Sanctuary and Asylum Linda Rabben

Published by University of Washington Press

Rabben, L.. Sanctuary and Asylum: A Social and Political History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/47599

Access provided by University of Washington @ Seattle (5 Jan 2017 18:10 GMT) 2 Sanctuary’s Beginnings

I was a stranger, and ye took me in.

—Matthew 25:35

Homo sapiens is a migrating species. Scientists have traced our wanderings across continents and oceans through a history that stretches back more than two million years. During this long process, we have adapted to our varied surroundings by developing diverse practices and beliefs, as well as forms of behavior that distinguish us from our primate relatives. And in the hundreds of thousands of years during which we have had language, we have evolved further, from discrete, isolated communities into a worldwide community. According to anthropologist Adam Kuper, “Five hundred years ago, the history of the human population began to come together again into a single process, for the first time since the origin of modern humans. After a history of dispersal and differentiation that lasted perhaps a quarter of a million years, there is once more something approaching a single world economy, culture and political system” (1994: 95). A highly sociable species characterized by sharing, exchange, cooperation, and hospitality, we are also quarrelsome and violent, excluding and rejecting those we define as different from ourselves. Many social commentators have argued that conflict and competition for scarce resources, such as food, status, and mates, characterize human societies. Yet anthropologists have studied societies in which food, status, and mates are not particularly scarce; the only general- ization one can make with assurance about human beings is that our circumstances and actions vary considerably—within certain broad limits determined by biology, environment, and culture.

27 28 ChaPteR 2

As both anthropologists and biologists acknowledge, we have in common with other species a tendency to act altruistically. The great primatologist Frans de Waal observes, “Aiding others at a cost or risk to oneself is widespread in the animal world.” Like other primates, humans extend help not only to their biological kin but also to unrelated individuals or groups. “Helpful acts that are costly in the short run may produce long-term benefits if recipients return the favor,” de Waal notes (1996: 12). Such reciprocal altruism follows rules laid out by biologist Robert Trivers in 1972:

1. The exchanged acts, while beneficial to the recipient, are costly to the performer. 2. There is a time lag between giving and receiving. 3. Giving is contingent on receiving. (de Waal 1996: 24)

De Waal links reciprocal altruism among primates to the evolution of morality, “a tendency to develop social norms and enforce them, the capacity for empathy and sympathy, mutual aid and a sense of fairness, the mechanisms of conflict resolution, and so on” (2001: 34). Morality among humans extends beyond single communities, as disparate groups meet to socialize, trade, court, and perform. Anthro- pologists have documented how the social relationships that develop at such gatherings endure over long periods and great distances. De Waal points out that human societies differ from those of chimpanzees in that kin bonds extend well beyond the group’s boundaries, partly through exchange of females in marriage (34). De Waal goes much further when he writes: “Early human societies must have been optimal breeding grounds for survival-of-the-kindest aimed at families and potential reciprocators. Once this sensibility had come into existence, its range expanded. At some point, sympathy for others became a goal in and of itself: the centerpiece of human morality and an essential aspect of religion. It is good to realize, though, that in stressing kindness, our moral systems are enforcing what is already part of our heritage” (2006: 181). Thus giving asylum or sanctuary may be seen as one of the basic manifestations of altruistic behavior and human morality. In the sanCtUaRy’s beginnings 29 face of conflict, humans wander or even flee, sometimes thousands of miles from home, seeking safety among strangers who may have little apparent reason to welcome us. We seek sanctuary from pursuers and offer asylum to strangers in this richly contradictory context. Sanctuary and asylum are ancient, perhaps primordial, institutions, part of the foundation of our species. Why should that be so? Aside from saving the lives of those fleeing persecution, what larger purposes does sanctuary serve? Other primates’ social lives may be suggestive. Homo sapiens is not the only species whose members offer or seek sanctuary. Among our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos, females often move from one group to another, fleeing sexual overtures or attacks by local males they do not want to mate with, perhaps because they are related to them.1 According to primatologists, female primates are more averse to incest than males and therefore more likely to leave home to avoid it. About chimpanzees, primatologist Lynne Isbell writes: “Because inbreeding is more costly to females than to males, selection should favor females that minimize incestuous matings. Males disperse because limited mating opportunities in their natal groups or home ranges create greater mating opportunities in other groups or home ranges, all else being equal” (2004: 96). Chimpanzees manage to find shelter in groups where they have no relatives, even though their social life is characterized by chronic conflicts, including raids and killings, between communities. Perhaps sanctuary or asylum could even be considered an integral part of intergroup hostility within a species, since it can be defined as the reception and protection of a fleeing member of a strange or “enemy” group. However one chooses to interpret primate migration, it is a deli- cate business to extrapolate from other primates’ behavior to our own. Humans differ from chimpanzees and other primates in important ways. Most strikingly, we form enduring nuclear and extended families; we keep in touch with distant relatives; unrelated humans become friends and maintain those friendships for long periods; we maintain elaborate kinship groups, based on social as well as biological ties; we socialize and trade with hundreds or even thousands of other humans, creating huge communities that span continents; we make war, but 30 ChaPteR 2 we also make peace; we codify and change social rules; and we give refuge to unrelated individuals and groups on a scale unknown to other primates. As a result, our sociability is far more complex than theirs, and to a far greater extent we are an unfinished species. We have tried to take our evolution into our own hands through whole- sale alterations of the natural environment, with unforeseen and as yet unknown results. Our evolution is still going on. Kuper warns us “not to expect to learn very much about our present nature from a study of remote ancestors scratching a living some 40,000 years ago” (1994: 101). Nonetheless, it is instructive to look at the long history of human groups to find the commonalities that define us as members of one species. Nineteenth-century theorists disagreed about the mechanisms of human evolution on the basis of their observations of other species, ancient Greek and Roman sources, and reports on recently contacted human groups. In his 1865 book Primitive Marriage, John McLennan speculated that early human males had avoided incest by seizing women from outside their local group. Darwin played down ideas about generalized promiscuity among early humans by pointing out that mating is never random, but Freud apparently believed that such promiscuity had existed. In contrast, early twentieth-century anthropologists, including Westermarck and Malinowski, theorized that incest was the first human taboo. Westermarck went further, proposing that association with close relatives during childhood inhibits later sexual attraction in humans and other primates; this has come to be known as the Westermarck effect. Evolutionary biologists’ research over the past hundred years has proven him right. They have also found that in some primate species, such as chimps and bonobos, males tend to be philopatric (remaining in their birth communities), while females migrate to other communities to mate. Thus primates, including humans, practice exogamy (mating outside their family or community) to avoid incest, which has damaging effects on reproductive fitness over time. In the process, humans create and maintain trade and other relationships outside their home community. Relations with other communities may be friendly, antagonistic, or both: strangers may be seen as important sources of information or potential exchange partners sanCtUaRy’s beginnings 31 rather than dangerous interlopers or deadly assailants, but which of these cannot be known in advance (Chapais and Berman 2004: 401). For this system of communication and exchange to work, communities must take in strangers at least some of the time. Furthermore, “social inclusion is absolutely central to human morality, commonly cast in terms of how we should or should not behave in order to be valued as members of society. . . . Universally, human communities are moral communities; a morally neutral existence is as impossible for us as a completely solitary existence,” de Waal maintains (1996: 10). However, he insists, our sympathy for others is not boundless. We give it most readily to our own family and clan, less to other members of the community, and least of all to outsiders (88). Accepting strangers makes them part of the moral community. That is the basis of sanctuary. But the ever-present ten- sion between incorporating and rejecting strangers limits humans’ willingness to bestow it. In many societies, sanctuary is only temporary or is hedged with restrictions. Inspiring stories of Christian Holocaust rescuers sheltering Jewish children at the risk of their own lives must be juxtaposed against today’s punitive and exclusionary asylum policies, which break up families or return refugees to die in the country that persecuted them. Decisions about whom to accept and whom to reject may seem arbitrary, but they are not; they are based on our willingness to incorporate members of certain groups but not others into our moral community. The criteria we use to make such decisions change over time, depending on a complex combination of economic, social, and political factors and circumstances. And sometimes sanctuary is given despite these factors, as individuals and groups defy custom and law, risking their lives and livelihoods to give refuge to strangers.

Ancient Sanctuary Traditions

Often these decisions come out of deeply held beliefs that form the foundation of our moral community. Almost every major religious tradition includes concepts and rules governing sanctuary. Religious texts codify customs that probably existed long before the texts were 32 ChaPteR 2 written. For example, rules establishing “cities of refuge” for manslayers are laid out in the Old Testament, in the Book of Numbers and Deuteronomy, compiled more than 2,500 years ago. Siebold explains: “Exodus XII:14 ruled that whosoever transgressed against his neigh- bor, killing him by cunning, should be removed from the altar and slain. Deuteronomy marked a new epoch in the administration of criminal justice: blood vengeance was divested of its private character and replaced by public punishment; the purchase of freedom from punishment by the murderer was no longer permitted; and a clear distinction was made between premeditated and unpremeditated crimes. All shrines were abolished except for the temple at Jerusalem, where the entire cult was centralized, and the institution of sanctuary was completely transformed” (1937: 534). The ancient Hebrews created six cities of refuge, linked to former religious sanctuaries and intended only for those who had committed unpremeditated murder. Over time, protection of the innocent and punishment of the guilty became the public features of secular law (Siebold 1937: 534). Bau (1985) points out that the city of refuge lessened the harshness of the blood feud by giving refuge to such unintentional killers, who were in a different category from murderers. Once they had arrived in the city of refuge, manslayers had to undergo a trial to prove that they had killed accidentally. Then they could stay in the city until the reigning high priest died. After that, they could return home safely. Traditions of sanctuary in the Mediterranean world are even older. Among the ancient Egyptians, Siebold notes, “in the earliest times every shrine, including places dedicated to the gods, royal altars, pic- tures and statues of the ruler, or sites used for the taking of oaths, was a protected region sought out by all the persecuted, by mistreated slaves, oppressed debtors and political offenders” (1937: 534). The word asylum comes from the ancient Greek asylos, “inviolable.” Three thousand years ago, the goddess Diana’s sanctuary at Ephesos was famous throughout Greece as a place of asylum, and people also sought refuge in groves, temples, and other places associated with the gods. Boundary markers, including rocks and trees, marked sacred and inviolable space. Nothing could be damaged and sanCtUaRy’s beginnings 33 no one harmed there with impunity. Fugitives could sit at the foot of a statue or an altar or tie themselves by a rope to a statue, and no one was supposed to touch them, John Pedley, a historian of ancient Greece, wrote. Sometimes the area around a sanctuary, such as all the space within bow-shot range of the corner of the roof of the temple of Ephesos, was sacred (Pedley 2005: 57–58). Outlaws and refugees, guilty and innocent alike, fled to sanctuaries. It was believed that severe punishment such as a plague would befall anyone who broke the rules protecting them. These sanctions could also affect the community of someone who violated sanctuary. Defeated soldiers, slaves, exiled politicians, or social outcasts could cross the boundary into the sacred space and be safe. No one could remove them by force (Pedley 2005: 97). The Greek city-states were constantly at war with one another, producing a stream of refugees and exiles seeking sanctuary with their enemies. Sanctuaries on the frontiers of city-states were well known. Promontories, considered sacred to the god Poseidon, often served as places of asylum because they were accessible by both land and sea. According to Siebold, “Temples enjoyed the character of sanctuaries and under all circumstances could protect the oppressed and the persecuted, slaves, debtors, malefactors and criminals. Even deliberate murderers and those under sentence of death had a claim to protection and could dwell in the sanctuary grounds surrounding a temple, secure under the sheltering wing of the divinity, until death overtook them” (534). Under Roman rule during the third and second centuries CE, Greek sanctuaries were still giving shelter to fugitives, often escaped slaves. A Roman emperor, hearing that sanctuaries were being violated, referred the matter to the senate. Its decisions usually favored the sanctuary seeker on the basis of ancient practice. Romans thought the Greeks knew best about maintaining sanctuaries (Pedley 2005: 98). Although the ancient Romans were not known to be merciful, they also considered certain places as sanctuaries. Westermarck writes that an old Roman tradition held that “Romulus [the mythical cofounder of Rome] established a sanctuary, dedicated to some unknown god or spirit, on the slope of the Capitoline Hill, proclaiming that all who 34 ChaPteR 2 resorted to it, whether bond or free, should be safe” (1909: 162). He also notes that a temple built to honor Julius Caesar in 42 BCE, two years after his assassination, gave sanctuary to fugitives. Statues of Roman emperors were considered places of sanctuary as well. According to Siebold, during the imperial period their protective power extended to persons and objects connected with the cult of the divine emperor. Statues, portraits, and temples of the caesars, as well as military flags and eagles, were imbued with the properties of asylum (535).

Sanctuary in Other Societies

Cultures and societies remote from Western civilization also have long traditions of sanctuary and asylum. Ethnographers, historians, explorers, invaders, and travelers since the fifteenth century have observed and reported on such traditions, which may date from ancient times. Margaret Mead observed in her study of the island of Manus, in Papua New Guinea: “In a primitive community, sanctuary and hospitality are so intermixed that it is difficult to distinguish between them” (1956: 315).2 In cultures where honor is a central virtue, it usually includes the obligation to wreak vengeance, provide safeguard and sanctuary, protect the integrity of women, and guarantee hospitality (Masters 1953: 180). These ideals predate major religious traditions in the Middle East and Mediterranean, and some continue up to the present. For example, in the 1960s the Bedouins of western Egypt preserved an ancient practice, the nazaala, “the act of taking refuge”: “If a killing is committed, the killer immediately seeks protection by going to the residence of a neutral third party. . . . During the period of sanctuary, it is hoped that two things will happen: that the killed man’s group will be placated and agree to compensation rather than retaliation as a means of conflict regulation; and that over this period of one year the killer’s family will pay the [compensation]” (Obermeyer 1969: 201). Seeking or giving sanctuary or asylum to forestall blood vengeance is a frequent theme in the anthropological literature. Sanctuary also serves other purposes in “honor” cultures. Boehm wrote that when Montenegro was a Balkan tribal society, malefactors sanCtUaRy’s beginnings 35 might be exiled temporarily or permanently. In Montenegro and the Turkish territory that surrounded it, refugees from trouble of one sort or another kept showing up and asking for permission to stay. The local moral code made sanctuary an imperative (1984: 75). In many African societies, sanctuary was based on animist religious beliefs and thus was a sacred institution. Among the Igbo, a major ethnic group in Nigeria, “the shrine of the goddess became a sanctuary for such social offenders as thieves, adulterers, debtors and those sent there as gifts to the goddess. . . . As the stream was considered sacred, all creatures in it were considered sacred and taboo by the community” (Amadiume 1987: 53). Among many examples of sanctuary throughout the world, Wester- marck cites one from India: “Among the Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush there are several ‘cities of refuge,’ the largest being the village of Mer- gron, which is almost entirely peopled by . . . descendants of persons who have slain some fellow-tribesman” (1909: 161). Half a world away, Native American groups that had tense relationships with one another still offered and received sanctuary. After their rebellion against the Spanish in the 1680s, for example, the Tewa fled west and sought refuge with the Hopi. Anthropologist Harold Courlander notes: “The Hopi mesas were a sanctuary for Lagunas, Acomas and others seeking escape from Spanish authority virtually throughout the seventeenth century. At one time or another there were Eastern Pueblo settlements close to every one of the extant Hopi villages” (1987: 12). In what later became New York state, Seneca of the eighteenth century gave sanctuary to indigenous people of diverse origins. Many of them were assimilated into Iroquoian society (Deardoff 1951: 82). A History of American Indians, published in 1775, describes “peace- able towns” among the tribes of the Southeast: “They seem to have been formerly ‘towns of refuge,’ for it is not in the memory of their oldest people that human blood was ever shed in them, although they often force persons from them, and put them to death elsewhere” (Westermarck 1909: 161). Hawaiians were more forgiving, although their system of kapu (taboos) was rigid and all-encompassing: “The authority of the high 36 ChaPteR 2 chief and the priests to regulate the patterns of ancient Hawaiian society, especially as they related to social and religious customs, was unquestioned. Those who disregarded the traditional restrictions were susceptible to the most extreme punishment. One avenue of succor was available to them, however, consisting of escape to a place of refuge. These were the only checks to the king’s absolute power of life and death over his subjects” (Rhodes and Greene 2001: 219). These places, called pu‘uhonua,

were sacred areas, not necessarily enclosed, to which murderers, kapu- breakers, and other transgressors who had incurred the wrath of the ruler could hastily retreat to gain sanctuary from reprisal. . . . Theoreti- cally, no one pursuing this person, including a high chief, the king, or enemy warriors, could enter the enclosure without risking death at the hands of the resident priest or his attendants. The one seeking asylum usually remained several days and then returned home, absolved of his misdeeds by the gods. Fugitives from battle also fled to these places; during times of war white flags waved from tall spears placed outside the walls at each end of the enclosure. . . . Ten pu‘uhonua existed on the island of Hawai‘i, the one at Honaunau being the largest in the Hawaiian Islands. (219)

Pu‘uhonua O Honaunau (City of Refuge) is now a US national park, and its sanctuary has been carefully restored.

Sanctuary Transformed

Over the past five hundred years, as societies changed under the pressure of Western colonialism and imperialism, they transformed ancient traditions to respond to modern conditions. For example, Catholic Church historian John Noonan points to the reuse of ancient concepts of sanctuary in nineteenth-century America, “when churches were to be used as safe places for slaves who had fled their masters in slave states. . . . Here sanctuary was not incorporated into the law to limit the law but operated in bold defiance of the law. Nonethe- less the ancient idea of the special character of a holy place was at sanCtUaRy’s beginnings 37 work. Somewhere on earth, it was believed by religious people, the hunted should be beyond their pursuers” (quoted by Bau 1985: 2–3). Members of the Sanctuary Movement in the United States often cited Canon 1179 of the Catholic Church’s 1917 Code of Canon Law to justify giving refuge to Salvadorans, Hondurans, and Guatemalans during the Central American wars of the 1980s. Ignatius Bau quotes the canon: “A church enjoys the right of asylum, so that guilty persons who take refuge in it must not be taken from it, except in the case of necessity, without the consent of the ordinary, or at least of the rector of the church” (1985: 91; and quoted by Lippert and Rehaag 2013: 26). Despite its omission from the Code of Canon Law of 1983, this provision continued to have moral force for some Catholics. Bau, the first writer to put the Sanctuary Movement in historical, religious, and political context while it was most active, called the provision “shocking to the secular mind. How can there be any place within the confines of a nation that the law does not operate? How can religion claim a privilege to say it is beyond the law? How can the law stultify itself by acknowledging that in certain places the law ceases to hold sway? Religious history teaches otherwise” (2). Thus modern sanctuary givers have sought legitimacy in ancient traditions.

* * *

Human cultures are characterized by diversity and variety, and contradictory tendencies to exclude and to integrate strangers are both widespread in our species. As a result, it is incorrect to assume that human nature leads inevitably to rejection of the other. We are as likely to accept strangers as to drive them away, depending on complex factors that cannot be reduced to the immediate self-interest of a particular group. Sanctuary and asylum may be informally or spon- taneously given, but they are rule-bound institutions based on shared values and well-established cultural codes. Nevertheless, individuals and groups may defy powerful social, political, and economic forces and norms to give sanctuary. Giving refuge to strangers is an act of reciprocal altruism, an adap- tation we share with our primate relatives and other species. It may 38 ChaPteR 2 have its roots in the avoidance of incest and the practice of exogamy in various species. Sanctuary is often associated with sacred or otherwise special places where extraordinary exceptions may be made to normal rules, punishments, and restrictions. Asylum may be given to complete strangers from distant societies or to known individuals from neighboring communities or nearby kin groups. Whoever gains sanctuary is protected from violence, usually temporarily but sometimes permanently. The religious nature of sanctuary is a constant across cultures and millennia.