. Mills, W.G. 1995. Missionaries, Xhosa clergy and the suppression of customs. In Bredekamp, H. & R.J. Ross (eds.): Missions and Christianity in South African history. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Mokoena, H. 2008. The Queen’s bishop: A convert’s memoir of John W. Colenso. Journal of Religion in Africa 38, 3: 312-342. Mukonyora, I. 1999. Women and ecology in Shona religion. Word & World 19, 3: 276-284. Mugambi, J.N.K. 2003. Christian theology and social construction. Nairobi: Action Publishers. Oosthuizen, G.C. 1990. Christianity’s impact on race relations in South Africa. In Prozesky, M. (ed.): Christianity in South Africa. Bergvlei: Southern Book Publishers. Opoku, K.A. 1993. African traditional religion: An enduring heritage. In Olupona, J. & S. Nyang (eds.): Religious plurality in Africa: Essays in honour of John S. Mbiti. New York, Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. Nel, M. 2015. Remembering and commemorating the theological legacy of John G. Lake in South Africa after a hundred years. Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae 41, 3: 147-170. Owomoyela, O.1994. With friends like these…A critique of persuasive anti- Africanisms in current African studies epistemology and methodology. African Studies Review 37, 3: 77-101.

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Platvoet, J. 1996. From object to subject: A history of the study of the religions of Africa. In Platvoet, J., J. Cox & J. Olupona (eds.): The study of Religions in Africa: Past, present, and prospects. Cambridge: Roots and Branches. Ranger, T. 1991. African traditional religion. In Clark, P. & S. Sutherland (eds.): The world’s religions: The study of religion, traditional and new religions. London: Routledge. Ranger, T. 2003. Women and environment in African religion: The case of Zimbabwe. In Beinart, W. & J. McGregor (eds.): Social history and African environments. Oxford: James Currey. Ukpong, J.S. 1984. The emergence of African theologies. Theological Studies 45, 3: 501-536. Sanneh, L.O. 1993. West African Christianity: The religious impact. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Sanneh, L.O. 1996. Piety and power: Muslims and Christians in West Africa. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Sanneh, L.O. 2003. Whose religion is Christianity? The gospel beyond the West. Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans. Simensen, J. 1987. Religious change as a transaction: The Norwegian mission to Zululand, South Africa, 1850-1906. In Petersen, K.H. (ed.): Religion, development and African identity. Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies. Sindima, H. 1990. Liberalism and African culture. Journal of Black Studies 21, 2: 190-209. Tutu, D. 1987. Black theology and African theology: Soulmates or antagonists. In Parratt, J. (ed.): A reader in African Christian theology. London: SPCK. Venter, J.J. 1999. HF Verwoerd: Foundational aspects of his thought. Koers: Bulletin for Christian Scholarship 64, 4: 415-442. Villa-Vicencio, C. 1988. Trapped in apartheid: A socio-theological history of the English-speaking churches. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Yorke, G. 2004. Bible translation in anglophone Africa and her diaspora: A postcolonialist agenda. Black Theology: An International Journal 2, 2: 153-166.

230 Ironies of Christian Presence in Southern Africa

Sibusiso Masondo School of Religion, Philosophy & Classics University of KwaZulu-Natal [email protected]

231

A Faith that Does Justice: The Public Testimony of Oliver Tambo1

Jonathan D. Jansen [email protected]

‘We may never be able to discover what it was in your essence which convinced you’ (Nelson Mandela at the funeral of OR Tambo 2 May 1993)

Abstract Throughout the 20th century, mission-educated black men rose to prominence in the African National Congress while simultaneously holding leadership positions in the church. Yet, less is written about the faith of these men, and more about their politics; even less studied is the spiritual life of political leaders, what Nelson Mandela, in reference to his struggle companion, Oliver Tambo, called ‘the essence’ of man. Drawing on the construct of interiority, this article offers a re-assessment of public testimonies about the ANC’s longest serving president, demonstrating how the internal workings of Tambo’s faith came to be expressed in the external life and leadership of this devout Christian activist.

Keywords: religion and politics, interiority, biography

1 An earlier version of this manuscript was presented on 15 March 2018 in the form of the OR Tambo Memorial Lecture at Georgetown University, USA. I am grateful to the reviewer and editorial comments that improved the original version for journal publication.

Journal for the Study of Religion 31, 2 (2018) 232-258 232 Online ISSN 2413-3027; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a11 A Faith that Does Justice: The Public Testimony of Oliver Tambo

Introduction Many people testify to the fact that some of the great leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) were men of faith2. The founding president, John Dube (1871-1946), who studied at Oberlin College, was an ordained priest in the Congregational Church. The Nobel laureate, President Albert Luthuli (1898-1967), the son of John Bunyan Luthuli, was confirmed in the Methodist Church and became a lay preacher. Similarly, President Oliver Tambo (1917- 1993) applied and was accepted for ordination as a priest in the Anglican Church – an ambition derailed by his arrest with others, shortly afterwards, on a charge of high treason. At first glance, none of this is surprising, since black African elites at the turn of the 20th century were normally sent to mission schools, given the lack of state schools at the time (Elphick 2012; Freedman 2013; Moloantoa 2016). Their parents were often converts to Christian faith and reared their children in the values of the church. It is in this context that one should understand Nelson Mandela’s reflection: ‘Without the church, without religious institutions I would never have been here today…Religion was one of the most motivating factors in everything we did’ (Mandela 1999:4). What was different about mission-educated men like Oliver Tambo, was the fact that they found a way to reconcile their Christian faith with their liberation politics. These were not cloistered priests or pastors detached from the pressing social, economic, and political concerns of the day. This observation is compelling – how great men (in this case) of Africa’s oldest liberation movement lived their faith through the long and difficult struggle for freedom which none of these three leaders (Dube, Luthuli, and Tambo) would see fulfilled in their lifetime. A further point of interest is the kind of politics that was made possible within the ANC by the people with these faith commitments and how that might contrast with the moral state of the party 25 years since the death of perhaps its most devout leader, Oliver Reginald Kaizana Tambo. This meditation is also necessary because liberation movements generally eschew open talk about religion, let alone the spiritual life of each of their leaders. There are many reasons for this in the context of the ANC. One is an awareness of the potentially divisive role of competing religious commitments of members. When a department of religious studies was

2 The ANC has not yet had a woman president of the organization.

233 Jonathan D. Jansen eventually set up, it was already towards the end of the exile years (1987) and then probably to manage the growing stream of South African visitors, often including representatives of churches, to meet with leaders of the ANC (Macmillan 2013:184). Even so the ANC’s approach has been to speak of itself, the irony of language notwithstanding, as ‘a broad church’ that accommodates diversities of ideology and belief. Another reason for the avoidance of religious talk in liberation circles was the discomfort of dwelling on spiritual matters often regarded among the communists in the movement as other-worldly concerns where the focus should be on the material basis of the struggle here-and-now. In the exiled community, Christian talk was even sometimes associated with spies trying to infiltrate the organization3. The ANC’s way of dealing with this discomfort was to relegate religious issues to the private sphere, as a personal thing and not a matter of public testimony4. In this regard the emeritus Anglican Archbishop, Desmond Tutu, tells with his trademark humor of a Thabo Mbeki who ‘paced up and down outside smoking his pipe’ while he was administering the sacraments to Oliver Tambo inside a London house (Tutu 2017:359). References like these to the spiritual life of OR Tambo – or for that matter, any other ANC leader – are sparse and appear as single lines on his life and have not yet been the subject of a concentrated study. Brigalia Bam5, an Anglican woman and civic leader comments: ‘Very little is often said about Oliver Reginald Tambo’s lifelong, abiding and militant Christianity’ (Bam 2017), and in the wake of Tambo’s death, his dear friend, Father Trevor Huddleston, would lament: ‘It hasn’t come out nearly sufficiently in the obituaries, what a deeply religious person Oliver was and how much principle, ethical and moral principle mattered to him, far, far more than any political philosophy’6.

3 This interesting point was made by Sophie du Bruyn whose home in exile was often a dwelling place for the traveling Tambo (Personal Communication, 7 March 2018, OR Tambo International Airport). 4 For an excellent treatment of the ANC and religion, see Barney Pityana (2015). 5 Brigalia Bam recalls receiving messages from the International Red Cross after they visited Mandela in prison, and they would communicate the same to Tambo in London by his codename ‘Holy Cross Mission’ – a school attended by both of them (Bam 2015). 6 Trevor Huddleston in May 1993, quoted in notes shared with the author by Luli Callinicos (2018).

234 A Faith that Does Justice: The Public Testimony of Oliver Tambo

The concept of interiority in the life of Oliver Tambo In telling the full story about the spiritual life of OR Tambo, I want to take a different approach to the place of religion in the life of liberation leaders than some of the references. Of the little known about the devotion of Oliver Tambo (and others, like Mandela), the primary treatment is on the exteriority of his faith – that is, the public expression of his Christian values and commitments7. First, many tributes refer to Tambo’s association with Canon Collins (Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, London) who famously referred to Tambo as his African son (an appellation he himself would claim on occasion), and with Father Trevor Huddleston (Missionary of the Community of the Resurrection sent from England to St Peters in Rosettenville, Johannesburg) to whom Tambo wrote that memorable and moving letter in his last days: ‘Nothing is more precious to me than our unbroken friendship over 50 years’ and then, ‘your concerns, Father, are also mine’8. Using the same frame of reference, Tambo’s faith is often claimed in relation to his family’s conversion, or his attendance of a series of mission schools (Methodist and Anglican), or his membership of an Anglican Hall of residence at the then Fort Hare University College, or his church attendance and familiarity with church rituals, or even his annual retreat at the Community of the Resurrection in Yorkshire, England. All of these exteriorities together reflect Tambo’s circumstances and choices over the 75 years of his life. However, these exteriorities do not in themselves reveal his deep and abiding inner commitments as a Christian, that can be referred to as the interiority of his faith. What does this mean? This notion of interiority is what the Jesuit theologian and intellectual, Bernard Lonergan, describes as foundational self-presence, a realm in which each person dwells within him/herself9 (O’Sullivan 2014:62). Interiority in this vein means both an alertness and a responsiveness to the call of the divine, something that originates from within the self. Where, for others, the response

7 For an example of this exteriority principle applied to the analysis of a spiritual life of a liberation leader, see Dion Forster (2014). 8 Trevor Huddleston (1993) recalls in his published Obituary to Tambo these exact words from the letter sent to him by Tambo five months earlier. 9 Lonergan is insightfully interpreted on the concept of interiority by Michael O’Sullivan (2014).

235 Jonathan D. Jansen to duty might come from ingrained habits or social pressure, interiority is a response to an inner voice which calls for commitment (Dupre 1997). The master on the interior life in Western thought was of course Augustine. For him, interiority is a place of contemplation to which one returns, for it is there, in that inner world where that truth resides, light is found, and the inner self discovered. And it is in that place of constant and anxious seeking after the divine that the call can be heard (Harding 2010). For Lonergan interiority positions the devotee as ‘always already, open to the world and to ourselves precisely because of the reflexive and relational character of our inwardness’ (O’Sullivan 2014:62). Interiority does not therefore mean private, individual devotion in the sense of ‘a spirituality of detachment from the engagement with the public realm’ (O’Sullivan 2014:62); it is rather the outward expression of an inward devotion. Exteriority, the opposite, is not possible therefore without being present to oneself (Morelli 2012).

He heard the call This quest to inquire more deeply into the fervent faith of Oliver Tambo emerged from a critical passage in the speech that his comrade, Nelson Mandela, delivered at his funeral, and is worth quoting at length (Mbeki 2017b:xxi):

Somewhere in the mystery of your essence, you heard the call that you must devote your life to the creation of a new South African nation. And having heard that call, you did not hesitate to act…it may be that all of us will never the able to discover what it was in your essence which convinced you that you, and us, could, by our conscious and deliberate actions, so heal our fractured society that out of the terrible heritage, there could be born a nation. All humanity knows what you had to do to create the conditions for all of us to reach this glorious end (emphasis added).

Nelson Mandela was onto something. There was much more to Oliver Tambo than the fact that he was educated at mission schools, or that he had prominent Christian friends. There was something in the deep interior of his life, however

236 A Faith that Does Justice: The Public Testimony of Oliver Tambo elusive, that could possibly explain his remarkable life as a moral leader of a liberation movement. Mandela refers to the interiority of Tambo’s spiritual life, as ‘essence’, as the area in which to try and make sense of someone once described as ‘a man imprisoned by his Christian hope’ (Brown 2017:331). One way, methodologically, to make sense of the Christian, Tambo, is to rely on public testimonies. A testimony is of course a standard form of witnessing in the evangelical churches, to tell others about your spiritual transformation. This was not unfamiliar territory to Oliver Tambo at all, like on an occasion when he addressed the mainline church leaders in Britain and Ireland in order to counter the demeaning of the ANC and its leaders as ‘terrorists’ by the Thatcher government. Those leaders would learn of his Christian devotion and his ambitions to become a priest; they have heard of the inspiration that his mentor, Albert Luthuli – ‘a Christian first, a politician second’ (Samuel 2017:53)10 – had on his spiritual life. On that occasion the Tambo speech and the questions-and-answers that followed ‘felt rather like an old-time testimony meeting’ (Brown 2017:331).

On the road he asked his disciples: ‘Who do men say that I am?’ (Mk 8:33) The intention here is to draw on the testimonies of others in relation to Tambo’s spiritual and humane values, as there are abundant testimonials about Tambo and his life. The goal is to compile a range of testimonies – principally, but not only from Pallo Jordan’s 2017 collection of tributes (Oliver Tambo remembered) (Jordan [2007] 2017a) – that focus on his spiritual life and then to (re)interpret those eye- and ear-witness accounts with reference to the interiority or essence of the man. In the process of reinterpreting Tambo, some of the common misconceptions about the man among his closest friends will be challenged – for example, that he separated his faith from his activism. We should begin, however, with his roots.

The wellspring of his faith Tambo’s first contact was with charismatic Christians near his home – those hellfire-and-brimstone believers of the Full Gospel Church. Their Pentecostal

10 This, says Harold Samuel, was Chief Luthuli’s public witness (Samuel 2017:53).

237 Jonathan D. Jansen campaign of 1930 no doubt influenced the family’s spiritual trajectory, starting with the conversion of his father, Mzimeni. It was the personal and spontaneous expressions of faith among these evangelicals that touched Tambo deeply in contrast to the more scheduled rites and rituals of the Anglicans. As he witnessed an evangelist, called Matthew, kneeling in earnest prayer, Tambo remembers a life-changing moment:

I was thunderstruck. It seemed like he was talking to a friend. This was more than the prayer as I understood it. He was talking to somebody. I said to myself...Why can’t we talk to [God] as a friend, and converse, talking to a person? That struck me, and it introduced a new dimension to my own prayer. Even as I now went back to school, some of the results were remarkable. And I knew that my prayer was very powerful (Callinicos [2011] 2017:56-57).

These ‘born-again’ Christians with their fiery faith were not, however, the place where Oliver Tambo would find his spiritual home. Could it be that his oft-described personality – reticent, reserved, and retiring – drew him towards the much less bouncy Christianity of mainstream ? As he put it, reflecting on his college campus experiences (Fort Hare) that, having met the Pentecostals, ‘my religious life took on a new and more personalized character. I developed a liking for the early morning Holy Communion [Anglican] service that would normally be held in a chapel, which, because it was early, attracted few people. Often I was the only one attending’ (Macmillan 2013:17). However, long before this precocious youth entered University College, he started off in a Methodist primary school where learning tonic sol- fa in particular shaped his long-term love of spiritual music. But school was generally boring to the young boy and so he played truant. Then a priest invited him and one of his stepbrothers to the Anglican Holy Cross Mission (near Flagstaff, Eastern Cape) and a profound episode in his Christian journey touched him:

I arrived there on Easter Day with one of my stepbrothers, and I shall never forget the moment. We entered the great church while the Mass of Easter was being sung. I can still see the red cassocks of the servers, the grey smoke of the incense, the vestments of the priests at the altar…it was a new world (Macmillan 2013:12).

238 A Faith that Does Justice: The Public Testimony of Oliver Tambo

As he moved from the transformative influence of the evangelicals in Kantolo to the Ludeke Methodist School to the Anglican Mission School of Holy Cross, Tambo was baptized at least three times – twice by immersion in a local river (evangelicals, Methodist) and the third time by the pouring of water over his head (Anglican). These acts of baptism confirmed for the young man that he had ‘now’ become a Christian, ‘an acknowledged Christian’ and a member of the church (Macmillan 2013:57). This soft competition among rural missions for the soul of Oliver Tambo had the opposite effect on the convert, for he developed a strong sense of ecumenism and the inclusion of all faiths to which he was open, being impressed by them throughout the formative years of his youth. ‘As far as I was concerned’, Tambo would later reflect, ‘it made no difference if I was a Methodist or an Anglican’ (Macmillan 2013:58). The mission schools that shaped Tambo were nonetheless costly. His school fees were partly paid by his two sisters in England and he wrote regular letters of thanks to them, one of which revealed that he was baptized by a Bishop just before his eleventh birthday. Tambo repeated a few years of primary school, in part because he was waiting for a secondary school place that he could afford. Another priest helped him go to school at St Peter’s school in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, which belonged to the Anglican Community of the Resurrection. He did exceptionally well at St Peter’s and was one of the few first class passes in the country, writing a common examination (black and white) with a distinction in mathematics. At Fort Hare he continues his Christian devotion – an abstainer from alcohol and, apparently, celibate as a student (Macmillan 2017)11, while leading the college choirs. He landed in trouble with the university authorities on a dispute whether a campus tennis court could be used on a Sunday. The authorities pronounced that the strike had to end, and with that they demanded a pledge of good behavior in the future. ‘I asked the warden for time to pray about this’, said Tambo and after some time in the chapel, he refused: ‘It would have killed my religion stone dead – this strange agreement with the Almighty’. He was promptly expelled, but first went back to the chapel to pray where a light near the Blessed Sacrament told him ‘[t]hat somewhere, however dark, there is a light’ (Macmillan 2017:20). Tambo left Fort Hare for a teaching position at St Peters and from there he went on to meet Father Huddleston and

11 This is according to the simple and well-written account of his life by Hugh Macmillan (2017).

239 Jonathan D. Jansen eventually became an active member and later on the leader of the ANC, before fleeing into exile.

Faith in hard places It was in the difficult years of exile that Tambo’s political ideas evolved, and his spiritual commitments would be tested in the furnace of material hardship, the separation from his family, the longevity of apartheid, and the death of comrades at the hands of the regime. It is this furnace that Jeremy Cronin refers to when he speaks of ‘the sociology of exile, its paranoias and factionalisms’ (Macmillan 2013:8), and to which Hugh Macmillan (2013:1) would attribute ‘homesickness, loneliness, pain, alienation, sense of loss, and the waste of energy and time’. If one wanted to really know the essence of a man like Tambo, it would surely be revealed under those exacting years of exile. What then are the testimonies of people about this remarkable activist, humanist, and believer? The responses to this question are framed through a creative display of the keywords used at least twice – some many more – by Tambo’s friends, family, and associates, and that together describe his leadership over the course of the exile years. Here is what they said of this man:

(Personal archive)

240 A Faith that Does Justice: The Public Testimony of Oliver Tambo

The church for and against apartheid The faith context in which Tambo lived his life as a liberation leader is itself revealing. Through the dark night of struggle under colonialism, segregation, and apartheid, there was the fervent faith of the white Afrikaner nationalists and their political leaders expressed through the Dutch Reformed Church. These pious, devout believers saw no contradiction between the oppression of black people and the teachings of scripture. And then there were the black African nationalists and their leaders who, reading the same scriptures, came to understand the evils of racial subjugation by a white government. South Africa must have been one of a few countries where, on a Sunday, both the oppressor class and the oppressed prayed to God for deliverance from the other. For Tambo there were two churches: Those who justified the oppression of black people, and those who fought for their liberation. In one breath he could criticize what he called ‘the civilising mission’ (Brown 2017:327) of the church, while acknowledging that he was a graduate of mission schools in rural and urban South Africa. He would condemn the behavior of church leaders who supported apartheid violence and at the same time seek out church leaders to join the struggle against apartheid. As already indicated, his closest friendships included great churchmen of his generation, like Collins and Huddleston. In short, for Tambo the church was neither innocent nor irrelevant in the anti-apartheid struggle and became one of the fronts of the fight for justice (Kleinschmidt 2017). It is in this very contrast – between the false piety of white nationalists in the mainstream South African churches and the spiritual devotion of Tambo – that his interiority shines through and his witness speaks volumes. As Judith Scott (2017:353) would testify of him, ‘I had witnessed so much racism and inhumanity perpetrated by those who purported to be Christian…What a contrast to the warmth of the hospitality I received at Muswell Hill (the Tambo family home in London)’. Tambo did not therefore stand apart from the church in his personal testimony; in other words, the church was not something else, external to himself, a body to be criticized or embraced. He lived church. In Luli Callinicos’ single-paragraph reference to Tambo’s interiority titled But what of Tambo’s inner life?, his biographer in this studied account of the leader recognizes that he was

241 Jonathan D. Jansen

a private man who by and large expressed his inner self through his spiritual resources…No matter how gruelling his schedule, he would find time to pray, and whenever possible, attend church – sometimes in the early hours of the morning before the day’s work began. Joe Matthews, who was his personal assistant in the sixties, observed Tambo’s prayers, and the need – far too seldom – to take stock of himself (Callinicos [2011] 2017:447).

This is what church meant to him – a living testimony to the outside of what he believed in the inside. In this sense, even his closest comrades failed to understand the interiority of the man as inextricably linked to the exteriority of his testimony. Tambo did therefore not live two lives or two compartmentalized existences as wrongly suggested by Ben Turok (2017:229): ‘Oliver kept various roles and values in distinct compartments, rarely allowing overlap between them. This was why Christians with deep faith were able to relate to him in a special way as one of their own’. These two sentences contradict each other in terms of Christian witnessing. It is in fact Tambo’s internal faith, his essence, that shone through in his public testimony, that drew all towards him – atheist and believer alike – as the testimonies below will show. He was not one person on the inside and another on the outside. Emeka Anyaoku (2017:270) states correctly: ‘Oliver derived unfailing strength and inspiration from his faith…His faith bred in him a steadfastness to truth, justice and fellow feeling’. Tambo could clearly not be, as another close observer confirms, a ‘disembodied machine by his Christian values’ (Callinicos [2011] 2017:448). His deep interior life would come to be expressed in his perspective on his life. For example, Luli Callinicos tells that in his intimate letters to his wife as well as his taped memoirs, Tambo would often refer to the unexpected course of his life and his altered ambitions as a consequence of divine intervention:

…his choice of school, his hope for a career as a medical doctor, his plans to become a parish priest, and Luthuli’s sending him into exile to tell the world about Apartheid immediately after Sharpeville. OR

242 A Faith that Does Justice: The Public Testimony of Oliver Tambo

and Adelaide earnestly discussed the instruction from the ANC [and] both concluded that this was God’s plan for them (Callinicos 2018)12.

It could therefore not be true that of ‘his Christian faith…he never spoke,’ as Ronnie Kasrils puts it (Kasrils 2017:85). Here was a man who explained to Diana Collins who counseled him, that he could not rest, because, as he said, ‘I was born to become a priest and talk to people of love and reconciliation’ (Wastberg 2017:317). He then took to the pulpit at the funeral of her husband (Canon Collins) and read to the assembled congregation the powerful story of The Good Samaritan. Referencing the Samaritan story, Tambo concluded his commentary with the urgent question: ‘Why are our fellow humans even today still being robbed along the Jericho road?’ (Jordan 2017b:22). Tambo certainly spoke his faith. One of his bodyguards recalled: ‘[Tambo] ensured that all of us went to church, especially on significant days such as ’ (Msimanga 2017:160). When pastors or priests in the exiled movement went to seek his counsel, Tambo would encourage them to ‘keep doing what you’re doing to assist those in need of faith’ (Mokhele 2018)13. It was the same man who, at an international consultation organized by the World Council of Churches, and disrupted by both black power and white right activists, would conclude his stirring address with the Christian preacher’s clarion call: ‘Who is on the Lord’s side?’ (Webb 2017:24). Parenthetically, this kind of public testimony is reminiscent of the well-known and, for some in the liberation movement, uneasy declaration of his Christian mentor, Albert Luthuli, that ‘the road to freedom is via the cross’ (Suttner 2010)14. This is as powerful a statement of Christian conviction as any other, for the cross is central to the Christian gospel and, in particular, represents the symbol of ultimate sacrifice in the place of someone else (substitutionary death). Is this perhaps what Nelson Mandela understood about

12 I am very grateful to Professor Callinicos for sharing these notes from her continuing research into the life of OR Tambo, in an e-mail sent to me on 9 March 2018. 13 These are recollections of ‘Commander’ Tsietsie Mokhele who served in the Angolan camps and studied in the Soviet Union. The telephonic interview was conducted on Sunday 11 March 2018. 14 Raymond Suttner, one of the ANC’s freedom fighters, makes an attempt to unravel the possible meanings of the cross in Tambo’s famous Road to freedom speech (Suttner 2010).

243 Jonathan D. Jansen the interiority of Oliver Tambo as a Christian when his daughter, Zinzi, delivered her imprisoned father’s message to a packed Jabulani Stadium in Soweto, 1985?:

Oliver Tambo is much more than a brother to me. He is my greatest friend and comrade for nearly fifty years. If there is any one amongst you who cherishes my freedom, Oliver Tambo cherishes it more, and I know that he would give his life to see me free. There is no difference between his views and mine (Mandela 1985).

The clause ‘he would give his life to see me free’ might sound a little over the top, but these words formed part of a revolutionary statement by Mandela to reassure the crowds that he was not making deals from prison for his own freedom without consulting the exiled leader of the ANC, his friend, Oliver Tambo. Fact is that Mandela’s speeches were never hyperbolic – bold and persistent, yes, but not emotionally excessive. This is therefore a considered reflection from the other person in the duo that has been described as ‘a biblical David and Jonathan relationship’ (Callinicos [2011] 2017:283): Tambo would give his life for Mandela if such a sacrifice was required for his freedom. In Matthew 27:21, 24, 25 we read the words of Jesus: ‘Not everyone who says to me “Lord, Lord”, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven…Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house upon a rock. The rains came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundations on the rock’. This selflessness is another way in which Tambo referred to his faith, not in words but in deeds. It is the Christian doing something rather than just say something, as Jesus said in John 14:15, ‘If you love me, keep my commands’. This notion of living one’s faith through what one does rather than what one professes is fundamental to the public testimony of the believer – and nobody in the ANC leadership carried this testimony to the outside world more powerfully than Tambo. In the next quote, Kader Asmal also misunderstands this outer expression of the inner life of faith when he, like others, says of Luthuli and Tambo that ‘[b]oth…were profoundly religious though neither allowed [their] beliefs to obtrude on personal relationships’ (Asmal 2017:34). This is only true

244 A Faith that Does Justice: The Public Testimony of Oliver Tambo if one regards personal faith as a barrier to inter-human relationships – something that inevitably causes friction among those who believe differently or not at all. This was not Tambo’s ecumenical and inclusive understanding of his faith – something captured in a different observation of Asmal. On receiving and reading John Bunyan’s classic on Chief Luthuli, Asmal concludes that ‘OR’s life resembled the life of Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress’ (Asmal 2017:33). In short, it was in fact Tambo’s faith that made such warm and inclusive human relations possible in the first place. Tambo, in Christian terms, therefore lived the fruits of the Spirit – the outward expression of a deep, inner transformation – and everybody witnessed it. Reg September gives Tambo high honors with this extraordinary appellation: ‘[O]ne of the world’s greatest revolutionary Christian gentlemen’ (September 2017:201), thereby capturing three shades of his indivisible devotion: The freedom fighter, the believer, and the humanist. Once again, his mentor, Chief Luthuli, echoes this understanding of the oneness of faith and politics with his famous remark: ‘I am in Congress precisely because I am a Christian’ (Couper 2010) – almost an unthinkable public statement by an ANC leader in the 21st century. But how does this three-part devotion come together in the life of Oliver Tambo during the hard days of exile? Consider this recollection by Rita Mfenyana. The terrible news had just reached the exiled community and its leader that the freedom fighter, Solomon Mahlangu, had been executed by the apartheid regime. Then Tambo responded: ‘They have done it; they have killed him’. Mfenyana observes this about the man and that moment: ‘There was pain and dejection in his face; the burden was too heavy…Then the singing of hymns and freedom songs started’ (Mfenyana 2017:131). Albie Sachs also tries to make sense of these interconnections of his devotion when he observes that ‘at the core of his [Tambo’s] faith was a set of principles very close to [the] humanist and rationalist values’ (Sachs 2017b:254). What becomes clear from these testimonies is the notion of one man whose exterior life flowed seamlessly from his interior devotion, and people witnessed it, including his family on his infrequent visits to their London home. His son, Dali Tambo, would recall the following as he listened through the walls of their London home: ‘When he would come, my mother and him would talk for hours, through the night into the next morning…

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Sometimes I would hear them singing hymns for like 3 hours, seriously 3 hours in their bedroom’ (Tambo 2018). Indeed, many others would have felt the strength of this witness in their own life. Scott (2017:353) witnesses: ‘My abiding memory is of the generosity of spirit and deep humanity that pervaded Oliver’s whole being’. Even Tambo’s protégé, and future president of the party, would acknowledge that he has set the standard for public leadership and commitment: ‘OR became our exemplar’ (Mbeki 2017b:269). This capacity to reconcile the gentleness of his humanity, the strength of his faith and the resoluteness of his political mission comes together powerfully in this frequently quoted passage from Tambo’s address to the World Council of Churches in 1980:

When those who worship Christ shall have, in pursuit of a just peace, taken up arms against those who hold the majority in subjection by force of arms, then shall it truly be said of such worshippers also: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God’ (Macmillan 2013:184).

It is these connected qualities of Tambo, the man that gave him the moral authority to lead in those hard years. His very presence commanded respect and channeled appropriate behavior among those who fought for the liberation of their country. Commander Tsietsie Mokhele from the Angolan campus remembers that while nobody really got very close to Tambo, ‘we felt strongly that we knew him enough to follow him’ and that ‘a significant part of what kept you going in the years of exile was leaning on him’ (Mokhele 2018). That moral authority also captured the attention of those in the broader international community whose support Tambo sought and regarded as vital to the struggle to end apartheid. Michael Siefert (2017:257) was one of those who noticed ‘the enormous moral authority and dignity that permeated everything he said. People knew they were in the presence of someone whose integrity was absolute’. Others too would tell of ‘the consistent humanity of his vision and its reliance on the highest ideals of ethical conduct’ (Bindman 2017:237) – an orientation which had its roots in Tambo’s upbringing, for he was no doubt ‘trained since childhood in the moral discourse of Christianity’ (Callinicos [2011] 2017:276).

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The man who held the ANC together in exile Apart from his role in international diplomacy, selling the cause of the ANC to foreign governments, this is the most common description of Tambo’s role in exile. According to his biographer, ‘the bulk of Tambo’s emotional energy was directed at holding together the movement’ (Callinicos [2011] 2017:452). It was Tambo’s exteriority – that public witness of a private faith – that gave him the moral authority to hold together the ANC’s factions and manage its fissures under the trying conditions of exile. He did more than appeal to the policies of the movement or the righteousness of the struggle: What Tambo could and did offer was the example of his life. The challenges of life in exile threatened to destroy the ANC. A few well-researched publications, such as Stephen Ellis’ External mission: The ANC in exile, 1960-199015 (Ellis 2013), emerged in the past few years. These publications cast a sharp light on the long years of banishment and the struggle to survive as an organization: • The relentless assault on the front-line states as apartheid military power, including agents and assassins, crossed borders at will, spied on the movement, and murdered comrades. There was paranoia. • The abuses in the campus, including the executions of suspected collaborators. There was bitterness. • The early signs of corruption both among leadership and the rank and file as one dreary day passed into another. There was disillusionment. • The constant movement on the ground to escape death. There was genuine fear. • The wavering commitment under apartheid pressure of some of the front-line governments that would expose the movement, such as the Nkomati Accord between the governments of South Africa and Mozambique. There was deep disappointment. • The failed military endeavors such as Wankie and Sipolilo. There was dejection.

15 The strength of this book is the quality of its overall research program. One of its weaknesses is an obsession with proving Mandela’s membership of the Communist Party, as if it mattered in the broad, tactical support of African nationalists for the mix of liberation movements and ideas.

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• The threat of rival organizations – from the Pan Africanist Congress to the South African Communist Party – at various points in the exile period. There was wariness16. • The reports from home of mass detentions and murders before, during, and after States of Emergency. There were defections. • The support of the major Western powers for the apartheid government which presented itself as the last bulwark against a Communist takeover during the Cold War. There was frustration.

Somebody extraordinary and tough had to hold together this 1912 organization against these formidable odds, and the source of this leader’s resilience was his faith. This is what one of his loyal fighters – who named his son Reginald – concluded after a long period of thinking about how Tambo kept ‘all the streams’ in the ANC together:

The issue of his spirituality, from where I am sitting…you needed somebody to sustain all the strengths, the streams, for we were dependent on the energies of this one person. I do not believe he was able to offer this only with his physical strength; it must have been because he is anchored spiritually (Mokhele 2018; emphasis added).

How did the anchor of his faith express itself in his behavior as a leader? We know now that he was, in the first instance, a humble and reluctant leader who referred to himself as ‘Acting President in recognition of Mandela, the real President, but for his imprisonment on Robben Island’17. There was no personal ambition here and certainly no opportunism to elevate himself in the absence of the Islanders.

16 Thabo Mbeki has listed these competitive challenges threatening to destroy the ANC as coming from among movements like the All African Convention (1930s), the PAC (1950s), the so-called Gang-of-Eight, as well as the Black Consciousness Movement (1970s). Of these and other challenges, ‘none of these developments succeeded to displace the ANC as…the preeminent and historic representative of the oppressed’ (Mbeki 2017a:3). 17 Tambo was in fact elected president of the ANC at the 1985 ANC Consultative Conference held in Kabwe, Zambia.

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We know that he listened carefully and empathetically to every member, big or small, who wanted to talk to him. Once everyone around a table had stated their views or made their case he would come in, summarize the inputs and offer a position informed by virtue of what he heard. There was no rush of blood to the head or even the kind of spontaneous leadership decisions that would resolve a matter on the spot. This frustrated some, but Tambo was ponderous even if his resolve was firm. Tambo’s views as a leader of the movement evolved over time on a number of critical issues. Like others, he did not initially agree on broad membership of an essentially black African movement that once excluded Coloreds, Indians, and Whites from membership, and later from senior executive positions. He was constantly suspicious of the South African Communist Party and its likely undue influence in the ANC18. Like his mentor, Luthuli, Tambo’s views on violence evolved over time to the point where he accepted the necessity of violence in response to the unrelenting violence of the South African state against black people. This position must again be seen against the backdrop of decades of petition to the post-Union government and to Western powers for relief from racialized oppression. The point is not so much that Tambo changed his views, but that he was flexible, thoughtful, and open to conviction on the basis of argument and experience. When challenged, he was considered not intemperate, but more likely to concede a point than simply to demolish critics or dismiss hecklers. This sense of fairness in exchange and of consideration of others, enabled him to lead. Indeed, for him, ‘[y]ou were all equals in a debate’ (Callinicos [2011] 2017:450). These qualities endeared him to restless comrades and wary representatives of foreign governments.

He was present at the river Tambo was always present in those most difficult years of struggle. He sacrificed seeing his family in London, being mainly on visits for ANC work where the demands on his time meant far too few moments with his wife and

18 The argument that Tambo was a dishonest politician who was always an ardent supporter of the Communists is the kind of right-wing fantasy of those still fighting the Cold War today. One such fantasy is the recent article by Leopold and Ingrid Scholtz (2017).

249 Jonathan D. Jansen children. He was always elsewhere as far as his family was concerned and yet always there as far as the struggle was concerned. On this point Mbeki sees his shadow hovering over much of the movement’s history: ‘Oliver Tambo was present…at all seminal moments in the evolution of the ANC and our struggle’ (Mbeki 2017a:6). One of the common refrains from the exile narrative is that he was there at the river – that critical moment in the Wankie military campaign as fighters dropped from the banks of a river along a rope into the darkness of the Zambesi below. Tambo was there as inspiration and example. There was no turning back as he baptized this group The Luthuli Attachment going to war. That sense of presence was not only physical but also spiritual and emotional, offering the connective tissue that held people together. One of his senior colleagues recalls: ‘OR’s life with the men…being at the river…being in the bush…his very simplicity and style, have won him substantial support and he is holding together…what is patently clear is that his leadership has been established, amongst the men in the camps and internationally’ (Callinicos [2011] 2017:452). Commander Mokhele makes a similar point, stating: ‘When we were in Angola he used to come quite regularly to the MK camps. He as the Commander in Chief came even more frequently than the people below his rank who should have been doing so’ (Mokhele 2018). That sense of presence and simplicity of lifestyle was a key window into the moral leadership of OR Tambo. He was not extravagant, and he certainly was not corrupt. Comrades recalled that he sometimes slept on the floor, while traveling through the continent. He moved frequently in order to escape capture or death. He was an ordinary man eschewing displays of privilege and not abusing the authority of his standing as leader of the ANC. That is why one of his comrades observed ‘a very bread-and-butter type of Christianity’ and conclude that ‘I haven’t seen anybody more Christian than Oliver Tambo’ (Callinicos [2011] 2017:448). It was also this sense of practical Christianity that lent him ‘the ability to inspire the cadres spiritually, rekindling in them a sense of selfhood and personal fulfilment’ (Callinicos [2011] 2017:467). This certainly did not mean that Tambo was perfect (Callinicos 2018) or that his moral leadership prevented a minority within the exiled community

250 A Faith that Does Justice: The Public Testimony of Oliver Tambo from corrupt, abusive or exploitative behavior19. But the comrades knew without a doubt where their leadership stood on these matters and many would take their lead from the reluctant president. As Albie Sachs recalls, ‘[Tambo’s] intrinsic sense of political honour made him totally and utterly opposed to attempts by people to use the name of the struggle for material accumulation, personal or family enrichment, sexual favours or individual ambition’ (Sachs 2017a:7).

‘The end of an error’ This was a media headline as the fourth president of the democratic South Africa was effectively fired. Jacob Zuma was in every way the antithesis of OR Tambo. Venal, corrupt, incompetent, tribal, manipulative, and vindictive, this senior leader of the movement had to defend himself against rape charges in court, face 783 charges of fraud, corruption and money-laundering, and was found by the highest court of the land to have ‘failed to defend, uphold and respect the Constitution as the supreme law of the land’ (Mogoeng 2016). Zuma did not elect himself; he was the product of a movement that, despite some outstanding leaders within the party, had become corrupted at its core and this was reflected in, inter alia, the disastrous state of the public service and the state-owned enterprises. One after the other simmering publication would bring to light the depth of the corruption within the state, including the selling-off of the state to a wealthy family that South Africans have come to describe as ‘state capture’ (cf. Jacques Pauw 2017; Crispian Olver 2017; Adriaan Basson & Pieter du Toit 2017). It is very likely that the former president could have charges reinstated against him and that he might end up in prison. How did the once glorious movement of Dube, Luthuli, and Tambo fall into such disrepair? What at root was the cause of the demise of the ANC not as an electoral force, yet, but as the liberation movement that held the moral high ground by virtue of its founding values and fighting history as the party that helped bring South Africa democracy? One of the main reasons for the

19 From letters to Adelaide it appears that Tambo must have been at pains to explain his family’s residence in London and who paid for her travels to be with her husband in Lusaka (Callinicos 2018).

251 Jonathan D. Jansen demise of the organization was the loss of moral leadership as demonstrated in the life of Oliver Tambo. There was, again, this strong connection between the private man and the public leader; his protégé puts this well, that ‘[i]t was not possible that Oliver Tambo could achieve what he did as a leader of the ANC…unless he had the personal capacity and attributes in this regard…the character of this eminent patriot and leader of our people’ (Mbeki 2017a:1). Needless to say, such moral leadership does not need to emerge from spiritual or religious devotions of leaders, and here Mandela is a good example of a moral leader who was respectful and even acknowledging of the life of faith, but for all intents and purposes Madiba was largely non-observant with respect to religion – as he once told Charles Villa-Vicencio in an interview on the subject, ‘No, I am not particularly religious or spiritual’ (Makgoba 2017:122). For Tambo, on the other hand, the strength of his leadership derived from his interior life, his spiritual devotion. The difference, therefore, between Zuma and his post-apartheid administration, and Tambo and his organization-in-exile, is moral leadership. Albie Sachs, a close observer of Tambo, makes this point well, no doubt with the Zuma government in mind:

So much depended on the quality of the leadership being given at the time. If those at the top had been avid for the spoils of war, our struggle would soon have turned in on itself and imploded…Fortunately for us, for our struggle and for South Africa, people like Oliver Tambo… provided honest, principled and dedicated leadership…if our top leader and those around him had lacked integrity and been corrupt, then soon the whole organisation all the way down would have been engulfed by opportunism, maneuvering and self-enrichment (Sachs 2017a:20).

That was then, in the long years of exile under the leadership of Tambo. Now, under the Zuma presidency, the moral pendulum had swung the other way, as Thabo Mbeki observed of his beloved organization when he bemoaned ‘the entrenchment within the ANC of a rapacious and predatory value system and the ascendance to positions of authority or major influence in the leadership structures of the ANC…at all levels of leadership’ (Mbeki 2017a:17).

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The question that remains is this: Is this decay of the movement, the government, and the country reversible?

Conclusion As the Anglican Archbishop Thabo Makgoba moved towards the casket, carrying the body of Oliver Tambo for purposes of ‘incensing and blessing his remains’, he felt an unexpected jolt:

Accustomed to photos of OR looking like a venerable grandfather in suit and whiskered face, I was startled when I opened the lid of the coffin to find a body in full military uniform. For a moment I thought it was a trick of the forces of apartheid, but on recognising the familiar markings of the amaMpondo people on his face, I realised it was indeed OR, in the uniform of an MK soldier (Makgoba 2017:100).

In death as in life, discipleship and duty were the same thing. There could be no more powerful testimony to a faithful life devoted to the freedom of his people. Like the external scarification on his cheeks marked the Pondo identity of Tambo, so too did the internal scarification on his heart leave no doubt as to his Christian devotion. This quest to understand his ‘essence’ has revealed a man whose political convictions were borne from a deep inner persuasion of the duty to serve. As a result, his politics was neither cynical nor self-serving, but committed and selfless. In this his Christian identity was indivisible from his struggle identity. What does this meditation on the life of OR Tambo mean for the moral crisis faced by his beloved organization and the country for which he fought? It is clear from Tambo’s life that leadership matters, especially under conditions of crisis and duress. However, his is a particular kind of leadership that held together a community and changed the fate of a nation. Tambo’s leadership came from within through a deep conviction to a set of core values that expressed itself outwardly through service, selflessness and single-minded devotion to the struggle over decades. It is a leadership that was remarkably

253 Jonathan D. Jansen influential over a large territory and diverse groupings of followers inside and outside South Africa. It may be too early to foretell the prospects for a deepening of democracy, decency, and development within a post-Zuma South Africa. There are, however, indications that the new leadership in government under President Ramaphosa might well chart a new path that reverses the erosive corruption within the state (such as in the state-owned enterprises and the tender system), the weakening of democratic institutions (such as the public protector and the prosecuting authority), and the growing inequality in basic services (such as school education and public health).

Nobody talks about rainbows anymore Above all, the new leadership has the vital task of reinspiring hope among those who still feel exiled from the social and economic freedom for which Tambo and many others sacrificed their life. As this meditation has shown, such Tamboan leadership will have to deliver much more than well-intentioned policies (such as land reform) or sophisticated plans (such as the NDP – the national development plan). What will be required is nothing less than a courageous and determined moral leadership founded on those values that inspired OR Tambo so that those policies and plans find real purchase in the life of ordinary South Africans.

A faith that does justice In 2017, Georgetown’s president, John DeGioia, led a moving apology on behalf of the university community to the descendants of 272 slaves who were sold in 1838 and the money used to pay off the university’s debts (Sullivan 2017). There is no doubt that Oliver Tambo, for whom Georgetown University has a Lecture named in his honor, would today own these words of courage and compassion spoken by DeGioia (2017): ‘[T]he urgent demands of justice still present in our time [and that] we build a more just world with honest reflection on our past and commitment to a faith that does justice’ (emphasis added). Those words powerfully summarize the essence of Tambo – a faith that does justice – and sets the standard for moral leadership and social activism whether in post-apartheid South Africa or in Trump’s America.

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Mbeki, T.M. 2017a. Lecture by the patron of the TMF, Thabo Mbeki, on the occasion of the celebration of the centenary of the birth of Oliver Reginald Tambo, 27 October 2017, Johannesburg. Mbeki, T.M. 2017b. Oliver Tambo: ‘A great giant who strode the globe like a colossus’. In Jordan, P.Z. (ed.): Oliver Tambo remembered. Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan South Africa. Mfenyana, R. 2017. A man of many talents. In Jordan, P.Z. (ed.): Oliver Tambo remembered. Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan South Africa. Mogoeng, M.T.R. 2016. Constitutional court of South Africa in the matter of Economic Freedom Fighters v Speaker of the National Assembly and Others; Democratic Alliance v Speaker of the National Assembly and Others. ZACC 11, Cases 143/15 and CCT 171/15, Section 83:41. Mokhele, T. 2018. Telephonic interview conducted on 11 March 2018 between the author and Mokhele. Morelli, E. 2012. After theory: A commonsense approach to interiority. Emory University, 28 October 2012. Available at: https://www.lonergan- resource.com/pdf/contributors/LOE-2012-11_Eric_Morelli.pdf. (Accessed on 12 August 2018.) Moloantoa, D. 2016. The contested but pivotal history of missionary education in South Africa. The Heritage Portal, 15 September 2016. Available at: http://www.theheritageportal.co.za/article/contested-pivotal-legacy- missionary-education-south-africa. (Accessed on 12 August 2018.) Msimanga, T. 2017. OR’s security unit in exile. In Jordan, P.Z. (ed.): Oliver Tambo remembered. Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan South Africa. O’Sullivan, M. 2014. The spirituality of authentic interiority and the option for the economically poor. Vinayasadhana 5, 1: 62-74. Olver, C. 2017. How to steal a city: The battle for Nelson Mandela Bay. Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers. Pauw, J. 2017. The president’s keepers: Those keeping Zuma in power and out of prison. Cape Town: Tafelberg Publishers. Pityana, B. 2015. The inter-faith movement and the Mandela dream. Inter- Faith Council Lecture, Nelson Mandela Foundation, 5 December 2015, The Centre for Memory, Houghton, Johannesburg. Sachs, A. 2017a. The quiet South African. In Jordan, P.Z. (ed.): Oliver Tambo remembered. Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan South Africa. Sachs, A. 2017b. Oliver Tambo’s dream: Four lectures by Albie Sachs. Cape Town: African Lives.

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Samuel, H. 2017. Gandhi, Luthuli, Mandela: The struggle for non-violence in South Africa. Johannesburg: C&R Printing Works. Scott, J. 2017. Hospitality at Muswell Hill. In Jordan, P.Z. (ed.): Oliver Tambo remembered. Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan South Africa. Scholtz, L. & I. Scholtz 2017. Oliver Tambo en die kommunisme. Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe 57, 4: 939-954. September, R. 2017. A culture of service and sacrifice. In Jordan, P.Z. (ed.): Oliver Tambo remembered. Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan South Africa. Siefert, M. 2017. A vigilant guardian. In Jordan, P.Z. (ed.): Oliver Tambo remembered. Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan South Africa. Sullivan, S. 2017. Georgetown University, Jesuits formally apologize for role in slavery. USA Today Network, 18 April 2017. Available at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/04/18/george- town-university-jesuits-slavery-apology/100607942/. (Accessed on 12 August 2018.) Suttner, R. 2010. ‘The road to freedom is via the cross’: ‘Just means’ in Chief Albert Luthuli’s life. South African Historical Journal 62, 4: 693-715. Tambo, D. 2018. The son of Oliver Tambo in the television documentary, Have you heard from Johannesburg? Available at: http://www.clarityfilms. org/haveyouheardfromjohannesburg/. (Accessed on 12 August 2018.) Turok, B. 2017. The ANC incarnate. In Jordan, P.Z. (ed.): Oliver Tambo remembered. Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan South Africa. Tutu, D. 2017. Reluctant freedom fighter. In Jordan, Z.P. (ed.): Oliver Tambo remembered. Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan South Africa. Wastberg, P. 2017. An inner compass. In Jordan, Z.P. (ed.): Oliver Tambo remembered. Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan South Africa. Webb, P. 2017. Father of a boisterous family. In Jordan, Z.P. (ed.): Oliver Tambo remembered. Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan South Africa.

Jonathan D. Jansen Education Policy Studies Stellenbosch University [email protected]

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Will Religion Survive? A Critical Discussion of the Divergent Answers of two Atheists: Archaeologist David Lewis-Williams and Philosopher of Religion J.L. Schellenberg

Martin Prozesky [email protected]

Abstract Underlying this article are the questions of how to demarcate the phenomena to which the term ‘religion’ refers, and of how to differentiate between interpreting and explaining such phenomena – a matter to which David Chidester has offered guidance. These questions are approached by considering a different but closely related question: Does religion have a future, as answered in important recent books by two eminent scholars, both of them atheists, working in very different academic disciplines. These are the books of archaeologist, David Lewis-Williams, Conceiving God: The cognitive origins and evolution of religion (Lewis-Williams 2010) and philosopher of religion, J.E. Schellenberg’s more recent work, Evolutionary religion (Schellenberg 2013). These works provide divergent answers to whether religion has a future – a divergence arising from different views about what constitutes religion. This article refers to their respective views, then provides a critical discussion of both, and ends by engaging, where relevant, with ideas in the work of David Chidester.

Keywords: future religion, evolution, brain science, unethical religion, explanation, interpretation

Journal for the Study of Religion 31, 2 (2018) 259-275 259 Online ISSN 2413-3027; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a12 Martin Prozesky

Introduction Two recent works by leading scholars offer conflicting accounts about the future of religion. Eminent South African archaeologist, David Lewis- Williams, internationally known for his expertise on the meaning of prehistoric rock and cave art, contends in his 2010 book, The cognitive origin and evolution of religion, that religion has no future. Canadian philosopher of religion, J.L. Schellenberg, author of an acclaimed trilogy in his field (Schellenberg 2005; 2007; 2009), offers a very different view in his most recent book, Evolutionary religion (Schellenberg 2013). Both scholars take science and especially evolution as a given, but they interpret its implications for religion differently; both reveal exceptional knowledge of religion, but also define it differently in reaching their divergent verdicts about what lies ahead for religion. This article presents and contrasts the essentials of their respective accounts. It does so briefly in connection with Lewis-Williams, because much of his important book is a wealth of illustrative and supportive details which need not be mentioned for the purposes of this article; it does so in much greater detail in connection with the views of his Canadian counterpart because of his greater attention to the future of religion. The article then offers a critical conclusion about which account is more persuasive on factual and logical grounds.

Lewis-Williams on the nature and fate of religion The book of Lewis-Williams reveals a great erudition about important aspects of religion, brain science, evolution, anthropology, and palaeontology, in which he contends that religion, which he defines as a belief in supernatural beings and forces is a delusion (Lewis-Williams 2010:86) and that religious experience ‘is generated by the human nervous system’ (Lewis-Williams 2010:232). The preposition ‘by’ in this quotation is crucial, for he is not saying what many scientifically informed believers like Ashbrook and Albright (1997) would say, that religious experience is generated ‘through’ the human nervous system. That would leave them logically free to aver that there is at least one supernatural being or force that activates a religious experience by using the nervous system, as very skillfully laid bare by Lewis-Williams. What he means is entirely naturalistic, namely that religious experience arises from

260 Will Religion Survive? nothing but the human nervous system and especially from the way the brain works. He therefore argues that there is ‘no supernatural realm apart from the one that people create inside their heads’ (Lewis-Williams 2010:161). According to him, the problem for believers is that such experiences cannot be replicated and verified by others, unlike the way our experience of the natural environment can be checked by others for confirmation or refutation (Lewis- Williams 2010:148f). Lewis-Williams has a very sharp eye for moral and intellectual shortcomings in religion, especially in Christianity, although his criticism occasionally verges on caricature, e.g. his dismissal of Eastern religions as ‘consciousness fiddling’ (Lewis-Williams 2010:182); his contention about Augustine and Aquinas in the context of notions about demonology and witches, that their ‘obsessed, twisted minds verged on madness’ (Lewis- Williams 2010:181); when he rejects as denialists those, like theologian Alister McGrath, who do not agree that religion is a spent force (Lewis-Williams 2010:259); and when he avers that spirituality is really no more than religion’s poor cousin (Lewis-Williams 2010:275). While such statements are unfortunate, they are few in number and do not detract from the validity of the issues he identifies. While he accepts that there is much good in religion, he is even more aware of evils like the appalling violence of the kind he cites in Mayan religion and the terrible Christian cruelty, earlier in its history, towards those it deemed heretical (Lewis- Williams 2010:18-22, 185ff). For him there is no question of compatibility between religion, understood as belief in supernatural beings and forces, and science, least of all between religion and evolution. He therefore states: ‘Rational knowledge has consistently defeated revealed knowledge’ (Lewis-Williams 2010:86). He also does not accept the proposal that religion and science represent separate domains, each autonomous in its own domain, because ‘religion repeatedly impinges on the domain of science’ (Lewis-Williams 2010:117) in ways that cannot be verified, such as religious claims about physical miracles. For him no reconciliation is possible between religion, as he sees it, and science. Fundamental to his conviction that religion is destined to be eclipsed, being allegedly wanting in its core beliefs, is Lewis-Williams’s highly erudite and informative account of how well-known and important religious beliefs, like transcendence and immanence, and the belief in a three-decker universe (clearly expressed and regularly recited in Christianity’s Nicene Creed, for

261 Martin Prozesky example), connect with brain processes. According to him, when people had experiences of hearing voices in the past, or had dreams in which people appeared, these were understandably, but mistakenly, taken to show that there exists what can be called a supernatural realm, inhabited by such beings. Now we know better, he argues. His handling of this issue is very sophisticated and detailed, especially in the section on Making sense of consciousness (Lewis-Williams 2010:158- 160). This is, however, not the concern of this article. In the Preface of his book he states that ‘religion is the outcome of complex interactions between human neurology, social contexts and repeated practices’ (Lewis-Williams 2010:9). Later he adds that we ‘now know that all our inner experiences have a neurological foundation, even if we are still in the dark about the details of those foundations’ (Lewis-Williams 2010:140; cf. also 148, 232ff; emphasis added). The conclusion that Lewis-Williams infers from neurobiology is that people have powerful experiences of supernatural beings and realms because of the way the human brain functions, not because there are such supernatural beings and realms. Since there is no valid, independent evidence of them, he holds that we can rationally conclude that they simply do not exist. Science, therefore, defeats religion by showing its defining feature to be no more than the product of the mind. Belief in a supposed realm of spiritual beings is, according to Lewis- Williams, the defining feature of religion. It is clear that this excludes belief systems like Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, which are otherwise widely included in the movements generally seen as religious. They are excluded because for they make no use of that belief system, even though it is acknowledged in those cultures. Lewis-Williams’ view of religion, like that of the philosopher, Grayling (2013), is therefore narrower than that of most leading scholars who have been influential in the field of religion over the past few decades, like Ninian Smart and Richard Hecht (1982), John Hick (1989), and John Hutchinson (1981). Lewis-Williams has written an impressive book with an immense amount of material about a remarkable range of relevant fields. It should therefore be read by everybody concerned with or about religion. In addition, his criticism of moral and intellectual issues in religion must be squarely faced by believers. He agrees with the view of so-called new atheists like Richard Dawkins (2006) and Sam Harris (2006), that religion is a belief in spiritual beings, and who regards it as a spent force which no well-informed, rational,

262 Will Religion Survive? and independently ethical person can accept. The question prompted here is whether he is correct. An important new voice in philosophy of religion argues that they are not.

Schellenberg on the nature and fate of religion The aim of Schellenberg’s book, Evolutionary religion, is getting people ‘to think more seriously about the idea of evolutionary religion’ (Schellenberg 2013:6). He rejects the notion held by Lewis-Williams, by some evolutionary scientists, and also by many conservative believers, that evolution and religion are mutually hostile (Schellenberg 2013:2), defining religion quite differently and much more broadly than Lewis-Williams, and also as spanning a far longer period of time. He asserts that

religion throughout our history has seen itself as putting us in touch with higher realities than those of mundane life or the sciences that have proved so clever at charting its regularities. These allegedly higher realities are regarded as capable of benefiting us in distinctive ways, and precisely because they are viewed as higher and greater than mundane realities, the benefits flowing from them are typically regarded as higher and greater than mundane benefits, too (Schellenberg 2013:57).

According to him, religion not only has a future, but evolution allows us to think that it could well have an immensely long future in which it can be expected to evolve into new forms. His suggestion about what such a future faith might be is the most religiously important and interesting part of the book and is discussed below. He argues that, if religion would still undergo a long, evolving future, then the belief that any given religion, like certain monotheisms, is in its final form, is mistaken. This perspective allows Schellenberg to contend that homo sapiens is at present an immature species with an immature spirituality and intellect, and that it can perhaps be expected to evolve much greater brain power in the future, with much greater powers of understanding than anything we now have.

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In his Prologue and first two chapters Schellenberg bases his view that religion is still in a very early stage of development, on the concept of deep time, involving the immensely long past and a future also involving huge spans of time (Schellenberg 2013:8-33). Adopted from science, this perspective about time is based on the scientific consensus that our planet was formed about 4.3 billion years ago; that life appeared around 3.5 billion years ago; that homo sapiens emerged about 200,000 years ago; and that the earliest signs of religious awareness occurred around 50,000 years ago (Schellenberg 2013:3ff). Monotheistic religions, along with Buddhism, classical Hinduism, and the Chinese religions, have histories of at most a few thousand years. By contrast, the scientific evidence is that life on earth could exist and evolve for another billion years, a calculation based on the astronomical evidence that the sun is slowly getting hotter and will by that time have made the earth too hot for life to survive on it. It follows from this perspective that religion is now at a very early, even infant, stage of its evolution. Keeping well within this immense period of future time, Schellenberg reckons that our species could plausibly exist for another 600,000 years (Schellenberg 2013:4). Why does Schellenberg think that religion will survive as our species evolves greater brain power, contradicting Lewis-Williams and others? The reason lies in his understanding of the nature of evolution and evolutionary religion. Given the immense period of time that lies ahead for our planet, it is reasonable to expect that life will continue to evolve new forms – that includes homo sapiens. As the human’s brain is much larger than those of earlier and related species, it is reasonable to hold that it could become even larger in the future, with greater powers of understanding. Such an evolutionary development would obviously be advantageous to our species, and evolution shows that advantageous changes in a species tend to spread and supersede what has been changed. In chapters 3 and 4 of his book, Schellenberg (2013:34-70) continues to prepare the ground for his view of religion’s future, set forth in the remaining chapters, which form the key part of the book. There he accepts that skepticism like that of Lewis-Williams about present forms of religion is justified, suggesting that religion has perhaps had a bad start, locking us into its present forms and preventing us from moving forward (Schellenberg 2013:90). Against the outright dismissals of religion, Schellenberg contends that such skepticism does not imply the end of religion, holding instead that ‘a brand

264 Will Religion Survive? new way of being religious emerges…a religiousness that not only tolerates but thrives on skepticism’ (Schellenberg 2013:72). Welcoming everything that modern thought and knowledge reveal, such a new religiousness will have four main features, according to Schellenberg. It will be diachronic rather than synchronic, being sensitive to the vast amount of time that lies ahead; it will be cognitively modest rather than dogmatic; it will be forward-looking and patient; and it will be attentive to what he calls redesigned religion that ‘might help us evolve towards ever greater maturity in all areas of human life’ (Schellenberg 2013:75). Turning to the object of a future religiousness, Schellenberg adopts a minimalist view which he calls a ‘thin’ view because it avoids details, as distinct from ‘thick’ views that do give details like declaring that the Divine is a family of deities who dwell on Mount Olympus (Schellenberg 2013:93f). In providing his ‘thin’ view on the object of faith – a view that reveals an accurate understanding of existing religion – Schellenberg contends that some notion of transcendence, also referred to as the Divine, is at the heart of religion, meaning something more than, or deeper and greater than, the world of physical nature explored by science. He adds that there are three dimensions of transcendence (‘triple transcendence’): First, whatever is held to surpass us, does so in fact (‘meta- physical transcendence’); second, in value (‘axiological transcendence’); and third, in importance for us (‘soteriological transcendence’) (Schellenberg 2013:94). He elaborates on these statements, distinguishing between what he calls strong and weak concepts of the Divine: A strong concept holds that the Divine, or transcendence, is ultimate in all three dimensions of transcendence; a weak concept is just that the Divine is the ultimate value and the ultimate source of good for us (Schellenberg 2013:96). His preference is to think of transcendence in the mode of ‘thin’/‘strong’ – strong, because of the triple ultimacy that faith seeks, and thin because humans with their limited mind need to be cautious about imagining that they are capable of detailed knowledge of the nature of the Divine (Schellenberg 2013:97). In summary, he argues that ‘the fundamental idea of evolutionary religion would be an idea of something deepest in reality (metaphysically ultimate) that is also unsurpassably great (axiologically ultimate) and the source of our deepest good (soteriologically ultimate)’; he calls this religious perspective ultimism (Schellenberg 2013:99). Echoing the traditional theological belief that the deity is both transcendent and immanent,

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Schellenberg comments that ultimism posits a reality that is ‘not so distant as to be incapable of touching us’ but not too close to us either (Schellenberg 2013:100). This is followed by Schellenberg’s account of faith in this evolutionary religious perspective (Schellenberg 2013:100ff). His account calls to mind and accords with the seminal work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1979) on faith and belief – work which appears not be known to Schellenberg. Smith’s contribution to a deeper understanding of faith is his distinction between faith and belief, with the latter being understood to mean the acceptance of certain propositions as true, for example that angels exist (Smith 1979:9). Smith shows that this is not what belief originally meant at all, for the word derives from Latin and Germanic words that can be translated as ‘to set your heart on something’ (Smith 1979:76, 106ff). Far from merely giving your assent to propositions like those in the creeds of the church and its doctrines, faith is ‘to be faithful, to care, to trust, to cherish, to be loyal, to commit oneself’ to a transcendent reality (Smith 1979:117). For Schellenberg, faith would not involve belief, whose involuntary nature is not appropriate to a faith that understands its own intellectual limitations and is open to deeper and better spiritual insight. Instead it would involve imagination. Turning then to the life of faith that goes with ultimism, Schellenberg notes that if ultimism is true, then ‘the core of reality is on the side of the good, and may indeed in some sense be the good’ (Schellenberg 2013:107). The significance of this contention for an evolutionary religious ethic is clear and is said to involve three directions: Downward, inward, and outward. The first of these – the downward direction – means seeking the best understanding from any and all sources and experiences of transcendence, as well as being free of the way an existing religious belief often stands in the way of such an exciting quest for richer truth (Schellenberg 2013:107ff). The inward direction of faith takes us into ourselves and enables us to know ourselves as capable of reordering ourselves to align with reality at its deepest, beyond anything that science, for all its glory, can reveal (Schellenberg 2013:109ff). This reordering reveals that acquisitiveness and anxiety are unfounded and can be overcome, giving way to self-control, contentment, and serenity. The third direction of faith is a matter of turning outward. It engages us with others and the world in ways that align with ultimism, and it both justifies and encourages greater commitment to seek and do good even when risk is involved (Schellenberg 2013:110ff). Schellenberg hints here at his

266 Will Religion Survive? earlier contention that ultimacy is also about supreme value, and with it, supreme relevance to us, in its capacity for us to be aligned to the unsurpassably valuable, but he does not say what this could be. Next is a discussion of religious community (Schellenberg 2013:112). Schellenberg argues that ultimism’s evolutionary faith is a ‘movement away from egoistic, self-concern’ and endorses the valuable life of religious community with others (Schellenberg 2013:113). The ‘others’ are not limited to members of particular religious orientation, for the intellectual quality of this evolutionary and modest mentality, with its ‘thin’ view of transcendence, seeks inclusion and openness – not closure – which makes for an acceptance of religious pluralism. It also permits one to retain aspects of what religion so far has been, as part of a journey into a new spiritual future, moving ‘toward all that only the future may reveal of what is most beautiful, good, and true’ (Schellenberg 2013:115). Having discussed the parameters of evolutionary faith, Schellenberg proceeds in chapter 7 to consider and counter various objections to it (Schellenberg 2013:116-136), e.g. issues of evil where, among other things, he notes that ‘personality, at least as we know it, may not at all be part of the Ultimate’ (Schellenberg 2013:120); the contention that an afterlife is impossible; and the accusations of wishful thinking, of merely being a type of new age religion, and of having no chance of ever catching on. In the final chapter, Schellenberg (2013:137-156) depicts evolutionary religion as a religion for pioneers – for those who first explore new spaces. The very nature of this kind of faith is said to make it ideal for those with a pioneering disposition, because it is radically open to a future that could be immensely long, also because of its open-mindedness and its acceptance that, in the vast total possible span of human existence, humankind is now at a very early stage of development, indeed in key respects in an incomplete, even mistaken stage, like believing that they already know the last word about ultimate reality. In this pioneering spirit, Schellenberg reviews and transforms the traditional arguments for the existence of God, rejected as failures by thinkers like Anselm, Leibniz, Paley, and James, by using them in re- interpreted ways to enhance evolutionary faith in a triply transcendent Divine and showing that it is an ideal home for such richness of understanding, values, and spiritual concerns. Anselm’s concept of a reality of which a greater one cannot be conceived, is made into an encouragement to enlarge our mind and vision –

267 Martin Prozesky open to really big ideas (Schellenberg 2013:141ff). Leibniz can foster, in those willing to adopt the imaginative faith that Schellenberg explores, a commitment to enhanced intellectual understanding (Schellenberg 2013:144ff), and Paley’s teleological argument can become an encouragement to cherish and protect the beauty of the universe and even discerns that beauty runs ‘deep in reality too’ (Schellenberg 2013:147ff). Schellenberg states, ‘In the practice of evolutionary religion, experiences of beauty will be regarded as possible intimations of a transcendent reality’ (Schellenberg 2013:148). In what can be judged the most important words in the book, he adds that ‘the dream of religion – if indeed the ultimate dream ̶ can be of nothing less than a good embracing all that exists’ (Schellenberg 2013:149). The last of the thinkers with whom Schellenberg engages in this final chapter, is James (Schellenberg 2013:150-156). His well-known pragmatism is developed into ‘a powerful, teeth-gritting determination to imagine and live by what ought to be the case’, as long as this is not ruled out by evidence (Schellenberg 2013:154). Continuing in this vein, he adds that

ultimism, which tells us that the ultimate reality is ultimately valuable and the source of an ultimate good in which we can participate, leaves open the door to some sort of redemption for all those lives that have been and continually are being crushed, often before they have had a chance to be fully formed; and for that reason alone ultimism ought to be true (Schellenberg 2013:155).

By living out such a faith we can help to show that it is indeed true. That a rich ethic is inherent in such a faith is well expressed by the words that end the chapter, which declare that evolutionary religion ‘looks not for consolation and an escape from the world as it is but a pioneering hope and determination that may be spent on behalf of others and a world still being born’ (Schellenberg 2013:156). In a short Epilogue (Schellenberg 2013:157f), Schellenberg ingeniously uses the dialectical notion attributed to Hegel, that things develop through the interaction of a reality (the ‘thesis’) which is judged by its critics to be flawed, or worse (the ‘antithesis’), giving rise to a new reality (the ‘synthesis’). Here might be a doorway to concluding that traditional religion can be seen as the thesis, which Enlightenment rationality dismantles as the antithesis, signaling not the end of religion as Lewis-Williams and others like

268 Will Religion Survive? him contend, but a rebirth in the form of evolutionary, imaginative faith – the Hegelian synthesis ̶ drawing on the best in both the thesis and the antithesis, to ‘stimulate and guide the next stages of human evolution’ (Schellenberg 2013:158).

Critical discussion Three main issues requiring critical appraisal arise from the foregoing accounts: First, the adequacy, respectively of Lewis-Williams’ narrow definition of religion as belief in supernatural beings and forces, and Schellenberg’s broader view that religion is best seen in soteriological terms as evolving faith in that which is found to provide the most valuable of benefits; the second issue is the adequacy of their very different views about whether religion has a future; and third, the light they shed on the two methodological strategies of interpreting and explaining religion – an issue on which David Chidester has shed valuable light. On the first critical issue, the question to Lewis-Williams (and others who share his view, like Grayling), is whether the definition of religion as belief in supernatural beings and realms is justified. The term ‘religion’ is commonly held to refer to a cluster of socio-personal phenomena which, despite very great differences of detail, exhibit what has been called a family resemblance. This resemblance consists of two related, basic dimensions which we could term as their ontological and their personal or existential dimensions. The former refers to the fact that believers orientate their life to what they regard as transcendent, as surpassing ordinary existence in some way, such as one or more deities or an encompassing tendency in the cosmos like the Tao, which can be experienced but is not amendable to scientific investigation. The personal or existential dimension refers to the way believers take this ontological dimension with utmost seriousness, holding that it is what concerns them most like finding an assurance of a desirable afterlife. In expressing this belief, they develop and practice appropriate rituals, form communities, tell symbolic stories, and create supportive institutions. These can be observed in Buddhism, which does not involve a belief in supernatural

269 Martin Prozesky beings – as in the theistic faiths, which obviously do, and which concern Lewis- Williams mostly. My problem with his definition of religion is that it arbitrarily selects as definitive one example ̶ belief in supernatural beings ̶ which I am calling the ontological dimension of the movements commonly seen as religion, thereby leaving out of consideration as religious the remaining features that reveal the family resemblance noted above. His account would gain in acceptability, had it been directed just at belief in supernatural beings and forces, about which he has important things to say as we have seen, and not at religion in general. Doing so, would not exclude other manifestations from the category of religion and does not, arguably, exclude from the study of religion the rich range of manifestations about which David Chidester has written, ranging from what he calls savage systems to authentic fakes and wild religion (Chidester 1996; 2005; 2012). For the same reason I regard Schellenberg’s much more inclusive view of religion to be methodologically sounder than that of Lewis-Williams. However, is Schellenberg justified when he singles out the soteriological function of religion as its key feature? My own, very wide-ranging study of religious data led me to the same view (Prozesky 1984:18-50) – a conclusion also reached by Hick in his magnum opus, An interpretation of religion (Hick 1989:21-55). If this conclusion is incorrect, based as it is for both Hick and myself on evidence from a wide range of religious and scholarly sources, I have yet to see it convincingly reproduced. My second critical issue concerns the future of religion. Lewis- Williams holds that there is no good evidence to support a belief in a supernatural order of beings so that it will prove unsustainable. Thus defined, religion therefore has no future. Let me grant, for argument’s sake, that he is correct about the non-existence of supernatural beings of any kind. That does not entail that the belief in them will wither away, definitely not in the short to middle term of the next few generations and longer, because it is simply incorrect that supernaturalist religious belief is nourished by and dependent mainly on intellectual concern for scientifically verifiable evidence. On the contrary, feelings and emotions play a decisive part in winning and retaining religious allegiance, as classical studies of religious experience from the pioneering work of Friedrich Schleiermacher onward show (Schleiermacher 1799; James 1902; Starbuck 1914; Hardy 1979; Battson & Ventiss 1982).

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It seems impossible to prove the non-existence of spiritual beings, and as long as their existence, power, and favor are believed in, especially a belief in one such supreme, beneficent being, the feelings of security, protection, and comfort this generates in believers make it overwhelmingly likely that such belief will continue for a very long time. Above all, it is hard to exaggerate the emotional value to some believers of the sense that their faith saves them from a truly horrific fate in an afterlife. Church-going is nowadays evidently far less prevalent in secular, Western Europe than it was several generations ago, but it has not gone and is reportedly growing significantly in other parts of the world like formerly communist countries where huge pressures against it were brought about by the state, for well over half a century in the case of the former Soviet Union (Micklethwaite & Wooldridge 2009). It is also evident in Western Europe that religious observance in other theistic faiths like Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, and parts of Hinduism, is not waning. Ironically, a more inclusive concept of religion than just belief in supernatural beings actually assists Lewis-Williams’ critique of that belief, because it obliges the supernaturalist to explain why non-theists of such outstanding intellectual, spiritual, and ethical standing as the Dalai Lama, reject it, if beings like these actually exist – above all if they are everywhere. Schellenberg’s view that religion will continue to be part of human existence for as long as the species exists is in my judgment much more plausible than predictions of its demise, for it is supported by at least three considerations: The first is his foregrounding of what he calls the soteriological element, with its powerful emotional attraction, and I produced indications above from the nature of religious experience as to why this makes the endurances of religion a virtual certainty. Next, Schellenberg’s open-ended, metaphysically minimalist view of the object of religious concern allows for very great changes over time in the way that object of faith is conceived, especially if human brain-power evolves to ever greater cognitive capabilities. As long as such changes retain the all-important soteriological function, and as long as its human subjects remain vulnerable and drawn by the appeal of that function, religion will endure, albeit in forms we cannot now conceive. The third factor in support of Schellenberg about the lengthy future of religion is evolution itself and the scientific evidence that our planet can support life for an immensely long time to come, barring a planetary catastrophe like the impact of a truly massive comet which will destroy most forms of life including

271 Martin Prozesky our own. This being the case, the persistence of religion as Schellenberg sees it is indeed highly likely and even certain. My final critical issue is about interpretation and explanation – an issue that has greatly interested me since researching and writing my first book (Prozesky 1984:68-98). Lewis-Williams regards his treatment of religion as explanatory in nature, in that he holds that he has identified its causes from the way the brain works (Lewis-Williams 2010:9, 115-138). It is this strong sense of the term ‘explanation’ as causal explanation that he has in mind, not the weaker sense where it means no more than clarifying something. Schellenberg makes no such claim, being concerned to indicate what religion is, and not why it exists. This brings us to an important insight made by Chidester early in his career in South Africa. I recall him pointing out that while interpretations of religion involve no more than being interesting, in the sense that they illuminate and deepen understanding in significant ways, explanation involves the daunting requirement of being true, or at least significantly more plausible than other explanations (cf. Chidester 1985:80, 86). Schellenberg’s interpretation of religion is indeed immensely illuminating and interesting, compared to that of Lewis-Williams, which is a much narrower view of religion. What must be asked, in the light of Chidester’s important observation, is whether Lewis-William’s purported explanation of supernaturalism is true, or at least more plausible than other explanations. The issue can be stated as follows: What is better supported by all the evidence, as the more likely cause of widespread and very long-lasting belief in one or more supernatural beings, is the question about their real, objective existence, which they make evident to people in various revelatory ways, or is it just the way the human brain projects the personal onto the purely natural forces that affect us, making us see them as gods and as other spiritual beings, and ultimately, for monotheists, as one supreme being? Judging the plausibility of Lewis-Williams’ explanation is a complex matter and beyond the scope of this article. What can be done is to propose a number of considerations, both in support of and against his theory. In favor of it is human brain science (Ashbrook & Albright 1997; Van der Walt 2010:23- 39). There is no doubt that the brain does indeed enable us to project the familiar onto the strange and mysterious as Lewis-Williams argues. Then there is the support that supernaturalists themselves unintentionally give to his explanation. While they would strongly contest it for their own belief, their rejection of the same kind of belief in other religions means that they regard

272 Will Religion Survive? them as mere human creations. How many theists, for example, would also believe that Zeus and his fellow deities in fact exist on Mount Olympus? Philosophers of religion have also long cited pain, suffering, and other evils as counting against the existence of the beneficent deity of the most widely followed theistic faiths. Against Lewis-Williams and all the other attempts to refute supernaturalism on the basis of projective human brain functioning, is the response that theists themselves can easily give, to which I alluded earlier in this article. They can quite consistently reply that our brain was designed by the Creator in whom they believe to enable humanity to come to an awareness of their divine source. I therefore suspect that Chidester’s warning about trying to explain religion causally results, for Lewis-William’s attempt to do so, at best in a split vote: Skeptics will agree with his explanation, while believers will not. My own verdict is that for all its immense erudition and valuable warnings about unethical religious practices, his attempt at a causal explanation of belief in supernatural beings on the basis of human brain science fails.

References Ashbrook, J. & C.R. Albright 1997. The humanizing brain: Where religion and neuroscience meet. Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press. Battson, C.D. & W.L. Ventiss 1982. The religious experience. New York: Oxford University Press. Chidester, D. 1985. Theory and theology in the study of religion. Religion in Southern Africa 6, 2: 75-94. Chidester, D. 1996. Savage systems: Colonialism and comparative religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Chidester, D. 2005. Authentic fakes: Religion and American popular culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chidester, D. 2012. Wild religion: Tracking the sacred in South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dawkins, R. 2006. The God delusion. London: Bantam Press. Grayling, A.C. 2013. The God argument: The case against religion and for humanism. New York: Bloomsbury.

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Hardy, A. 1979. The spiritual nature of man: A study of contemporary religious experience. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Harris, S. 2006. Letter to a Christian nation. New York: Knopf. Hick, J. 1989. The interpretation of religion: Human responses to the transcendent. London: Macmillan. Hutchinson, J.A. 1981. Paths of faith. 3rd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Education. James, W. 1902. The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Lewis-Williams, D. 2010. The cognitive origin and evolution of religion. London: Thames & Hudson. Micklethwaite, J. & A. Wooldridge 2009. God is back: How the global rise of faiths is changing the world. London: Allen Lane. Prozesky, M. 1984. Religion and ultimate well-being: An explanatory theory. London: Macmillan. Schellenberg, J.L. 2005. Prolegomena to a philosophy of religion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Schellenberg, J.L. 2007. The will to doubt: A justification of religious skepticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Schellenberg, J.L. 2009. The will to imagine: A justification of skeptical religion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Schellenberg, J.L. 2013. Evolutionary religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schleiermacher, F.D.E. 1799. On religion: Addresses in response to its cultured despisers. Tice, T.N. (trans.). Richmond: John Knox Press. Smart, N. & R.D. Hecht (eds.) 1982. Sacred texts of the world: A universal anthology. London: Macmillan Reference Books. Smith, W.C. 1979. Faith and belief. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Starbuck, E.D. 1914. The psychology of religion: An empirical study of the growth of religious consciousness. 4th ed. London: The Walter Scott Publishing Company. Van der Walt, E. 2010. The limbic system and the ‘religious brain’. In Du Toit, C.W. (ed.): Homo transcendentalis? Transcendence in science and religion: Interdisciplinary perspectives. Pretoria: UNISA Press.

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Martin Prozesky School of Religion, Philosophy and Classics University of KwaZulu-Natal [email protected]

275

David Chidester: An Appreciation

Edward T. Linenthal [email protected]

When the editors asked if I would write a short reflection on my long and enduring friendship with David Chidester for a book honoring David’s brilliant career, I of course said, ‘Yes’. David and I met in 1974 as graduate students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the department of Religious Studies. Along with two good friends and fellow graduate students, Jim McNamara and Deborah Sills-Gunn – who left us far too early – the four of us made up the Board of Directors (acknowledged in every one of David’s books). So many years later, we still have not yet decided what we are directing, but even with Deb’s empty chair, we remain a board-of-directors-in-waiting. We all shared wonderful times at the warm and inviting home of Walter and Lois Capps. Deb, David, and I spoke at the university’s memorial service after Walter’s sudden death in 1997, and David and I loved that we were able to present him with a copy of our co-edited book, American sacred space, dedicated to Walter. I remember our team-teaching in 1978, Religion in America today, when the events at Jonestown challenged the adequacy of the field’s interpretive frameworks. David wrote in his 2003 Prologue for the revised edition of Salvation and suicide: Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown: ‘I was not prepared when entering the classroom on that morning to make sense out of the event’. The first edition, published in 1988, he tells us, ‘was my attempt to understand not only the specific case of Jonestown but also questions about religion, violence, and America’. His central question, he informs his readers, ‘for those who died willingly, [is] how could they have died meaningfully within the religious worldview that was developed in the Peoples Temple and Jonestown?’ (Chidester 2003:xvii-xviii). Significantly, David wrote Salvation and suicide after he moved to apartheid South Africa

Journal for the Study of Religion 31, 2 (2018) 276-279 276 Online ISSN 2413-3027; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a13 David Chidester: An Appreciation and, he writes, ‘the real subject matter of the book was about what America would look like if it looked like South Africa’ (Chidester 2003:xxii). I remember how the book jerked me out of predictable, formulaic ways of ‘making sense’ of horrific events and how, in this case, the deployment of popular and irresponsible rhetoric of ‘cults’ and ‘brainwashing’ was itself an act of violence. Mindful of Salvation and suicide, I have tried in my own work to be sensitive to the rhetorics of containment cloaked in the guise of ‘understanding’. Further, David demonstrates how careful cultural analysis is a compellingly humanizing enterprise. Victims were, he observes, ‘depicted as not American, not religious, not sane, and ultimately not human. In the context of all this denial, distancing, and even demonization, I have tried to recover a sense of the humanity of the people who died in Jonestown’ (Chidester 2003:xix). For many years while teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, I would begin our introductory course with David’s chapter Perspectives on an event, focusing mainly on the section, Death rituals of exclusion and inclusion. How better to yank students who thought about religion as largely a matter of belief and rules of living into religious worlds deeply engaged with sacrificial/redemptive violence, with bodies, with events subversive of cherished convictions about religion as by definition humanizing? In my own struggles with various representations of violence – at battlefields, at Holocaust memorial sites, in bitterly contested commemorations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, and the 2011 terrorist attacks in Norway – Salvation and suicide has remained a lodestar for me. I recall a handwritten note David sent me after I asked him to read a chapter – on Gettysburg, I think – in what would become Sacred ground: Americans and their battlefields. David has the gift of understanding what I am about better than I do myself. He liked the chapter, he wrote, because I had demonstrated how dynamic was the life of this place through processes of veneration, defilement, and redefinition. As soon as I read his words, I knew that he had captured the crucial categories that were the ideal interpretive framework for the book. Consequently, the first sentence reads: ‘This book is about the processes of veneration, defilement, and redefinition that have characterized public attitudes toward America’s most famous battlefields: the Lexington Green and Concord’s North Bridge, the Alamo, Gettysburg, the Little Bighorn, and Pearl Harbor’. Thanks, D, you are the best!

277 Edward T. Linenthal

I think of David and Careen’s wedding during an American Academy of Religion meeting in Anaheim – presided over by the incomparable Jim McNamara – and of David and Careen’s visits to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and Bloomington, Indiana, that combined business – David’s lectures – with time for David, Careen, Ulla and I to eat, drink, and be merry. In 1990, David was a keynote speaker at a conference I organized at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, named Religion, racism, violence: South Africa & North America. I arranged a busy Wisconsin lecture tour for David after the conference. He spoke about some of the case studies in Shots in the streets: Violence and religion in South Africa. At the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, he offered a lecture that eventually became the basis for the chapter, Sacrificial religion, in Authentic fakes: Religion and American popular culture. David offers a ‘curious parallel’ between Jim Jones and Ronald Reagan: ‘Jones wanted children to die to save them from capitalism, while Ronald Reagan wanted children to die to save them from communism’. (Readers will appreciate the comparison by reading Reagan’s chilling convictions expressed in his oft-cited speech to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983, quoted in David’s chapter.) ‘Although engaged in different strategic projects’, David writes, ‘the sacrificial negotiations conducted by Jim Jones and Ronald Reagan were enacted in the same American political economy of the sacred in which person, place, and power can be negotiated through inherently violent acts of human expenditure’ (Chidester 2005:92, 110). I remember being nervous before David’s talk, which I feared would be intolerably heretical to many in the audience. To my pleasant surprise, people listened intently and openly. This provocative comparison is only one example of David’s ability to engage in serious play. He has such a wicked smart sense of humor, of irony, and incongruity. It is hard for me to imagine, for example, another historian of religion writing in playful seriousness about the First church of the last laugh, dedicated to St. Stupid. ‘As the church observes’, David writes, ‘its ritualized stupidity preserves the original religion. Since religions are based on guilt and fear, which are stupid, stupidity must have come first. The annual St. Stupid’s Day parade, in the view of the First Church of the Last Laugh, practices the most basic religion of humanity’. This is only one small example of why it has been so much damn fun to be David’s friend all these years. I hope it continues: Great books, great stories, and many more years for it all.

278 David Chidester: An Appreciation

References Chidester, D. 2003. Salvation and suicide: Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. Rev. ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chidester, D. 2005. Authentic fakes: Religion and American popular culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Edward T. Linenthal Department of History Indiana University Bloomington [email protected]

279 David Chidester Publications (1982-2018)

Books 2018. Religion: Material dynamics. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2014. Empire of religion: Imperialism and comparative religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2014. Religions of South Africa (Routledge Revivals). London: Routledge. 2012. Wild religion: Tracking the sacred in South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2010. Savage systems: Religion and colonialism in Southern Africa (in Japanese). Nishimura, A. & Shim, S. (trans.). Tokyo: Aoki-Shoten. 2008. Savage systems: Religion and colonialism (in Korean). Shim, S. (trans.). Seoul: Kyong Sae Won. 2005. Authentic fakes: Religion and American popular culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2005. Legacy of freedom: The ANC’s human rights tradition. Asmal, K. & C. Lubisi (co-eds.). Johannesburg, Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers. 2004. South Africa’s Nobel laureates: Peace, literature, and science. Asmal, K. & W.G. James (co-eds.). Johannesburg, Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers. 2004. Interfaith solidarity: A guide for religious communities. Du Toit, F. & C. Villa-Vicencio (co-authors). Cape Town: Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. 2004. Religion, politics, and identity in a changing South Africa. Tayob, A. & W. Weisse (co-eds.). Berlin: Waxmann. 2004. Nelson Mandela, in his own words. Boston: Little, Brown. 2003. What holds us together: Social cohesion in South Africa. Dexter, P. & W.G. James (co-eds.). Cape Town: HSRC Press. 2003. Salvation and suicide: Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. Rev. ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (2015. Audiobook, narrated by Grimsley, S.R., 10 hours and 45 minutes. Bloomington, Indiana: University Press Audiobooks).

Journal for the Study of Religion 31, 2 (2018) 280-293 280 Online ISSN 2413-3027; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a14 Publications 1982-2018

2003. Nelson Mandela: From freedom to the future. Asmal, K. & W.G. James (co-eds). Johannesburg, Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers. 2003. Nelson Mandela, in his own words: From freedom to the future. London: Little, Brown. 2002. Patterns of transcendence: Religion, death, and dying. 2nd ed. Belmont: Wadsworth. 2001. Shūr-i jāvidānigī. Tavacoly, G. (trans.). Ghum: Markaz-i Muṭāliāt va Taḥghīghāt-i Adyān va Maz̲ āhib̲ . 2000. Christianity: A global history. London: Allen Lane/Penguin; San Francisco: HarperCollins. 1999. Diversity as ethos: Challenges for interreligious and intercultural education. Stonier, J. & J. Tobler (co-eds.). Cape Town: Institute for Comparative Religion in Southern Africa. 1997. African traditional religion in South Africa: An annotated bibliography. Kwenda, C., R. Petty, J. Tobler & D. Wratten (co-authors). Westport: Greenwood Press. 1997. Christianity in South Africa: An annotated bibliography. Tobler. J. & D. Wratten (co-authors). Westport: Greenwood Press. 1997. Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism in South Africa. Tobler, J. & D. Wratten (co-authors). Westport: Greenwood Press. 1996. Savage systems: Colonialism and comparative religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 1995. American sacred space. Linenthal, E.T. (co-ed.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1994. Religion in public education: Options for a new South Africa. Mitchell, G., I.A. Phiri & A.R. Omar (co-authors). 2nd ed. Cape Town: UCT Press. 1992. Word and light: Seeing, hearing, and religious discourse. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1992. Religions of South Africa. London: Routledge. 1991. Shots in the streets: Violence and religion in South Africa. Boston: Beacon Press. (1992. Cape Town: Oxford University Press). 1990. Patterns of transcendence: Religion, death, and dying. Belmont: Wadsworth. 1988. Salvation and suicide: An interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (1991. Paperback ed.)

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1988. Patterns of power: Religion and politics in American culture. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. 1987. Patterns of action: Religion and ethics in a comparative perspective. Belmont: Wadsworth.

Chapters in books 2018. Heritage under construction: Boundary objects, scaffolding, and anticipation. In Meyer, B. & M. van de Port (eds.): Sense and essence: Heritage and the cultural construction of the real. Oxford: Berghahn. 2017. Interreligious football: Christianity, African tradition, and the religion of football in South Africa. In Adogame, A., A. Parker & N. Watson (eds.): Global perspectives on sports and Christianity. London: Routledge. 2017. Apartheid comparative religion in South Africa. In King, R. (ed.): Religion/theory/critique: Classic and contemporary approaches and methodologies. New York: Columbia University Press. 2016. Space. In Stausberg, M. & S. Engler (eds.): Oxford handbook of the study of religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2016. Time. In Stausberg. M. & S. Engler (eds.): Oxford handbook of the study of religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2015. Colonialism. In Segal, R. & K. von Stuckrad (eds.): Vocabulary for the study of religion. Vol. 1. Leiden: Brill. 2015. Material culture. In Segal, R. & K. von Stuckrad (eds.): Vocabulary for the study of religion. Vol. 2. Leiden: Brill. 2015. Sacred. In Plate, S.B. (ed.): Key terms in material religion. London: Bloomsbury. 2015. Crosscultural religious business: Cocacolonization, McDonaldization, Disneyization, Tupperization, and other local dilemmas of global signification. In Reid, J. (ed.): Religion, postcolonialism, and globalization: A sourcebook. London: Bloomsbury. 2015. The religion of football: Sacrifice, festival, and sovereignty at the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. In Brintnall, K. & J. Biles (eds.): Negative ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the study of religion. New York: Fordham University Press.

282 Publications 1982-2018

2015. Zulu dreamscapes: Senses, media, and authentication in contemporary neo-shamanism. In Hackett, R.I.J. & B. Soares (eds.): New media and religious transformations in Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2014. Popular culture. In Léon, L. & G. Laderman (eds.): Religion and American cultures: Traditions, diversity, and popular expressions. Vol. 2. 2nd ed. Santa Barbara: ABC Clio. 2013. Religion education and the transformational state in South Africa. In Ferrari, S. & R. Cristofori (eds.): Religion in the public space: Volume III. Surrey: Ashgate. 2012. Economy (in Farsi). In Morgan. D. (ed.): Key words in the study of religion, media, and culture. Qom, Iran: Islamic Research Center, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. 2012. Pure heritage: Indigenous, missionary, and anthropological constructions of sexual purity in South Africa. In Rösch, P. & U. Simon (eds.): How purity is made. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. 2012. Dreaming in the contact zone: Zulu dreams, visions, and religion in nineteenth-century South Africa (in Japanese). In Tanaka, M. & I. Koike (eds.): Religious practices. Kyōto: Kōyōshobō. 2012. Dreaming in the contact zone: Zulu dreams, visions, and religion in nineteenth-century South Africa. In Hecht, R.D. & V.F. Biondo III (eds.): Religion and culture: Contemporary practices and perspectives. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. 2012. African Christian communities, In Fisher. M.P. & L.W. Bailey (eds.): An anthology of living religions. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall. 2011. Colonialism (in Japanese). In Isomae, J. & T. Yamamoto (eds.): Beyond the concept of religion. Kyoto: Hozokan. 2011. Imperial reflections, colonial situations: James Frazer, Henri-Alexandre Junod, and indigenous ritual in Southern Africa. In Michaels, A. (ed.): Ritual dynamics and the science of ritual. Vol IV: Reflexivity, media, and visuality. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. 2011. Darwin’s dogs: Animals, animism, and the problem of religion. In Lloyd, V.W. & E. Ratzman (eds.): Secular faith. Eugene: Cascade Books. 2009. Situating the programmatic interests in the history of religions in South Africa. In Hackett. R.I.J. & M. Pye (eds.): IAHR World Congress

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proceedings Durban 2000. The history of religions: Origins and visions. Cambridge: Roots and Branches. 2009. Frontiers of comparison. In Elliott, S.S. & M. Waggoner (eds.): Readings in the theory of religion: Map, text, body. London: Equinox. 2009. Zulu dreamscapes: Senses, media, and authentication in contemporary neo-shamanism. In Howes, D. (ed.): The sixth sense reader. Oxford: Berg. 2009. Religious fundamentalism in post-apartheid South Africa (in Japanese). In Mori, K. (ed.): Can Judaism, Christianity, and Islam coexist? Tokyo: Akashi Shoten. 2008. Economy. In Morgan, D. (ed.): Key words for religion, media, and culture. London: Routledge. 2007. Religion and the study of Africa. In Middleton, J. & J.C. Miller (eds.): New encyclopedia of Africa. Vol. 4. 2nd ed. New York: Scribner’s. 2007. Religious animals, refuge of the gods, and the spirit of revolt: W.E.B. Du Bois’s representations of indigenous African religion. In Fontenot, C. & M. Keller (eds.): Re-cognizing W.E.B. Du Bois in the twenty-first century. Augusta: Mercer University Press. 2007. Real and imagined: Imperial inventions of religion in colonial Southern Africa. In Fitzgerald, T. (ed.): Religion and the secular: Historical and colonial formations. London: Equinox. 2007. Studying religion in South Africa. In Courville, M.E. (ed.): The next step in studying religion: A graduate’s guide. London: Continuum. 2007. Religion education in South Africa. In De Souza, M., K. Engebretson, G. Durka, R. Jackson & A. McGrady (eds.): International handbook of the religious, spiritual and moral dimensions of education. New York: Springer. 2006. Indigenous traditions, alien abductions: Creolized and globalized memory in South Africa. In Stier, O.B. & J.S. Landres (eds.): Religion, violence, memory, and place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2006. African Christian communities. In Juergensmeyer, M. (ed.): The Oxford handbook of global religions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006. ‘Religion’ and ‘violence’ in contemporary South Africa (in Japanese). In Asad, T. & J. Isomae (eds.): Renarrating religion: Reconsideration of the modern category. Tokyo: Misuzu-shobu. 2005. The American touch: Tactile imagery in American religion and politics. In Classen, C. (ed.): The book of touch. Oxford: Berg.

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2005. Capps, Walter. In Jones, L. (ed.): Encyclopedia of religion. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan. 2005. Colonialism and postcolonialism. In Jones, L. (ed.): Encyclopedia of religion. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan. 2005. Jonestown and Peoples Temple. In Jones, L. (ed.): Encyclopedia of religion. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan. 2005. Animism. In Taylor, B. & J. Kaplan (eds.): Encyclopedia of religion and nature. New York: Continuum. 2005. Mutwa, Credo. In Taylor, B. & J. Kaplan (eds.): Encyclopedia of religion and nature. New York: Continuum. 2004. Introduction. Asmal, K. & W.G. James (co-authors). In Asmal, K., D. Chidester & W.G. James (eds.): South Africa’s Nobel laureates: Peace, literature, science. Johannesburg, Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers. 2004. Colonialism and shamanism. In Walter, M.N. & E.J.N. Fridman (eds.): Shamanism: An encyclopedia of world beliefs, practices and culture. Vol. 1. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio. 2004. Prologue. Tayob, A. & W. Weisse (co-authors). In Chidester, D., A. Tayob & W. Weisse (eds.): Religion, politics, and identity in a changing South Africa. Berlin: Waxmann. 2004. Credo Mutwa, Zulu shaman: The invention and appropriation of indigenous authenticity in African folk religion. In Chidester, D., A. Tayob & W. Weisse (eds.): Religion, politics, and identity in a changing South Africa. Berlin: Waxmann. 2004. Credo Mutwa, Zulu shaman: The invention and appropriation of indigenous authenticity in African folk religion (in Japanese). In Kimura, T. (ed.): Sekai no minshu shukyo: Festschrift for Michio Araki. Tokyo: Minerva. 2004. ‘Classify and conquer’: Friedrich Max Müller, indigenous religious traditions, and imperial comparative religion. In Olupona, J.K. (ed.): Beyond primitivism: Indigenous religious traditions and modernity. London, New York: Routledge. 2004. Censorship. In Skotnes, P., G. van Embden & F. Langerman (eds.): Curiosity CLXXV: A paper cabinet. Cape Town: University of Cape Town. 2004. Forensics. In Skotnes, P., G. van Embden & F. Langerman (eds.): Curiosity CLXXV: A paper cabinet. Cape Town: University of Cape Town.

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2003. Popular culture. In Léon, L. & G. Laderman (eds.): Religion and American cultures: An encyclopedia of traditions, diversity, and popular expressions. Vol. 2. Santa Barbara: ABC Clio. 2003. Introduction. Dexter, P. & W.G. James (co-authors). In Chidester, D., P. Dexter & W.G. James (eds.): What holds us together: Social cohesion in South Africa. Cape Town: HSRC Press. 2003. Globalisation, identity, and national policy in South Africa. Hadland, A. & S. Prosalendis (co-authors). In Chidester, D., P. Dexter & W.G. James (eds.): What holds us together: Social cohesion in South Africa. Cape Town: HSRC Press. 2003. Conclusion: Social cohesion in South Africa. Dexter, P. & W.G. James (co-authors). In Chidester, D., P. Dexter & W.G. James (eds.): What holds us together: Social cohesion in South Africa. Cape Town: HSRC Press. 2003. The church of baseball, the fetish of Coca-Cola, and the potlatch of Rock ‘n’ Roll: Theoretical models for the study of religion in American popular culture. In Hackett, D.G. (ed.): Religion and American culture: A reader. 2nd ed. London, New York: Routledge. 2003. Introduction. Asmal, K. & W.G. James (co-authors). In Asmal, K., D. Chidester & W.G. James (eds.): Nelson Mandela: From freedom to the future. Cape Town, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers; London: Little, Brown. 2003. Crosscultural religious business: Cocacolonization, McDonaldization, Disneyization, Tupperization, and other local dilemmas of global signification. In Reid, J. (ed.): Religion and global culture: New terrain in the study of religion and the work of Charles H. Long. Lexington: Lexington Press. 2003. Religion education in South Africa: Teaching and learning about religion, religions, and religious diversity. In Larsen, L. & I.T. Plesner (eds.): Teaching for tolerance and freedom of belief. Oslo: Oslo Coalition on Freedom of Religion or Belief. 2003. Global citizenship, cultural citizenship, and world religions in religion education. In Jackson, R. (ed.): International perspectives on citizenship, education, and religious diversity. London: Routledge. 2002. Christianity and evolution. In James, W.G. & L. Wilson (eds.): The architect and the scaffold: Evolution and education in South Africa.

286 Publications 1982-2018

Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council and New Africa Education. 2002. Religion education: Learning about religion, religions, and religious diversity. In Asmal, K. & W.G. James (eds.): Spirit of the nation: Reflections on South Africa’s educational ethos. Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council and New Africa Education. 2001. Response to religious tolerance: A human rights approach. In Chidester, D. & D. Little (eds.): Religion and human rights: Toward an understanding of tolerance and reconciliation. Atlanta: Emory University, The Academic Exchange. 2001. Monuments and fragments: Religion, identity, and spaces of reconciliation. In Chidester, D. & D. Little (eds.).: Religion and human rights: Toward an understanding of tolerance and reconciliation. Atlanta: Emory University, The Academic Exchange. 2001. Multiple voices: Challenges posed for religion education in South Africa. In Caldwell. Z.T. (ed.): Religious education in schools: Ideas and experiences from around the world. Oxford: International Association for Religious Freedom. 2000. The word and the light, the ear and the eye: Contrasting Jew and Greek. In Zion, N. & B. Spectre (eds.): A different light: The big book of Hanukkah. New York: Devora Publishing. 2000. Foreword. In Cochrane, J. & B. Klein (eds.): Sameness and difference: Problems and potentials in South African civil society. Washington D.C.: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. 2000. Une epistemologie (exotique) de la religion en Afrique du Sud. In Faure, V. (ed.): Dynamiques religieuses en Afrique austral. Paris: Karthala/ CEAN. 2000. Jim Jones. In Roof, W.C. (ed.): Contemporary American religion. Vol.1. New York: Macmillan Library Reference. 2000. Colonialism. In Braun, W. & R.T. McCutcheon (eds.): Guide to the study of religion. London: Cassell. 2000. The church of baseball, the fetish of Coca-Cola, and the potlatch of Rock ‘n’ Roll. In Forbes, B. & J. Mahan (eds.): Religion and popular culture in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2000. David Chidester traces the Peoples Temple to its mass suicide in Guyana (1978). In Allitt, P. (ed.): Major problems in American religious history: Documents and essays. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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1999. Embracing South Africa, internationalizing the study of religion. In Chidester, D., J. Stonier & J. Tobler (eds.): Diversity as ethos: Challenges for interreligious and intercultural education. Cape Town: Institute for Comparative Religion in Southern Africa. 1999. in July: Laughter, pain, and incongruity and the study of religion. In Cohn-Sherbok, D. & C. Lamb (eds.): The future of religion: Postmodern perspectives. London: Middlesex University Press. 1999. Stories, fragments, and monuments. In Cochrane, J., J. de Gruchy & S. Martin (eds.): Facing the truth: South African faith communities and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press; Cape Town: David Philip. 1998. Comparative religious studies. In Mouton, J. & J. Muller (eds.): Theory and method in South African human science research: Advances and innovations. Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council. 1997. Man, God, beast, heaven, light, burning fire. In Andree, T., C. Bakker & P. Schreiner (eds.): Crossing boundaries: Contributions to interreligious and intercultural education. Münster, Berlin: Comenius Institute. 1996. Bushman religion: Open, closed, and new frontiers. In Skotnes, P. (ed.): Miscast: Negotiating the presence of the Bushmen. Cape Town: UCT Press. 1996. Mutilating meaning: European interpretations of Khoisan languages of the body. In Skotnes, P. (ed.): Miscast: Negotiating the presence of the Bushmen. Cape Town: UCT Press. 1995. Gestures of dismissal, policies of containment: From denial to discovery in South African comparative religion. In De Gruchy, J. & S. Martin (eds.): Religion and the reconstruction of civil society. Pretoria: Unisa. 1995. Introduction. Linenthal, E.T. (co-author). In Chidester, D. & E.T. Linenthal (eds.): American sacred space. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1995. ‘A big wind blew up during the night’: America as sacred space in South Africa. In Chidester, D. & E.T. Linenthal (eds.): American sacred space. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1994. The poetics and politics of sacred space: Towards a critical phenomenology of religion. In Tymieniecka A.-T. (ed.): From the sacred to the divine: A new phenomenological approach. Analecta

288 Publications 1982-2018

Husserliana: The yearbook of phenomenological research. Vol. XLIII. Dordrecht: Kluwer. 1992. The politics of exclusion: Christian images of illegitimacy. In Burman, S. & E. Preston-Whyte (eds.): Questionable issue: Illegitimacy in South Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. 1990. Primal religions. In Prozesky, M. & J. de Gruchy (eds.): A Southern African guide to world religions. Cape Town: David Philip. 1986. Panel discussion: When does life begin? Abortion and In Vitrio Fertilization. In Benatar, S.R. (ed.): Ethical and moral issues in contemporary medical practice. Cape Town: Department of Medicine.

Articles 2018. World religions in the world. Journal for the Study of Religion 13, 1: 41- 53. 2018. Disrupting religion. Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review 79, 3: 379-383. 2017. Beyond religious studies? The future of the study of religion in a multidisciplinary perspective. NTT: Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion 71, 1: 74-85. 2014. The accidental, ambivalent, and useless sacred. Material Religion 10, 2: 239-240. 2013. Postgraduates producing knowledge. Journal for the Study of Religion 26, 1: 5-7. 2013. Colonialism and religion. Critical Research on Religion 1, 1: 87-94. 2013. Thinking black: Circulations of Africana religion in imperial comparative religion. Journal of Africana Religions 1, 1: 1-27. 2012. An author meets his critics around Manuel A. Vásquez’s More than belief: A materialist theory of religion. Comments by David Chidester. Religion and Society: Advances in Research 3: 190-192. 2011. Gates of distance. Frequencies: A genealogy of spirituality (November 17). Available at: http://freq.uenci.es/ 2011. Sacred. Material Religion 7, 1: 84-91. 2010. Reflections on imitation: Ethnographic knowledge, popular culture, and capitalist economy. Etnofoor 22, 2: 139-153.

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2010. Hopes and fears: A South African response to REDCo. With Federico G. Settler. Religion & Education 37, 3: 213-217. 2009. Darwin’s dogs: Animals, animism, and the problem of religion. Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 92, 1-2: 51-75. 2008. Dreaming in the contact zone: Zulu dreams, visions, and religion in nineteenth-century South Africa (in Japanese). Contact Zone 2: 1-21. 2008. Religious fundamentalism in South Africa. Scriptura: International Journal of Bible, Religion, and Theology in Southern Africa 99: 350- 367. 2008. Unity in diversity: Religion education and public pedagogy in South Africa. Numen: International Review for the History of Religions 55: 272-299. 2008. Zulu dreamscapes: Senses, media, and authentication in contemporary neo-shamanism. Material Religion 4, 2: 136-159. 2008. Engaging the wildness of things. Material Religion 4, 2: 232-233. 2008. Dreaming in the contact zone: Zulu dreams, visions, and religion in nineteenth-century South Africa. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, 1: 27-53. 2006. Sacred nation or sold nation: South African ‘religious work’. Wiser Review 2 (December): 11. 2006. Language, person, and place: Echoes of religion in minority literatures. Journal for the Study of Religion 19, 2: 5-16. 2006. Religion education and the transformational state in South Africa. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Cultural and Social Practice 50, 3: 61-83. 2006. Atlantic community, atlantic world: Anti-Americanism between Europe and Africa. Journal of American History 93, 2: 432-436. 2004. Moralizing noise. Harvard Divinity School Bulletin 32, 3: 17. 2003. Fake religion: Ordeals of authenticity in the study of religion. Journal for the Study of Religion 16, 2: 71-97. 2003. Primitive texts, savage contexts: Contextualizing the study of religion in colonial situations. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 15: 272- 283. 2003. Religion education in South Africa: Teaching and learning about religion, religions, and religious diversity. British Journal of Religious Education 25, 4: 261-278.

290 Publications 1982-2018

2002. Credo Mutwa, Zulu shaman: The invention and appropriation of indigenous authenticity in African folk religion. Journal for the Study of Religion 15, 2: 65-85. 2002. Religion, globalization, and human rights. Human Rights Committee Quarterly Review, special edition (April): 77-86. 2001. Forum: American religious people as ‘other’. Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 11: 2-9. 2000. Mapping the sacred in the Mother City: Religion and urban space in Cape Town, South Africa. Journal for the Study of Religion 13, 1-2: 5- 41. 2000. Material terms for the study of religion. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68: 367-379. 2000. Haptics of the heart: The sense of touch in American religion and culture. Culture and Religion 1: 61-84. 2000. Belief and Values. Visionaries: The essential guide to the 21st century, work leisure and lifestyle. BBC World Service. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/sci_tech/features/essentialguide/vis _wrk.shtml 1998. Embracing South Africa, internationalizing the study of religion. Journal for the Study of Religion 11, 1: 3-33. 1998. No first or final solutions: Strategies, techniques, and Ivan Strenski’s garden in the study of religion. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66: 369-376. 1998. Forum: Interpreting Waco. Religion in American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 8: 17-25. 1997. Taking the bull by the tail: Responses to the Lingua Franca article. Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 26, 4: 80. 1997. La censure comme culture, la culture comme censure: La parole en gésine en Afrique du Sud. Rue Descartes 17: 31-42. 1997. Scholar’s bookshelf: Religion and popular culture. Religious Studies News 12, 4: 17. 1996. Man, God, beast, light, burning fire. Southern African Review of Books 46 (November-December): 7-9. 1996. The church of baseball, the fetish of Coca-Cola, and the potlatch of Rock ‘n’ Roll: Theoretical models for the study of religion in American popular culture. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, 4: 743-765.

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1996. Anchoring religion in the world: A Southern African history of comparative religion. Religion 26: 141-160. 1995. The failure of the word. Southern African Review of Books (March- April): 18. 1992. Rage, healing in South Africa. The Witness 75, 12: 36-38. 1991. Saving the children by killing them: Redemptive sacrifice in the ideologies of Jim Jones and Ronald Reagan. Religion in American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 1: 177-201. 1991. Religion, racism, and violence: South Africa and North America. Viewpoints: The Journal of the Wisconsin Institute, a Consortium for the Study of War, Peace, and Global Cooperation 1: 2-15. 1990. Time, space, and tension in American Christianity. New Scholar 11: 154-162. 1990. Review article: John Hall, Gone from the Promised Land. Religion 20: 89-92. 1989. Worldview analysis of African Indigenous Churches. Journal for the Study of Religion 2: 15-29. 1988. Rituals of exclusion and the Jonestown dead. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 56: 681-702. 1988. Stealing the sacred symbols: Biblical interpretation in the Peoples Temple and the unification church. Religion 18: 137-162. 1988. Religion alive/religious studies unborn: A review of recent research on African Indigenous Churches. Journal for the Study of Religion 1: 83- 94. 1987. Published by authority: Religion in the President’s Council Report on Youth. Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 61: 73-79. 1987. Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, and others. Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 60: 81-86. 1987. Religious studies as political practice in South Africa. Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 58: 4-17. 1986. Michel Foucault and the study of religion. Religious Studies Review 12: 1-9. 1986. The symmetry of word and light: Perceptual categories in Augustine’s Confessions. Augustinian Studies 17: 119-133. 1985. Theory and theology in the study of religion. Religion in Southern Africa 6: 75-94.

292 Publications 1982-2018

1985. Word against light: Perception and the conflict of symbols. Journal of Religion 65: 46-62. 1984. Symbolism and the senses in Saint Augustine. Religion 14: 31-51. 1984. The challenge to Christian ritual studies. Anglican Theological Review 66: 23-37. 1983. The symbolism of learning in Saint Augustine. Harvard Theological Review 76: 79-90. 1983. Aesthetic strategies in Western religious thought. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 51: 55-66. 1982. Being human: Symbolic orientation in new religious movements. Journal of Dharma 7: 430-451. 1982. Symbolic synesthesia in the history of religions. Epoche: Journal of the History of Religions 10: 32-45.

David Chidester Emeritus Professor Department of Religious Studies University of Cape Town [email protected]

293 JSR ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION IN SOUTHERN AFRICA ISSN 1011-7601

Journal for the Study of Religion: Essays in honour of David Chidester