Globalization, Identity Formation and Hegemony in the Baha'i
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Bates College SCARAB Honors Theses Capstone Projects Spring 5-2016 Drops of One Ocean: Globalization, Identity Formation and Hegemony in the Baha'i Communities of Samoa, the Netherlands, Latvia, and Lithuania Detmer Yens Kremer Bates College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scarab.bates.edu/honorstheses Recommended Citation Kremer, Detmer Yens, "Drops of One Ocean: Globalization, Identity Formation and Hegemony in the Baha'i Communities of Samoa, the Netherlands, Latvia, and Lithuania" (2016). Honors Theses. 163. http://scarab.bates.edu/honorstheses/163 This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Capstone Projects at SCARAB. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of SCARAB. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Drops of One Ocean Globalization, Identity Formation and Hegemony in the Baha’i Communities of Samoa, the Netherlands, Latvia, and Lithuania An Honors Thesis Presented To The Faculty of the Department of Anthropology Bates College In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts By Detmer Yens Kremer Lewiston, Maine March 28, 2016 i Leave pake, Jo koene dizze wurden net lêze. Ik haw se skreaun yn in taal dy't jo net praten koe, mar ik hoopje dat jo grutsk binne. Miskien kin immen it foar jo fertale. Ik sei ‘t net faak genôch, mar ik hâld fan dy (I dedicate my thesis to my grandfather, a man who taught me to work hard and be proud of who I am. A kind man with his own stubborn ideas and sense of right and wrong. A man who taught me to remove the tendrils from vines so our grapes would grow bigger and taste sweeter.) ii Acknowledgements Although this thesis bears my name, it was an endeavor I could have never undertaken by myself. The Baha’is that I met in Samoa, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Netherlands took me in and with unparalleled kindness shared their ideas, hopes, and experiences through the stories they shared. I am indebted to every single one of you, and I hope you will enjoy reading my thesis. I do want to take the time to explicitly thank several of you, those of you that have gone out of their way to introduce me to your friends, to host me in your homes, to drive me across your countries, and to translate the languages I did not understand. Thank you Karen Te’o, Galumalemana Steven Percival, Telesia Tuiletufuga, Harry Koree, Jornt de Jong, Tatjana Sokolova, Maris Pavlov, Valentina Poltavets, Raimundas Leugaudas, Agne Pozniakiene, and Pawkar Alvaredo. This thesis reflects only what I believe, and how I have interpreted the stories that were shared with me, it is not an articulation of the individual opinions of Baha’is or the ideology presented by the Faith. These are my thoughts, and they are not intended to be read as facts. I also want to thank Bates College, for providing academic challenges that have pushed me to consider ideas and thoughts I could have never imagined otherwise. The anthropology department here especially has truly made me feel at home in academia, a place I did not think that would accept me. I want to thank Andrew Hamill ’05 and the Hamill Fund for Fieldwork in Anthropology because without this fund I would have never been able to meet the people I did in Latvia, Lithuania, and the Netherlands. I want to thank my fellow study abroad students, for being there when we needed it most. I want to thank my friends here at Bates who helped me stay focused but also made sure senior year was a blast. In particular I want to thank Will Sartorius for reading my short stories, Thuy My Do for being my rock, and Sasha Grodsky for creating a room of one’s own. I want to thank my parents, papa en mem, for driving me around and continuously supporting me to go places I have never been before. I want to think my brothers and their partners, Wessel, Maaike, Derk, en Rita, for being kind and present in my life. I want to thank oma en beppe for their warmth and love. Lastly, I want to thank Professor Joshua Rubin, for reading incoherent pages, checking unfinished sentences, and teaching me the difference between quote and quotation. iii Abstract This thesis examines the processes of globalization in different Baha’i communities in Samoa, Latvia, Lithuania and the Netherlands. Traditionally globalization has been defined as a secular force imposing worldwide homogenization from the global-center onto the global- periphery, however in the Baha’i Faith globalization is an essential part of the central goal to materialize a unified world marked by peace and racial, class-based, and gender-based justice infused with monotheistic spirituality. Drawing evidence from interviews with Baha’is and observations of community events and prayer services, and theoretical support from Foucault’s concept of authorship and Tsing, Rifkin, and Appiah’s theories of globalization, the central argument revolves around how the use of spirituality in Baha’i rhetoric centers human experience in globalization, resulting in tangible examples that defy assumed homogenization. The combination of these diverse theories aid to a conversation demystifying and decolonizing hegemonic globalization discourse and incorporate the ways in which friction between local and global streams of culture produce and reproduce heterogeneous cultural identities and communities. iv Table of Contents Introduction: Learning how to fly ................................................................................................1 Methodology: On what, where, and how ...................................................................................17 History: A sense of place .............................................................................................................23 Literature Review: A particular kind of universality ..............................................................54 Chapter I: I will obey ...................................................................................................................72 Chapter II: From the mouthpiece of god ...................................................................................78 Chapter III: For fatherland and freedom .................................................................................98 Chapter IV: The smell and sight of flowers.............................................................................106 Chapter V: Founded on god .....................................................................................................127 Chapter VI: The unifying forces of life ....................................................................................133 Chapter VII: Looking for salvation in the secular age ...........................................................151 Conclusion: Across oceans ........................................................................................................162 Bibliography ...............................................................................................................................174 v Introduction learning how to fly “The world of humanity has two wings – one is woman and the other man. Not until both wings are equally developed can the bird fly” ~ Abdu’l-Baha We start in a small Frisian town called Nij Beets, located in the Dutch north. On Sundays church bells would wake me up. I would open my curtains and see the line of cars parked outside the church. I was never part of this – or any – religious community. This immediately placed me in the position of an observer. It seemed to me that religious communities walked a tightrope. The interplay of exclusion and inclusion seemed pivotal to constituting community. Believers always tried to convince me of how inclusive they were and how they found comfort and solace in the accepting arms of divine spirit(s). Exclusion was tied to notions of either poor choices or unfortunate blood. It was clear to me that the politics of exclusion were a useful tool to understand the identity of who was included. The juxtaposition of the excluded and the included perfectly illustrates who is worthy, and who is not. The virgin/whore dichotomy is a good example of this as virginity is defined exactly by the absence of the acts of the whore. I experienced exclusion firsthand through a combination of identities; my family was not born in Nij Beets, my vegetarianism, my academic pursuits, and the one that garnered the most explicit violent response, my sexuality. The interplay of outsiders and insiders 1 that shapes religious communities fascinates me and I always wondered if there were exceptions, and what those exceptions might look like. Before I started doing research, the name ‘Baha’i’ was an unfamiliar term that described an obscure religion I recall once reading about. I knew about the temples, scattered irregularly over the world, but nothing more. The quoted words that open this introduction were the first from the Faith that I read. They were printed on a banner at the temple in Tiapapata, Samoa. Through a School of International Training program I connected with several members of the local Baha’i community and I was quickly taught about the ways and experiences of this religious minority. This quote about the equality of men and women sparked a project that looked at the constructions of gender within the Samoan Baha’i community. Through this research I had conversations about place and culture that required more time than a month-long project could permit and thus I expanded my topic for my thesis. I wanted