New Car Blessing: Creolisation, Modernity and Religious Beliefs on Reunion Island

New Car Blessing: Creolisation, Modernity and Religious Beliefs on Reunion Island Srilata Ravi University of Alberta Andre Mary (2000) in his work on popular religions from island to island – in Reunion everyone born on in Africa suggests that syncretic forms of religions the island is Creole whereas in neighbouring Mauri - present a type of resistance to modernity and to the tius, darker skinned Mauritians of African descent are proselytising practices of Christian missionaries. This called Creoles. While anthropologists like Hannerz study, while acknowledging that syncretic religions are (1996) have employed the term to study the world of forms of resistance in some cases, questions the gen - mobilities and mixtures, it is to Edouard Glissant, the eralising tendency of this assumption by looking at Martinican novelist and essayist, that we owe a de - representations of creolised religious practices within tailed elucidation of creolisation as a theoretical con - a secular state, the overseas French department of Re - cept that explains how meanings are made, contested union in the Indian Ocean. and reconstructed in ambiguous zones, located in the In contemporary theory and practice, terms like spaces between boundaries. Even if Glissant’s defini - ‘syncreticism’ and ‘hybridity’ (which carried pejorative tion of creolisation in Caribbean Discourse (1989 connotations in the past) are now viewed in a more [1981]) invokes a specific geographical and historical positive light and are seen to describe the resilience, setting (island topography, plantation culture and creativity, and inevitability of cultural mixing. Yet an - slave histories in the Caribbean) suggesting an unend - other concept, ‘creolization’, in cultural criticism has ing, fluid process that captures the creative, unpre - gained wide currency (Lionnet and Shih, 2011; dictable results of cultural contact, he extrapolates his Cohen and Toniato, 2009). However, it must be ideas to identify creolisation as a process occurring noted that as a concept to understand cultural mixing, globally. this term can be potentially confusing as it takes on Founded on French colonial enterprise, African different meanings at different moments in history slave and Asian indentured labour, Reunion Island and in different disciplinary usages (anthropology, lin - (which has no indigenous populations) presents a guistics, literature). An analogy taken from linguistics, complex multiracial and a multicultural profile today creolisation also refers to a specific aspect of colonial - similar to the Caribbean islands. Reunionese scholars ism, namely the uprooting and displacement of large Françoise Vergès and Carpanin Marimoutou have in numbers of people in colonial plantation economies. their essay, Amarres- Créolisations india-océanes All groups who participated in this economy during (2005), elaborated a definition of creolisation for the slavery in the Caribbean basin as well as in the Indian Indian Ocean region based on Glissant’s concept: Ocean, were described as Creoles. Today, as Stewart (2007: 1-25) notes, even if accurate definitions of ‘We would defend a philosophy of borrowing, for - gery, imitation, and a dynamic of patching up, mak - ‘Creole’ as a language exists in linguistics, the vernac - ing do. Fixing up, mending. A world quick to imitate, ular use of the term to designate its speakers varies but which creolises the thing imitated to make some - isa.e-Forum © 2012 The Author(s) © 2012 ISA (Editorial Arrangement of isa.e-Forum) 1 Ravi thing else of it, which invents the quotidian. This is a nanced electrification, construction works, and im - dynamic of alterity where we see no alienation or sub - proved the islander’s quality of life, creating a new mission, rather a creativity of a world subject to con - tinual conflicting inputs.’ (Amarres- Créolisations middle class that has transformed the complexion of india-océanes (2005), Trans. Vergès and Muecke, Reunionese society. “Moorings-Indian Ocean Creolisations”, 2010) The island is only 63 kilometers long, 45 kilome - ters wide, and covers 2150 square kilometers. Given Readings of creolised practices and those of creolisa - its size and history, Reunion’s parachuting into moder - tion as a cultural descriptor tend to be celebratory and nity has created social complications. Departmentali - often ignore the politically managed realities of cul - sation, and the drastic transformation it has tural distinctiveness that co-exist with spontaneous engineered, has brought about changes in health be - cultural mixing. My use of the term creolised rituals in haviour and demographic patterns: rise in birth rate, Reunion follows from the above definition of Indian drop in mortality, mass education, and move towards ocean creolisations (my emphasis) in that it describes the cities. Ironically, the transfer of metropolitan funds syncretic practices as creative inventions of the quo - has also led to the validation of metropolitan culture tidian, and subject to ‘continual conflicting inputs’ re-introducing a new form of assimilationist/neo-colo - thereby suggesting constantly shifting negotiations. nial practices in a post-colonial/post-departmental era. Notwithstanding this rapid and significant cultural and economic ‘metropolitanization’ of the island in Post-Departmentalised Reunion Island the last 60 years, the cultural identity of the local Re - Reunion Island is unionese islander in post-departmental Reunion is ‘an island onto which history tossed Malagasy, more complex than the label ‘culture créole’ attributed Africans, Indians, Chinese, Indochinese, Malaysians, to it. Undoubtedly, Reunionese ‘culture’ includes the Europeans and French atheists, Catholics and Mus - common elements that constitute a dynamic hybrid lims, Buddhists and Hindus, Christians, animists and polytheists. But this cannot be a simple question of culture forged historically on the island. At the same juxtaposition. The island makes it such that one can time, it is also composed of different elements bor - be simultaneously Christian and Hindu, Christian rowed from the diverse ancestral traditions of the Re - and animist, Hindu and animist. It is an island of the Creole world, on the route between Africa and Asia, a unionese people. The cultural space of religion(s) sub-French Island and island archipelago. It is an is - presents an interesting focal point for the study of land of the India-Oceanic world, an island of Indian identitarian practices on the island where religious tra - Ocean creolisations.’ (Vergès 2006: 43) ditions are practised both separately and syncretically. Pourchez (2005) argues that the intricate inter - Colonisation began in Reunion Island around 1665 twining of the sacred and the everyday is a dominant with the arrival of the first French settlers. From the characteristic of this ‘modern island state’ in the In - 17th century onwards, French colonial immigration dian Ocean. Even the passing tourist is amazed by the which in turn generated the arrival of African slaves, numerous churches dedicated to Virgin Mary, the pro - Chinese traders, Malays, and Indian indentured labor - fusion of private and public Hindu temples near sug - ers resulted in an island society of multi-ethnic texture arcane fields and urban ghettos, and the countless as Vergès (2006) points out. It was only in 1946 that altars to Saint Expédit and other saints and divinities Reunion Island changed administrative status – from along roadsides and ravines. This cultural complexity a distant colony, it became an overseas French depart - of Reunion has been rendered invisible in public dis - ment. Since the sixties, the massive transfer of public course that has sought to very quickly represent Re - funds and the arrival of the French people (mainly ad - unionese culture as homogeneously ‘creole’ in an ministrators, teachers, investors and traders) from unproblematic sense – representing the island as pre - metropolitan France initiated rapid modernisation on dominantly made up of métis peoples and fore - the island (Vaillant, 2008: 9-40). Public funds fi - grounding the hybrid nature of everyday culinary, 2 New Car Blessing linguistic and musical practices. As Laurent Médéa cultural reinventions exist not merely to resist moder - points out, métissage or cultural mixing as described nity and public discourse on plurality and secularism, by the French State and celebrated as Reunion Island’s but to accommodate it in diverse ways. unique identity is a political strategy in that it forges a false unity of the various racial, religious and cultural constituents into a unique and justifiable concept, New Car Blessing Ritual supported by a ‘tolerant’ Catholic church, thus pro - Through a reading of Laurence Pourchez’s visual an - moting it as the most advanced form of European uni - thropological publication, Loto Bon Dié (2003), this versalism (Médéa in Labache, Médéa and Vergès, paper explores the usefulness of visual ethno-narratives 2005:177). Such a discourse on cultural identity, while in understanding creolised religious practices on Re - being different from that of metropolitan culture, does union Island, and more importantly demonstrates that not threaten the fundamental laïcité of the modern these creolised practices do not oppose modernity but French State. In fact, it allows for the maintenance in are complicit with it. I argue that these rituals by the public discourse of the presence of ‘domesticated growing out of the very core of a modern Reunionese

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