Contemporary Religiosities: Emergent Socialities and the Post-Nation-State 9780857455345

Citation preview

Contemporary Religiosities

Contemporary Religiosities Emergent Socialities and the Post-Nation-State

Edited by

Bruce Kapferer, Kari Telle, and Annelin Eriksen

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2010 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2010 Berghahn Books Originally published as a special issue of Social Analysis, volume 53, issue 1. All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Contemporary religiosities : emergent socialities and the post-nation-state / edited by Bruce Kapferer, Kari Telle, and Annelin Eriksen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85745-130-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Religions. 2. Religion and sociology. 3. Religion and politics. I. Kapferer, Bruce. II. Telle, Kari. III. Eriksen, Annelin. BL74.C66 2010 200—dc22

2010028098

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed on acid-free paper

Contents

1 Introduction: Religiosities toward a Future—in Pursuit of the New Millennium Bruce Kapferer, Kari Telle, and Annelin Eriksen Chapter 1 17 The Politics of Conviction: Faith on the Neo-liberal Frontier Jean Comaroff Chapter 2 39 Strategic Secularism: Bible Advocacy in England Matthew Engelke Chapter 3 55 Pentecostal Networks and the Spirit of Globalization: On the Social Productivity of Ritual Forms Joel Robbins Chapter 4 67 Healing the Nation: In Search of Unity through the Holy Spirit in Vanuatu Annelin Eriksen Chapter 5 82 What Happened to Cargo Cults? Material Religions in Melanesia and the West Ton Otto Chapter 6 103 Gold for a Golden Age: Sacred Money and Islamic Freedom in a Global Sufi Order Nils Bubandt –v–

vi | Contents

Chapter 7 123 Sri Lankan Civil Society and Its Fanatics Rohan Bastin Chapter 8 141 Dharma Power: Searching for Security in Post–New Order Indonesia Kari Telle Chapter 9 157 An Ancient Case of Interrogation and Torture Bruce Lincoln Chapter 10 173 The Terrorist as Humanitarian Faisal Devji Chapter 11 193 Reflections on the Rise of Legal Theology: Law and Religion in the Twenty-First Century John L. Comaroff 217 Index

( Introduction Religiosities toward a Future—in Pursuit of the New Millennium Bruce Kapferer, Kari Telle, and Annelin Eriksen

Benedict Anderson once commented that nationalism was the modernist political movement that appeared to have had the most resilience contrasted with other political ideological movements of the time. Anderson ([1983] 1991) was writing when the nation-state, whose imaginary of community and shared history and identity constitutes a transcendent ideal, was in the ascendant. Encouraging and/or inventing such a nationalist consciousness, the agents of state power often strove to create and to legitimate the social order of the state within the terms of a nationalist consciousness, augmenting their authority and potency accordingly. In many instances, the agents and the agencies of the state were able to excite a degree of religiosity in nationalist ideals—often with disastrous and tragic results. Despite the religiosity of much nationalism, it was usually explicitly secular, eschewing overt commitment to religion (see Kapferer 1988). Many nationalisms implicated religious or cosmo-ontological orientations embedded in religious practice in the articulations of their consciousness. These orientations were subordinated to, and their meaning was fashioned by, References for this section are located on page 16.

2 | Bruce Kapferer, Kari Telle, and Annelin Eriksen

the political pragmatics and processes of state power. As a broad statement, insofar as religion is connected to the political interests of the nation-state, it is the political that plays the key role in defining the relevant aspects of the religious. Modern nationalisms, such as those of Israel or the Buddhist nationalism of Sri Lanka, are expressions of the religious largely constrained—and defined—within the terms of the political order of the state. In other words, it is chiefly political concerns that determine or create the particular import given to religious ideas, engaging them with the purpose of legitimizing actions that are decided largely independently of the religious. Overall, nationalism, which often shared a passionate intensity with religion, whose metaphors it frequently engaged, was a secular force that displaced the religious. A view of many commentators is that if religion, at least in the West, once appeared to be increasingly a feature of a bygone age, it now appears to be staging a comeback. Moreover, if the abandonment of religion might appear to define the current secular age (Taylor 2004, 2007), the return of religion, in the opinion of some, is threatening a secular trend that has been seen as progressive. Contemporary secularists—some of whom, including the neo-Darwinist philosopher Daniel Dennett and the biologist Richard Dawkins, display a religiosity of their own, albeit of a scientific-rationalist variety—are attempting to push back what they see as a re-encroachment of religion, often in a manner reminiscent of similar debates in the Victorian era and into the early part of the twentieth century. In Britain, rationalist and avowedly anti-religious secularists, supporters of Dawkins’s own personal crusade, have taken to parading through the streets in a London bus across which is hung a large-lettered sign proclaiming, “THERE IS PROBABLY NO GOD.” By opposing their scientific conviction of radical doubt to the certainty of religious truth, they enthusiastically mimic much militant and populist religious practice. Yet in so doing they reveal a not dissimilar fundamentalism. Such rationalist and secularist protest is motivated by the growth of popular support for creationism, especially in the US, and by the apparent link of fundamentalist religious movements with reactionary and repressive social and political processes, which is evident globally. Al-Qaeda terrorism, the fundamentalist regime of the Taliban, and the emergence of the politically powerful Christian right in the US have led some critics to note that religion is achieving a return to its totalizing, mystifying, and emotive intensity of the past, even realizing once again a theological political potency (see Lilla 2008). If such is the case, we insist that this is not a recidivist, ‘back to the future’ process—a strong implication of some criticism. Rather, it is a dimension of contemporary circumstances that could be described as thoroughly postmodern. There seems to be a link between what appears to be the ‘return of the religious’ and reconfigurations of political and social realities attendant on what is loosely referred to as globalization. That is, the increasing power of religion in the framing, organization, and motivation for social and political action may be associated with the break-up and fragmentation of formerly dominant sociopolitical orders and the social dislocations, redistribution and movement of populations brought about by such developments.

Introduction: Religiosities toward a Future | 3

In these situations, social and political alienation, poverty, and a myriad of other kinds of uncertainty and suffering drive an appeal to the religious, which has always thrived on such experience. The soteriological directives, ideas, and objectives of most religions everywhere aim to alleviate, overcome, or redress anxieties and uncertainties largely produced and driven in a variety of social and political processes. This kind of understanding is almost canonical in anthropology. Periodical bursts of religious enthusiasm and the formation of new religions (e.g., millenarian cults) at intense points of change or at times when the very conditions of life are threatened (e.g., populations disrupted by colonial invasion, the violent upheavals of war, pestilence, etc.) are widely recorded by historians, anthropologists, and sociologists. The current return of the religious can be grasped as another instance of the emergence of the religious at a moment of crisis. This is likely to be an enduringly repeated phenomenon for the teleological reason that religion is thoroughly concerned with the crises of human existence as such. As Rappaport (1999) argues, religion is integral to humanity, as it addresses existential dimensions of life and its circumstances, offering resolutions that will always be in excess of any other rationalistic orientation. Indeed, other forms of the human creative imaginary, even those avowedly opposed to religion, are themselves vulnerable to the very kind of religiosity of which they may be critical, involving similar circularities in reasoning and cries of faith. Capitalism and the belief in economic rationalism often have more than a millenarian and religious ring to their discourses—as Jean and John L. Comaroff (2001), among others, have elaborated—especially today in a context of looming global market depression. Rationalist social science typically claims to approach religion from an outside secular perspective, yet this contention can obscure deeper affinities. Max Weber ([1930] 2001) showed that religious discourse can constitute itself around a kind of rationalism that refracts that of the realities from which it emerges, impelling further elaborations in such realities, for example, the relation of Protestantism to capitalism. In European contexts, the character of much secularism, while apparently eschewing the religious, embeds orientations that have had their inspiration and have been shaped in the history of Christianity (see Dumont 1986). Despite enthusiastic claims to the contrary, the secular is not necessarily outside the religious. The apparent rejection of the religious in much secularism masks the secular subsumption of religious orientations. It might be said that modern secularism achieves a universalization of values that a variety of religions could not accomplish. In European and North American contexts, an ideology of secularism conceals certain dimensions of religious attitudes and orientations that it might otherwise appear to have displaced. The point we are making here is that the arguments and the implicit assertions of religions—what can be termed the various articulations of the religious imagination—are thoroughly intimate with the social and political contexts of the realities in which they form. More than expressions of the social in Durkheim’s sense, they are specific imaginary constitutions of it and, as well, often

4 | Bruce Kapferer, Kari Telle, and Annelin Eriksen

totalizations of forms of life. That is, they are attempts to infuse and unify all aspects of life within overarching religious conceptions and orientations. This is particularly apparent in contemporary global situations where the socially constitutive capacity of the religious has a force in what seems to be both the resurgence and the modernity of religion. We have commented on the connection between globalizing forces and the seemingly growing importance of religion. The dissolution of the Soviet Union, the new national assertions in Central Asia and Eastern Europe, and the economic and social (if limited) liberation of China have all been marked by a spectacular reassertion of religious commitment and practice. An example is the extraordinary re-emergence of the popularity of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has seen the agents of state power, the president and prime minister, acknowledge its spiritual authority. In China, practices connected with the worship of ancestors, Confucianism, and Buddhism have returned to an intensive visibility. Undoubtedly, these developments are connected with the removal of state-mediated authoritarian and rationalist constraints in the face of global political and economic pressures, but this overlooks the role of religion in the re-formation of social realities under new conditions. Roman Catholicism in Europe appears to be resurgent. The death of Pope John Paul II in 2005 resulted in an unexpected outpouring of religious emotion, which may be related to a renewed dependence on the socially and morally maintaining, generating, and sustaining role of Catholicism in circumstances of rapid social and economic change and increased alienation and uncertainty. Pentecostal religious movements have been gaining ground throughout the world. Apart from their direct appeal to personal existential anxieties and the problematics of self (see Csordas 1994), some of the impetus for their popularity stems from their affirmative take on the trappings of wealth and success. They do not express millenarian ideas of a new dawning (sometimes of an apocalyptic kind); rather, they focus on a remoralization and an insistence on practices that appear to fit with what seems to be the outward associations and indications of success among already dominant groups. Much current Pentecostalism is aspirational and orienting in attitude and behavior toward managerialist values that are associated with business or corporate elites. This is the case with Pentecostal movements such as Hillsong and Rhema, which have major followings in Australia, Europe, and southern Africa. Influenced by Midwestern American television revivalism, they are high-tech, mediadriven proselytizing organizations that have a pronounced celebrity-consumerist style. They appeal to the upwardly mobile and, in Australia, for example, to recent immigrant groups that are powerfully achievement-driven. Those Pentecostal movements whose appeal is directed mainly to the impoverished—such as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (founded by a Brazilian lotteryticket seller), which has a marked presence in South America and in southern Africa—aggressively equate their worship with the attainment of the symbols of wealth and success. These are not religious movements of suffering and marginalization, or even of the weak. The redemption that is sought is in the immediate benefits of success and wealth. They preach confidence and acceptance of

Introduction: Religiosities toward a Future | 5

the values that appear to be in control and, in the case of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, also seem to force entry into the domains of social and economic power. These religious movements are built around consumerism and the ethos of globalizing capital, generating the creation of religions of radical acceptance rather than resistance. In their missionizing zeal, such movements are also intimate with the expansion of global capital and the social and political orders that support and facilitate its spread. Christian missionizing is widely shown to be systematic with the hegemony of colonial and imperial expansion, a bio-political, virtually ontologizing force, creating populations of control despite, or perhaps even through, their resistance (see J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff 2001; Veer 1996). The current wave of Pentecostalism and similar Christianizing movements, which often work closely in hand with development agencies such as World Vision and CARE, could be seen as vital in new processes of an imperial kind in which the parameters of state orders are undergoing significant change. Although the nation-state remains the dominant political form, there have been a growing number of external as well as internal attacks on the nature of state sovereignty and autonomy, especially among those countries that have achieved independence from colonial control after World War II. Broadly, the social-economic orders of states as these were politically constituted in the idea of the nation-state have weakened. What might be referred to as the ‘society of the state’ (the order established through the relative totalizing power of the nation-state) has been disrupted by post-colonial processes of international dependency and the postmodern forces of globalization. This is expressed in the rise in civil wars, the emergence of contested or “wild sovereignties” (Kapferer 2004), and the scaling back of state intervention in what is widely referred to as civil society, which is increasingly viewed as being opposed and denied by the assertion of state authority. Many of the newer religious movements appear to have expanded their opportunities in these current circumstances, actively promoting programs that supplant state functions or obtruding on domains in which state or other locally based institutions have been ineffective. Here they can play a role in augmenting neo-imperial moves connected with new socio-political and economic configurations emanating from global centers. They thus play a positive part in opening the way for new intrusions of external power and, more significantly, in the articulations of new social assemblages of political and economic effect that bypass erstwhile state controls, perhaps further weakening them. What we are saying is that new religious movements are not only Durkheimian expressions of particular social processes; they are agencies in the creation of new kinds of social and political arrangement of a global and non-territorial kind. In Pentecostalism there is a remarkable similarity globally in the presentation and style of message and the characteristic of participation despite local variations (see Robbins 2004 and this volume). This has much to do with the movement’s connections and influence within North American corporate culture: the

6 | Bruce Kapferer, Kari Telle, and Annelin Eriksen

leaders of Pentecostal groups sometimes appear to manifest the charismatic and messianic qualities of some corporate executive officers (CEOs), including an intense authoritarianism and a degree of secrecy. That Pentecostalism embodies the techniques and spirit of much global capital is arguably a key to understanding the extraordinary spread of its success. It could be said to build from the basis of the social and political alienation of an increasing individualization and flattening-out of globalization, Pentecostalism itself being an engine of the process even as it appears to be the resolution of its anxieties. Often Pentecostal organizations have the internal as well as transnational forms of cellular, rhizomic, and social assemblages, concepts that have arisen to describe the globalizing social of postmodernity. Paradoxically, these notions are themselves to a degree consistent with the very spirit of the postmodern as a particular emergence within capital. Pentecostalism, while Christian in inspiration, often suppresses the Christian denominational aspect. What might be referred to as the ‘apparatus of capture’ (see Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2002) of Pentecostal organizations, especially the large ones, is an ecumenical suppression of a clear Christian message. The references are often to an abstract God or Lord or to ‘He’ (rather than the more specific ‘Christ’), and the apparent fundamentalism is documented by frequent readings from the Old Testament, thus communicating a kind of generalized primordialism. There is a blandness in performance and an explicit use of styles of music that is international in reference but capable of merging with the local. Pentecostalism in its various manifestations often conveys the sense of a global product operating through a diversity of local franchises. Many Pentecostal groups are overtly inclusive rather than exclusive, encouraging the participation of people from different faiths, although this apparent inclusiveness may mask an ultimate closure. If sameness is a feature of Pentecostal groups, other new religions are more consciously hybrid, which operates as their apparatus of capture. This is especially so among groups that have developed in Asia and have spread out along the migratory or travel routes of their adherents. One of the many examples is the movement begun by Mata Amritanandamayi (a spiritual leader known as Amma), which originated in Kerala, India, and now has ashrams or centers in the US, Europe, and Australia. The iconography of the movement is a complex of references to a diversity of religious practices in South Asia with Amma, who manifests as Devi/Bagavati/Krishna, at the center. The ambience of this movement, like the neo-Hindu Satya Sai Baba movement, is strongly ecumenical. Amma has addressed the United Nations, and the movement is open to people of all religions. One message of the movement is its capacity to ‘heal’ the evils of capital but simultaneously to assist in the progress to success. Devotees who travel from America and Europe to the main ashram in Kerala seem to be largely concerned with overcoming their personal anxieties. They take part in performances at the ashram where they are pointed out as, in a sense, exemplars of the ills of modern realities who are healed through their contact with Amma and who can be returned to modernity, cleansed and renewed in their capacity to take advantage of the possibilities of capital. The movement might be thought

Introduction: Religiosities toward a Future | 7

of as a kind of recycling station within the dynamics of globalizing capital. It is of considerable appeal to an upwardly mobile Indian urban middle class and is highly corporate and indeed totalizing in its organization (a dimension of the hybridity of its iconography and message). The movement’s non-profit organization, Mata Amritanandamayi Math, has among the best hospitals in India, operates institutes of technical and vocational training, provides pensions to widows, and builds houses for the homeless. Its Amrita Institute of Computer Technology possesses one of the most powerful computers in the country. Our argument is not so much that new religious movements merely reflect the logic of capitalism and the processes of globalization. They may do this, but simultaneously they can put forward new interpretations on what appears to be a general process and offer in themselves a reorientation within the logic of capital—or propose ways out of it, some of which are radical and extreme (see Bubandt and Devji, this volume). Religious groups are perhaps better conceived of as singularities in the sense that they are intensities of potentiality that open up innovative orientations to existence and perhaps ways of living it. They are not to be seen only as representations or symptoms of larger encompassing structures or systems, as in much functionalist sociology, but as processes or organizational dynamics in themselves, out of which relatively new orientations may develop. We refer here to an understanding that was apparent in Max Weber’s sociology of religion and which is taken in a possibly new direction by scholars such as Badiou and Deleuze. Although we have argued that Pentecostalist groups and Mata Amritanandamayi Math are organizations within globalizing capitalist processes, this should not occlude the fact that they are better conceived as differentiations within these processes and are by no means reducible to common terms. Nor are these movements just dimensions of capital. Rather, they develop new potentiality within cosmological frames and cosmologies of the person and through relations that are at hand in the cultural-historical circumstances that form the location of their emergence. Pentecostalist groups, for example, were born out of social realities in the US that are part of a history thoroughly oriented around individualism and concepts of the bounded self, and this is integral to their imaginary. Such is not irrelevant to the movement of Mata Amritanandamayi, but this movement, at least in the context of Kerala, if not elsewhere, is oriented in its values toward an existential communitas of the sort outlined by Victor Turner (1969) and is intensely so in the specific Indian context in which it was initiated. The idea of the independent autonomous self is suppressed to produce a community that is united through the body of one person, Amma, who in the practice of worship physically embraces her followers, implicitly giving them a rebirth through her body (Amma presents herself as a manifestation of the Hindu goddess Kali, currently considered the goddess of time and change). This might have Christian resonance except that in Pentecostalism, we suggest, individuality and the self are not suppressed or momentarily erased. The community of much Pentecostalism is more a collectivity of individuals or groups (often of families) who maintain and even assert their identity as part of a community. Both

8 | Bruce Kapferer, Kari Telle, and Annelin Eriksen

Pentecostals and those who are part of the Mata Amritanandamayi movement express an ethos of work. But in many Pentecostal groups, this work, while for the community, is also an assertion of commitment and personal identity. By contrast, in Mata Amritanandamayi ashrams, work for a devotee takes the form of self-abnegation. The religious, we suggest, is thoroughly the realm of the ontological, which usually is delineated cosmologically. The cosmological schemes that religions often outline and the ritual practices that are elaborated in cosmological terms establish the horizons of experience, often the space-time coordinates of such experience and its transcendental limits, and the manner in which human beings should live and proceed through such domains. Religions and their rites, whether of the past or of the present, construct worlds for life that are to be lived in and conditioned by the ontological-cosmological ground and enclosure of the religious domain. Religious buildings are not merely venues of worship. Spaces of ontological and cosmological enclosure, they are places of social moral ordering and sites for the formation of relations. A Christian cathedral, an Islamic mosque, a Jewish synagogue, a Hindu or Buddhist temple, a Pentecostal auditorium—all become spaces in which a form of life and its inner structures is lived, however fleetingly. Their architectonic domains are spaces for explorations within ontology, even experiments in ontology. They are, in other words, singularities or places of intense potentiality that are not necessarily to be reduced to the external realities that have motivated their emergence. Thus, our descriptive contrast between some forms of Pentecostal practice and that of Mata Amritanandamayi might see them not simply as different expressions of generalizable globalizing processes or as distinct permutations of capital echoing the same universal logic, but also as living experiments and part of the ongoing differentiation of human social existence. These practices constitute in themselves domains of intensity emergent within a particular constructed cosmic ontological plane in which certain potentialities are realized and formed as a socially lived reality, a present that might become a future. The point is well-illustrated in Norman Cohn’s ([1957] 1970) classic work, The Pursuit of the Millennium, in which the author explores the marvelous heterogeneity of religious ideas and practices that took root in Europe at the turn of the previous millennium. These, as Cohn argues, anticipated and prefigured later social and political ideas and movements from anarchism to National Socialism. They were created as particular potentials upon largely Christian ontological-cosmological ground in which new ideas and practiced orientations and relations to the realities in which people lived were articulated. Thus, in the twelfth century the monk Joachim de Fiore’s reconceptualizations of the idea of the Holy Trinity and its vision of progress toward an ultimate order on earth in which suffering would be eliminated, as well as the earthly powers that were its cause, was later to be repeated in Hegel and Marx, but, of course, distinctly so. The latter have no necessary historical connection to de Fiore, whose magical and mystical elaborations have no part, for instance, in the insistent scientific rationalist approach of an avowedly secular Marx. Nonetheless, as

Introduction: Religiosities toward a Future | 9

Cohn indicates, regardless of their religious or secular manifestation, they can be understood as different realizations of the ontological potentiality ingrained within historical realities, however distinct. In Cohn’s argument, other possibilities, such as the ideas and practices of Nazism, are realizable out of the same ontological-cosmological ground. The ontological or ontic potentials that become manifest in ideas and action are not essential to ontology but come into being through the socio-cultural historical realities in which they are shaped, directed, and come to have effect. Leaving aside the issue of ontology, which is not Cohn’s concern, what we develop in relation to the kind of argument and evidence that Cohn presents is that the forms and practices that emerge as the potentialities of socio-cultural and historical worlds can also be grasped as forms of lived creative experiments upon reality—a realization of a potential that in its singularity or particular uniqueness is a specific configuration with its own intensity of potential that may or may not be manifested. Religious domains are, we consider, par excellence the space of the creative and experimental imaginary of human beings upon their existential realities. Here are thrown into relief some of the potentials of existence but within an ontological-cosmological grid or scheme that is presented as fundamentally vital to existence as well as reorienting of it. The diverse religious ideas and practices that are evident around the world are experiments in living that sometimes throw up possibilities and enthuse people in such a way that they may shift or switch their beliefs in new directions entirely—a point that Max Weber ([1930] 2001) made in relation to the emergence of Christianity and the particular redirection in ontology and the intensity of potentiality that were variously manifested as its historical effects. Our emphasis on the religious as a major site of what can be understood as often radical social and political experimentation does not, however, exclude other entities that are ostensibly non-religious or anti-religious. In contemporary social and political realities there are numerous movements that are thoroughly experimental. In their demands for participation, they often insist that their ideals and principles should be completely lived. While they are by no means religious in a conventional sense, they nonetheless express a religiosity—an urgency to total commitment that is a force of the religious and that tends to find the legitimation of its truth in the evidence of experience, in the qualities of its lived relations, and in its capacity to rid the world and the person of the perceived humiliations and injustices of encompassing realities. This is also a well-demonstrated feature of many nationalisms, often motivating their excesses of destruction, as well as of those movements that might resist the dangers of nationalism and urge a greater ecumenism or toleration of difference. We argue that religiosity may be considered not merely as expressive but as a force in itself. Like the re-formations of experience and of life that take place in religious domains, it can have major redirectional effects of a historical nature, of even irreducible ontological depth. Through the intensity of potentiality that social and political movements in their very religiosity can express, new visions of reality—visions that have radical, historical consequence—may be imagined into life.

10 | Bruce Kapferer, Kari Telle, and Annelin Eriksen

The Chapters The chapters in this volume are in different ways concerned with the religious and the religiosity of social and political processes. The first of the chapters, “The Politics of Conviction: Faith on the Neo-liberal Frontier,” by Jean Comaroff, outlines the structural premise for the current, intensified relationship between religion and these social and political processes. Comaroff argues that the expansion of religious symbols into what has been perceived as secular spaces and the sacralization of profane and everyday practices are integral to a new stage of capital. With the secular hegemony losing ground to social formations wherein the religious is a core element, we are entering an epoch in which state regulation, with control of labor and capital, is no longer the key policy and governments engage in “novel power-sharing partnerships with private enterprise.” This trend undermines ideas of unitary communities, the nation-state, and the ‘society’, and new movements, freed from the social entities of earlier stages of capitalism, are being born. In the chapter, Comaroff examines some of the ways in which religious life can be linked to these shifts: firstly, religious movements tend to take the form of theocracies; secondly, these movements “strive to counter relativism and a crisis of meaning”; and, thirdly, these movements often mimic the social form of the market. Nigerian Pentecostalism, analyzed as “world-making” and “inherently political,” is an example of the first. North American religious politics that are shaping government policy is another. As an example of the second link, Comaroff draws attention to the intimate quality of the new religious movement, exemplified in the “cell-group structure” where face-to-face interaction is dominant. This social structure stands in contrast to the processes of fragmentation and alienation characteristic of ‘modernity’ and thus reintroduces the ‘softer’ and ‘meaningful’ aspects of social life. As an example of the third link between the new religious movements and the new stage of capital, Comaroff points to developments including “fee-for-service” faiths and the “market in Gods and services,” such as the Universal Church in South Africa, which offers “daily specials” for curing AIDS, depression, and witchcraft. She concludes that a rereading of Weber’s ([1930] 2001) classical work on the Protestant ethic might prove useful in assessing the new development of Christianity and capitalism: “Are we not witnessing a later chapter in the same long story of the kinship between evangelicalism and capitalism?” she asks. One of the main arguments made by Jean Comaroff is nicely exemplified in the next chapter, “Strategic Secularism: Bible Advocacy in England,” by Matthew Engelke. In describing the British and Foreign Bible Society’s work to promote the Bible in British society, Engelke illustrates exactly the current tendency of religious institutions and movements to integrate secular formations into religious agendas. The Bible Society’s poster campaign, featuring guns and flowers and references to the popular BBC evening drama Eastenders, is analyzed not only as an example of a religious institution’s ability to develop a strategy of public engagement through a creative approach. The chapter also explores how the Bible Society attempts to accommodate itself to a ‘privatization of religion’ trend in which individuals feel that the Bible is no longer pertinent

Introduction: Religiosities toward a Future | 11

to their everyday lives. As a result, the Bible Society, whose goal has been “to put a Bible in the hands of everyone on earth,” realizes that its message must be made relevant for people’s daily lives and speak to their ongoing moral dilemmas. The ethnography shows how a ‘traditional’ institution undergoes radical change in its advocacy and in its means and ends judgments in order to fit the new religious conditions of modern British society, thus engaging in what Engelke calls “strategic secularism.” This chapter thus also contrasts with descriptions made by Jean Comaroff on the new religious movements that are challenging secular institutions, wherein the religious not only is made relevant in profane places but totally encompasses profane values, making secularism irrelevant. Engelke’s chapter is an analysis of a religious institution that is “working to make the secular a channel of its own transformation.” Another aspect dealt with in Jean Comaroff’s chapter, namely, the fragmentation of unitary social entities and the re-emergence of new forms of collectivity in new religious movements, is the puzzle that opens Joel Robbins’s chapter, “Pentecostal Networks and the Spirit of Globalization: On the Social Productivity of Ritual Forms.” Robbins investigates why the Pentecostal church movement has grown rapidly in a time when social institutions are vanishing, collectivism is diminishing, and individualism is growing. The chapter targets one aspect of the Pentecostal church movement: its institutional success. In this chapter, Robbins is mostly concerned with the social aspect of Pentecostal churches, what he calls their “social form.” He describes the way that Pentecostal churches ritualize social behavior (“praying, praising, worshipping, healing” together). These rituals are easily identifiable and the same all over the world. Drawing on the concept of interaction rituals (from Collins and Goffman), Robbins argues that what makes the Pentecostal church so attractive is its constant focus on collective interaction or everyday rituals. These interaction rituals, Robbins concludes, generate novel social forms that can “flourish in contexts where older social forms find it difficult to survive.” Annelin Eriksen’s contribution to the volume, “Healing the Nation: In Search of Unity through the Holy Spirit in Vanuatu,” focuses not so much on Pentecostal Christianity’s ability to become global. Rather, the main concern is the way in which the Pentecostal church takes on locally meaningful social and political agendas. Eriksen analyzes the growth in the South West Pacific nation, Vanuatu, of a number of small and independent Pentecostal churches that are creating “new social spaces wherein the value of change and the value of becoming independent are emphasized.” She argues that the new churches do not seek to replace the state in Vanuatu; instead, they seek to salvage the nation from what is regarded as the malignant forces of the colonial era and those of the independent state. Many people believe that the post-colonial situation “has created a false independence.” To some extent, this development is comparable to the cargo movements, which also sought to circumvent state structures and oppose the values and rationality on which the state was founded. The new independent church movements in Melanesia, as well as the cargo movements, are efforts at creating alternative forms of social unity that threaten established social orders.

12 | Bruce Kapferer, Kari Telle, and Annelin Eriksen

It is exactly this aspect of cargo cults that Ton Otto addresses in his chapter, “What Happened to Cargo Cults? Material Religions in Melanesia and the West.” Otto argues that cargo cult movements are especially appealing to the marginalized and dispossessed, whose religious imagination creates millenarian visions of violent upheavals and radical transformation. Comparing Melanesian cargo cults to Norman Cohn’s description of revolutionary religious movements in Europe in the Middle Ages, Otto asks whether the revolutionary zeal that characterizes both of these movements might still be found in modern Western and Asian societies. He also compares the Melanesian cargo movements to certain aspects of millennial capitalism (see J. Comaroff, this volume; J. and J. L. Comaroff 2001). He suggests that both millennial capitalism in the West and millennial cargo cults in Melanesia are fueled by the fundamental contradiction between two central value orientations: “mind versus matter, or spirituality versus materiality, and redemption versus wealth.” Following Dumont, he argues that there is a constant struggle for hierarchy between these values, whether in medieval Europe, the present-day West, or Melanesia. Nils Bubandt’s chapter, “Gold for a Golden Age: Sacred Money and Islamic Freedom in a Global Sufi Order,” speaks directly to the theme of ‘revolutionary millenarianism’ discussed by Cohn and illustrates how current developments have allowed for religious forms of social movements and of “global protest.” Analyzing links between faith and finance, the chapter provides an analysis of the Murabitun movement, a Sufi brotherhood with established communities on several continents, and their search for Islamic enlightenment and a new kind of freedom—not from religious domination but from the “false promises of modern capitalism” and the “Enlightenment project of democracy and individual liberty.” By establishing the gold dinar as the global currency, the Murabitun movement aims to overturn the capitalist world system and bring about a modern Islamic millennium. This golden age of unity and freedom, as envisioned by this movement, is earthly and will be brought about through a “specific program of socio-economic restructuring.” Fleshing out the millennial utopia promoted by this Sufi brotherhood, Bubandt makes a strong argument for seeing the Murabitun movement as an example of a range of contemporary movements that overturn the conventional distinctions between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ politics. While the idiosyncratic fusion of Sufi mysticism with strands of existentialist philosophy is unique, this movement is part of a much wider—arguably global—phenomenon that Bubandt aptly terms the ‘‘contemporary re-enchantment of politics.” With Rohan Bastin’s contribution, “Sri Lankan Civil Society and Its Fanatics,” we move into the radical strand of Buddhist religious politics as it unfolds in the context of a protracted civil war, the ‘war on terror’, and the utopian discourse of global civil society. Current manifestations of Buddhist militancy include the creation of the Buddhist monk political party, the Jathika Hela Urumaya (National Heritage Party), which has formed an unstable alliance with the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (People’s Revolutionary Front), a political party with roots in violent insurgency. This ‘robe and plough’ alliance plays on a “profound sense of rupture between Buddhism and the state,” a trope that

Introduction: Religiosities toward a Future | 13

runs through the history of the Buddhist revitalization movement that emerged in the eighteenth-century revival of monastic orders and was accompanied by assertions of Sinhalese ethnicity and Buddhist ritual in the face of the perceived danger of Tamil Hinduism. Bastin gives several examples of how monks engage in “acts of fanatical iconoclasm,” understood as the destruction of ideal representations of the ‘natural’ order of the state—practices that are reminiscent of the aggressive iconoclasm in different periods of European history. He points out that the militant clerics’ critique of the state resonates strongly with the notion of civil society as this concept is presently peddled by global civil society advocates. Rather than dismissing Buddhist militants as “fundamentalists or nationalists or reactionary conservatives,” Bastin argues that Sri Lanka’s militant clerics are “subaltern agents” who are caught up in the “global state of war” that takes the form of “wars on abstractions,” such as terror, drugs, or poverty. As militant Buddhists pursue their wars against enemies both imagined and real, they manifest the violent possibilities of the utopian discourse of civil society and the “current crusade to replace governments with governance and the nation-state with the post-national state.” The contemporary moment is also characterized by emerging forms of global security governance. In her chapter “Dharma Power: Searching for Security in Post–New Order Indonesia,” Kari Telle examines how members of the Hindu minority on the island of Lombok have appropriated the “discourse of security” in an effort to realize an existential, cosmologically grounded sense of security premised on the importance of cultivating auspicious connections between the invisible and visible realms. Highlighting the deliberately eclectic nature of Hindu Balinese security formations on Lombok, Telle understands these formations as avatars of a ‘culture of security’ centered on the cultivation of invulnerability that has a long history in Southeast Asia. Telle further suggests that the militarization from below, fueled by perceptions of being under threat on a Muslim-dominated island, is a defensive response to growing appeals to ‘sons of the soil’ discourses that have accompanied Indonesia’s program of decentralization and the devolution of power after the collapse of the New Order regime in 1998. While some Lombok Balinese express ambivalence toward this discourse, others have eagerly embraced the new opportunities “to mobilize along ethnic and religious lines.” As Telle argues, ongoing efforts to revitalize Balinese Hinduism through a renewed focus on a spiritually empowered notion of security entail an understanding of state-society relations that rejects the idea of the modern state as carved into seemingly distinct secular and religious spheres. Bruce Lincoln’s chapter, “An Ancient Case of Interrogation and Torture,” addresses how members of “worried empires” persuade themselves and their interlocutors that they are engaged in a righteous cause. Juxtaposing ancient Persian materials detailing the judiciary ordeals that “enemies of the realm” were made to go through with torture scenes from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Lincoln uncovers a number of intriguing, if deeply disturbing, parallels. The analysis recounts a struggle for imperial succession between two sons of Darius II (r. 423–404 bce). Lincoln’s careful reading of sources chronicling the

14 | Bruce Kapferer, Kari Telle, and Annelin Eriksen

incident makes plain that ordeals were constructed to reveal the ‘truth’ about ‘enemies’ of the state. By transforming and disfiguring the body, the interrogation process became a “self-validating practice” that enabled the regime to write its own “preferred truths on the bodies of captives and victims.” Drawing on Scarry’s work on torture, Lincoln argues that the photographs from Abu Ghraib depicting captors and captives make use of many of the same oppositions that figured in the Persian ordeals. But in the case of Abu Ghraib, it was a group of ordinary GIs who invented cruel spectacles to persuade themselves that they were fighting “Terror on behalf of Freedom.” Lincoln concludes by noting that the methods employed by worried empires to reassert their legitimating beliefs are likely to be so crude and self-serving as to contradict the values that the actors are supposedly fighting to preserve. Questions of Islam’s universality are the focus of Faisal Devji’s contribution, “The Terrorist as Humanitarian,” which offers a reading of militant Muslim politics in a globalized world. How does Islam come to represent humanity and why? These are the questions Devji poses while uncovering surprising parallels between al-Qaeda’s global jihad and Mahatma Gandhi’s writings on sacrifice as a way to lay claim to the noblest of human virtues, such as courage. Foregrounding the ethical as opposed to the political content of al-Qaeda’s actions and rhetoric, Devji argues that these practices invoke the “specter of a global community.” Extending from Hannah Arendt’s writings on shame in the aftermath of World War II, Devji suggests that shame provides a starting point for al-Qaeda militants, for whom the Islamic community (ummah) in its status of global victim has come to represent humanity. While these militants partake of the language of humanitarianism, Devji insists that they are less concerned with the “victimization of humanity” than with its “transformation into a global agent.” For these reasons, martyrdom is represented by al-Qaeda as a “victory in its own right,” even as humiliation becomes a category that transcends a means-ends-oriented politics. Rather than offering an alternative to the current world order, Devji claims that these latter-day militants would transform it by bringing forth its “latent humanity” through their sacrificial acts. If terrorist rhetoric has been marked by a rigorous logic of equivalence, Devji concludes that this logic, associated with a statistical conception of humanity, may be yielding to an “existential conception of humanity.” In the final chapter, entitled “Reflections on the Rise of Legal Theology: Law and Religion in the Twenty-First Century,” John L. Comaroff explores the growing hegemony of the law. Due to the rising salience of the law—as ideology, utopic cure-all, and instrument of governmentality, among other things— Comaroff characterizes our epoch as one of “theo-legality.” The simultaneous “fetishism of the law” and assertive forms of religiosity in our time make it vital for scholars to understand more about legal theology as opposed to political theology. While modern secular law has always had the quality of a fetish, Comaroff maintains that the contemporary moment is marked by an unprecedented ‘faith’ in the law, a development that is discussed in relation to shifts in the understanding of nationhood and the outsourcing of many operations of governance with the rise of the neo-liberal state and globalization. What

Introduction: Religiosities toward a Future | 15

is different nowadays, he argues, is the extent to which members of all faiths resort to “lawfare” to protect and extend their sovereignty. In other words, the secular instrument of legality has become one of the principal means whereby members of faith-based communities attempt to secure the propriety and authenticity of religious rites. The sacralization of the law and the ‘juridification’ of religion, as Comaroff demonstrates with reference to both Christianity and Islam, transform the nature of religion. By the same token, courts everywhere have to respond to lawfare conducted under the “sign of R/ religion” and cultural difference. Citing examples of the infusion of the sacred into governance and the rising tide of difference, Comaroff observes that the recourse to a theo-legality that redeploys liberal jurisprudence against itself in order to overturn core principles of the modern liberal constitution is far from played out. After a spirited plea for recognition of the values associated with the Enlightenment episteme of empirical reason as opposed to some alternative episteme of conviction, Comaroff ends his chapter by noting that “wherever it is being engaged, the battle itself is changing both faith and the law.”

Bruce Kapferer is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and is currently Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway. He was affiliated with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (1963–1966) and was later appointed to the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester (1966– 1973). He was subsequently Foundation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Adelaide and later at James Cook University, as well as Professor and Chair at University College London. He has held research fellowships at the Center for Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, and the National Humanities Center, North Carolina. His published books include A Celebration of Demons (1983), Legends of People, Myths of State (1988), and The Feast of the Sorcerer (1997). He has edited Beyond Rationalism (2002) and has co-edited, with Angela Hobart, Aesthetics in Performance (2005) and, with Bjørn Bertelsen, Crisis of the State (2009). Currently, he leads a Norwegian Research Foundation project located at Bergen on contemporary state formations and their effects and is continuing major fieldwork in South Asia, Southern Africa, and Australia. He is editor-in-chief of Social Analysis and joint editor of Anthropological Theory. Kari Telle is a Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) in Bergen, Norway, where she also coordinates the “Politics of Faith” research program. Her work in Indonesia deals with popular religion, ritual, conflict, and security politics. Recent publications include “Swearing Innocence: Performing Justice and ‘Reconciliation’ in Post–New Order Lombok” (2009), “Entangled Biographies: Rebuilding a Sasak House” (2007), “Spirited Places and Ritual Dynamics among Sasak Muslims on Lombok” (2009), “Nurturance and the Spectre of Neglect: Sasak Ways of Dealing with the Dead” (2007), and “The Smell of Death: Theft, Disgust and Ritual Practice in Central Lombok, Indonesia” (2003). Annelin Eriksen is an Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. She has worked since 1995 in Vanuatu, first on the island of Ambrym

16 | Bruce Kapferer, Kari Telle, and Annelin Eriksen

and later in the capital Port Vila. Her work deals with social and cultural change, Christianity, and gender relations. A member of the Bergen Pacific Studies Research Group, her current project, “Christianity, Gender, and the Dynamics of Community beyond the State: A Study of Urban Christian Movements in Vanuatu,” is funded by the Norwegian Research Council. Her most recent book is Gender, Christianity and Change (2008).

References Anderson, Benedict. [1983] 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso. Cohn, Norman. [1957] 1970. The Pursuit of the Millennium. London: Paladin. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff, eds. 2001. Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Modern Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Csordas, Thomas. 1994. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. [1980] 2002. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum. Dumont, Louis. 1986. Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Kapferer, Bruce. 1988. Legends of People, Myths of State. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. ______. 2004. “Democracy, Wild Sovereignties and the New Leviathan.” Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies 6, no. 2: 23–38. Lilla, Mark. 2008. The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. New York: Vintage. Rappaport, Roy A. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ______. 2007. The Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. London: Penguin. Veer, Peter van der, ed. 1996. Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity. London: Routledge. Weber, Max. [1930] 2001. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge.

( Chapter 1

The Politics of Conviction Faith on the Neo-liberal Frontier Jean Comaroff

The sacred, it seems, is becoming ever more prominent in profane places. Like the message beside a highway to Sun City, northwest of Johannesburg, reading “Jesus is the answer” in large, uneven letters, or the image of the Virgin Mary that revealed itself to construction workers in Chicago on a damp afternoon in April 2005.1 The workers had been repairing a concrete underpass on the Kennedy Expressway, one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares.2 Fanned by avid television reportage from across the country, the news spread, and soon hundreds of people had gathered, wreathing the image with flowers and votive candles. Yet the gentle spirit evoked surprisingly strong emotions: watchful police were unable to prevent nocturnal vandals from scrawling the words “Big Lie” across her sepia visage.3 When the city fathers ordered the whole expanse to be covered in plain brown paint, her features shone through again, as if to confirm the irrepressible presence of the divine, even in the most inhospitable Notes for this chapter begin on page 33.

18 | Jean Comaroff

of locales. Such apparitions are hardly unprecedented, especially in popular Catholic culture. However, until recently, events of this sort have been less visibly a feature of mainstream public life in the US and in other contexts that are predominantly Protestant. But times are ‘a-changing’. In 2004, a toasted sandwich bearing the face of the Virgin fetched $28,000 on e-Bay.4 Soon after, a pro-life passion play that centered on hapless coma patient Terri Schiavo5 took control of the American mass media, refashioning Schiavo as a middle-aged fetus threatened by liberal abortionists and others willing to flout the letter of divine law (see J. L. Comaroff, this volume). The fervor spurred an effort in the US Congress to overrule the sovereignty of the courts, which, after due deliberation, had decided that Schiavo’s existence on life-support machines should be brought to an end. Like the ‘manifestation on the motorway’, these events underline the extent to which—amid ever more audible worldwide commitment to market rationalization—a new religious realism, whether in Pentecostal or Latin shape, is pervading mundane American life. Efforts to propel ‘creationism’ onto school syllabi in the South in the guise of ‘intelligent design’ have been accompanied by ‘born-again’ pastors issuing fatwahs against foreign heads of state. As the ‘Religious Right’ became a tangible influence on politics in the early twenty-first century, government itself resorted more overtly to the language of divine imperative. Theologico-politics, a concern of crusading seventeenthcentury rationalists including Spinoza ([1670] 1883), is once again a lively reality. Returned, too, is early nineteenth-century “Christian Political Economy” (Norman 1976: 41), making cheerful fellowship with the spirit of neo-liberal capitalism: mass-merchandised hamburgers now come wrapped in biblical homilies, and Starbucks coffee cups have been graced with quotations from best-selling pastors like Rick Warren (Cave 2005). The Christian exercise chain, Lord’s Gym, promises to build body and soul—without compromising a properly “Christian atmosphere” (Schippert 2003). Its logo is a pumped-up Jesus, bench-pressing a huge cross under the message “His Pain Your Gain.” Muscular Christianity is upon us, in unabashedly literal form. The erotic is also close to the surface.6 The aim is to turn you on—to the Passion of the Savior. Music that is simultaneously devout and brimming with worldly desire floods the pop charts. And Hollywood becomes Holywood as the likes of Mel Gibson re-present the Savior’s suffering with the graphic hyper-realism of the action movie (Scott 2005). Despite its vibrancy, much of this is not all that new. Faith has never been separate from commerce: “Jesus taught in the temple and the marketplace,” notes Starbucks’s Pastor Rick; nineteenth-century Italian wine merchants sought papal endorsements (Cave 2005); and Victorian Methodist missionaries deployed commodities and mass-marketing techniques to promote God’s Word at home and abroad (J. L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff 1997: 168f.). Nor are we witnessing a simple growth in religious observance: recent US surveys report that despite all this evangelical activity, the numbers of those who profess no faith are also on the rise.7 We may well be caught up in the consequences of an epochal religious revival—Robert Fogel (2000) has controversially termed

The Politics of Conviction | 19

it the “Fourth Great Awakening”—but revitalizations of one kind or another have occurred repeatedly over the centuries. Nor is it even an matter of religion having ‘gone public’ in unprecedented ways, reconfiguring received definitions of the sacred and the secular with the rise of ever more state-like, faith-based institutions. Despite its protestations to the contrary, modernity never was truly disenchanted. This is less a matter of its revered institutions having taken on the status of sacred forms, as writers like Schmitt (1985) have argued. For while they may have been hallowed, these institutions were also assertively secular. It is more that, despite all this, as Asad (2003: 5) insists, religion proper has not actually been absent from the public life of most modern nation-states, although its precise place within them may have varied. Thus, while the British state has been linked to the established church, its population has been relatively irreligious—the reverse of the situation in the US. The issue is that, amid a flourishing of confessions of all types, the hegemony of liberal humanism—what Asad (2003: 13) terms “the modern project”—has been assertively brought into question in recent times, largely in the name of revealed truths and divine imperatives. In some places, these confrontations have been explicitly framed as challenges to prevailing notions of the secular; thus, the prolific pre-millennialist pastor Tim LaHaye (1980) attacks the ‘hubris’ of liberal humanism, in so many words. But dissent often emerges as a less overt shift in sensibility, a loss of faith in key tenets of modernist ontology—like the taken-for-granted reality of the ‘social’ or the axiom that truth, morality, and progress flow from human action under evolving historical conditions (cf. Harding 1994). There is, in fact, an ever more audible appeal, both popular and scholarly, to absolutist truths. Nor is this limited to Pentecostals, those ‘born again’ through direct experience of God by means of baptism in the Holy Spirit. Benedict XVl, described by one critic as “a 14th century pope with a 21st century communications network” (Monbiot 2005: 31; cf. Flores d’Arcais 2006), put it like this: “We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism, which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires” (Monbiot 2005: 31). From this perspective, claims that norms may vary across time and space are a dangerous delusion, a slippery slope to meaninglessness, solipsism, and a Hobbesian state of nature. A deep suspicion of hermeneutics, of contextual understanding, and of the recognition of difference is shared by foundationalists across a range of creeds. They link in form, if not in content, to the concerns of other opponents of liberal humanism, from political neoconservatives to market fundamentalists. The latter are also partial to declaring the end of history and the treachery of philosophy, preferring a putatively literal reading of the law from pulpit and bench (Crapanzano 2000). A related aspect of revitalized faith—no less in tension with the modernist project—is the growing salience of revelation as a legitimate basis for knowledge, action, and the definition of worldly space and time. Zionist settlers embrace their messianic mission with a zeal rivaled only by the youthful Muslim martyrs who seek to actualize their own sacred calling on the same terrain. Likewise, there is a host of other born-again believers across the world who suspend ‘free’ choice when acting on their convictions, manifesting a form of

20 | Jean Comaroff

selfhood that is different from the idealized, deliberative Kantian subject considered by many as being at the core of modern rationalism (cf. Hansen 2007). Foundational texts and prophetic callings speak to a quest for absolute sovereignty, an unquestioned basis for law and order, and a fixed correspondence between signs and referents, all of which are seriously undermined by current social conditions. But these revivified faiths do more than merely question from below the tenets of liberal modernist knowing and being. They aim, also, to counter the institutional arrangements that have embodied this ontology in its various, historically rooted forms: the arrangements canonized in the Euro-modern nationstate, with its putatively neutral public civil domain, clearly separated from the realm of private commitment and belief. Revitalized Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and nativist movements have all striven, if in distinctive ways, to reconstitute the order of things, to challenge the authority and neutrality of state law and the secularism of the market (J. L. Comaroff, this volume). Many late-modern faiths work to unify the fragmented realms and plural cultural registers of liberal modern societies, seeking to recover the profane reaches of everyday existence as instruments of divine purpose. Commerce, government, education, the media, and popular arts—nothing seems too trivial or debased to offer grist to the spiritual mill. The task, according to Ted Haggard, the former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, is to put “God-ineverything,” so “anything-can-be-holy” (Newton 2006). This impetus has special salience in an age of widespread deregulation. At a time when, under the sway of neo-liberal policies, many states have relinquished significant responsibility for schooling, health, and welfare—in short, for the social reproduction of their citizens—religious organizations have willingly reclaimed this role. It is a role that, in some places, they never fully lost to the grand disciplinary institutions of the welfare state. The recent expansion of faith-based social services has challenged the separation of powers that underlay the ideals, if not always the practices, of most twentieth-century liberal democracies. These days, the life of the spirit extends ever more tangibly to profane realms beyond the space of the sanctuary and the time of worship, heralding a significant reorganization of the modernist social order as a whole. In fact, organized religion has made a vital place for itself in the world of politics, the market, and the mass media. Even more, it tends to take on their work, evincing a shift from the division of institutional labor that is described in signal modernist accounts, like those of Durkheim ([1893] 1947) and Weber (1930). This fact is made graphically evident by the large, luxurious megachurches that flourish on the new frontiers of the post-industrial economy in the American West, where they are held to constitute new town squares and “surrogate governments” (Mahler 2005). Here Pentecostals deliberately blur received distinctions to encompass diverse reaches of secular life—business, schooling, day care, athletic facilities, counseling, gourmet dining. The pastor of one such center is quite up front about hitching God’s business to the ordinary wants of the world: “If Oprah and Dr. Phil are doing it, why shouldn’t we?… We want the church to look like a mall. We want you to come in and say, ‘Dude, where’s

The Politics of Conviction | 21

the cinema?’” (ibid.: 33). Said a South African counterpart: “It might sound heretical, but we strive above all to make our services exciting, affecting. Our competition, after all, is the video arcade, the movie house, and the casino.”8 Pentecostal holism is even more vibrant in the global south, where it resonates with forms of spiritual pragmatism that were never really captured by Protestant orthodoxy. What Paul Jenkins (2002: 3) terms the “New Christian Revolution” is centered in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, which together have a growing majority of the estimated 2.6 billion Christians worldwide. Evangelical Pentecostal churches are said to attract almost 20 million new members a year, having emerged as the major competitor of Catholicism, which is itself becoming markedly more charismatic (Nixon 2003). Here, too, it is not merely that faith-based initiatives are expanding, that their culture of revelation is having a major impact on ordinary understandings of self, identity, politics, and history. These movements are assuming a widening array of civic responsibilities, especially where state sovereignty has been compromised for one reason or another. The mass media have played a vital role in extending the reach of faith in the world, not just because they radically amplify the scale, speed, and directness of its address, but because they have become integral to the way that revelation stages itself. To a large extent, the media have come to shape the very form in which the sacred is witnessed, especially in the growing number of so-called electronic churches across the planet (see Smith 2004). Recall here the quip about Pope Benedict’s communications network (cf. Rajagopal 2001 on Hindu revitalization). Of course, the media have been used to spread the Word since the advent of the printing press, and evangelists in Africa and elsewhere have long been avid users of novel means of communication, from magic lanterns to movies. At the same time, the reach of popular religious broadcasting today seems unprecedented. In Africa, transnational Evangelical and Muslim groups (Hackett forthcoming; Meyer 2002, 2004; Schulz 2007) are taking advantage of the deregulation of state media to build broadcast enterprises that have a powerful impact on the circulation of images and the creation of subjects and publics. The means of communication in general are ever more under the control of faith-based corporations on the continent, and religious actors conduct a growing proportion of media-related business, from paid religious programming to Pentecostal videocassettes, gospel CDs, and tapes conveying the baraka of sheikhs (Soares 2004). Religious vernaculars are also colonizing popular culture. In the huge West African video industry, best exemplified by Nigeria’s ‘Nollywood’, movies range from crime dramas to witchcraft horror, but most tend to project a ‘Pentecostalite’ worldview in which the surreal meets the supernatural (Meyer 2004). In Latin America, the airing of glossy, camera-ready spectacles on hightech neo-Pentecostal channels is said to be infusing the production values of televangelical drama with an understanding of local rites, for example, exorcisms (see Smith 2004). Similarly, in Africa local ritual practice is being significantly affected by these electronic genres: in South Africa’s rural northwest, healers offer Internet and television divinations, while Pentecostal leaders urge

22 | Jean Comaroff

followers to ‘download’ Jesus into their lives. In 2005, a Brazilian preacher told an audience of hundreds in the gleaming new Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in central Cape Town: “When the film credits roll at the end of your life, they will not acknowledge the South African government. They will thank us at the Universal Church.” This creativity and exuberance defy easy explanation. The qualities displayed by revitalized faiths are both old and new, uniform and diverse, global and thoroughly domesticated. Movements of this kind, whether Christian or Muslim, hardly exhaust the contemporary religious terrain. But older, established denominations that tend to question their values and motives have also had to respond to the stunning effectiveness of their modus operandi and their seemingly irrepressible appeal, especially among the young. While there appears to be an elective affinity between Pentecostalism and the unruly vitality of economic liberalization, its style of pragmatic preaching has roots reaching back to the ‘positive thinking’ fostered by Christian Science in the late nineteenth century and to the ‘name it and claim it’ Word-Faith (now called the ‘Rhema’ doctrine), first popularized by Kenneth Hagen of the Assemblies of God in Texas in the 1930s (Albrecht 1999). What is more, while often associated with ‘free-market faith’, not all Pentecostals worship at the shrine of prosperity. Dubbed “the conscience of evangelical Christianity,” the Trinity Foundation of East Dallas “wages a fervent war against televangelism and what it terms the ‘Gospel of Greed’” (Bilger 2004: 70). Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the spectrum, too literal a faith in the power of belief to produce riches sometimes puts Pentecostals at odds with the actual workings of market enterprise. This was the case with respect to ‘Miracle 2000’, a South African pyramid scheme whose born-again founder promised a 220 percent return on investments in 42 days. The promise drew crowds from across the land to the founder’s East Rand home. When the police cracked down on the scheme, hundreds of outraged believers marched on the High Court in Pretoria to demand the release of their “Messiah,” carrying placards that read “Do My Prophet No Harm” (Bokaba 2000). How can we explain the exuberant growth of ‘new Christianity’ in these times? What are its continuities with—and breaks from—the past? Talal Asad (2003) has argued that the process of defining the space of the secular has been essential to the modern state and its mode of governance. But how might we account for the widespread popular impetus, in the early twenty-first-century world, to redefine the place of religion in the civic order? How exactly have nation-states been implicated, and might we not need to go beyond their logic of operation to get at what underlies these transformations? There is much to suggest that the character of contemporary faith is integral to a new stage in the life of capital—a shift that is less a complete rupture with the past than a reorganization of core components of capitalism as social formation. This has implied an intensification of some signature features of industrial modernity and an eclipse of others, a process made manifest in the changing credo and institutional form of liberal democracies across the world. Such shifts vary in local manifestation, as do the nature and impact of the kinds of religious revitalization I have

The Politics of Conviction | 23

been describing. Some scholars have argued, for example, that the challenge to secular hegemony has been less evident in Western Europe—the presumed heartland of liberal democracy—than elsewhere, although there is mounting evidence to suggest that this claim might need rethinking.9 Indeed, there are grounds for identifying some very widespread trends in religious life across the world. How might this reconfigured social landscape speak back, with latterday insight, to classic accounts of religion and modernity, such as Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930)?

The Same Again, but Not Quite: The Neo World Order What has come to be glossed as ‘neo-liberalism’ has been characterized in a variety of ways, few of which capture adequately the refractory mix of continuity and breach, intensification and transformation, at work. For my purposes here, I stress the fact that the current moment entails an epochal shift in the relation of capital, labor, consumption, and place. The generation of wealth is more reliant than ever on abstract media: on the transaction of quasi-monetary instruments across space and time in the electronic economy, and on means such as the market in futures and the extraction of profit from intellectual property (cf. Ghosh 2006). Primary production has also been reorganized as the quest for cheap, tractable labor has eroded existing bases of industrial manufacture, globalizing the division of labor and significantly liberating corporate enterprise from state regulation—at least until the onset of the fiscal crisis of 2008. As sites of manufacture and consumption have been dispersed across the earth, their connection has become increasingly opaque, undermining the very idea of a national economy in which local interest groups recognize each other as interdependent components of a commonweal (J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff 2000). As a result, the spatial articulation of politics and economy has been fundamentally disrupted, and globe-trotting capital has renegotiated the terms of its relation to the nation-state. Governments have had to make new kinds of accommodation with market forces, striking novel power-sharing partnerships with private enterprise and allowing corporations to roam abroad while operating with reduced regulation at home. States themselves have outsourced key functions, from customs and excise to prisons and warfare, sometimes (as the Dubai Ports dispute in the US made plain)10 to foreign operators. These shifts render borders ambiguously open and closed. The private contracting of public services is not unique to neo-liberal times, but state monopolies over the legitimate means of enforcement have been a founding precept of liberal democracy. Now sovereignty is often blurred or overlapping, and ever more intense, disarticulated flows of bodies, goods, finances, and media link ‘communities’ in highly convoluted circuits of exchange that governments are increasingly less able or willing to regulate. All this undermines not only the experience of a unitary political community that is bound by the space-time of the nation, but also the modern idea of ‘society’, which presumes a similar

24 | Jean Comaroff

territorial architecture and integrity of organization. The proliferating horizons mapped by deregulated exchange multiply the bases of local identification, calling upon people to reconsider the once axiomatic attachments that configured their lives, the bounded ‘we’ of which they are part (cf. Coetzee 2005: 193). Representation, both semiotic and socio-political, is destabilized by these shifts, a sensation heightened in many places by the radical devaluation of key media of value—national currencies, for example—and a widespread perception that in the post–Bretton Woods era, the real value of money is progressively more inconstant, foregrounding the slipperiness of the relation between signs and meanings, the real and the counterfeit, the thing and the fetish. Some—like William Connolly (1996)—have argued that the radical deconstruction of received identities clears the way for liberating possibilities. But there is much to suggest that it often triggers the reverse: a quest for fundamental certainties, authoritarian truths, absolute sovereignties. Revitalized movements are able to find a firm foothold on such disrupted terrain. Yet these movements are not autonomic responses to neo-liberal transformation. Born-again faiths, especially in the South, often run ahead of such transformation, bearing aspirations—visions of a this-worldly millennium— that help prepare the ground for more radical, market-oriented reform, yet another Weberian issue to which we will return. In what follows, then, I shall examine some of the ways in which these new forms of religious life might be related to ongoing shifts in the relation of economy and society, religion and secularism. Three dimensions of this relationship are especially striking. The first is sociological: the fastest-growing religious movements tend to take the form of theocracies, to embrace an ever wider array of once secular activities and regulatory functions as part of a quest for the total reclamation of the social sphere. The second is ontological: many born-again faiths strive to counter relativism and a crisis of meaning by offering cogent orders of fixed referents and absolute truths. The third is pragmatic: many contemporary faiths, in both the North and the South, tend to mimic the creative forms of the market, promising to unlock unprecedented sources of value and productivity by tapping the direct operation of God in the world. While these three tendencies are not presently limited to Christian revitalization, my focus here will be primarily on Pentecostalisms of one sort or another, for the most part in Africa and the United States.

Making Us Whole Again Across the ages, religious utopianism has repeatedly sought to return to holiness through wholeness (Cohn 1957; Douglas 1966), through integrative visions and encapsulated communities that pursue a primal, prelapsarian unity, a oneness with divinity that is free from all manner of mediation. In the late-modern era, contemporary megamovements seek to build a new Christendom by healing breaches and distortions of the original Word that seem to have been exacerbated by current historical conditions. At the same time, the forces of economic

The Politics of Conviction | 25

and political liberalism have disturbed the institutional arrangements that characterized the high-modern world of industrial capitalism, colonialism, and the European nation-state. As a result, relations among locality, class, and identity have been complicated. Difference appears to have overwhelmed sameness, and ideology has ceded ground to “ID-ology” (J. L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff 2003; see also J. L. Comaroff, this volume). In all this, modernist nationhood can no longer presume to monopolize the affect and imagination of its wouldbe subjects. For example, a recent study found that while South Africans do not reject their national identity, the “vast majority” think of themselves first and foremost as members of “an ethnic, cultural, language, religious or some other group,” and “attach their personal fate” to those entities (Gibson 2004: 2). Similar investigations carried out elsewhere (Rex 1996)11 confirm that while most human beings continue to live as citizens in nation-states, they tend to be only conditionally citizens of nation-states. Their composite personae may include elements that disregard political borders and/or mandate claims against the commonweal within them. The rise of evangelical organizations that approximate many features of ethno-national movements and proto-governments is all of a piece with these general historical developments. So too, alas, are the passionate conflicts that often accompany the spread of identity-based loyalties, especially where aggressively proselytizing faiths burgeon in situations of political instability. Walter Ihejirika (2005) points out that Nigerian Pentecostalism has declared its aim to be a “Total Take Over” of the country, to be accomplished by establishing inroads from the fringes to the core of the national polity. “[We] are working while others are sleeping,” a leader of the national Pentecostal Fellowship announces. “If you want to take over Nigeria, you better win the students, win the market women, the media … the rich, the poor and the press.” Here religion is about world-making. It is inherently political. In West Africa, as in the United States, these expansionist movements tend to be centered on particular charismatic leaders, whose congregations and megachurches, while often part of religious federations, remain organizationally independent (ibid.). As is often remarked, the fact that Pentecostals stress personal religious experience rather than doctrine allows for considerable differences among them, although they remain united in their foundational belief in baptism of the Spirit and in the operation of charismatic powers in the world. What is more, widely shared goals (e.g., extending God’s dominion on earth by promoting Christian values, and returning religion to the schools, courts, and market square) have made them a force that transcends local organizations in many places. In North America, it is now a truism that the Religious Right plays a key role in electoral politics, both local and national, with implications for the shaping of government policy. In Kiev, the home to Europe’s largest single evangelical church, an army of self-designated “Christian capitalists” is credited with helping sweep pro-Western candidates to power (Sharlet 2005: 47). In fact, in a recent 10-nation survey of Pentecostal and charismatic Christians, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that adherents of such “renewalist” faiths made up a fast-growing segment of the population in countries including

26 | Jean Comaroff

Brazil, Guatemala, Kenya, South Africa, and Chile. The survey also reported that adherents were prone to bringing their personal commitments into public debate, with real political consequences.12 All of this reinforces the point that new holistic movements are part of the neo-liberal turn, both reactively and intrinsically. In their readiness to take charge of forms of community service such as welfare and rehabilitation that late-liberal governments cannot, or will not, provide, revitalized movements have often extended modes of civic care beyond the bounds of the church proper. To be sure, this is hardly a novel feature of religious movements, but once again the process takes on specific late-modern features: faith-based initiatives have been subcontracted by state governments (either formally or by default) to undertake civil services ranging from prison management and care of the elderly to the delivery of mail. At times, this trend is seen explicitly as a valued infusion of the public sphere with an ethos of sacrifice and service that has been systematically eviscerated by the “bloodless” secular state (Muehlebach 2007). The expansion of Pentecostal membership among the indigent, from Siberia to South Korea, Alaska to Albania, makes evident a certain organizational genius that thrives on the very socio-economic conditions that have undercut more conventional forms of modern social aggregation rooted in class or locality. Widespread use is made of the so-called cell-group structure, in which networks of highly ritualized small units proliferate yet remain alike in their mode of professing faith. This method of organization was popularized by Paul (David) Yonggi Cho, who built his massive Seoul church to wage what he claimed was a ‘frontline’ battle against communism (cf. Stockstill 1998). Multiplex, face-to-face congregations—offering everything from soup kitchens to computer literacy classes, personal counseling to video-animated worship extravaganzas—also fill the classic role of churches as places of intimacy, affective engagement, and recreation. Pentecostal networks that span continents provide portable conviviality to migrants bereft of other cultural capital, much like the grassroots churches that nurtured an earlier generation of mobile workers in colonial Africa (Gaiya 2002; Welbourn and Ogot 1966). As this example implies, the upsurge in revivalist faith is also implicated, in complex ways, in global economic restructuring: in the ironic combination of intensified cultures of consumer desire with widening Gini coefficients, and in the chronic exclusion in many places of a growing proportion of the population from the formal economy—a process that generates an ever more acute combination of appetite and impossibility. Connolly (n.d.: 30) has argued that in the US, right-wing evangelists play most directly on the resentment felt by working- and middleclass men, who find themselves squeezed between the male business elite and professional women entering the lower reaches of the economy. Those born-again faiths that propagate the spirit of neo-liberalism, that see the creativity of God as immanent in the creativity of capitalism (Connolly n.d.: 33), contrast markedly with older-style mainstream Protestantism, which remains ambivalent about the frank embrace of worldly appetites. Pentecostals, by contrast, show great readiness not merely to collaborate with business but to enter into businesses themselves in a higher cause—a form of “Free Market Theology”

The Politics of Conviction | 27

(Sharlet 2005: 41). Hence, there is an avid endorsement, most evident in the ‘prosperity gospels’, of the desire for material things. “The Lord delights in my private aircraft,” a successful motivational-speaker-turned-preacher recently assured a skeptical Larry King.13 In a similar spirit, the Brazilian pastor of the Universal Church in central Cape Town periodically yanks open the door of the large wooden cupboard that stands on the podium, proclaiming: “The Lord will open his treasure chest to those who believe.” The stress on personalized divine intervention, on a faith that “takes the waiting out of wanting” (a phrase that this Pentecostal preacher shares, ironically, with a 1970s British ad campaign for a major credit card), accords well with the spirit of neo-liberal enterprise, encouraging an identification of spiritual gift with the ‘hidden hand’ of market providence. I shall return to these issues in a moment. As I have already intimated, while not all Pentecostals champion prosperity, most are comfortable with freedom of enterprise, enabled by an ideology of downscaled government and a politics of “intense moral purity” (Watney 1990: 100). Bringing state law and public institutions into conformity with conservative Christian values (with a focus on issues such as abortion, stemcell research, gay marriage, the teaching of evolution in schools) is more consequential than a concern with secular forces for social betterment. At issue here is a different ontology of how the world works: mass conversions confirm that charismatic faith and styles of worship jibe with radically revised perceptions of the nature of selfhood, truth, and spirituality in ordinary experience. Accounts of the everyday orientations of the born again—be they Catholics-turned-Pentecostal in Latin America (Cleary and Stewart-Gambino 1997), Hindus-turned-Pentecostal in KwaZulu-Natal (Hansen 2006), or socialiststurned-Pentecostal in Central Europe (Wanner 2007)—make evident that their lived horizons are minimally shaped by modernist conceptions of work, nation, and development. In their personal circumstances, metaphysical forces seem more palpable in the pattern of unfolding events than do intangible forces such as society, economy, and history. In fact, the conditions that underwrote the plausibility (Berger 1967) of these larger concrete abstractions and fed a belief that humanity could author its own destiny seem to be eroding on a global scale, especially in places where bourgeois Western European hegemonies never fully displaced rather different axioms of existence. As Malaysian Methodist theologian Hwa Yung notes (1995: 2): “There is even less reason today for non-Western Christians … to allow their theologies to be domesticated by Enlightenment thinking, something which Western Christians themselves find increasingly dissatisfying.”

A Stone We Can Touch: Or, St. Paul on Ground Zero As already noted, a prominent feature of recently reborn faiths is the centrality of revelation. How, if at all, might this be connected to recent changes in the economy, society, and ontology? In reflecting on the co-existence in the US of neo-liberal political rationality with neo-conservatism, Wendy Brown (2003)

28 | Jean Comaroff

invokes Michel Foucault’s 1979 lectures on the “birth of bio-politics” at the Collège de France, in which he sought to distinguish neo-liberalism from its Smithian precursor. Foucault’s key insight concerned the differing relationship of the state to the economy: whereas in classic liberalism the state directed and monitored the workings of the economy, the neo-liberal turn makes “the market itself the organizing and regulative principle underlying the state” (Foucault quoted in Brown 2003). If it means anything at all as creed, neo-liberalism centers on the effort to extend market values to all domains of social action. By these lights, enhancing entrepreneurial profitability and promoting self-producing citizens have become both the end and the measure of good statecraft. Like the new religious movements we have been discussing, this mode of governance seeks to break down the separations between moral, economic, and political institutions, and to threaten the relative autonomy once enjoyed by each of these distinct spheres. This autonomy was, after all, the hallmark of modern liberal democracies. In undermining rationalities and moralities beyond the market, a process speeded by the effects of globalization and deterritorialization, neo-liberal administrations, especially in the US, have gone a long way toward dissolving the independent bases from which to mount a critique of laissez-faire and its co-option of politics. A similar point has been made by critical theologians about the extent to which economic theory has become the guide for spiritual enhancement in prosperity-oriented denominations. By making Christian dictates synonymous with those of the prevailing society, Greg Newton (2006) asserts, God’s people lose their unique identity: “Is there nothing about our free-market economy,” he asks, “that God’s Reign questions?” In collapsing the distinction between church and world, Pentecostals risk losing the key tension between faith and its context, a distinction that allows each to hold the other accountable. Certainly, the extension of economic rationality has eroded what we might term, after Hegel, an ethics of social responsibility. This perhaps explains why advocates of liberal governance and a politics of redistribution are having such difficulty framing ideological positions from which to oppose deregulation and the advance of corporate interests within nation-states on both sides of the Atlantic, even when they foster serious economic crisis. Neo-conservatives and revitalized religious creeds have energetically seized the ground once held by a discredited humanist ethics. In an age of eroding sovereignty, they offer absolute moral certitudes and ultimate accountability. In the space ‘between Jesus and the market’, they favor forms of government that are strong on protecting the liberty of commerce and the authority of the church and are weak on a politics of secular social engineering and reform (cf. Connolly n.d.: 24–25; Kintz 1997). While their endorsement of getting-andspending seems a world away from Weber’s Puritans, advocates of free-market faith share the belief that profit is proof of divine design. “I take all I have as a gift from God,” says best-selling apocalyptic author Tim LaHaye. “I don’t see that God puts any priority on poverty” (Boston 2002). There are echoes here of Luther (Weber 1930: 160) and of St. Paul’s indifference toward the world—at least as regards an ethics of social redistribution.

The Politics of Conviction | 29

More than one observer has seen the reactivation of the spirit of St. Paul in the theologico-political culture of our times. For Alain Badiou (2003), the significant thing about Paul’s ‘anti-philosophy’ was that it was rooted in revelation, in the witnessing of an inimical event, an end that is also a beginning. Badiou insists that he reads Paul’s revelation not primarily as an act of faith but as the foundation for a new conception of universal truth that goes “beyond evident differences and separations” (Miller 2005: 42).14 Born-again believers, too, find foundational truth in personal revelation, the physical experience of being ‘filled with the Spirit’—a rupture that breaks with delusions past and fosters religious devotion with its inimical power. Thus captured, the faithful seek ways to perpetuate the in-dwelling presence in word and deed. As actors and agents of inspired ‘new life’, they inhabit a world of immanent superhuman force. They have become direct bearers of divine grace, just as their opponents are the avatars of Satan. “Colorado Springs … is spiritual Gettysburg,” declares a worker at the evangelical World Prayer Center in the town. “I am a warrior for God” (Sharlet 2005: 47). Here the spirit of St. Paul meets the ghost of antiliberal writers like Carl Schmitt (1985: xx), who rejected “liberal normativism” for the rediscovery of a passionate politics of friend versus enemy, of the exceptional and the miraculous (ibid.) that returns the power of “non-rational” transcendence to dispassionate secular governance. It is the kind of passion evoked by exceptional events like 9/11, which for many people in America and beyond was the ground zero of a new age of global terror, insecurity, and innocence lost. It was an end that was also a beginning, a trauma that must be made the stuff of redemption, an apocalyptic threat to civilization that justifies all countervailing means. Here, as Spinoza ([1670] 1883: 42) insisted long ago, revelation and critical reason stand on “different footings.” Revelation, then, is an event out of time. Its white heat re-establishes truth, realigns words and things, stems semiotic drift. Of course, the quest for original truth (e.g., the desire to return Christianity to what it was before the institutional church) pulls against the hermeneutic impetus in most traditions. In the majority, the pendulum swings between moments of exegesis and purification. In the space of Euro-modernity, in the “void left by the absence of the Gods” (Foucault 1978), human beings became their own measure, seeking to explore their own being rationally, relationally, to understand themselves as interpreters of the world, makers of history. Secular modes of knowing have been beset by crises of authority since the dawn of the Enlightenment. Yet the rapidly increasing scale and abstraction of life under neo-liberal conditions has drastically eroded the assumptions that underpinned modernist understandings of social existence. Intellectual elites remark on the ‘crisis of representation’ or the scourge of relativism, while people in everyday situations lose faith in surface appearances and accepted canons of evidence, especially where civic order has imploded, where currencies are drastically devalued, and where corruption and fakery seem ubiquitous. From Russia to Rwanda, people in such circumstances suspect that occult forces are at work: witches, surreal mafiosi, demonic terrorists, or what Kenyan Pentecostals call ‘Satan the deceiver’ (Blunt 2004; Geschiere 1997; Humphrey 1999). They find solace in those who promise

30 | Jean Comaroff

to ‘out’ the arcane, to stabilize value, and to return a counterfeit world to one of transparency, enforceable rules, and unambiguous meanings. What is more, in Pentecostal churches, rebirth into God’s truth and blessing is not a pacific experience. Rather, it empowers those reborn in the Sprit to go forth and strive for this-worldly dominion.

Privatizing the Millennium On the face of it, such a pragmatic, this-worldly focus would seem to be at odds with the millennialism associated with born-again Christianity—especially the pre-millennialist belief in the imminence of the End Times espoused by many Pentecostals in the US and beyond. As Susan Harding (1994: 15–16) explains, most American pre-millennialists (or “dispensationalists”) are “futurist” not “historic” in orientation, that is, they separate the end of history into two distinct periods: the present, in which biblical prophecies are not being fulfilled, and the future, in which they will be. Until quite recently, dispensational Christians believed that their only role in bringing on the Second Coming was to save souls. But since the 1980s, preachers like Tim LaHaye and Jerry Falwell have distinguished “a new kind of time,” one in which the Last Days are seen to be less hopelessly regressive (Harding 1994: 33). With this shift in emphasis, God is held to have called upon all Christians to become active in wresting their country and way of life away from threats such as liberal humanism. Followers will be judged according to the way that they respond. This altered view of redemption in time seems to have ensured that bornagain Protestants become more central to the political and cultural life of late-twentieth-century America. To be sure, a revived sense of Christian agency—and urgency—accords with the revitalized world-making, the sense of activism-in-time that I have been documenting here. Harding (1994) argues for an expanded definition of political action to encompass this born-again pragmatism, but she stops short of embracing the material dimension so significant in the movements we have been exploring. Yet the window opened up by pre-millennial reform jibes with both the presentism and pragmatism presumed by those who seek to shape market forces to the purpose of producing Christian value, those happy to hitch business to the pursuit of God’s kingdom on earth. Hence the return of interest, mentioned earlier, in Christian Political Economy (Marty 1991), and in reconciling the ethics of faith with the workings of free-market enterprise.15 Advocates of the gospel of prosperity are simply the most literal in communicating a much more widely shared sensibility: many mainline denominations embody this same ethos in practice. North American and European Catholic Churches, for example, currently send Mass Intentions (requests for prayers to be said on behalf of a person, living or dead) to clergy in Kerala—mainly by e-mail. Here, in a process of devotional outsourcing, the prayers are performed by low-paid priests at about one-fifth the cost in the West. A spokesman for the British union Amicus excoriated the practice: “[It] shows that no aspect of life in the West is sacred,” he chided.16 But the truth

The Politics of Conviction | 31

is perhaps the reverse: that all aspects of the world—not least, the creativity of the market—can be sacralized in the ‘here-and-now’ to serve the divine. These features are perhaps most pronounced in what some have called the ‘fee-for-service’ faiths17 or the ‘market in Gods and services’ (Beit-Halahmi 2003) that flourish in many places, from Africa to Southeast Asia. Taiwanese roadside churches and shrines offer a menu of ritual services for drive-by patrons in a context where religion has long been involved in commercial transactions of all kinds (Weller 2000). Southern African congregations of the Universal Church, like the one in central Mafikeng, North West Province, frequently meet in downtown storefronts where they offer similar daily specials and services, including cures for AIDS, depression, and witchcraft; financial counseling; and advice and guidance for the unemployed. Such churches have regular members, but much of their business is with itinerant clients—customers, really—who select the benefits they require. Here, Pentecostalism blends directly with neo-liberal enterprise. Even the smallest sanctuaries have powerful sound systems, their upbeat music beckoning the public at large. Street-facing windows display the beaming faces and testimonials of those who have found rapid health, wealth, and happiness by responding to the call. The ability to deliver in the here-and-now, a potent form of space-time compression, bears witness to God’s contract with the faithful, just as riches in the hands of the faithless are evidence of the powers of Satan. Both promise the instant efficacy of the magical and the millennial, this being the phenomenon with which I began—that is, the active presence of the supernatural in the mundane world. In the Universal Church, and in others that preach the gospel of prosperity, worship is often an emotive effort to arouse the spirit. Communal prayer is a cacophony of voices, each supplicant striving, in the first person singular, to draw down the force of the divine through the depth of his or her faith and need. Visions of blessing bespeak a privatized millennium, a personalized rather than a communal sense of rebirth. Eternal questions of suffering, bafflement, and hopelessness are addressed here in an idiom at once old and new, that of the power of faith, and of the certainty that material sacrifice will yield a quick, fulsome response. If John Wesley’s sermons on the precious stewardship of money echoed the labor theory of value, the language of Godly enterprise in Pentecostal liturgy is more likely to mimic the logic of finance capital. Pastors urge their congregations to believe that investment in the Lord will yield rich dividends, vying with competing options to offer ever more immediate returns on spiritual venture capital. As noted elsewhere (J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff 2000), this quality plays on the optimistic millennialism that has always been inherent in capitalism, a millennialism that has been enhanced with the return of laissez-faire in its fundamentalist form. To the degree that this is a moment of significant social rearrangement, of ideological shift, of revival, it fuses the pre-modern and the postmodern, hope and hopelessness, possibility and impossibility—precisely the juxtaposition associated with cargo cults and revitalization movements in other times and places (Cohn 1957; Worsley 1957). This redemptive promise lends itself to a range of domestic versions, appealing across a wide social

32 | Jean Comaroff

spectrum to those tuned to a new sense of Pentecostal agency at the end of times; to those shaped by a culture of late-capitalist impatience with the postponed rewards of an older faith; to those left out of the promise of prosperity, who look in on the riches of the global economy from its exteriors. The neo-liberal turn held out the millennial prospect that everyone would be free to accumulate and speculate, to consume and indulge repressed desires. Yet for the majority, the millennium has passed without visible enrichment. For the excluded—those who call themselves the ‘poors’ in post-apartheid South Africa (Desai 2002), for instance—the citadels of power and privilege seem as impregnable as ever.

Conclusion In many ways, as I have stated, none of this is new. In the Protestant Ethic, Weber (1930: 175) italicizes a passage from Wesley: “We must exhort all Christians to gain all they can, and to save all they can; that is, in effect, to grow rich.” Weber saw the Protestant ethic as sanctifying the maximizing ethos of early industrial society and nurturing its habits. Are we not witnessing a later chapter in the same long story of the kinship between evangelicalism and capitalism? The answer is yes—and no. The historical relationship of Protestantism to capitalism is both less privileged and more complex than Weber allowed. For one thing, his long-term telos has not been born out: the prediction that capitalism would develop a secular autonomy, free from the need for Godly reinforcement, has proved wrong. It is evident that there was a more intrinsic connection between capitalism and various strains of Protestantism, not to mention Catholicism and Judaism, than Weber acknowledged. All contributed to the contingent mix that congealed as industrial capitalism in the West and its various empires, and all were drawn up into the new forms of value and personal being produced by these formations. What is more, all three strains of faith were transformed—‘modernized’—by their give-and-take with capitalism as a realized social order; by the impact of its stress on popular literacy and entextualization; by the effects of the commodification it spawned; and by the rise of liberal politico-legal institutions that secured its terms of operation in a secular domain increasingly set off from that of organized religion. But while each of these faiths was transformed in particular, context-specific ways in relation to state and civil society, the dialectic of religion and economy was never severed in the manner implied by more literal understandings of ‘disenchantment’. But I have also argued that many of the features of contemporary Pentecostalism are in fact new, and that they share attributes with other revitalized faiths beyond the Christian fold. Moreover, I have tried to show that these developments are not merely endorsements or ‘reflections’ of free-market forms: they are reciprocally entailed with economic forces in the thoroughgoing structural reorganization I have identified in the current moment. These forces include the expanding scale and abstraction of transactions across the globe, the growing tension between mobile capital and the nation-state, the increasing disparities

The Politics of Conviction | 33

of wealth and power in the world at large, and the erosion of the institutional forms of liberal democracy. This unsettlement does not occur everywhere in the same way. Secular liberal hegemonies seem less vulnerable in northwest Europe than elsewhere, although there are signs that they too are being disturbed from below. The institutional separations associated with modern bureaucratic states—the complementarity of the sacred and profane, public and private, state and society—are being cross-cut by renewed forms of theodicy, by totalizing religious authorities that promise to anchor abstraction, fix sovereignty, and yield new agglomerations that are at once pre- and post-modern. The spirit of revelation is among us once more, resonating ironically with the ethos of our late-secular age—the compression of space and time, the sense of urgency and expectation, the longing for the sublime. The genius of the new holistic faiths is to address the displacements and desires of the current world, to make its pathologies and terrors the portents of imminent transcendence. As the circumstances that rendered liberal humanism plausible are increasingly undermined, it is incumbent on social critics—both within and beyond the religious field—to make cogent sense of this history-in-the-making.

Jean Comaroff is the Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town. Her current research in southern Africa is on medicine and body politics; religion and state transformation; crime, policing, and the ‘metaphysics of disorder’; and democracy and difference. Recent publications include “Beyond the Politics of Bare Life: AIDS and the Global Order” (2007), and, with John L. Comaroff, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (2000), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (2006), and Ethnicity, Inc. (2009).

Notes 1. Some sections of this chapter appeared in abridged form in an online essay in the Caterwaul Quarterly 1, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 2008). 2. “‘Virgin Mary’ on US Motorway Wall,” BBC News: World Edition, 21 April 2005, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4468275.stm (accessed 6 August 2006). 3. “‘Vision of the Virgin’ Vandalised,” BBC News: World Edition, 7 May 2005, http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4524057.stm (accessed 6 August 2006). 4. “‘Virgin Mary’ Toast Fetches $28,000,” BBC News: World Edition, 23 November 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4034787.stm (accessed 4 December 2005). Another seller offered a “Virgin Mary sandwich toaster,” although the item description included the caveat that the toaster “may or may not reproduce the Virgin Mary image.” 5. Theresa (Terri) Marie Schindler Schiavo was an American woman who, after suffering extensive brain damage in February 1990, becoming dependent on a feeding tube and was institutionalized for eight years in what was diagnosed as a “persistent vegetative state.” Her husband and legal guardian petitioned the Circuit Court in Pinellas County, Florida, to remove her feeding tube. Schiavo’s parents opposed the petition, arguing that

34 | Jean Comaroff

their daughter remained conscious. Although the court determined that Schiavo would not wish to continue life-prolonging measures, religious leaders, politicians, and pro-life advocacy groups became involved, and the battle continued for seven years. Before the local court’s decision was finally carried out on 18 March 2005, efforts were made by the Florida state government and the US federal government to intervene. The struggle received extensive national and international media coverage (see Caplan, McCartney, and Sisti 2006). 6. See also evangelical discussions of sexuality-as-godliness, such as the bestseller The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love, by Tim LaHaye and Beverly LaHaye ([1976] 1998); cf. Linda Kintz (1997). William Connolly (n.d.: 28) has gone so far as to speak of the “Christian-family-eroticism” formula in the contemporary United States. 7. “Survey Indicates More Americans ‘Without Faith,’” American Atheist, 22 November 2001, http://www.athiests.org/flas.line/athiest4.htm (accessed 10 September 2005). 8. Interview with the founding pastor. 9. This is evident not merely in the challenge of what might be construed as immigrant religiosity in Western Europe (recall here the controversial remarks by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the effect that adoption of some aspects of Sharia law for relevant communities “seems unavoidable” (“Sharia Law in UK is ‘Unavoidable,’” BBC Radio 4 World at One, 7 February 2008). The introduction of the Human Fertilization and Embryo Bill into the British Parliament in the spring of 2008 drew unprecedented levels of home-grown Christian activism and evoked considerable media attention. One extended BBC report noted that “[h]ard-line Christian activists are now mobilizing believers in an attempt to make an impact on society nationally,” adding that “well funded and politically active Christian groups [are] emerging as a significant voice in British politics” (In God’s Name, Channel 4 Dispatches, 19 May 2008, 8:00 pm). 10. The Dubai Ports World controversy was a high-profile dispute that took place from February to March 2006 between the US and the United Arab Emirates. The issue was whether the sale of businesses managing six major US seaports to Dubai Ports World (DPW), a company owned by the government of Dubai, would compromise American state security. The business had earlier been owned by a British company, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O), which had been purchased by DPW at the time of the controversy. As a result of the deal, DPW would assume the leases of P&O to manage 6 major US port facilities, as well as operations in 16 others. The transfer of leases had been approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, but Democratic and Republican members of the US Congress started to question it after the Associated Press published a story suggesting that the arrangement constituted a threat to national security. After a House Panel voted 62–2 to block the deal, DPW released a statement saying that it would turn over operation of the ports to a US “entity” (Yasin 2006). 11. See also “States Not Run by People’s Will,” BBCNews, 14 September 2005, http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4257158.stm (accessed 1 May 2008). 12. The 2006 Pew Forum survey can be found at http://pewforum.org/surveys/pentecostal/. See also “Pentecostal Christians Widening Influence, Says Poll,” Associated Press, 6 October 2006, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,218230,00.html (accessed 6 February 2008). 13. Larry King is one of America’s best-known talk show hosts. His globally syndicated program, Larry King Live, is CNN’s most watched offering and is said to draw over one million viewers per night. 14. Badiou does acknowledge, though, that there has been a ‘religious co-opting’ of his work. He counters that in light of the significant issues at stake in our current world, the difference between “the religious way and the non-religious way” is relatively trivial (Miller 2005: 42). 15. See, for example, Stapleford (2002: 134) on the “intermediate” nature of private property in relation to the divine ownership of all things.

The Politics of Conviction | 35

16. It is reported that this outsourcing is mainly routed through the Vatican. In Kerala, priests earn about $45 per month, and the extra income is welcomed.” See Rai (2004). 17. Scholars have noted the prevalence of spirit medium shrines and other popular religious forms that operate on a fee-for-service basis in China and Vietnam (e.g., Weller 2000).

References Albrecht, Daniel E. 1999. “Rites in the Spirit: A Ritual Approach to Pentecostal/Charismatic Spirituality.” Journal of Pentecostal Theology, Supplement Series 17. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Badiou, Alain. 2003. Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Beit-Halahmi, Benjamin. 2003. “Scientology: Religion or Racket?” Marburg Journal of Religion 8, no. 1. http://web.uni-marburg.de/religionswissenschaft/journal/mjr/beit.html (accessed 18 May 2008). Berger, Peter. 1967. The Sacred Canopy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Bilger, Burkhard. 2004. “God Doesn’t Need Ole Anthony.” New Yorker, 6 December, 70–81. Blunt, Robert. 2004. “‘Satan Is an Imitator’: Kenya’s Recent Cosmology of Corruption.” Pp. 294–328 in Weiss 2004. Bokaba, Selby. 2000. “Hero’s Welcome for Miracle 2000 Mastermind.” The Star (Johannesburg), 31 July. http://www.iol.co.za/general/newsprint.php3?%20art_id=ct20000731204 009474M624397 (accessed 5 August 2000). Boston, Rob. 2002. “If Best-Selling End-Times Author Tim LaHaye Has His Way, ChurchState Separation Will Be … Left Behind.” News, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, February. http://www.au.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id= 5601&news_iv_ctrl=0&abbr=cs_&JServSessionIdr009=t5m7i61g62.app13a (accessed 25 October 2006). Brown, Wendy. 2003. “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Theory and Event 7, no. 1. http://web2.trentu.ca:2008/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.1brown.html (accessed 24 October 2005). Caplan, Arthur, James McCartney, and Dominic Sisti, eds. 2006. The Case of Terri Schiavo: Ethics at the End of Life. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Cave, Damien. 2005. “How Breweth Java with Jesus.” New York Times, Week in Review, 23 October, 4. Cleary, Edward L., and Hannah W. Stewart-Gambino, eds. 1997. Power, Politics, and Pentecostals in Latin America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Coetzee, J. M. 2005. Slow Man. London: Secker and Warburg. Cohn, Norman. 1957. The Pursuit of the Millennium. London: Secker and Warburg. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 2000. “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming.” In Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoli­beralism, ed. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff. Spe­cial edition of Public Culture 12, no. 2: 291–343. Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 1997. Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier. Vol. 2. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ______. 2003. “Reflections on Liberalism, Policulturalism, and ID-ology: Citizenship and Difference in South Africa.” Identities 9, no. 4: 445–474. Connolly, William E. 1996. “Pluralism, Multiculturalism and the Nation-State: Rethinking the Connections.” Journal of Political Ideologies 1, no. 1: 53–73. ______. n.d. “The Contingency of Capitalism.” Paper presented in a lecture series sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, University of Chicago, October 2006.

36 | Jean Comaroff

Crapanzano, Vincent. 2000. Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench. New York: New Press. Desai, Ashwin. 2002. We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa. New York: Monthly Review Press. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Washington, DC: Frederick Praeger. Durkheim, Emile. [1893] 1947. The Division of Labor in Society. Trans. George Simpson. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Flores d’Arcais, P. 2006. “Pope Benedict XVI.” Paper presented at the symposium “Theologies of Power: Religion and Politics in Contemporary Europe,” Center for Contemporary Culture, Barcelona, 9 October. Fogel, Robert. 2000. The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books Gaiya, Musa A. B. 2002. “The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria.” Occasional Paper, Center of African Studies, University of Copenhagen. Geschiere, Peter. 1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Ghosh, Jayati. 2006. “The Economic and Social Effects of Financial Liberalization: Part One.” New Agenda: South African Journal of Social and Economic Policy 21: 55–59. Gibson, James L. 2004. Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? New York: Russell Sage. Hackett, Rosalind. Forthcoming. “Devil Bustin’ Satellites: How Media Liberalization in Africa Generates Religious Intolerance and Conflict.” In Religion in African Conflicts and Peacebuilding Initiatives: Problems and Prospects for a Globalizing Africa, ed. Rosalind Hackett, Sakah Mahmud, and James Smith. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Hansen, Thomas Blom. 2006. “On the Complexities of Being Hindu: A Battle Over Souls.” WISER Review 2: 12. ______. 2007. Cool Passion: The Political Theology of Conviction. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Harding, Susan. 1994. “Imagining the Last Days: The Politics of Apocalyptic Language.” Bulletin of the Academy of Arts and Sciences 48, no. 3: 1–44. Humphrey, Caroline. 1999. “Shamans in the City.” Anthropology Today 15, no. 3: 3–10. Hwa Yung. 1995. “Critical Issues Facing Theological Education in Asia.” Transformation 12, no. 4: 1–6. Ihejirika, Walter. 2005. “Media and Fundamentalism in Nigeria.” World Association for Christian Communications. http://www.wacc.org.uk/wacc/network/africa/african_ articles/media_and_fundmentalism (accessed 9 October 2005). Jenkins, Paul. 2002. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kintz, Linda. 1997. Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions That Matter in Right-Wing America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. LaHaye, Tim. 1980. The Battle for the Mind. Grand Rapids, MI: Fleming H. Revell. LaHaye, Tim, and Beverly LaHaye. [1976] 1998. The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Mahler, Jonathan. 2005. “The Soul of the New Exburb.” New York Times Magazine, 27 March, 30–57. Marty, William R. 1991. “A Christian Political Economy: Some Dilemmas.” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 3, no. 1–2 (special issue on Christian Political Economy): 107–120. Meyer, Birgit. 2002. “Pentecostalite Culture on Screen: Magic and Modernity in Ghana’s New Mediascape.” http://history.wisc.edu/bernault/magical/public.3.htm (accessed 9 October 2005).

The Politics of Conviction | 37

______. 2004. “‘Praise the Lord’: Popular Cinema and Pentecostalite Style in Ghana’s New Public Sphere.” American Ethnologist 31, no. 1: 92–110. Miller, Adam S. 2005. “An Interview with Alain Badiou: Universal Truths and the Question of Religion.” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 3, no. 1: 38–42. Monbiot, George. 2005. “My Heroes Are Driven by God, but I’m Glad My Society Isn’t.” The Guardian, 11 October, 31. Muehlebach, Andrea. 2007. “The Moral Neo-Liberal: Welfare State and Ethical Citizenship in Contemporary Italy.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Newton, Greg. 2006. “Free Market Christianity.” Travelers: Theological Conversation for the Journey. http://travelersjournal.blogspot.com/2006/03/free-market-christianity.html (accessed 5 May 2008). Nixon, J. Peter. 2003. “Not Dead Yet.” America: The National Catholic Weekly 188, no. 5, 17 February. http://www.americamagazine.org/BookReview.cfm?textID=2794&articletypeid =31&issue ID=422 (accessed 5 February 2008). Norman, Edward R. 1976. Church and Society in England 1770–1970: A Historical Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rai, Saritha. 2004. “Short on Priests, U.S. Catholics Outsource Prayers to Indian Clergy.” NYTimes.com, 13 June. https://webmail.uchicago.edu/horde/imp/message.php?Horde= fe3019d7f77d60499f03398c (accessed 15 June 2004). Rajagopal, Arvind. 2001. Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rex, John. 1996. “National Identity in the Democratic Multi-Cultural State.” Sociological Research Online. http://www.socresonline.org.uk/1/2/1.html (accessed on 1 May 2008). Schippert, Claudia. 2003. “Sporting Heroic Bodies in a Christian Nation-at-War.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 5 (Fall). http://www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/art4-heroicbodies. html (accessed 5 February 2008). Schmitt, Carl. 1985. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Trans. George Schwab. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schulz, Dorothea. 2007. “Evoking Moral Community, Fragmenting Muslim Discourse: Sermon Audio-Recordings and the Reconfiguration of Public Debate in Mali.” Journal of Islamic Studies 26: 39–71. Scott, A. O. 2005. “Reading from Left to Right.” New York Times, Art and Leisure, 25 September, 1. Sharlet, Jeff. 2005. “Soldiers of Christ: Inside America’s Most Powerful Megachurch,” Harper’s Magazine, May, 41–54. Sheridan, Alan. 2005. Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth. London: Taylor and Francis. Smith, Dennis A. 2004. “Eine Bewegung jenseits der Modernität in Lateinamerika.” The World Association of Christian Communication, 13 August. http://www.wacc.org.uk/de/ publications/media_development/2005_2/moving_beyond_modernity_in_latin_america (accessed 14 October 2005). Soares, Benjamin. 2004. “Muslim Saints in the Age of Neoliberalism.” Pp. 79–105 in Weiss 2004. Spinoza, Benedict de. [1670] 1883. A Theologico-Political Treatise. Part 1. Trans. A. H. Gosset. London: George Bell and Sons. Stapleford, John E. 2002. Bulls, Bears, and Golden Calves: Applying Christian Ethics in Economics. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press. Stockstill, Larry. 1998. The Cell Church. Ventura, CA: Regal Books. Wanner, Catherine. 2007. Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Watney, Simon. 1990. “Missionary Positions: AIDS, ‘Africa,’ and Race.” Pp. 89–106 in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Glover, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornell West. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Weber, Max. 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. by Talcott Parsons. London: Unwin University Books.

38 | Jean Comaroff

Weiss, Brad, ed. 2004. Producing African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age. Leiden: Brill. Welbourn, Frederick, and Bethwell Ogot. 1966. A Place to Feel at Home. London: Oxford University Press. Weller, Robert P. 2000. “Religion, Capitalism and the End of the Nation-State in Taiwan.” In Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoli­beralism, ed. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff. Spe­cial edition of Public Culture 12, no. 2: 477–498. Worsley, Peter M. 1957. The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of ‘Cargo’ Cults in Melanesia. London: Macgibbon & Kee. Yasin, Kakande. 2006. “Analysing the Dubai Ports Controversy.” Arab Media Watch, 31 October. http://www.arabmediawatch.com/amw/CountryBackgrounds/UnitedArabEmirates/ DubaiPortsControversy/tabid/348/Default.aspx (accessed 29 July 2008).

( Chapter 2

Strategic Secularism Bible Advocacy in England Matthew Engelke

In late September 2003, the Bible Society of England and Wales posted images of guns and flowers on billboards and bus stop shelters around Nottingham.1 There was nothing else on these posters: just guns and flowers. A week later, the posters were rehung with more information. Alongside the image of the gun ran some text: “Is Lisa right to seek revenge on Phil Mitchell? Text yes or no to 82100.” Below the gun was the logo of the Bible Society, although without the accompanying text to identify it as such. Alongside the flowers, tagged with the same logo, the text read, “Should Dirty Den’s kids forgive him for faking his own death?” Shortly after, the posters were rehung yet again, this time with the full Bible Society logo, along with new text: “Soap stories and the Bible. Both full of life’s struggles, choices, and emotions. The Bible: More relevant than you thought? www.getthestory.co.uk.” Local residents finally had a sense of what the posters were all about: this was Bible marketing to fans of the popular BBC evening drama EastEnders. These posters were part of a tease-and-reveal media campaign that the Bible Society had been planning for the better part of a year. Termed a ‘Campaign to Culture’, it was part of a new initiative in the Society’s domestic work. But the idea was not to sell Bibles. It was not even to evangelize, as one stereotypical view of Christian campaigning might have it. The logic behind the campaign Notes for this chapter begin on page 53.

40 | Matthew Engelke

was at once more simple and more complicated: the Society wanted to get the ‘man on the street’, as staff members put it, thinking about the Bible. Gone are the days, in their view, when the Bible was a central part of people’s lives and a key element in the forum of the public square. By linking biblical stories to the plot lines of a soap opera, the Bible Society sought to suggest to Nottinghammers the importance of the Bible for understanding their cultural heritage, today’s world, and even something of the human condition. In this essay, I discuss the logic behind the Nottingham Campaign in relation to the Bible Society’s overall strategy of public engagement. Drawing from a series of interviews and an analysis of the campaign-related materials, I focus on the Society’s concern with, interest in, and harnessing of ‘the secular’. There are several elements to this. Staff members at the Society do not see evidence of biblical literacy in the population at large, nor do they think that the Bible plays a significant role in the life of the public square. On the contrary, their view is that many people harbor a certain hostility—or, at best, indifference— toward the Bible. In paying attention to these concerns, we can gain an important sense of how secularization is perceived and acted upon at the local level. As a concept or historical process, the secular has, of course, been well studied. What is less well explored, certainly within anthropology, is how it functions in people’s perceptions and in the social projects of organizations and institutions. The secular, in other words, is often analyzed at some remove from everyday life. This chapter, which connects to a larger, ongoing ethnographic study, aims to present something of that everyday life as it is understood within one organization in contemporary England.2 For many on the staff at the Bible Society, the secular is seen as both a threat and an opportunity. Rather than turning away from secular discourses or denouncing them outright, the Bible Society tries to incorporate them within its advocacy work. What they deploy, as I show, is a strategic secularism.

Assumptions of the Secular In April 2006, KSBR, a brand futures consultancy, ran a series of focus groups for the Bible Society on the attitudes of ‘unchurched’ people toward the Bible. There were some encouraging findings, from the Society’s perspective. For example, many young parents thought that the Bible could be useful in helping their children build moral character. And “when pushed,” respondents could “see beyond all their negative associations of the Bible and agree that it articulates a valuable moral framework” (KSBR 2006: 4). However, negative associations were what dominated. Here are just a few of the comments included in the report, taken from participants in focus groups that KSBR ran in Manchester and London: • On the Bible: “I find it really complicated to read.” • On the Bible: “For me, the Bible has a cold and dark feel to it. It reminds me of walking through a graveyard.”

Strategic Secularism | 41

• On Christians who talk about faith publicly: “I hate the way they always talk about heaven and hell and saving your soul … In our society nobody has time to worry about the Bible and its rules.” In their executive summary, the KSBR consultants concluded that the Bible “is fundamentally felt to be at odds with modern life. Therefore people drift away from the Bible as they, and society in general, increasingly [free themselves] from official reasons to come into contact with the Bible (Church, School, Sunday School etc.)” (KSBR 2006: 3). What the consultants were presenting was a certain image of a secular world, confirming some of the Society’s own perceptions. Within the Society, secularization refers mainly to three things, each of which picks up on different theoretical arguments that one can find in much of the academic literature. First, it means that life is not governed in any meaningful sense by the church. In other words, it means what many sociologists and historians—especially in light of work by David Martin (2005), José Casanova (1994), and others—now take it to mean: that the processes of secularization as differentiation mark many European modernities. This is not a problem as far as the Bible Society is concerned. Its members are not uncomfortable with bishops sitting in the House of Lords, but they are not advocating a church-run state. Indeed, some staff emphasize that secularization was a historical process begun from within the church and that they see this as a good thing. Second, leading on from the process of differentiation, the staff understand faith to be increasingly relegated to private life. The sidelining of the church has also led to a sidelining of faith in the public square. It is difficult, they think, to be publicly Christian, and they often pick up on what they see as a hostility to open expressions of faith. Finally, and most importantly for the staff, secularization represents a threat to the very existence of organized religion. Committed to the life of the church, the Bible Society does not believe that a more nebulous ‘spirituality’ is an acceptable state of affairs. In other words, it subscribes to some version of a theory that equates secularization with religious decline. In the sociology of religion, this kind of theorizing stirs real debate (see, e.g., Davie 1994; Voas and Crockett 2005; see also Bruce 2002). Differentiation is the valid core of secularization theory (Casanova 1994: 4), but its other effects are hotly contested. While it would be too simplistic to say that the staff at the Society expect Christianity (and Christians) in England to disappear in the next 50 years, they nevertheless often operate with the sense that Christians in England are an endangered species. In the 1990s, sensing that they were up against these ‘cold and dark’ feelings—a hatred for talking about heaven and hell and saving one’s soul—the Bible Society began to rethink seriously the nature of its mission in England and Wales.3 Founded in 1804, the Society had functioned for nearly 200 years primarily as a publisher, distributor, and coordinator of translations. Simply put, its goal has always been to put a Bible in the hands of everyone on earth. Alongside this commitment to universal provision, the founders of the Society made three key organizational decisions. First, the Society would be independent, layrun, and overseen by an inter-denominational board. As one early admirer put

42 | Matthew Engelke

it, it was at the time “a society for furnishing the means of religion, but not a religious society” (Howard in Howsam 1991: 7). Second, the Bibles it produced or sponsored would be published “without note or comment.” In other words, the Bibles would not include directions on how they should be read; any such guidance should come from the churches, not the Society itself. Third, in all but the most exceptional circumstances, the Society’s Bibles would be sold rather than given away for free. This decision was based on the firm belief that one does not value what one gets for free. It also built upon a growing interest within early nineteenth-century evangelical circles to use “the line of business” (Owen in Howsam 1991: 7) as a missional register. In summary, then, and simply put, the Bible Society located itself with a secular space opened up by the processes of differentiation. It was, and is, comprised of private individuals in a public corporation that was not in itself religious, but whose purpose was, and remains, to foster the conditions of possibility for religiosity.4

Making the Bible Heard A major inspiration behind the Society is the story of Mary Jones, a poor Welsh girl who wanted nothing more than a Bible of her own. After saving her money, she walked over 20 miles to the nearest bookseller, only to find that no Bibles were available. Her plight became a providential sign for the evangelicals behind the Society. They saw in it an unshakable and growing desire for the Bible, not only within Britain, but in the world beyond. If no Bible was available in a given language, it had to be provided; if there was, it had to be made readily available at an affordable price. In England alone, the Society had over 2,000 auxiliaries and local associations by 1835, each of which raised funds in the effort to meet the Society’s goals of provision (Howsam 1991: 63). By 1854, the Society had distributed close to 28 million Bibles or Scripture passages in 152 languages. The Society has always relied on the financial support of its members. While the Bible is a perennial seller, the Bible business, like the book trade more broadly, is not reliably or easily profitable. The commitment to provision makes profit all but impossible, since it requires selling Bibles below their production costs. Today, much of the funding comes from programs such as the Bible-a-Month Club, through which individuals pledge £4 a month for any number of projects, including Bible subsidies, translations, and the production of Braille editions. The Society also sponsors Mary Jones walks, which help supporters raise money from their church communities by walking in the footsteps of Mary Jones. In 2006, it launched an ‘8:32’ campaign, which refers to the verse from John (“and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free”). This campaign is modeled after the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign that became so popular in 2005 around the time of the G8 summit at Gleneagles and the corresponding LIVE 8 concerts. It is a challenge to young people to “make Bible poverty history,” and it has been a major source of donations for the Bible Society. While it prides itself on its fiscal discipline, the Society would operate at a loss were it not for these avenues of charitable support.

Strategic Secularism | 43

The Society is still committed to the goals of its founders, expressed today in its motto, “making the Bible heard.” The staff of just over 80 people come from a variety of backgrounds: Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, and Pentecostal. There are even a handful of agnostics and atheists—albeit none in strategy-related posts—and a self-declared pagan. The Bibles that the Society distributes do not have notes or comments, and, aside from some small domestic programs (e.g., servicing prisons), the Society still does not hand out Bibles for free. Of course, there has been a great deal of change in other ways. The Society today is not limited exclusively to print: it works across a wide range of technologies and mediums, including audiotapes, CDs, podcasts, and text messaging. It also distributes and supports several different versions of the Bible, from the ‘Authorized Version’ (originally, the only English version used) to the ‘Good News’. In fact, it now produces, funds, and distributes much more than Bibles, including educational materials for schools and various films and documentaries, such as the recent BBC production The Miracles of Jesus, hosted by the Somali-born journalist Rageh Omaar.5 However, it has been a long time since the Society’s nineteenth-century heyday, and although the Society was “a fact of Victorian life” (Howsam 1991: xiii), it is not widely known today. For example, there are currently around 300 local action groups, down from the thousands there once were. In the early 1980s, the Society sold its majestic Bible House on Queen Victoria Street in the City of London and relocated to the outskirts of Swindon, in part due to financial pressures. In 1991, there was a major reorganization, and the Society moved away from publishing per se. In a sense, however, there was no need for the Bible Society to exist along the lines originally set out, at least in its domestic work. It had been a long time since anyone in England or Wales had to walk—or even wanted to walk—20 miles to find a Bible for sale. Moreover, compared to most books, Bibles have become relatively inexpensive. Philip Poole, the Society’s deputy CEO, told me that throughout the 1990s, the staff was posing some hard questions in relation to societal changes. “In our culture, where are we?” he recounted everyone saying. “What is the role of the Bible Society? Everybody in our culture who wants a Bible has got one. Should we just shut up shop? Is the job done?” By the late 1990s, a new vision was coming into focus. While its international work is still largely about provision and circulation, in its domestic work the Society shifted its emphasis to ‘advocacy’. A Bible advocacy team run by Ann Holt, a former history teacher who went on to work as an educational consultant for the Major and Blair governments, for which she was awarded an OBE, was established. As Holt put it to me, “Advocacy is about moving [people] from the mindset that says ‘[the Bible] is rubbish, this has nothing to do with me, it’s difficult, it’s irrelevant’ … to somewhere different.” Advocacy accomplishes this in part by trying to make the Bible ‘credible’. Credibility has become a key word, although one that staff are reluctant to define in detail, as they prefer to keep its meanings open-ended. In the most general sense, though, Poole told me that credibility means “to try and deal with the increasing fact that the Bible [is] being progressively marginalized” in the wider society.

44 | Matthew Engelke

Bible advocacy addresses this perception of progressive marginalization in several ways. Generally speaking, it takes two directions. The first is what staff refer to as ‘Church-facing’, for in the eyes of many at Bible House, Swindon, it is not only the unchurched man on the street who needs to connect with what the Bible has to offer. Staff members say that many churches do not give their congregations the confidence to engage with the Bible in any meaningful, in-depth sense. One staffer explained this in blunt terms: “There’s a lot of talk in the Church about making disciples and going out there and wanting to impact the world. But quite often they don’t do it. That’s the first thing. Obviously some do—I don’t want to be fully condemnatory. But overall we know the Church is, kind of, losing market shares. So it’s obvious: they’re not doing it.” The Society tries to build confidence within the church so that it can regain ‘market shares’ in a number of ways. For example, it promotes an annual Bible Sunday, providing vicars with materials for sermons to their congregations. It has run a project called Reel Issues, a film discussion group that focuses on biblical or biblically inspired themes and plot lines in Hollywood movies. And through the work of a representative in Westminster, it encourages Christian members of Parliament to bring the Bible to bear on decisions in their political work. The second direction in advocacy work is ‘Culture-facing’. The Society tries to build credibility within what it calls ‘the Culture’ by addressing what it sees as the four major ‘cultural drivers’ in British society: arts, media, politics, and education. In each of these areas, it tries to shape discussions and concerns. The arts officer, for example, organized a display of angels, designed by a famous kite maker from south London, for the holiday decorations at a shopping center in Swindon. The idea behind this project was to suggest the continuing importance of the Christianity behind Christmas, in the face of its disenchantment. The media officer has written a handbook on the Bible for journalists in an effort to promote what the Society considers more informed reporting on stories relating to Christianity and the Bible. In 2006, the Society launched Theos, a ‘public theology’ think tank that aims to contribute to the analysis of social and political trends by addressing issues not only of obvious religious significance but also of more general concern, thus suggesting that faith matters cannot be bracketed off. And, as already mentioned, the Society produces educational materials, many of which are used in the religious education curriculum in schools in England and Wales. Although in many projects and programs the Church- and Culture-facing work does not meet, the overall goal of the Society is to lessen the difference between its perceived constituencies. One image that staff members like to use is that of building a bridge. They say you need to start on both sides of the divide and meet in the middle. The Bible Society thinks of itself as situated in that divide, furnishing support in each direction. The hope is that in building such a bridge, the Society can provide the church with a more effective platform from which to regain market shares, as some staff might put it. What do the Bible Society staff mean by ‘the Culture’ and ‘the Church’? As Holt once put it in a seminar discussion I attended, culture is “the way people do things—the way they think, feel, act.” The Culture is used to refer to people

Strategic Secularism | 45

and institutions that are neither motivated nor governed by any sense of faith. In Bible advocacy discourse, then, it is understood that the way people do things is without religion. Put another way, the Culture is the unmarked norm—a disenchanted modernity according to which all else is defined. The Church, then, is something of a marked subculture. It refers to those people and institutions that are motivated and governed by faith. In many respects it is seen as a world unto itself, and certainly one that has a difficult time relating to or understanding the logic of the Culture. As an anthropologist, I have often found the inflexibility of these terms problematic. At face value, ‘the Culture’ and ‘the Church’ represent the kind of neatly bounded, capital-C objects we tried to banish long ago. Taken to its extreme, this bifurcation paints a picture of Christians as alienated strangers in modern-day England. When questioned about this rigidity and sense of separation, however, Bible Society staff members are quick to qualify the terms. Holt has even referred to culture as a “weasel word.” Staff recognize that Christians do not live inside a bubble (or cage) and that non-Christians and secular institutions do not exist independently of the faithful and of Christian concerns. Holt described this situation to me as a figure eight: you can recognize the existence of separate spheres, but you also have to acknowledge their connection. When it comes to the Culture, “we are part of it,” she says. One of the reasons staff members use this dualism is for convenience; it is an analytic shorthand and has to be accompanied by all the requisite caveats. At the same time, she stressed, this is part of a more widespread Christian language in British society with which the staff must work. It represents a “churchy attitude,” but the staff cannot reject it completely if they want to be effective in their Church-facing work.

Getting the Story The Campaign to Culture in Nottingham was the first of its kind. As of this writing, two more have been held: one in Bristol in 2005 and another in Greater Manchester in 2007. The campaigns have been the most well-resourced and comprehensive projects in the Society’s Culture-facing advocacy. Each takes about a year to plan and places heavy demands on staff, not only in the advocacy team, but across the entire organization. In resource terms, these campaigns also involve a significant financial investment. Buying media space for posters is an expensive exercise for a charity the size of the Bible Society, and there are also costs for events that run in conjunction with the poster campaigns. These events try to interconnect issues in the four cultural drivers (arts, media, politics, and education) to the Bible. Co-organized with and coordinated by local churches, the Campaigns to Culture are, in this sense, Church-facing as well. Indeed, they represent the furthest point in the Society’s bridge-building exercise. The Campaigns to Culture are the brainchild of James Catford, the Bible Society’s CEO. By the end of the 1990s, Poole told me, the Society was beginning to get a reputation as all talk and no action; thus, Catford was hired in 2002 to implement and refine the ideas developed earlier in the 1990s. Catford came to

46 | Matthew Engelke

the Bible Society from the publishing industry, having worked for both Hodder Headline and HarperCollins as an editor on biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs of politicians, royals, and major figures in the sports and entertainment world. One of his last books for HarperCollins was the memoir of Princess Diana’s private secretary. Despite his success in the publishing world, Catford had wanted a change: “My faith had to handle all of this, had to handle the commercial world, and the oppressive nature of [the] associations.” Taking the reins at the Bible Society seemed a perfect move, enabling him to harness together his faith and his professional skills. He was convinced that the Society “understood how deep the problem is between the faith and the culture.” As a non-religious society dedicated to providing the means for religion, the Bible Society occupies a niche within the Christian community. Not beholden to the agenda of any one church, it answers to an inter-denominational board and, ultimately, its supporter base. As Catford put it to me, “We don’t have a position on anything.” He acknowledges that this itself is a position, and says so slightly tongue-in-cheek. All the main players in Bible advocacy work are conscious of the ways in which they bring the specificities of their own faith to the table.6 But the mandate of provision does give the Society a fair bit of room when it comes to setting its strategies and agendas. It also frees it from some of the expectations of ‘mission-based’ organizations: its only mission is to make the Bible heard. In essence, promoting the Bible is not exactly the same thing as promoting Christianity. This is, I would argue, a product of the secular: differentiation not only between church and state but also in how the Bible can be understood as an object in itself (cf. Asad 2003: 11). I mentioned in passing at the outset of this chapter that proselytism is not a goal of the Society. “I feel no burden to convert people,” Catford told me. The Society went into the first campaign in Nottingham with this point in mind. The staff harbored no illusions that sticking up posters would get unchurched people into the churches. The EastEnders project was supposed to register a “blip on the radar,” as the coordinator of the campaign put it to me. “A successful campaign,” she said, “would be somebody seeing a billboard or some form of media mix and then saying, ‘Actually, blimey, that’s made me think completely differently about the Bible’ or ‘It’s changed my perceptions.’” Moving people away from the cold and dark feeling toward something slightly warmer and brighter was considered enough of a first step and a challenge in its own right. To accomplish this, the Society had to do three things: first, present people with something unexpected; second, not scare away the target audience; and, third, make the link between the Bible and daily life—essentially, by showing how the Bible was always already a part of their world. The first and second of these prerequisites were two sides of the same coin. If the campaign was to be a success, presenting Nottinghammers with something unexpected was considered absolutely crucial, and only something unexpected would not scare them away. In line with the Society’s general dissatisfaction over church outreach, the last thing they wanted to do was design posters expressing churchy attitudes. They made a conscious decision to work with a mainstream design agency, not one in what some of the staff refer to

Strategic Secularism | 47

as the ‘church ghetto’. In the first instance, they had to strip the posters of any outward religiosity. Putting up a Bible or a cross or a picture of Jesus might have led to an automatic shut-off. This is why the Society chose to go with the images of guns and flowers for the tease and reveal. They knew that if they wanted to start conversations about the Bible, they could not begin with the Bible. It would have been the equivalent of knocking on people’s doors—just what unchurched people expect from Christians. The Society knew it was taking a risk in going with the gun. The approach was certainly unexpected—sensational, even. As a complicated act of bridge building, it also had the potential to raise some eyebrows within the Church and, even more dangerously, among the Society’s individual donors, who have been described to me as, for the most part, older Anglican ladies, fairly conservative and reserved, with primary commitments to the Society’s international work. Although mindful of this, the Society knew that it had to go out on a limb. The gun turned out to be almost too far. At the time of the campaign, Nottingham was known as the ‘gun crime capital of the UK’, and was referred to variously as ‘Shottingham’ and ‘Gun City’. On 30 September 2003, just as the campaign was being launched, a family-run jewelry store in Arnold, an area of Nottingham, was robbed. In the course of the robbery, Marian Bates, who co-owned the store with her husband Victor, was shot and killed by the thieves when she acted to protect her daughter, who was working at the counter. The murder made national headlines and became a touchpoint for subsequent debates about gun crime and policing. It also led the Society to reconsider the appropriateness of its gun-emblazoned posters. While the Bates family apparently did not ask for them to be taken down, the Society did so. Nevertheless, the tragic incident was seen as something that brought “into even sharper focus … the campaign’s message of the relevance of biblical themes to everyday life,” according to Canon Mark Brown, the chairman of the Local Churches Steering Group for the campaign (see BFBS 2003a). Another member of the Steering Group, the Methodist minister Rob Cotton, became personally involved in linking the lessons of the campaign to the shooting. His church, just a stone’s throw from the jewelry shop, hosted the memorial service for Mrs. Bates, as well as a public discussion for the campaign on the theme of violence. After the campaign, Cotton joined the Bible Society and now works as its senior campaign manager, having organized both the Bristol and Greater Manchester campaigns. The murder of Marian Bates bore a remarkable resemblance to the kind of story one might expect in a television drama. The Society had no intention of exploiting such an actual event, but it was precisely the kind of human story that it wanted to highlight through its focus on EastEnders. At a basic level, the subtext behind this strategy worked to suggest something that surely no one would deny but which, through the active assertion, made a point about the gap between the Culture and the Church as perceived within the Society: Christians watch television. Even more, what it suggested was the Society’s contemporaneity—that it could speak to, and from, the drama of the day. Indeed,

48 | Matthew Engelke

the time-sensitive nature of the campaign was supposed to counter any sense by the person on the street that Christians are ‘out of touch’ with the world and that Christian messages are irrelevant in today’s society. EastEnders was something shared between the faithful and the unchurched. It was a plank in the bridge. When it came to suggesting the relevance of the Bible for understanding oneself, one’s relationships, and the world, the campaign could be taken up at a number of other levels. By the end of the tease and reveal, the posters made this point in themselves. Because the text was generalized (“Soap stories and the Bible …”), one did not even have to follow EastEnders to get the gist. For those who wanted to probe the question of the Bible’s relevance more deeply, going to the advertised Web page presented a range of possibilities, from individual readings to invitations to campaign events around Nottingham. The Society also produced a booklet—Get the Story (BFBS 2003b)—that people could use as a starting point for an engagement with the Bible. Get the Story opens with a section titled “More than Froth,” which makes a concerted pitch for the value of the campaign: What is it about soaps? Half of us are addicts, caring about the ups and downs of fictional neighbors like they are our own. The other half try—often successfully—to give them the slip, but when our guard is down, somehow we find ourselves drawn in. This is because soaps aren’t all froth. On a daily basis, they get us thinking and reacting to the lives and loves of everyday people—their dreams and schemes, struggles and triumphs—and the countless scrapes they find themselves in. At times they take on emotive subjects and venture into big social issues. Think and react—it could be the motto for this booklet. In a few short pages we drop in on some recent EastEnders storylines and offer you a space to think about the issues they raise. And in a twinning exercise that has yet to be copied by Walford Council, we pair the stories of Albert Square with similar stories and themes from a book that’s been around for a lot longer, the Bible. It’s a book that’s both honest enough to tell the real lives of ordinary people and unafraid to connect with something beyond them. Because, surprising though it may seem, where many of the human dramas portrayed in soaps are concerned, the Bible got there first.

The seven story lines chosen for the booklet cover the issues of forgiveness, love, manipulation, and revenge, among others. By picking up on the EastEnders thread of the Queen Vic publican and tough guy Phil Mitchell, for instance, the Society wanted to raise issues of caring and love. Shortly before the launch, the character Phil had married Kate Morton—a police officer who fell in love with Phil during the course of an investigation. After the wedding, Lisa, the mother of Phil’s daughter, Louise, turns up to challenge Phil, who has been taking care of Louise ever since he followed Lisa to Portugal and took Louise from her. Lisa confronts Phil about Louise, wanting to take her away. It is well known that Lisa is unstable; she has tried to shoot Phil in the past.

Strategic Secularism | 49

When the Nottingham Campaign went live, it was unclear what would happen. Would Lisa get her revenge? To this, the Society juxtaposed the story of Solomon’s judgment in 1 Kings 3, in which two mothers come to Solomon to settle a dispute over a child. Each woman claims to be the mother of the child. The first claims the child was stolen from her after the death of the second’s own newborn. The second denies the charge wholeheartedly. Solomon calls for his sword and tells the women he will cut the child in half for them. The first woman cries out to spare the child and to let the second keep it. The second urges Solomon to carry through his plan, so that neither can have the child. Solomon then decrees the first to be the real mother, since her love for the child came above all else. In drawing EastEnders and 1 Kings 3 together, the Society stressed: Lisa’s situation is typical of many today. Relationships break down and are often followed by a tug of love over care of the children. Many societies have looked to the law to settle such disputes, but even then not everyone goes away content. Solomon’s decision has given a phrase to the English language. “A judgment of Solomon” is a decision made in an impossible situation. In this case, his wisdom was based on the care that real mothers naturally feel. No real mother would want to see her baby harmed. From a different angle, the decision was also based on giving care to the woman who actually had the child’s interest at heart, whoever that was.

In line with the Society’s strategy, the connection between the care of Louise and that of the infant in 1 Kings 3 is made at a very general level. It acknowledges the importance of relationship breakdowns and child custody, but it does not do so with moral undertones. Rather, the analysis shifts quickly to what the Bible has given us to help make sense of such situations: an exemplar and a phrase in the English language. This is a reading of the Bible as cultural heritage rather than the Judeo-Christian message. Here, the Bible takes its guise as inspirational and insightful literature, alongside the likes of Shakespeare. The argument for its relevance is presented in secular terms. The Society even actively sidesteps a message in 1 Kings 3. According to the Bible, Solomon’s wisdom is not based on the care real mothers naturally feel (a point that in itself rests on a specific theory of human nature, which must be passed over for now); within Israel, this was seen as a gift from God. The chapter goes on to relate: “Everyone in Israel was amazed when they heard how Solomon had made his decision. They realized that God had given him wisdom to judge fairly” (1 Kings 3:28). This was a verse that the reader in Nottingham would have to come to on his or her own. Recognition of a divine gift is not something the campaign could raise. If it had been included in Get the Story, the tone of the discussion would have been radically different: it would have been religious. Relevance, then, must translate first into an appreciation of the Bible’s ability to raise issues that can be separated out from any spiritually inspired project. Although the campaigns are not evangelical, and although Catford feels no burden to convert people, the secularization of the Bible that takes place within

50 | Matthew Engelke

the campaigns generates tensions among the Society’s staff and within the formal vision of its work. This is not to say that Catford and members of the Bible advocacy team are being insincere or duplicitous when they talk about success as a “blip on the radar.” The Society seeks to satisfy the desire of those who want to read the Bible and, where that desire does not exist, to spark it. However, it will not tell people how to read the Bible. If people simply end up as more sophisticated viewers of the BBC, that is something in itself. And yet the Society does not want to reduce the Bible to entertainment, even if world-class. This was made clear by Chris Sunderland, a consultant who worked closely with the Society in Nottingham, in a short paper that was published in The Bible in TransMission, the Society’s magazine for clergy and theologians. Sunderland (2004) argues that even if EastEnders can be seen as addressing moral issues—or, even more loftily, something true about the human condition—it does not offer a coherent worldview. EastEnders has no metaphysical underpinnings, no teleology. “The Bible, on the other hand, has the whole world in view, speaks of a great creator God and reveals God’s vision for society. There could really be no greater contrast” (ibid.: 4). This argument for coherence and comprehensiveness was also made clear in Ann Holt’s reaction to the KSBR focus group results. While she was glad that young parents might be persuaded to use the Bible as an ethical guide for their children, she was disheartened and upset that the participants seemed to have stripped it of its Gospel message. She was quite adamant that the Bible is about Jesus. It is not, as she put it, “a book containing bits of guidance.” David Spriggs, a Baptist minister who works on the Bible advocacy team as a church consultant, is also something of an in-house theologian. In a discussion about the campaigns, I pushed him on the question of credibility and relevance. Surely the Society could not rest easy were it to spark a widespread appreciation for the Bible among the English public, but nothing more. If the Bible gained pride of place on the nation’s bookshelves as a book containing guidance, certainly that would not be enough, as Holt suggested. “Our job isn’t to tell people what to believe,” Spriggs replied. “It is to give them the opportunity to begin their engagement with the Bible.” Coming to my point, however, he reflected, “I mean, I wouldn’t like that. But I think that is the position of the Bible Society.” In the long run, the Church-facing work is supposed to ensure that the kind of world I described to Spriggs is not the only possibility. Alongside this, however, several of the staff, from a variety of denominational and theological points of view, have stressed to me that God is an activist God. He is at work in the world—in the Culture—through Scripture and through individuals’ readings of Scripture. “I think we would say that making the Bible available is our part of the deal,” Spriggs explained. “Because we actually do believe in the God who has chosen to work in and through this text.” Spriggs’s explanation raises an important point. Throughout its history, the Society has operated with an understanding of the Bible as an agent in itself. It has the power to speak and to transform the reader regardless of place and time (and even, to a certain extent, the reader’s disposition toward the Christian faith). In a previous research project I addressed the agency of

Strategic Secularism | 51

the Bible in relation to the mission history of southern Africa (Engelke 2007: 46–78). As the general secretary of the Bible Society of Zimbabwe once told me, reflecting one strain in this legacy of thought: “The Bible reads people.” This attitude is neither anachronistic to nor alien within Bible House, Swindon; indeed, I have heard some Swindon-based staff use the same phrase. If all they can do is offer the Bible to others, it is nevertheless done with a faith in the Bible’s capacity to act. “Is there, then, a magic in the Bible?” I asked Catford. “There has been some sense of magic in the Bible,” he answered. However, he was quick to qualify his comment: “Of course, I would want to say, well, be careful in taking that position.” A generation ago, he remarked, there was a feeling that the Good News Bible might effect a radical transformation in society—that relevance could be shown by putting the Bible into modern English. “But that clearly hasn’t happened,” Catford said. “So the outcome of that is, whilst I’m respectful of the transforming influence of the Bible just as it is, I don’t think it would be wise to count on it.” The Society operates in this space between a recognition of this-worldly challenges and the hope for otherworldly interventions.

A Tipping Point? Staff members at the Society include avid readers, and they have regularly recommended publications for me to read. Most of this has been theology or popular Christian writings, but the first book they suggested was altogether different: Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. A tipping point, as Gladwell (2000: 12) defines it, is “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.” It is the moment when something happens that changes the state of things and can be used to understand everything from meteorology to markets, from how rain becomes snow to how mobile phones progress from being a luxury to a necessity. Gladwell’s argument is that humans are gradualists at heart, “with expectations set by the steady passage of time” (ibid.: 13). And yet against this intuition we face “the world of the Tipping Point,” a place “where radical change is more than a possibility” (ibid.: 13–14). Gladwell pitches his book to several kinds of people, all of whom seek the benefits of tipping points: educators, parents, marketers, business people, and policy makers. That he leaves religious believers off this list is surprising, not only because they also look for tipping points, but because the idea of a tipping point owes so much to a certain Christian understanding of conversion. One might even argue that the tipping point is a secularization of Protestant (or Pauline) thought. Bible advocacy is a search for the tipping point. Through activities such as the Campaign to Culture in Nottingham, the Bible Society wants to spark a radical change within England. Its staff want to see a situation in which—perhaps even all of a sudden—people recognize that they need the Bible. Shortly after finishing Gladwell’s book, I ran into Ann Holt at Bible House and told her that I had read it. “The thing that’s missing,” she said, “is how can you know something’s going to tip? That’s not addressed. That’s what we want

52 | Matthew Engelke

to find out.” Of course, if Gladwell or anyone else, for that matter, could predict tipping points, he or she would be akin to a modern-day prophet. The advocacy team is aware they might never find the tipping point for the Bible, nor do they expect the search to be quick or easy. Advocacy work is a long-term project. After the Nottingham Campaign, the Society commissioned on-the-street research and telephone polls to gauge its effects (see BFBS 2003c). Advertising awareness was respectable: prompted recall was 54 percent, which placed third in the 10 ads tested—above Gillette razors and Kellogg’s Special K cereal. People had seen the ads, and a slight majority of the respondents remembered doing so. When it came to producing a ‘blimey effect’, however, only 2 people out of 300 said that they were more likely to read the Bible as a result of the campaign.7 The Society was not troubled by these results. Ann Holt once told me that the advocacy team is “playing” with things. She stressed that this was not a pejorative or flippant characterization. Like others in the management, she is aware of the fact that the Society, as a charity, is spending other people’s money. The advocacy work is looked on seriously, although inevitably it is built on trial and error—on getting some things wrong and some things right. Philip Poole once explained this by comparing it to something a doctor had told him: “Half of what we doctors tell [people] is wrong. Unfortunately, it takes 50 years to find out which half.” Like medical diagnoses and prognoses, Bible advocacy is an inexact science.

Conclusion In this brief discussion of Bible advocacy I have focused on the fine line that the Society walks in its work between what we might call, for lack of better words, its sacred and secular commitments. In doing so, I hope to have shown what we can yield by investigating how secularization is perceived and acted upon within specific organizations, in specific places and times. Within its domestic agenda, the British and Foreign Bible Society is working to make the secular a channel of its own transformation. It may not be a religious society; it may rather be a society for furnishing the means of religion. In contemporary England, however, means and ends run the risk of dissolving into one another. The lesson here, I would like to suggest, is that we should not understand the secular as the state of things, or, at least, not only that. It is also a strategy. For over 200 years the Bible Society has operated in a social space opened by the processes and dynamics of secularization as differentiation. Over the course of that time, it has been able to harness the worlds of business and book publishing toward its own goals. And over that time it has been able to present—and appeal to—the Bible not only as the Word of God but also as literature and part of a cultural heritage. Strategic secularism, then, is the use of secular subjects and objects as part of an overarching religious agenda. Strategic secularism is a process by which organizations such as the Bible Society use the language and tools of an ostensible other. It is a strategy of

Strategic Secularism | 53

encompassment that does not seek to deny the history of differentiation; rather, it seeks to shape the direction in which it points. This is not the teleology of God-is-dead, but rather a Christian one of divine presence revealed otherwise. There are some Christians in England, then, for whom secularization is not necessarily a dirty word. For them, the secular and the religious are mutually constitutive, not only as categories and concepts, but as elements in strategies of social transformation.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank the organizers of the “Vital Matters” conference at the University of Bergen for their comments on this chapter, especially Annelin Eriksen. James Catford of the Bible Society also read a draft and offered useful clarifications and advice, much of the latter of which will no doubt take some time to come to fruition in my work. I would also like to thank the many staff members at the Bible Society who agreed to be interviewed and always made me feel welcome.

Matthew Engelke teaches in the Anthropology Department at the London School of Economics. In addition to his work on public religion in England, he has conducted extensive research on African independent churches in Zimbabwe. He is the author of A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church (2007), which won the 2008 Clifford Geertz Prize; the editor of The Objects of Evidence: Anthropological Approaches to the Production of Knowledge (2009); and co-editor, with Matt Tomlinson, of The Limits of Meaning: Case Studies in the Anthropology of Christianity (2006). He is also editor of Prickly Paradigm Press.

Notes 1. The Bible Society of England and Wales is known formally as the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), but uses the former designation for the work it carries out in England and Wales, which are its designated ‘domestic territories’. Northern Ireland and Scotland have their own, independent Bible Societies. There are, in addition, over 140 national Bible Societies across the world. While the BFBS is often referred to as the ‘parent society’ by those in the wider Bible Society movement, it has no jurisdiction over them today. Coordinated work in the Bible Society movement is done through an umbrella organization, United Bible Societies, which is headquartered in Reading, Berkshire. 2. My ethnographic research on the Bible Society began in July 2006 and has been funded by a New Researcher Award from the Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD) and the Annual Fund at the London School of Economics and by a small research grant from the British Academy (SG-47097). 3. The reach of the Society’s domestic work can be difficult to determine. Throughout this chapter I refer in large part to England but not Wales. This is because the Campaigns to Culture have taken place in English cities. At times, however, I also refer to Britain or British society because, in practice, the Society’s work often addresses issues that relate

54 | Matthew Engelke







to and reach Britain as a whole, and because their work is picked up in media outlets that are not confined to England and/or Wales. 4. I am using the terms ‘private’ and ‘public’ here in a relatively weak sense and do not wish to deny their problematic nature. They will form the basis of discussion for future work based on this project. 5. These secondary materials could be rightly understood as offering notes and comments of a different kind, although there is no denominational coherence to them. 6. Catford and Holt, for example, are Anglicans, and a writer whom they admire is N. T. Wright, the bishop of Durham. Wright could be described as a rigorous intellectual with a populist sensibility—someone for whom sound scholarship does not preclude speaking to wider audiences. Theologically, he eschews both the ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ labels, and seems not to mind upsetting those in either camp. He makes strong arguments for engagement with Scripture as a kind of improvisation, as in jazz—not a “free-for-all” but “a disciplined and careful listening” that “invites us, while being fully obedient to the music thus far, and fully attentive to the voices around us, to explore fresh expressions, provided they will eventually lead to that ultimate resolution which appears in the New Testament as the goal, the full and complete new creation which was gloriously anticipated in Jesus’s resurrection” (Wright 2006: 126–127). 7. Curiously, the same number of respondents said they would be more likely to read the Bible if Christmas were celebrated more often.

References Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. BFBS (British and Foreign Bible Society). 2003a. “BFBS Campaign Places Soap Opera Themes in Biblical Context.” World Report 382. http://www.biblesociety.org/wr_ 382/382_12.htm (accessed 13 August 2007). ______. 2003b. Get the Story. Swindon: Bible Society. ______. 2003c. “Nottingham Campaign: So What Has the Research Told Us?” PowerPoint presentation. Bruce, Steve. 2002. God Is Dead: Secularization in the West. Oxford: Blackwell. Casanova, José. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Davie, Grace. 1994. Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging. Oxford: Blackwell. Engelke, Matthew. 2007. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gladwell, Malcolm. 2000. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. London: Abacus. Howsam, Leslie. 1991. Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. KSBR. 2006. “The Bible Society: Securing Wider Engagement with the Bible.” PowerPoint presentation. Martin, David. 2005. On Secularization: Toward a Revised General Theory. Aldershot: Ashgate. Sunderland, Chris. 2004. “Making the Bible Heard.” The Bible in TransMission. Autumn issue, “Exploring Trust.” http://www.biblesociety.org.uk/l3.php?id=320. Voas, David, and Alasdair Crockett. 2005. “Religion in Britain: Neither Believing nor Belonging.” Sociology 39, no. 1: 11–28. Wright, N. T. 2006. Last Word: Scripture and the Authority of God—Getting Beyond the Bible Wars. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco.

( Chapter 3

Pentecostal Networks and the Spirit of Globalization On the Social Productivity of Ritual Forms Joel Robbins

The neo-liberal global order has proven to be a harsh environment for a wide range of social, economic, and political institutions. Many of those local and more globally diffused institutions that once in various ways buffered people from the depredations of the market economy have been so starved for human and material resources in the current climate that they have retreated or simply disappeared. In the face of the ‘institutional deficit’ that has resulted, people have had fewer and fewer ways to sustain spaces in which social relations can be organized by non-market logics to meet non-market goals (Martin 1998: 117–118). Yet, looking out at the desiccated social landscape that neo-liberal restructuring so often leaves in its wake, one exception to the rule of institutional die-back stands out clearly: the current neo-liberal regime has in many places been very good for religious institutions, particularly for Pentecostal and charismatic churches. According to the tenets of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, gifts of the Holy Spirit such as healing and prophecy are understood Notes for this chapter are located on page 65.

56 | Joel Robbins

to be available to all believers. These faiths are widely recognized as among the world’s fastest growing religions, and taken together they may well be the single fastest growing type of religion in the global South (Jenkins 2002). They are also one of the great institution-propagating success stories of the neo-liberal era. Pentecostal and charismatic churches appear to thrive in the very kinds of environments in which so many other institutions struggle and fade. My fundamental question in this chapter is why this should be so. To be sure, there are a number of possible answers to this question that are readily available in the literature on global Pentecostalism.1 Most of these have a more or less functionalist tinge, suggesting that Pentecostal churches thrive because in one way or another they help people cope with the global orders in which they now live and, in doing so, help those orders to sustain themselves. Pentecostal churches do this, many have argued, by providing some form of community for people who have left rural worlds and kinship structures to fulfill their dreams of individualist, urban lives, or by offering healing to those who lack access to health care. In their prosperity guise, as another argument has it, they enchant the market in ways that allow people to construe it as a context for meaningful living, even in the absence of the resources that are needed to make it so. By other accounts, they provide people recipes for selfdiscipline that make it possible for them to cope with poverty and adapt themselves to whatever opportunities for work they can find.2 I could go on in this vein, detailing the numerous ways that scholars have attributed the popularity of Pentecostalism to its ability to compensate for losses and deprivations that people have experienced at the hands of the global order. And if I choose not to go on in this way here, it is not because I think such answers are entirely wrong. There is some truth to each of them, and taken together they represent a style of thinking about Pentecostal growth that cannot be discounted. I choose, then, to step back from compensation and deprivation arguments, not because they are flawed, but because I think they tend to beg a fundamental question—the question of how Pentecostal churches can succeed as institutions at all in the kind of resource-poor conditions in which they so regularly take root these days. It is only once they succeed as institutions that they can compensate for anything. This is why I take the question of the means of their institution-building success to be fundamental, even to the deprivation arguments I have laid out above. As this chapter develops, I will try to answer this question about Pentecostal institution-building ability by examining the fundamental role of ritual in Pentecostal social life. Before doing so, however, I want to specify in more detail the kind of institution building that Pentecostals have proven so successful at undertaking and to review some reasons that scholars have given for their success.

Pentecostal Institution Building When I talk about the institutional success of Pentecostal churches, I am referring minimally to their ability to engage people’s time in the construction and maintenance of congregations that regularly come together to worship and whose

Pentecostal Networks and the Spirit of Globalization | 57

members work to evangelize those who do not belong. That Pentecostalism has this ability is well attested in the literature on its global spread. Members of these churches regularly attend Sunday services that last several hours or more, often attend at least one other service a week, and regularly participate in home worship and Bible study sessions and in evangelization efforts. Chesnut (1997: 141) collected quantitative data on participation among the urban Brazilian Pentecostals he studied and found that members participated on average in 4.7 church activities per week (see also Gill 1990; Willems 1967). Furthermore, along with giving their time in the form of participation in church services and activities, many members of Pentecostal churches also volunteer to fill church offices, serving as deacons, elders, heads of women’s and youth ministries, and so forth. Chesnut (1997: 135) again provides enlightening quantitative evidence, finding that among those he interviewed, 79.5 percent held such offices. Making a similar point, Blacking (1981: 45) writes of the South African Zionist church that “the general principle seemed to be that as many members as possible should have an opportunity of holding positions.” These positions draw members into making regular contributions of their time to supporting the institution of the church and its many institutionalized sub-groups. As a final index of institutional commitment, it is worth noting that people often give materially to their churches as well, finding ways to tithe, even in conditions of great poverty, or giving in kind or in labor when they cannot pledge income. It is by soliciting such intense involvement on the part of its members that Pentecostal churches have been able to thrive as institutions. My original question about the reasons for the institutional success of Pentecostal churches during a period that has been hard on many other institutions can thus be reframed as a question about how they solicit this kind of involvement. One could imagine that they succeed in commanding people’s attention by giving away a lot of material resources or by providing services that people cannot furnish for themselves. For a long time, social scientists have used this explanation to account for the success of mission Christianity: people come for the food or the medical care or the access to schooling that the mission provides. But these kinds of ‘rice Christian’ arguments tend not to explain the institution-building success of Pentecostal mission efforts. For one thing, people’s involvement in Pentecostal church life tends to be much more intense than it is in the mission churches that have made material inducements and the provision of social and economic programs more central to their outreach efforts. And, more pointedly, one of the most noteworthy characteristics of Pentecostal church ‘planting’ is that it tends to be done on a shoestring. From the outset of the movement, Pentecostal missionaries have tended to ‘go out on faith’, as they put it. Heading out to the mission field with very few resources— often with no more than the cost of a one-way ticket to their destination—they trust that if they have been anointed by the Holy Spirit for mission work, their needs will be supplied by those to whom they bring the Word (Synan 1997: 133). If sustenance is not forthcoming, they know that their missionary efforts are not in accord with God’s plan for them. For those who have been missionized, this Pentecostal practice of going out on faith means that they are often

58 | Joel Robbins

asked to join a missionary in starting a church for which they are to provide all of the resources. This has been particularly true in the global South, where missionaries tend to be people from neighboring groups rather than the wellappointed Westerners who are often viewed as paradigmatic of the missionary enterprise in arguments about the material factors driving conversion. A second approach to explaining people’s willingness to make quick and strong commitments to Pentecostal institution building would take the belief system of Pentecostalism as its explanatory variable. In one way or another, such arguments have it, Pentecostalism is a perfect tract for the times: it preaches precisely the kind of self-reliance and self-discipline that the neoliberal order demands; it promises a better life to come for those whose current lives are marked by misery; it heals those who lack access to modern medicine and often to traditional healing as well; it empowers women who seek to escape traditional patriarchies and provides them with safe spaces for congregation.3 In many ways, this list overlaps with the one of compensatory or deprivation theories I presented above. And, reiterating what I said there, it is beyond doubt that many of these arguments are true. But again I would suggest that the compensatory promises made by Pentecostalism—promises on which many other religious and, for that matter, developmentalist and good governance doctrines also claim to be able to deliver—would not be so attractive if Pentecostalism was not better than its competitors at setting up thriving institutions in which people can participate in a world shaped around those promises. It is Pentecostalism’s social productivity that makes its promises credible, not the credibility of those promises that makes Pentecostalism socially productive. We are once again left, then, with the need to explain the reasons for this social productivity.

Ritual and Pentecostal Social Productivity What I want to suggest in the remainder of this chapter is that Pentecostal social productivity is rooted in its model of social life. The key to that model is, in my opinion, that it defines ritual as fundamental to social interaction and asserts that ritual should be practiced regularly in all kinds of settings. In making this assertion, I recognize that some might question whether an emphasis on ritual should in fact count as a feature of the Pentecostal tradition at all, much less as the key to its conception of social life. As Daniel Albrecht (1999: 21), a Pentecostal theologian trained in the social sciences, has noted: “Pentecostals themselves have often objected to or reject[ed] the term ‘ritual’ and its implied conceptualization.” Placing a high value on spontaneity and authenticity, Pentecostals condemn ritual as too routine, mechanical, or, as Albrecht has it, “unspiritual.” Furthermore, the Pentecostal tendency to introduce ritual into almost all domains of social interaction tends to rob believers’ ritualized productions of that sense of ‘set-apartness’ that scholars often see as central to the definition of ritual (Bell 1992). Largely for these reasons, when it comes to Pentecostalism, the study of ritual has lagged behind work in other areas. With a few notable exceptions,

Pentecostal Networks and the Spirit of Globalization | 59

such as the work of Csordas (1997; see also Robbins 2004a), this is true even among anthropologists, despite the support that their discipline provides for arguing that ritual is crucial to people’s lives (Robbins 2004b: 126). Yet despite both the lowly status of ritual in Pentecostal self-understandings and the extent to which Pentecostal ritual fails to announce itself as such in ways that scholars can easily recognize, it is not difficult to make the argument that a very frequent recourse to ritual is an important aspect of Pentecostal social life. To begin with, if we look carefully, we will see that Pentecostal antiritualism is, as Pfeil (n.d.) has noted, itself ritualized. Moreover, to an observer with an eye trained only on Pentecostalism’s social aspects, rather than on the fine points of its folk theology, it is hard to miss how much of what Pentecostals do with each other easily counts as ritual in terms of its formulaic quality and its directness toward divinity—and this is true even if the forms in question allow for a good deal of spontaneous elaboration of personal content in approaching the divine. Given this, it is easy to concur with Albrecht (1999: 21–22) when he goes on to say that despite their protestations to the contrary, “Pentecostals do in fact, engage in rituals, though they often call them by other names: ‘worship services’, ‘spiritual practices’, [and] ‘Pentecostal distinctives’, for example.” On the basis of such arguments, I think it is fair to say that it makes sense to talk about Pentecostals as people who have a vigorous ritual life. Returning to my argument about the centrality of ritual to Pentecostal social life, I suggest that to relate to one another as Pentecostals is to carry out rituals together. These rituals can be the act of praying together almost as a form of greeting or as a way to define the kind of interaction about to transpire: “God, we have come together today to [eat/hold a conference/plant a garden/make a business plan/study for a test, etc.].” They can be rites of ministration, where one prays for the needs or health of others. They can be celebratory rites of praise in word or song. And, of course, they can be the major Sunday service rites that constitute the sacred high point of the week in most churches (Nelson 2005). These rites can also involve a wide range of personnel. They can be carried out by two people or in small groups (a fast-diffusing social form in many of these churches) or by whole congregations, with some people acting as ritual specialists. One could go on in this manner, pointing to the variety of ritual forms and personnel configurations that Pentecostals can draw on in relating to one another, but perhaps enough has been said to carry my main point that Pentecostal sociality in a wide range of contexts is marked by a high degree of mutual ritual performance. A number of aspects of Pentecostal doctrine support this high frequency of ritual interaction. The conviction that God cares about the faithful and intervenes in their mundane lives and that a sharp sacred-profane distinction is untenable is important here, for it allows ritual to suffuse all domains of social interaction (Csordas 1997: 109), as illustrated by Pentecostal uses of the ritual of praying together in all manner of contexts. Also important are key design features of Pentecostal rites that make their ritual forms easily identifiable to participants while still allowing for improvisation in their content, thus making it possible for people to perform rites in almost any setting and to use them to

60 | Joel Robbins

address almost any circumstance. Thus, one can pray about almost anything or can use healing rites that are similar in form to treat almost any kind of physical or mental ailment. Yet as important as the refusal of the sacred-profane distinction and the openness on matters of ritual content are to the place of ritual in Pentecostal social life, probably the most important feature of Pentecostal doctrine in this regard is the idea that all church members are qualified to initiate and participate in ritual performances. The clergy has no monopoly on ritual. Everyone participates, and whoever is moved by the Spirit can initiate rituals in most settings. There is no need for those who initiate rituals to have formal training or possess church office. The literature has already made much of this lack of formal credentialing of the clergy in accounting for the rapid spread of Pentecostalism, with scholars pointing out that new converts quickly become missionaries to their friends and neighbors and then often set themselves up as pastors of their own churches. Here my point is the slightly different one that the intensity of ritual interaction that defines Pentecostal sociality is rooted in the Pentecostal belief that everyone, regardless of training or church office, can initiate and participate in ritual. This means that whenever any two or more Pentecostals are co-present, they have everything they need to engage in ritual together. So far I have made an empirical claim—that Pentecostal models of social life are distinctive in the amount of space they give over to ritual performance—and I have rooted this claim in a quick sketch of the basic features of Pentecostal doctrine that support it. What I want to do now is to connect this empirical fact with what I have called Pentecostalism’s social productivity, that is, its impressive institution-building capacity. In arguing for a connection between Pentecostalism’s emphasis on ritual and its social productivity, I draw on Randall Collins’s recent work, Interaction Ritual Chains (2004). The notion of interaction ritual comes from Erving Goffman (1967), and Collins takes from Goffman a focus on face-to-face interaction. But to construct the heart of his theory, Collins returns to Goffman’s Durkheimian roots. He starts with Durkheim’s (1995) argument that major collective rituals produce a kind of effervescence that energizes people and leads them to feel empowered—to feel larger than themselves. He then generalizes this familiar point to suggest that all successful interactions—interactions that are sufficiently ritualized in a way that I will lay out in a moment—produce some of this effervescence, which he calls “emotional energy.” In a final twist, one not associated from Durkheim or Goffman, Collins (2004: 44) claims that human beings are, at bottom, seekers of such emotional energy; they are creatures who go through life trying to participate in as many successful interaction rituals as they can, drawing on the energy generated in each such interaction ritual to support the next one. It is the tendency for people to endeavor to move from one successful interaction ritual to another, increasing their store of emotional energy as they go, that generates the chains of interaction rituals that provide Collins with his titular image. And it is these chains, he argues, that give society its shape. If Collins is right to suggest that people seek successful ritual experience and tend to invest in those situations and institutions that most regularly provide

Pentecostal Networks and the Spirit of Globalization | 61

it, then it becomes crucial in studying social life to understand what constitutes a successful interaction ritual and how it is produced. For Collins (2004: 47–101), interaction rituals involve two components. The first is “mutual focus of attention”—a sense on the part of participants that they intersubjectively share a common definition of what they are doing together. The second is what Collins calls a “high degree of emotional entrainment.” This refers to people’s developing sense that they are coordinating their actions together, a sense built up particularly through the rhythmic synchronization of bodily action so that the interaction flows smoothly. Such bodily synchronization can happen as fully in conversation or any other kind of interaction as it does in those social practices, like dancing, that explicitly aim to produce it. When it does happen and is combined with a strong sense of mutual focus, successful interaction ritual occurs. In this chapter, there is little reason to further unpack Collins’s discussion of the way successful interaction rituals are constructed. A moment’s consultation of one’s own experience of what is colloquially called a ‘good conversation’ or ‘a productive meeting’ or even ‘a smooth transaction’ is probably enough to grasp the outlines of Collins’s argument. In any case, for the purposes of my argument about the role of ritual in the social productivity of Pentecostalism, it is enough to know that mutual focus and emotional entrainment through bodily synchronization are, for Collins, what turns mundane social encounters into successful interaction rituals.4 It is enough for current purposes to know that these two features are at the heart of interaction ritual because, on inspection, it is clear that Pentecostalism is ideally suited to allowing people to put them in play when they come together. Mutual focus in ensured by the shared knowledge of the basic ritual frames that orient Pentecostals in so much of their interaction—frames such as prayer, praise, worship, healing. As I have noted, these frames are open enough to allow all kinds of content to arise within them, but their purposes and basic organization are fixed enough that, as soon as the frame is in place, people possess an immediate mutual awareness of their shared purpose and interactional focus: they know that they are praying, praising, worshipping, healing, or performing some other ritual together. And once Pentecostals are in an interactional frame together, they are well prepared to generate emotional entrainment through bodily synchronization, the second constituent of a successful interaction ritual. For if there is one thing even those who know little about Pentecostals tend to recognize, it is the extent to which members of the faith everywhere share a set of bodily practices that look very much the same: arms lifted in praise, hands laid on in healing, tongues speaking in prayer, voices lifted in song. Because of these shared bodily practices, Pentecostals recognize each other’s physical presence even when they do not share a verbal language. Hence, Pentecostal bodies of all backgrounds are well trained to work together in ritual and well practiced in producing the physical synchronization that turns mutual attention into successful interaction ritual. As a quick aside, I would point out that the wide diffusion of Pentecostal ritual frames and bodily styles must in part account for its success as a specifically global religious movement. Visiting pastors can immediately meld a

62 | Joel Robbins

huge crowd into a ritually focused group, even working through interpreters, because everyone knows the frames and the rhythms and trusts that others do as well. And new converts learn these frames and styles quickly, for evangelists focus on them from the outset, often leaving all but the very basics of theology for later, when converts can generate theological reflection out of their own experience (Smith 2008). As Albrecht (1999: 2005) puts it, in the Pentecostal tradition it is ritual, rather than “structured verbal catechesis,” that teaches people “what it means to live and behave as Christians in a faith community.” Tanya Luhrmann’s (2004) and Thomas Csordas’s (1997) work also points out aspects of this process of evangelization through bodily training (see also Smith 2008). The evangelical focus on the global spread of a limited number of widely shared ritual forms thus provides an important foundation for Pentecostalism’s noteworthy ability to travel widely throughout the globe and produce recognizable versions of itself wherever it alights (Robbins 2004b). The fact that Pentecostalism is learned through ritual brings me back to my main argument. In essence, what Albrecht and the others I have cited are suggesting, and what Albrecht in particular demonstrates very thoroughly in his fine book on Pentecostal ritual, is that “to live and behave as Christians” in a Pentecostal faith community is to participate in ritual together whenever one can, both within and outside the church. Drawing on their trained ability to fall into states of mutual attention and push such states forward through bodily synchronization, Pentecostals go through life producing an unusually high percentage of social occasions that qualify as successful interaction rituals. From Collins’s point of view, this would be precisely what makes them such good institution builders, even in situations where material resources are so scarce that few other institutions survive. The emotional energy that successful interaction rituals produce is, Collins would tell us, its own reward— or even what most people, whether they know it or not, take to be the one intrinsic good in the world. Edith Blumhofer (1993: 210) captures well the sense of Collins’s argument when she writes of the “spiritual acquisitiveness” that drove early Pentecostals forward in the pursuit of what she views as spiritual experiences and what Collins would see as emotional energy produced out of ritual interaction. As Blumhofer (ibid.: 211) puts it: “[T]hese eager pioneers … pressed relentlessly on to the next experience, impelled by an insatiable longing for more rather than by determination to reach a specific goal.” It is the Pentecostal ability to produce this intrinsic good in such boundless quantity that keeps people highly involved in churches that meet in shabby storefronts, or that move from office park to office park in dreary, decayed urban locales around the world, or that congregate in churches made of whatever scraps are at hand in rural villages in an equally wide range of places. My argument here is that it is the Pentecostal mastery of the technology of ritual production that makes these churches work. All of the doctrinal features that make Pentecostalism appealing to so many of those who live on the margins of the market economy can only suture people to the faith after these robust, ritually driven institutions have already proven their ability to thrive.

Pentecostal Networks and the Spirit of Globalization | 63

Conclusions In conclusion, I want to make three observations related to my argument that might in different ways help open up discussion on the role of ritual in contemporary religious movements. The first is to suggest a comparison case that might make my argument a bit more compelling. I often find that anthropologists and other scholars who do not study religion tend to lump fundamentalists and Pentecostals together. However, there are in fact major differences between fundamentalism and Pentecostalism, and as it happens, these differences bear very much on my argument. Pentecostals and fundamentalists share many, although not all, of the doctrinal stands that people sometimes refer to when explaining Pentecostalism’s globalizing success: both are strong on certainty, moral strictness, individualist models of salvation, and the conviction that the Second Coming is imminent. Where they differ is in their approach to ritual life. Fundamentalists largely banish it, and they do not provide the bodily training for it that Pentecostals do. Given what the two traditions share and what distinguishes them, it fits nicely with my argument that fundamentalism has not globalized with nearly the success that Pentecostalism has. It has planted far fewer churches around the world, and those it has planted rarely generate the kind of institution-building commitment so prevalent in Pentecostal churches.5 The Pentecostal promotion of ritual as a mode of sociality may not be the only explanation for this; there are some doctrinal differences I have not laid out here that may play a role as well. But with regard to the argument I am making, we would at least have to explore the possibility that the differences in the way the two traditions treat ritual is crucial to their differential global success. The second concluding point I want to make relates to the main theme of this book. Given its attested social productivity and the importance of ritual in producing it, what role might Pentecostalism play in shaping new socialities in the current period of global social disorganization? There is little agreement among scholars of Pentecostalism about the political trajectory its churches will follow in the future. For some, the churches are progressive, a force for democratization that in many cases cannot yet express itself in political situations that are not ready to go in the directions they point. For others, they are cradles of authoritarian attitudes and precursors to, or active promoters of, totalitarian tendencies. For yet others, they are simply new opiates of the masses, leading people to an otherworldly quietism and taking them out of battles that, if they knew what was good for them, they should be fighting. These kinds of claims tend to be made in the subjunctive mood: they are most often forecasts rather than analyses based on concrete cases. And I have to admit that I have trouble choosing between them. We do not yet know, I think, exactly what kind of political role Pentecostal churches will play around the world in the future. But the experiment I have just conducted of examining Pentecostalism less as a set of beliefs and more as a kind of social life suggests what may be a useful way to reframe such questions about the potential contribution of Pentecostalism to emerging forms of sociality. Looked at from the point of view I

64 | Joel Robbins

have developed in this chapter, what is distinctive about Pentecostal churches is that, as Levine (1995: 169) puts it, they give “the tools of association to everyone.” And those tools consist of the means of performing rituals with any other church member at any time and in any place. What these churches have proven, then, is the social productivity of this practice of widely dispersing ritual capabilities. They have shown that a social life dense with ritual provides fertile soil not for escape but for successful institution building. The ends to which Pentecostals will put the institutions that they build is not yet completely clear, but at least we can say that they have already demonstrated the value of the means by which they have built them. And in that point alone there is much to be learned about the kinds of social life that are likely to thrive in the foreseeable future. This leads to my third concluding observation, which is aimed more squarely at social theory than at the study of religious movements per se. There is a great deal of interest at the moment in ways of thinking about social life that do not rely on notions such as society or culture. These theories do not assume that there is something outside of interactions themselves that endures through time and decisively shapes the directions that interactions take. Hence, there is a general move afoot to turn away from talk of social structures or cultural formations and toward that of ‘assemblages’, ‘networks’, ‘relations’, and other such notions that are presumably more concrete—or that direct us more to the concrete phenomena that we observe and in which we participate when we do our research (e.g., Collier and Ong 2005; DeLanda 2006; Latour 2005). I am not wholly convinced at present about the advantages of this move if it is conceived of as the wholesale replacement of the older notions by the newer ones. However, given the nature of the Pentecostal religious movement I study, I can appreciate that this move does bring new issues into focus. One such issue, which I have explored here, is how the dynamics of ritual interaction in its own right can help to generate novel social forms that can flourish in contexts where older social forms find it difficult to survive. Yet in light of my ambivalence with regard to this new theoretical trend, one advantage of Collins’s conception of interaction ritual chains is that it allows us to keep some of the force of Durkheim’s insights concerning religion without having to bring on board his model of society. This makes it a promising theoretical approach to carry forward in pursuit of theoretical frameworks suited to the analysis of the emergent socialities that are such an important focus of contemporary social research.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Jon Bialecki, Naomi Haynes, Rupert Stasch, and the editors of this volume for comments that greatly improved this chapter.

Pentecostal Networks and the Spirit of Globalization | 65

Joel Robbins is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. His work focuses on cultural change, the anthropology of Christianity, the globalization of Pentecostalism, and the study of language, exchange, and ritual. He is the author of Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (2004) and is co-editor of the journal Anthropological Theory.

Notes 1. From this point, I will use ‘Pentecostalism’ to refer to both Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. 2. For a review of the kinds of arguments mentioned here, see Robbins (2004b). 3. See Robbins (2004b) for a review of the literature on these points. 4. In an essay focused on theories of ritual, it would be important to situate Collins’s theory of ritual interaction in relation to other work on this subject. I cannot take this on as a task here. But it is useful to note that, on the most general level, Collins’s theory, at least as I read it, should be counted among those that Handelman (1998: xxii; 2004) sees as examining “ritual in its own right.” Handelman’s important point in proposing this category is that most theories of ritual tend to focus on the relation of a ritual to the society that, in one way or another, it serves to represent and/or functions to perpetuate. While not denying that ritual does relate to society, Handelman asks that we develop theories that focus first on what ritual does in and of itself. Only after we have determined what this is should we then examine how ritual action connects with society more generally. Collins’s theory, with its emphasis on how interaction rituals produce emotional energy out of their own dynamics (as opposed to needing to draw on social dynamics outside of themselves for their effects), fits this bill nicely. The fact that it does so is crucial to the social productivity argument that I am making: it is because ritual can do things in and of itself that it is able to generate novel social dynamics. I will return to this point again briefly in my conclusion. 5. See, for example, the case described in Knauft (2002).

References Albrecht, Daniel E. 1999. Rites in the Spirit: A Ritual Approach to Pentecostal/Charismatic Spirituality. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Blacking, John. 1981. “Political and Musical Freedom in the Music of Some Black South African Churches.” Pp. 35–62 in The Structure of Folk Models, ed. Ladislav Holy and Milan Stuchlik. London: Academic Press. Blumhofer, Edith L. 1993. Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody’s Sister. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans. Chesnut, R. Andrew. 1997. Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Collier, Stephen J., and Aihwa Ong. 2005. “Global Assemblages, Anthropological Problems.” Pp. 3–21 in Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, ed. Aihwa. Ong and Stephen J. Collier. Oxford: Blackwell. Collins, Randall. 2004. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

66 | Joel Robbins

Csordas, Thomas J. 1997. Language, Charisma, and Creativity: The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press. DeLanda, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum. Durkheim, Emile. 1995. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Trans. K. E. Fields. New York: Free Press. Gill, Lesley. 1990. “‘Like a Veil to Cover Them’: Women and the Pentecostal Movement in La Paz.” American Ethnologist 17, no. 4: 708–721. Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Handelman, Don. 1998. Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events. New York: Berghahn Books. ______. 2004. “Introduction: Why Ritual in Its Own Right? How So?” Pp. 1–32 in Ritual in Its Own Right: Exploring the Dynamics of Transformation, ed. Don Handelman and Galina Lindquist. New York: Berghahn Books. Jenkins, Paul. 2002. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knauft, Bruce. M. 2002. Exchanging the Past: A Rainforest World of Before and After. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levine, Daniel H. 1995. “Protestants and Catholics in Latin America: A Family Portrait.” Pp. 155–178 in Fundamentalisms Comprehended, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Luhrmann, Tanya M. 2004. “Metakinesis: How God Becomes Intimate in Contemporary U.S. Christianity.” American Anthropologist 106, no. 3: 518–528. Martin, Bernice. 1998. “From Pre- to Postmodernity in Latin America: The Case of Pentecostalism.” Pp. 102–146 in Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity, ed. Paul Heelas, David Martin, and Paul Morris. Oxford: Blackwell. Nelson, Timothy J. 2005. Every Time I Feel the Spirit: Religious Experience and Ritual in an African American Church. New York: New York University Press. Pfeil, Gretchen. n.d. “They Overcame Him by the Blood of the Lamb, by the Word of Their Testimony: Rituals of Anti-‘Ritual’ in Contemporary American Charismatic Practice.” Unpublished manuscript. Robbins, Joel. 2004a. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. ______. 2004b. “The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 117–143. Smith, James K. A. 2008. “Thinking in Tongues.” First Things (April): 27–31. Synan, Vinson. 1997. The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Willems, Emilio. 1967. Followers of the New Faith: Culture Change and the Rise of Protestantism in Brazil and Chile. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

( Chapter 4

Healing the Nation In Search of Unity through the Holy Spirit in Vanuatu Annelin Eriksen

Pentecostal Christianity, characterized by the belief in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as prophesying and the ability to speak in tongues and heal (Robbins 2004b: 117), is, as several have noted (see, e.g., ibid.), among the fastest growing global movements, with more than 250 million adherents. Consequently, we have seen a great growth in the literature on these movements (e.g., Engelke 2007; Martin 2002; Meyer 2004) and also in Melanesian anthropology (e.g., Jebens 2005; Robbins 2004a; Stewart and Strathern 2000a). Jorgensen (2005), writing about a new wave of Pentecostal enthusiasm in New Guinea, argues that understanding Pentecostal Christianity in Melanesia is premised on the wider contexts of globalization and “world-breaking and world-making” (ibid.: 444). He shows how people in Papua New Guinea have been encouraged to break off from their ancestral worlds and join new global movements. These new movements represent both capitalist enterprises, seeking to acquire mineral resources in the mountain areas of New Guinea, and new imagined communities that are united in the expectation of the Second Coming of Christ. These movements are Notes for this chapter are located on page 80.

68 | Annelin Eriksen

literal war machines, encouraging the burning of ancestral houses and shrines and calling for ‘spiritual warfare’. The militant attitude of the mission and the language of ‘war time’ in these mission campaigns give clear connotations not only to the struggle involved in conversion, but also to the radical ruptures perceived to be part of it. This is in line with ethnographic descriptions of Pentecostal theology elsewhere, as in Latin America (Harris 2006) and Africa (Meyer 2004). The mantra of ‘breaking with the past’ has been indicated as a fundamental value of Pentecostal beliefs (Robbins 2007). In this chapter I look at Pentecostal churches in the South Pacific nation Van­­uatu. On the one hand, I show that the value of breaking with the past and establishing new and alternative social movements is relevant for an understanding of Pentecostalism in Vanuatu. On the other hand, I argue that an understanding of the new churches in Vanuatu requires an understanding of the desire to create new social unity. It is not necessarily a transcendence of the local and the need to hook into new, global movements that trigger these churches in Vanuatu. Rather, what is essential is the need to confirm the existence of a local unity. This cohesiveness is achieved through the establishment of an alternative social space wherein a different evaluation of past and present may take place. To some extent, the establishment of Pentecostal churches can be compared to the formation of ‘cargo movements’ in Melanesia. In the same way that the cargo movements often were understood primarily as a ‘cargo cult’ and not necessarily as a critical social movement, the new churches are easily underestimated as a social movement that critiques the present (see also Eriksen 2009). In this chapter I argue that the Pentecostal churches, like the cargo movements, seek not only a future of riches but also a social engagement and new social unity in the here and now.

Cargo Cults and Millenarian Christianity in Melanesia Cargo cults and Pentecostal churches have several characteristics in common. They both seek to break with the past. They both often advocate a future of great riches and prosperity, a return of the millennium. Millennial movements are, according to Stewart and Strathern (2000b: 10), “brought about by the pressure of societal change and are means to redirect the course of future change.” This pressure has also been given as an explanation for the cargo expectations and the radical transformation of society that the cargo cult members anticipated (see Lindstrom 1993b). In periods characterized by rapid social change during the colonial era, with the introduction of the monetary economy, work migration, access to colonial stores, and new religious institutions, colonial agents reported on the spread of what was called ‘hysteria’ and ‘madness’ at first, and later ‘cults’ and ‘cargo cults’ (ibid.). The first anthropological analyses of these movements argued that they were often organized around the belief that in the near future the social order would be turned upside down, and that this would be marked by the arrival of large quantities of Western goods (Burridge 1960; Lawrence 1964; Schwartz

Healing the Nation | 69

1962; Worsley 1975). However, as Lindstrom (1993b) and Jebens (2005) have pointed out, the first cargo-centered interpretations were later replaced by a greater focus on ‘cultic’ aspects. The aim of the movement—the reception of Western goods—might not have been its most important aspect. The very act of organizing the movement might have been of equal importance. Burridge (1960: xvii) points to the mobilizing element in his classic sturdy of the Mambu cargo movement in New Guinea: “Cargo cults pose the problem of the individual in relation to society at large.” Cargo cults created a new social space with new moral codes. Burridge (ibid.) argues: “Participants in a Cargo cult want to create for themselves a new way of life, a new order of living … [T]hey shape a new way of life for themselves, creating new customs, new ways of behaving towards each other.” The cargo cults were efforts to create new forms of local solidarity in periods characterized by great upheavals. The formation of the social organization, the focus on unity, and the regulation of internal and external relations often composed the key activities of the movements. In some cults, such as the John Frum movement on Tanna (Lindstrom 1993a), the cult members marched in uniforms, simulating military parades. The strict supervision of social behavior, the regulation of everyday life, and the repetitive rituals characteristic of many of these movements are perhaps indicative of the power that was recognized to be inherent in the social itself. The efficacy of the social was given almost an ontological status. If social relations were organized appropriately, this would in itself lead to rewards. The Kaliai cults in New Britain described by Lattas (1998), for instance, regularly feed and eat with the ancestors living in the underground, strengthening the social relations that will bring rewards in the future. A lesser-known cargo cult from the northern part of the Vanuatu archipelago, the Naked Cult, reorganized their social relations in such dramatic ways that even the marriage institution was abolished: villagers were urged to share wives and live totally free from the social regulations of the past (Beasant 1984). These stipulations also implied not wearing colonially introduced clothing—hence the name ‘Naked Cult’—or living in traditional villages. The cult expected that large amounts of Western goods would be brought by ships to the village’s shores, an event that would confirm the movement’s success in reorganizing society and abandoning the existing social order. The break from the established social rules was emphasized by the cult members’ new behavior. The social and moral distance between ordinary villagers and the cult members was underlined by the cult members’ new way of dressing: the Naked Cult spurned Western clothing, while the John Frum cult wore uniforms. In the colonial period, cargo movements were the exception. The more common new social movement was of course the Christian church. The first churches that were established had some of the same characteristics as the cargo movements. People who joined the church started to dress differently—to wear ‘proper’ clothes—and learned new rules of conduct. On Ambrym, for instance, in the late 1900s, a chief from the village of Linbul in the northern part of the island decided to set up a church and establish a congregation in his village

70 | Annelin Eriksen

(see Eriksen 2008). He had heard about Christian churches from his travels to other parts of the island and to neighboring islands. He succeeding in recruiting a German missionary to his village, and soon a church was built. However, the missionary introduced rules—when to work and when not to, how to behave, what to wear, what to eat—that were too much of a change for the chief, who in the end abandoned the whole village and moved to a neighboring one, a socalled heathen village. In other words, setting up a church on Ambrym in the early 1900s implied very conscious and visible breaks with the established rules of social life and the formation of a new social and moral space. Setting up a new church in Vanuatu today involves some of the same social dynamics: the new churches create a new social space for reflection. The belief in the Christian God and in the power of the Holy Spirit is central for the religious convictions of the members, but there is also a belief in the transformative capacity of the social in itself that makes these new churches appealing and powerful. In this respect, some of the churches being established today in Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, have much in common with the earlier cargo movements. The majority of the new churches in Port Vila today are Pentecostal, and they are less than a decade or so old. The majority are so-called independent churches that have been founded due to the initiative of a local person, usually a man, who received a vision and formed a new church in the name of the Holy Spirit (see Eriksen 2009). However, there are also international Pentecostal churches that have been established by foreign missionaries, although very often they are locally run. I am mainly concerned here with the local independent churches and less so with the international churches. By comparing the local independent Pentecostal churches to some aspects of the cargo movements, interesting dimensions of these churches might be revealed. As with the earlier cargo cult movements, the new Pentecostal churches are creating alternative local social unities. Furthermore, the break with the established churches and the creation of a number of new and independent Pentecostal churches can be seen as part of wider movement away from the colonial past and its colonial churches. The new churches establish not only new ways of worship but also a new perspective on the past. Furthermore, as I will show in this chapter, in spite of being fragmented into a number of small churches, these new churches can still be analyzed as a coherent social movement whose aim is ‘healing the nation’.

Vanuatu: From Colonial Churches to New, Independent Churches The new churches in Vanuatu represent a break with the colonial churches. Vanuatu was a colony (then known as New Hebrides) shared by Britain and France from 1905 until 1980. This shared administration implied that the two colonial powers developed separate apparatuses of control: school systems, law enforcement, courts, and also churches. The Anglican and Presbyterian Church on the one hand and the Catholic Church on the other co-existed side by side, splitting not only islands, but also sometimes villages into separate congregations. However,

Healing the Nation | 71

toward the end of the colonial period, people in Vanuatu, despite belonging to different churches, emphasized their shared Christianity as a foundation for the new nation-state. This was emphasized in the rhetoric of the newly elected politicians at the dawn of the new independent state. In speeches and in publications, Christianity was explicitly singled out as the framework for the new nation (see, e.g., Macdonald-Milne and Thomas 1981) and a common cultural heritage, as signified by the national slogan, “Long God yumi stanap” (We stand with God). After decades of independent government, the colonial churches today still have a strong position in Vanuatu and are among the churches with the largest congregations. However, the number of new churches that emphasize their independent status in relation to the colonially established churches is steadily growing (Eriksen 2009). During my fieldwork in Port Vila in 2006, I counted over 30 new churches that had been founded during the last decade and were operating in the country’s capital. These are all Pentecostal-charismatic churches, in which speaking in tongues and healing are regular practices. A common characteristic of these new churches is their emphasis on the break from the established churches. Some of these churches also consider the Gospel to be autochthonous, that is, pre-colonial and pre-mission. Not only are the new churches breaking with the colonial past, but some of them are reconnecting with the pre-colonial past. The Healing Ministry is a very clear example of this. The Healing Ministry, one of the independent new churches in Vanuatu, was established in the capital about a decade ago (Eriksen 2009). Aron, the main pastor of the Port Vila Healing Ministry, told me in 2006 that his church, although having been established in recent times, had a long history. He explained that in order to understand the Healing Ministry, one would have to understand the history of Nguna Island, located in central Vanuatu. He told me the story of his forefathers and their ability to heal through the power of spirits. Aron’s account of his ancestors and their life on Nguna in pre-colonial and pre-mission time emphasized the closeness between people and places. There were spirits connected to places, and these spirits enabled specific people, the klevas,1 to heal both sickness and misfortune. Sometimes these klevas could also foresee the future. Therefore, even before the missionaries arrived in Nguna, his forebears had been prepared for their visit. One of his forefathers had had a vision in which he had seen the missionaries arrive—and he had seen the Bible. Of course, he did not know that it was the Bible, Aron told me, but he had explained to his co-villagers that it was a an object that looked like cooking leaves but the inside of it was like the skin of the black and white snake. It was therefore easy for Aron’s ancestor to recognize the missionary with his Bible when he and his wife turned up on a beach on Nguna in 1869. From the missionary biography of Peter Milne (Don 1927), we have access to the first encounter between missionaries and people on Nguna, as it was perceived from the missionaries’ perspective. The mission ship Dayspring brought Milne and his wife from the Presbyterian mission of New Zealand to Nguna. Their arrival and their first period in Nguna were characterized by much conflict and mistrust, according to Aron’s account. Although Aron’s forefather had been prepared for the visit, he had trouble relating to the missionaries. Aron

72 | Annelin Eriksen

pointed out that the missionary had no interest in talking to the local men of importance. The conflict between the missionaries and the local chiefs—and the people in general on Nguna—is outlined in detail in the missionary biography as well. It was only with enormous hardship that the missionaries could get people in Nguna interested in their message. The Milnes could not see that people on Nguna had anything but selfish and material interests. They were mostly concerned with the goods they had brought. The chief who was most often in contact with the missionaries, giving them access to land and food, is described as self-interested and unsympathetic. His wives are described as “disgusting and loathsome looking creatures” (Don 1927: 83). J. Graham Miller (1989), writing the history of the Presbyterian mission on the islands of Vanuatu, points out that the missionaries not only encountered a disinterest in their gospel but also had to deal with witchcraft and sorcery. “Witchcraft, ‘poisen’ and all the related practices of heathenism were the deadly business of these men. So was the use of occult powers such as hypnotism, killing by suggestion and the traffic with demonic powers,” observes Miller (1981: 106). It might have been this attitude toward what the missionaries perceived as ‘demonic power’ that caused the most serious tension, at least in the case of Aron’s ancestor. Perhaps his position as a village kleva made the missionaries especially suspicious toward him. On this we can only speculate. However, according to Aron’s account, it became important for his forefather to reconcile with the missionary and his wife. Since he had already seen the arrival of the missionary in his vision and knew the significance of the message that the missionary wanted to convey to them, he went to visit Milne in order to give him his respect and recognition by shaking hands with him.2 For some reason, the missionary declined this invitation at reconciliation, and Aron’s forefather had to return without accomplishing his goal. This led to a very painful and troubling time for people on Nguna, according to Aron. When Milne finally realized his mistake and the significance of the act of shaking hands and reconciling, he visited Aron’s forefather in order to offer him his respect. As they shook hands, however, the hand of Aron’s forefather started to bleed violently, causing his instant death. The reconciliation had come too late, according to Aron. Aron’s story goes on to portray the life of the next generation on the island of Nguna. He points out that in spite of the tragic death of his forefather, people on Nguna, and especially Aron’s own family members who had particular abilities as klevas, continued their work. They did not surrender to the church’s insistence on abandoning these spiritual practices that belonged to the past. They attended church but kept on with their healing practices. Aron outlines, however, that at one point the healing practices suddenly changed: an encounter with the Holy Spirit turned the healing practices in a new direction (Eriksen 2009). After this encounter, they no longer separated their healing work from their Christian life. They realized that through the power of the Holy Spirit, healing would become even more powerful. Aron himself had been one of the healers who had worked through the Holy Spirit and had made healing part of his Presbyterian Christian life. However, the Presbyterian Church demanded that the healers stop what the church referred to as “heathen practices.” The

Healing the Nation | 73

elders in the church did not recognize the connection of the healing practices to the Holy Sprit, and in the end they expelled Aron and his family from the church because they did not lead their life in a “straight Christian fashion.” It was at this point that Aron and his brothers decided to establish their own church. This was to be a church based on their ancient healing practices from Nguna and the power of the Holy Spirit. They called their church the Healing Ministry. This story is symptomatic in many ways of the relationship between the new Pentecostal churches and the colonial churches. The story emphasizes both dramatic breaks as well as continuities with the past. On the one hand, the story makes the healing church into a symbol of the connection between the pre-colonial past and the present. It establishes the Healing Ministry within a biblical frame wherein Aron’s forefather becomes a local Jesus figure, who, because he was disbelieved and because of the missionaries’ arrogance, was violently killed. The story of Christ’s sacrifice becomes the discursive background against which the story of Aron’s forefather is understood. Reconnecting to the precolonial past, then, also becomes a reconnection to the Christian message. On the other hand, Aron’s account is also a story of how the break with the colonial church paved the way for a new kind of social unity—one that was based on other kinds of social principles. It was not only the healing practices that made the new church different from the Presbyterian Church. It was also the values of inclusion and reconciliation that had been denied Aron’s forefather by the first Presbyterian missionaries. Although Milne had eventually wanted to reconcile with Aron’s forefather, the initial lack of respect had already established a structure of domination that was impossible to overcome. Aron’s narrative of his forefather dying as a result of the missionaries’ lack of recognition and his story about the Presbyterian Church expelling his family because of their healing practices reveal a history of inequality and domination by the Presbyterian Church. Breaking with the church involved a break with its social and moral codes. The Presbyterian Church was invested with the morality of the colonial state and of the mission church. The new church, the Healing Ministry, opens an alternative space, challenging the established church and the established rules of accepted Christian behavior. However, what does this alternative social space represent? What kind of new unity does it want? What kind of new social order does it seek?

Pentecostalism and the Nation It has been argued that in New Guinea, Pentecostalism is triggering a “negative nationalism” (Robbins 1998), a new “world making” that offers global connections (Jorgensen 2005) at the expense of the local, regional, and national communities. Eves (2003) has pointed out that the nationalism that emerged after independence in New Guinea, heavily based on unifying symbols such as money (Foster 1995), was seriously challenged by the apocalyptic imaginaries of the Pentecostal churches. Whereas the post-independence money was vital as a symbol in the transformation from colony to nation, creating “a distinctive

74 | Annelin Eriksen

nation as a unit of collective identity with its own money” (Eves 2003: 528), new forms of money and electronic banking signify a new order and a new social world beyond the nation. In northeast New Guinea, New Ireland Pentecostals have interpreted this as a symbol of the Antichrist and thus a sign of the expected return of Christ and the approaching End Times. Pentecostalism has thus become associated with the breaking of national symbols in New Guinea. It is interesting that the new independent Pentecostal churches in Vanuatu do not engage in this imaginary. Although they take part in what one might call a process of ‘world breaking’—in the sense that they break out of established congregations that are powerful symbols of the colonial era—they do not represent their new churches as an alternative to the nation. The Healing Ministry was first and foremost a Nguna-based church, but today it is becoming a national church. Pastor Aron pointed out that their church is not only for people of Nguna, but for the whole of Vanuatu. Here, the process of world breaking is tied to the establishment of a new national unity rather than a global community. The Bible Church, for instance, another one of the many independent Pentecostal churches operating in Port Vila, had a map of Vanuatu painted as a central altarpiece. I asked the main pastor and founder of that church why that motif had been chosen. He immediately replied that his church aimed to “leftem ap Vanuatu” (lift up Vanuatu). They wanted to be a national church, a church for the country. This was not unique to this church. Rather, every congregation, whatever size, seeks to become a national church. When I visited some of the new churches, all of them established during the last decade and all of them based on the belief in the power of the Holy Spirit, I was struck by their ambition to become a church not only for their village or island but for the nation. The rhetoric would typically be: “This church aims at covering up (kaverem ap) the nation, starting in Torres in north through Aneitium in south,” which was how the founder of the Upper Room Church in Port Vila phrased it at a rally in July 2006. These churches are social movements that want to build not only a church but a nation. However, there is an obvious paradox here. Every new church movement has totalizing ambitions. Its adherents want to represent the whole nation, but in the process of establishing their church, they break out of and away from an already existing church that has the same ambition. In a few years, or perhaps only months later, new groups will break away from this current one. To exemplify this, I will briefly look at the Renewal Church, a Pentecostal church with a clear ambition to unify the country.

The Process of Fragmentation The Renewal Church was one of the first independent Pentecostal churches established after the first of these churches, the Revival Church on Tongoa Island in central Vanuatu, had spread its message to other islands with the help of foreign missionaries. The church was founded in the early 1980s and to some extent established itself on the ruins of the Nagriamel rebellion

Healing the Nation | 75

on Santo (Eriksen 2008, 2009). Formed in the 1950s with headquarters on Santo, the Nagriamel was a tradition-based movement that worked for the retrieval of alienated land. The movement has been compared to cargo cults and analyzed as an independence movement (Beasant 1984), but it also had its own church, a Nagriamel church. The movement did not accept the new independent government, advocating instead for complete local autonomy on Santo Island. However, the movement was violently crushed in 1980 by the government’s newly established military force and never regained the strength that it had in the 1970s. When the Renewal Church recruited members on Santo in 1980, a number of the earlier Nagriamel members found comfort in this church. “We needed to believe in forgiveness and a new start,” one of the former Nagriamel supporters and a member of the Renewal Church told me. The Renewal Church therefore grew quickly on Santo and spread to other islands. Its founder, Harry Faye, whom I interviewed in Port Vila in 2006, emphasized the importance of the new church in a period of great upheaval and uncertainty. He argued that the church created a new sense of community among people who had once been members of the Nagriamel movement and who felt let down by the independent government. The church had great ambitions and wanted to unite people of the different islands of the archipelago into a coalition that was based on different premises than those of the new state. However, after a decade, a man who had been described as the ‘right hand’ of the church’s founder broke away from the church. For a while he toured the country in order to heal people, in the process building up a significant reputation as a healer who could promote not only health but also good business. In Port Vila in 2006, he told me the story of how, after a long week of fasting, he had received a powerful vision from the Holy Spirit. The Spirit told him that he would start a new church, a church that would soon become the greatest in Vanuatu. Although he was dedicated to the ambition of uniting the islands, he divided the church and brought along a significant number of members from the Renewal Church to his new congregation. This new church, the Living Water, had ambitions that were similar to those of the Renewal Church, as did so many of the new churches in Vanuatu: they all wanted to become the church for the nation. The picture of churches in Vanuatu today, especially the urban Pentecostal ones, is therefore extremely fragmented. Figure 1 illustrates an example of one particular genealogy to which other churches could be connected, and some churches have other genealogies as well. The important point, however, is that there is an agreement about this kind of genealogy: people emphasize this shared origin and the shared platform of their churches. This consensus seems, at first glance, to contradict the force that makes people break away from the first churches and form their own ministries—namely, the desire to form a new unity. The story about the Renewal Church replacing the Nagriamel movement, and the new church, the Living Water, breaking away from the mother church seems to be a story about temporal unity. It shows the process whereby these movements— whether or not they are politico-religious movements such as the Nagriamel or

76 | Annelin Eriksen

Figure 1 Genealogy of Some Pentecostal Churches

Pentecostal churches—seem unable to develop into large movements. They are crushed, segmented, or subdivided before they reach a state of absolute unity. As I pointed out earlier, it has been argued (e.g., Lindstrom 1993a, 1993b, n.d.) that the cargo cults in Melanesia aim to create a new social whole. Creating this new whole involves a process of rupture and breaks with previous frameworks for unity, yet every new cult has totalizing ambitions to unite and encompass beyond existing divisions. In many respects, this can be said for Pentecostal churches as well. The unity they seek cuts across the division between different kinds of churches and competing ‘breakaway’ ministries. Although every new breakaway church contributes to the process of division and fission among these churches, every church aims at a new absolute encompassment. To some extent, this paradox might be understood by questioning our usual concept of wholeness. When new churches break away from mother churches, this could be looked on not as a fragmentation process but rather as a multiplication process. The new pastor did not conceptualize the Living Water Church as a breakaway church. Rather, he saw it as a ‘daughter’ church, which gave evidence to the effectiveness of the Renewal movement that had brought it about. Also, the pastor of the Renewal Church could take pride in the fact that it was his church that was responsible for bringing the new church into existence. The pastor of the New Covenant Church, Fred Moses, remarked that the many churches that had been initiated by people who were once members of his congregation (see figure 1) were proof of the powerful effect and importance of the New Covenant Church. “The new churches are new expressions of our faith,” he said. Sometimes all of the churches unite in a shared service.

Healing the Nation | 77

Thus, the new churches are not fragments of—or parts in opposition to—the whole from which they break away. Rather, they could be viewed as different levels of the whole or different levels of unity. This viewpoint reflects the healing practices performed in the Pentecostal churches: the object of healing can be a person, a congregation, or even a nation (see also Kapferer 1984).

Healing: The Part as the Whole Healing is a significant practice in Vanuatu today. One of the main characteristics of the new Pentecostal churches is the vital importance of healing. Some of the churches, such as the Healing Ministry mentioned above, are established explicitly as a result of the refusal of traditional churches to recognize healing practices. Healing, both of the traditional kind and of the Christian kind, wherein the power of the Holy Spirit is called upon in order to perform miracles, is often unacceptable to the traditional churches. The mantra of breaking with the past also includes a break with the previous view on healing. Thus, the new churches not only accept healing, but include it as a vital part of every church service. There are particular persons responsible for the healing sessions, and sometimes specific remedies, such as holy water, are used in the ceremonial healing processes. Several people in the new churches told me that they preferred going to a healer instead of a medical doctor. This was not because the healer was more affordable than the medical doctors. Quite the contrary, healers can be expensive as well. Rather, it was because people had more faith in the healers. When I visited the Pentecostal churches in Port Vila, I almost always encountered a queue of people waiting to be healed and prayed for, and every Sunday the services ended with a healing session. The specific target for the healing process is most often an individual. For instance, in a Pentecostal church called the Survival, after Sunday service, a group of people are always called to stand in front of the congregation in order to be healed. These individuals have often been in touch with the pastor in the days before the service, talking to him about their problems. Sometimes this might be a large group of 20 and sometimes only a couple. To some extent, the healing sessions involve bringing specific persons out of solitude and into the social framework of the congregation. For instance, one Sunday the pastor of the Survival Church called out the name of a man who had been ill for some time, spending most of his days in bed. Then the pastor called out the name of a young girl who had been studying abroad but was now beset with illness. Lastly, he called out the name of a young boy who had been involved in criminal activities characteristic of groups of young men in the city with nothing more to do than SPR (spearing the road), that is, walking the streets. The pastor asked the congregation to pray for these persons. Everyone started praying loudly and intensely, not as a choir but individually. Some of the women soon became agitated as the voices of the congregation rose, and they started shaking their hands intensely, closing their eyes and making low screaming noises. The persons to be healed stood silently, with their heads

78 | Annelin Eriksen

bowed. After a while, the pastor started singing a hymn, and the congregation joined in. Afterwards, the pastor sprinkled the persons to be healed with holy water contained in a small bottle. While doing this, he talked to the congregation, but also to God. He emphasized the change that was necessary in these people’s lives. He laid his hand on the head of the sick man and said that he would once more be able to work, to come regularly to church, and to visit his home village. Then he laid his hand on the head of the young girl and said that she would not be troubled any more and would be in perfect health when she returned to school. Lastly, he laid his hand on the young man’s head and said that the boy would no longer walk the streets of Port Vila town at night. The pastor did not confer the agency of these transformations to any one of the individuals. Rather, he was calling on divine agency but also on the agency of the social in itself. To some extent, this is an instance of the whole healing its parts by forcing the persons who had drifted away from the congregation to re-enter the unity. But it was also a way of cleansing the whole congregation. As the congregation took part in driving away the evil forces that were affecting the man, the girl, and the boy (bringing about illness, solitude, and criminality), they strengthened the spirituality of the congregation as a whole. One might say that in the healing of the individual, the whole congregation re-enacts the transformation that has taken them from their previous existence into the new social space of the church. Keeping in mind the perception of wholeness wherein the part stands as a representation of the whole (and not as a fragment of the whole), it is possible to argue that the target of healing, whether it is an individual, a family, or a village, is always also a healing of the whole. In the churches, the reference to the unity of the nation is always underlined, as I have already pointed out. Sometimes this reference is explicit in the healing process as well. Thus, the healing of individuals, which, as I have argued, implies the healing of the congregation, also makes reference to the healing of another encompassing whole—namely, the nation. In the same way that the individual stands as a representation of the congregation, the congregation itself is a representation of the nation. Thus, healing the person also means healing the nation. Sometimes I heard this talked about explicitly: people said that there are too many evil forces in Vanuatu today, and that they can be counteracted only through the process of healing and divine intervention. In line with Kapferer (1988), I argue that in every single individual the healers detect the forces that are threatening society as a whole. These forces are not, as in New Guinea (Jorgensen 2005), the ancestral shrines or other signs or symbols of the pre-colonial and pre-Christian past. Rather, the evil forces are those that threaten to disrupt the social unity by letting individuals drift away. The new churches are manifestations of the ability to create social units, to maintain them, and to transform them into new forms in an endless process of fusion and fission. Despite the seemingly fragmented picture of the new churches in Port Vila and elsewhere in Vanuatu today, these churches can be said to represent the same social space. They all seek to create a new social unity outside of the existing social formations that have been shaped by colonial powers. Although Vanuatu has been an independent state for decades,

Healing the Nation | 79

the stratifying differences from the colonial era are still evident in the emergent class structures and in the bureaucracy of the state (Eriksen 2009). Furthermore, the healing process articulates the alternative values of the new churches. It involves the explicit transferral of the dominant values of the churches to specific individuals, emphasizing the value of change, the value of the social, and the benefits of re-entering the group. The healing process thus not only involves the physical or psychological restoration of an individual, but also reinforces the value of transformation on which the church as a whole is founded. The well-being of the young boy who took part in criminal gangs, for instance, involved transforming him from a young ‘drifter’ into a participant in the social unity of the church. Thus, the young man was healed by becoming part of the church and realizing the importance of the value of change. A manifestation of the efficacy of the church in transforming people, the boy was also a symbol of the effectiveness of the church in transforming society and of the power of the social in itself. The new churches, like the earlier cargo cults, are frameworks for elevating the power of the social, whether it is in the orchestration of large-scale rituals, as with the John Frum cult on Tanna (Lindstrom 1993a, 1993b) or the Kaliai movement in New Britain (Lattas 1998), or in the smaller, ‘everyday’ healing rituals in the new churches in Vanuatu.

Healing the Nation Just as the cargo cults in the colonial period represented movements that externalized themselves from established society in order to create something new—something that could cope with what its members perceived as new challenges, new orders, and new values—the new Pentecostal churches in Port Vila might to a certain degree be analyzed as social phenomena of the same order. These movements are also creating new social spaces wherein the value of change and the value of becoming independent are emphasized. Whereas the cargo movements were created in the face of a new social situation in which colonialism, Christianity, and an emerging capitalism were important ingredients, the new Pentecostal churches face another situation. As I have pointed out, many of the pastors I interviewed in Port Vila emphasized their frustration with their lack of independence, and the story of the Healing Church lends credence to this view. Many people in Vanuatu today believe that the post-colonial situation has created a false independence (Eriksen 2009), and it is real independence that the new churches aim to acquire. Although fragmented and representing a number of different churches, these movements are structured by the same principles—the value of change and the value of independence. Every church service and every healing session in the many different independent Pentecostal churches represent this social space, and this space is talked about as the ‘nation’. The healing sessions, as I have shown, illustrate the way that individuals and congregations are representations of this envisioned unity. Thus, the many new Pentecostal churches in Vanuatu join in a combined effort to heal the nation.

80 | Annelin Eriksen

Annelin Eriksen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. She has worked since 1995 in Vanuatu, first on the island of Ambrym and later also in the capital Port Vila. Her work deals with social and cultural change, Christianity, and gender relations. Her most recent research project “Christianity, Gender, and the Dynamics of Community beyond the State: A Study of Urban Christian Movements in Vanuatu,” is funded by the Norwegian Research Council from 2006 until 2011. Her publications include Gender, Christianity and Change (2008) and “New Life: Pentecostalism as Social Critique in Vanuatu” (2009).

Notes 1. Klevas is a Vanuatu pidgin (Bislama) word for those who are clever, meaning those who have special abilities to heal, foresee the future, etc. 2. I have described this event in more detail elsewhere. See Eriksen (2009).

References Beasant, John. 1984. The Santo Rebellion: An Imperial Reckoning. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Burridge, Kenelm. 1960. Mambu: A Melanesian Millennium. London: Methuen Don, Alexander. 1927. Peter Milne (1834–1924): Missionary to Nguna, New Hebrides, 1870 to 1924, from the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand. Dunedin, New Zealand: Foreign Missions Committee. Engelke, Matthew. 2007. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eriksen, Annelin. 2008. Gender, Christianity and Change. Aldershot: Ashgate. ______. 2009. “New Life: Pentecostalism as Social Critique in Vanuatu.” Ethnos 74, no. 2: 175–198. Eves, Richard. 2003. “Money, Mayhem and the Beast: Narratives of the World’s End from New Ireland (PAPUA NEW GUINEA).” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9, no. 3: 527–547. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118851660/abstract?CRETRY= 1&SRETRY=0-en1#en1. Foster, Robert J., ed. 1995. Nation Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Harris, Olivia. 2006. “The Eternal Return of Conversion: Christianity as Contested Domain in Highland Bolivia.” Pp. 51–77 in The Anthropology of Christianity, ed. Fenella Cannell. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jebens, Holger. 2005. Pathways to Heaven: Contesting Mainline and Fundamentalist Christianity in Papua New Guinea. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Jorgensen, Dan. 2005. “Third Wave Evangelism and the Politics of the Global in Papua New Guinea: Spiritual Warfare and the Recreation of Place in Telefolmin.” Oceania 75, no. 4: 444–462. Kapferer, Bruce. 1984. “The Ritual Process and the Problem of Reflexivity in Sinhalese Demon Exorcisms.” Pp. 179–207 in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle, ed. John J. MacAloon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Healing the Nation | 81

______. 1988. Legends of People, Myths of the State. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Lattas, Andrew. 1998. Cultures of Secrecy: Reinventing Race in Bush Kaliai Cargo Cults. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Lawrence, Peter. 1964. Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District, New Guinea. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lindstrom, Lamont. 1993a. “Cargo Cult Culture: Toward a Genealogy of Melanesian Kastom.” Pp. 316–329 in Custom Today, ed. Geoffrey White and Lamont Lindstrom. Perth: University of Western Australia. Special issue of Anthropological Forum 6, no. 4. 1993. ______. 1993b. Cargo Cults: Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ______. n.d. “Dreaming of Unity and Cargo in Melanesia.” In Social Movements, Cultural Heritage and the State in Oceania, ed. Edvard Hviding and Knut Rio. Wantage, UK: Sean Kingston Publishing. Macdonald-Milne, Brian, and Pamela Thomas, eds. 1981. Yumi Stanap: Some People of Vanuatu—Leaders and Leadership in a New Nation. Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific. Martin, David. 2002. Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish. Oxford: Blackwell. Meyer, Birgit. 2004. “Christianity in Africa: From African Independent to PentecostalCharismatic Churches,” Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 447–474. Miller, J. Graham. 1981. Live: A History of Church Planting in the New Hebrides, Now Republic of Vanuatu to 1880. Book 2. Sidney: Bridge Printery, for Mission Publications of Australia. ______. 1989. Live: A History of Church Planting in the Republic of Vanuatu. Book Six: The Northern Islands 1881–1948. Port Vila: Presbyterian Church of Vanuatu. Robbins, Joel. 1998. “On Reading ‘World News’: Apocalyptic Narrative, Negative Nationalism, and Transnational Christianity in a Papua New Guinea Society.” Social Analysis 42, no. 2: 103–130. ______. 2004a. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. ______. 2004b. “The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 117–143. ______. 2007. “Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time, and the Anthropology of Christianity.” Current Anthropology 48, no. 1: 5–38. Schwartz, Theodore. 1962. “The Paliau Movement in the Admiralty Islands, 1946–1954.” Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 49: 207–421. Stewart, Pamela J., and Andrew Strathern, eds. 2000a. Identity Work: Constructing Pacific Lives. ASAO (Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania) Monograph Series, No. 18. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. ______. 2000b. “Introduction: Latencies and Realizations in Millennia Practices.” Pp. 3–27 in Millennial Countdown in New Guinea, ed. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern. Special issue of Ethnohistory 47, no. 1. Worsley, Peter. 1957. The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of ‘Cargo’ Cults in Melanesia. New York: Schocken Books.

( Chapter 5

What Happened to Cargo Cults? Material Religions in Melanesia and the West Ton Otto

Cargo cults were once at the forefront of the anthropological imagination. They no longer are. Although a continual stream of books and articles are published on the subject, it no longer kindles the same intense intellectual debate as it once did. What happened to cargo cults? In this chapter I will discuss theoretical analyses of old and new cults, some of which suggest that the term should be abolished, or at least avoided. The history of anthropology teaches us that it is very hard, if not impossible, to obliterate an analytical term once it has been well established in the literature and, in addition, has been adopted as a popular concept. Apart from this pragmatic consideration, however, I will argue that it is unnecessary and even unproductive to discard the term because it can still provide an analytical edge for understanding and comparing certain types of religious phenomena and moral discourses about inequality, wealth, and exchange, in both Melanesia and the West. As far as Melanesia is concerned, the cargo cult concept highlights a range of millenarian ideas, cults, and movements that originated in the wake of Western colonization and, more often than not, involved a strong concern with the Notes for this chapter begin on page 98.

What Happened to Cargo Cults? | 83

acquisition of Western goods—the cargo. As expressions of millenarian zeal that anticipated and provoked radical change in society, they can be compared with millenarian movements elsewhere, for example, with millenarianism in late medieval Europe, so impressively described and analyzed by Norman Cohn ([1957] 1970).1 Cohn connects the occurrence of these revolutionary religious movements to fundamental changes in the structure of society, in particular to the rise of industrial production for an emerging market. The people who were willing to follow local prophets, invoking biblical images of the apocalypse in order to transform the existing social order, mostly lived on the margins of society: they were peasants without land, journeymen, and unskilled workers, all of whom lacked the material, social, and emotional support afforded by traditional social groups and networks. This applies equally to Flanders and northern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Bohemia in the early fifteenth century, and Holland and Westphalia in the sixteenth century. Millenarian visions could be found in all layers of the population, but it was the hardship experienced by the dispossessed and marginalized that turned the flames of religious imagination into the burning heat that motivated political agitation and even violent social upheavals that threatened the established order. In a similar way, the early Melanesian cargo cults aimed at the radical transformation of society and were therefore seen as a threat to the establishment and maintenance of the colonial order. Their emergence can be linked to fundamental changes in society that led to the reinterpretation of existing and new myth material in order to regain intellectual control and agency. The deep impact of these social and intellectual experiments is discernible up to the present day, but it is generally not expressed in the form of revolutionary movements—although this still can happen, as in the case of the Bougainvillean independence struggle. Most contemporary cargo cults have accepted the existing political order and have been institutionalized as associations, sects, or churches. They still wait for a millennium to come and perform rituals to bring it on, but in a subdued, non-revolutionary way. A revolutionary zeal similar to that of the classic cargo cults can be found in some parts of present-day Western and Asian societies,2 driven by an unprecedented frenzy of consumerism and clothed in fantasies of personal fulfillment and social transformation. This trend is expressed in an economic and sometimes quasi-religious idiom even though it has wide-ranging political consequences. I will therefore conclude this chapter with a reflection on the categories of religion and economy that have played such a central role in the interpretation—and misunderstanding—of Melanesian cargo cults. They explain, I will argue, why the study of cargo cults continues to merit examination beyond a purely regional level and why it is still worthy of the intellectual interest it once aroused.

Classic Studies of Cargo Cults Peter Worsley’s ([1957] 1968) classic and enormously influential study, The Trumpet Shall Sound, accomplished for Melanesian cargo cults what Cohn’s

84 | Ton Otto

([1957] 1970) The Pursuit of the Millennium did for millenarian movements in late medieval Europe. It established cargo cults as a field of study by placing them in a comparative and sociological perspective. Inspired by a Marxist point of view, Worsley ([1957] 1968: lvii) emphasizes the economic causes and political impact of these popular movements: “Melanesians were profoundly disturbed by the impact of the European economy and its effects on their indigenous economic arrangements.” Far from adhering to economic determinism, as he was accused of doing (see Jarvie 1964: 91), Worsley ([1957] 1968: lviii–lx) refers to factors such as deprivation, rapid transformation, indeterminacy, and the importance of the idea of the millennium. He was, however, necessarily restricted in analyzing the natives’ “horizon of expectations” (Jarvie 1963), because comprehensive anthropological studies of cargo cults, as well as Melanesian religions more generally, were lacking at the time he wrote the book, which is based on an extensive reading of available documentary material. As one major effect of the cults, Worsley ([1957] 1968: 254–255) points to the formation of new regional groupings, which he calls “proto-national” formations, since they form a transition to more stable national identities. Worsley observes a general trend in the development of the cults away from apocalyptic mysticism and toward secular political organization in the form of political parties and cooperatives: “I believe, therefore, that activist millenarian movement is typical only of a certain phase in the political and economic development of this region, and that it is destined to disappear or become a minor form of political expression among backward elements” (ibid.: 231). Due to the work of Theodore Schwartz (1962) and Margaret Mead ([1956] 1975), we now know a great deal about the early Paliau movement, one of the key cases in Worsley’s comparative study. Schwartz provides one of the most detailed descriptions we have of such a political-religious movement in Melanesia and also deals with cargo cults and beliefs occurring at the same time that interact with—or merge into—the movement. In his theoretical approach, Schwartz (1976) is particularly interested in psychological explanations of cargo cults, which he defines as a “type-response,” “a basic mode of reaction or adjustment to situations of rapid culture change characteristic of an entire area in a specific historical phase” (ibid.: 159). He discusses concepts such as deprivation, stress, pathomimetic behavior, and cognitive dissonance. As a psychocultural basis for the occurrence of cargo cults, he points to a so-called paranoid ethos that presumably characterizes Melanesian societies in that period. I would be hesitant to use pathological complexes in order to understand social and religious movements, and I do not think that Schwartz argues the case convincingly.3 However, he coins another concept that I find very useful, namely, “value dominance,” which refers to a situation in which one is overcome by others in terms of one’s own values (ibid.: 174).4 Schwartz argues that Melanesians felt impoverished and overpowered by white people, because they—like white people—put great value on the demonstration of wealth. There was thus a resonance between the value systems of the two types of society—the colonizers and colonized: “The two cultures met on the common ground of materialistic, competitive striving for prestige through entrepreneurial achievement of wealth”

What Happened to Cargo Cults? | 85

(ibid.). Because Melanesians could not ignore the fact that white people did much better according to their own standards of living, they experienced strong feelings of inferiority and deprivation. Schwartz calls this “relative deprivation” (ibid.: 178), and its focus was the “cargo,” the wealth that was essential for the expression of Melanesian personhood and agency (ibid.: 177). I find this a valuable insight and will return below to the resonance between Melanesian and Western material values suggested by Schwartz. However, I am in only partial agreement. I will argue that although Melanesians and Westerners can be said to share a cultural interest that values material things highly, the social status of these things and the subjectivities connected with them differ widely. Other classic studies that emphasize the indigenous ‘horizon of expectations’ are those by Peter Lawrence (1964) and Kenelm Burridge (1960). Working on the Yali movement in the southern Madang area, Lawrence (1964) was able to give considerable historical depth to his study of cargo phenomena. Most striking is the continuity he observes in the indigenous value systems from pre-cult times to the time of his study. He describes the culture and religion in the area as being characterized by two central, pervasive values, namely, anthropocentrism and materialism. People regarded their religion above all as a technology to maintain their central and paramount position in the cosmic order as they saw it. Material wealth, apart from its primary utility, had a secondary and perhaps more important value as a symbol of social relationships (ibid.: 29). In Lawrence’s view, the cargo cults essentially built on these basic premises under changing historical circumstances. Burridge, who studied the Mambu movement in the northern Madang area, gives more weight to the aspect of cultural change, because he sees the cults as movements for moral regeneration. As such, they can be considered a variant of a universal human tendency, “putting into a symbolic framework those very radical and deeply felt desires for socio-cultural changes that will give renewed meaning to a life which seems presently to be without point or purpose, and for which the existing order provides few other alternatives” (Burridge 1993: 283). In the drive for moral regeneration, the ‘myth-dream’ played a central role. With this concept Burridge refers to the attempts to make new sense of things by using memories of myths—old and new—and mingling them with experiences and emotions. The focus of the cargo myth-dream was to comprehend the “secret” of the European material possessions (Burridge 1969). Burridge (1993) observes that there is general agreement among scholars that cargo (and similar) movements are rooted in disharmonies in social and cultural conditions that are “generated when a traditional economy is faced with modernization and the urgencies of money, commerce and industry” (ibid.: 285). He acknowledges the crucial aspect of hardship and marginalization emphasized by Worsley and Cohn and uses it to explain why there have been many more cults in coastal areas than in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. He argues that coastal cultures and societies were “ravaged” in a much more serious way by the impact of colonialization, which came earlier and was more devastating. Highland cultures and political entities were also more resilient due to their size (ibid.: 286). He further observes that cargo activities, although continuing to

86 | Ton Otto

the present day, have changed character. They have become less materialistic and more explicitly religious and transcendental. Their persistence is rooted in “anomie”—in an indeterminate and infirm structuring of society without welldefined moral authority and leadership (ibid.: 278, 288). Burridge’s observation that cargo cults have changed character is interesting and pertinent. A number of studies that have followed long-lasting classic cults to the present5 seem to corroborate that the explicit millenarian zeal aimed at immediate material change has transformed into more inward-looking and spiritual expressions. There is still the expectancy of the millennium, but often in more personalized forms. For example, the followers of Win Neisen—the contemporary name for the Paliau movement—believe that a person can attain redemption from the plagues of life (aging, illness, death, hunger, and hard work) through acceptance of the prophet’s message and the observance of his moral rules (Otto 1992a, 2004). Thus, partly in contradiction to Worsley’s expectations, some of the movements have become not more secular but instead the opposite—even more preoccupied with religious rituals and spirituality. But in another sense Worsley is also right: the movements have generally become more marginalized, even though one would be wrong to call them an expression of ‘backward elements’. Those movements that persist have become institutionalized as cooperatives, councils, or local churches. And in most of them, the cargo theme lingers, although it often has a less prominent place or a more ‘spiritual’ form.

Newer Studies: Problematizing Cargo Cults In this section I discuss some of the key issues that have arisen in the newer literature on cargo cults. Perhaps the most central debate concerns the suitability of the term itself, which has been critically assessed from a number of different perspectives. These stances can be summarized by the following questions: Does the term ‘cargo cult’ refer to an identifiable empirical reality? To what extent does it contain a Western ideological bias? Does the use of the term incur ethical and political problems? Do we need the term at all? Starting with the first and perhaps most challenging question, one may argue that a descriptive term always creates its own object, because the reality referred to first becomes an object of discussion and reflection through the use of this term. As a result of the looping effect of our constructions (see, e.g., Hacking 1995), the denoted object receives a life of its own—that is, it becomes a social reality whether or not it was an identifiable empirical object before the term came into existence. Lindstrom (1993: 26), who has investigated the history of the Western discourse about cargo cults, informs us that the term was first used in print in 1945, in an article in the Pacific Islands Monthly in which Norris Mervyn Bird attacked missionaries for having confused the New Guinea natives with their religious instruction about human equality (see also Hermann 2004; Lindstrom 2004). Bird came across the term and its derogatory and political connotations in the oral discourse between planters and businessmen in the

What Happened to Cargo Cults? | 87

Australian protectorate of Papua and New Guinea. Soon the term was picked up by anthropologists and was also used retrospectively for movements that had been previously described by other terms, such as “outbreaks of quasi-religious nature,” “disturbance,” and “Vailala madness” (Williams [1923] 1976). In addition to its academic use by anthropologists, the term spread widely to other written genres, from administrative reports on social trouble to newspaper articles and literary fiction. Finally, the term became part of the indigenous religious and political discourse in Melanesia (Hermann 1992, 2004; Jebens 2004c, 2007; Lindstrom 1993). The existence of cargo cults before the invention of the term may be rightly doubted, but they are now an established part of the academic and indigenous discourse and therefore a social reality. While the existence of the term ‘cargo cult’ and its continuous use is an undeniable fact, some have doubted its value as an analytical and comparative concept. The most forceful attack on the term was launched by Nancy McDowell (1988). Inspired by Lévi-Strauss’s deconstruction of the concept of totemism, she states that ‘cargo cult’ distorts the semantic field by isolating phenomena that really are part of something else. The larger field that gives meaning to the phenomena is, according to McDowell, the cultural construction of change: “As totemism did not exist, being merely an example of how people classify the world around them, cargo cults too do not exist, being merely an example of how people conceptualize and experience change in the world” (ibid.: 122). On the basis of her own ethnography of the Bun, she explains that change is always conceived of as dramatic, total, and complete, rather than gradual, cumulative, and evolutionary. This fits very well with the attitude observed in the cargo cults. Even though I find McDowell’s analysis of the ‘episodic’ view of time among the Bun and other New Guinea groups very useful and enlightening, I am not convinced by her critique of the term ‘cargo cult’. By taking out one aspect, however central, and defining that as the empirical phenomenon at issue—namely, views of change—she necessarily loses sight of other important aspects that have been associated with the cults, such as the focus on the abundant availability of things, the coming of the ancestors, and the elaboration of new mythologies in view of a moral and/or political crisis. McDowell (1988: 128–129) is right to point out that it is often difficult to distinguish between “cargo activity” and “economic activity,” or cargo cults and political activity (ibid.: 131). Looking at these aspects in isolation, it is obviously difficult to define certain activities as characteristic of cargo cults.6 But the purpose of a term such as ‘cargo cult’ is that it refers to a number of aspects that, in combination, make it possible to compare certain kinds of movements of a millenarian character. None of these aspects appear in all movements that have been called cargo cults, and their relative configurations vary. But following Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblances (cf. Blok 1976), it makes sense to identify and compare these movements on the basis of the aspects discerned. Using such a comparative perspective, Steinbauer (1979), for example, can state that about two-thirds of all the cargo cults he has found in the literature have as their main aim the attainment of material wealth and that they use “magical practices” to this end. Of course, we can disagree about what should be considered material wealth and magical practices and, for

88 | Ton Otto

that matter, which movements should be referred to as cargo cults. Doing away with the concept of cargo cult will not solve this problem of categorization, but it will deprive us of an opportunity to look at the occurrence of certain kinds of millenarian movements from an analytical perspective that focuses on their similarity and specific character in comparison to other types of movements. The other questions concerning the use of the term are closely connected and will be dealt with more briefly. Lindstrom (1993) has provided a detailed and insightful analysis of ‘cargoism’, which he defines as the discourse about cargo cults. He claims that this discourse is a specific expression of a common and fundamental cultural theme in Western culture, namely, the story of endless yearning—a love story without fulfillment. Although he states that his work deals only with texts and not with Melanesian realities, the central message of the book appears to be that cargo discourse is largely the result of the Western imagination embroidering on central cultural themes in an exotic Melanesian setting. The many examples certainly demonstrate continuing (and disturbing) themes, both in academic and popular writing, and Lindstrom’s claim that these are Western rather than Melanesian therefore appears rather convincing. There are, however, some limitations to Lindstrom’s argument that should be taken into account. In the first place, there is a certain circularity in Lindstrom’s reasoning that explains the cargoist discourse on the basis of a master trope (unfulfilled love), while the existence of the master trope is primarily demonstrated through an analysis of the discourse about cargo cults. Secondly, Lindstrom’s explanation cannot account for the specificities of the cargo discourse: its presumed focus on goods (cargo), and its placement in a Melanesian context. Therefore, even though I accept the assumption of a Western predilection to cargoist discourse, I argue that we need to include an analysis of historical and ethnographic realities, which makes it necessary to have a term for doing this—‘cargo cult’, for example (cf. Otto 1999). A serious problem with the term is the pejorative connotation of backwardness and silliness it evokes, as was very clear in the political context in which the term was invented: the ‘natives’ wanted to obtain Western consumption goods (‘cargo’) by the wrong means (‘cult’). Unfortunately, the derogatory value has stuck to the term, not so much in academia, I would argue, but certainly in indigenous usage, where ‘cargo cult’ is used to discredit certain religious movements and local churches. Following an idea from Derrida, Hermann (2004) suggests that we therefore should place the term “under erasure”—that is, we should use it but cross it out again to indicate that the term is both inaccurate and necessary. I am not convinced that this strategy works, as the word is still seen as necessary and is therefore used (as Hermann does in the cited article), even though it is considered inadequate. In addition, one should address the question of how much responsibility anthropologists can take upon themselves for the ways in which their theoretical concepts are used outside of academia— think of the many unfortunate political uses of the word ‘culture’—and how much influence they actually can exercise on the usage of their concepts, once they have become appropriated in popular discourse.7 Rather than placing the term ‘cargo cult’ under erasure, I would suggest that we use it, but with due

What Happened to Cargo Cults? | 89

respect for the movements we describe—as has actually been the case since the early classic studies by Worsley, Schwartz, and others. A more radical solution has been suggested by Martha Kaplan (2004; see also Kaplan 1995), who wants to circumvent the term by not using it. While acknowledging that cults do “exist, not necessarily as Pacific or non-Western phenomena, but rather as a category in Western culture and colonial practice,” Kaplan (2004: 63) demonstrates that she can describe the Tuka movement, another key example of a cargo cult in Worsley’s ([1957] 1968) comparative study, without using the term at all. Instead, she focuses on how concepts of tradition and foreignness inform dialectics of agency and power in the various phases of the movement. Even though she is able to give a very comprehensive and insightful account of the Tuka movement, it does not prove, I maintain, that discarding the term ‘cargo cult’ is the way to go. Its force is primarily not as a descriptive analytical term but as a comparative analytical term that allows us to look at a number of movements in the same light. Kaplan rightly acknowledges that the theorists of cargo cults were among the first scholars to shed light on the issue of indigenous agency and cultural change in colonial contexts, which is the central framework that she uses for her own study. Focusing on concepts of tradition and foreignness rather than cargo will open other useful coordinates of comparison, but doing so is not an argument against the term. I argue for the continued use of the term ‘cargo cult’ as it captures a certain ethos or common ‘style’ in a number of movements driven by millenarian expectations that aim to change society. These movements have primarily arisen in Melanesia, but the term has also been applied to movements in Western countries such as the United States and Australia. Interestingly, the term appears to have much less purchase in other regions. In a volume edited by G. W. Trompf (1990) on cargo cults and millenarian movements across the world, only millenarian movements in Melanesia and the West appear to have a cargoist character, while the case studies from Timor, Jamaica, and Africa completely lack this dimension. This confirms that there is a discernable quality that collectively sets a group of movements apart from others. Trompf (ibid.: 64) especially values the comparison of Melanesian and Western cults, because in the former the identification of cargo with the coming of the millennium is rather explicit, which makes it possible to see similar but more implicit configurations in the West. In the following section I will focus on the central themes of Melanesian cargoism as a millenarian type of answer to existential and moral challenges. In the last section I turn my eye to Western and Asian capitalist countries in order to see whether a comparative perspective on cargo cults can contribute to an understanding of certain millenarian trends in Western modernity.

Central Themes and Concerns In spite of the enormous variety of phenomena that have been branded as cargo cult in Melanesia, from the early beginnings to the present, it is possible to identify a number of elements that are present in most of them in

90 | Ton Otto

various combinations (Burridge 1993; T. Schwartz 1976; Steinbauer 1979). In particular, I would mention the following: the development of a certain myth-dream (Burridge 1960), a synthesis of various indigenous and foreign narrative elements and religious concepts; the expectation of the help and/or return of the ancestors; the emergence of leaders with special experiences and/or knowledge; and a strong belief in the appearance of an abundance of goods. These characteristics give a fair picture of the prominent aspects of most cargo cults, but they do not describe the moral and social crises that were the fertile ground on which the cults developed and to which they were a possible answer. Classic studies like those by Worsley and Burridge highlight the impact of the European economy on indigenous societies, and in a general sense they are right. But how and why did this cause the hardship and tension that generated millenarian movements and the drive to enact urgent and radical change? Theodore Schwartz (1976) suggests that we look at the sense of deprivation resulting from value dominance, the feeling of being defeated in terms of one’s own set of values. His focus on the subjectivity of the experience is pertinent and gives an important clue, which I believe can be developed further with the help of insights from the so-called New Melanesian Ethnography (Mosko 2002; Strathern 1988, 1992; Wagner 1991). A key insight from the so-called New Melanesian Ethnography is that Melanesian personhood is constituted through the exchange of material and immaterial things, such as food, valuables, knowledge of ritual, magical spells, and proper names. Agency is realized in the act of exchange, during which composite parts of persons are given and received. This type of personhood is therefore called ‘dividual’ or ‘partible’. The social perspective from each agent is determined by the gifts and counter-gifts exchanged in the past, which define the paths established between different agents as the nodes in social networks. A Melanesian agent works to be an active node, a center, through which wealth is collected and dispersed again (cf. T. Schwartz 1976). This creates a system in which the emergence of social inequality is counteracted by the moral obligation to exchange in order to establish agency. In a system that is completely rooted in gift exchange, a sudden influx of valuables can cause turbulence and tensions. This happened when Melanesian societies came into direct or indirect contact with white people, who traded local products such as coconuts, bêches-de-mer, and pearl shell for glass beads, cloth, iron, and imitations of local valuables such as shells and dog’s teeth. By working as crew on trading ships and as laborers on plantations, the young men in particular were able to gain much more wealth for exchange than they would have been able to in pre-colonial society. This put pressure on established relationships structured around older people, who had become central nodes in networks during a lifetime of exchange, investing composite parts of their persons in young people, who therewith became indebted through the obligation to reciprocate. With new access to wealth, the young had the opportunity to establish themselves as central nodes much earlier in life in competition with their elders, who did not accept this trend. This led to an intensified political and moral struggle between those who were interested

What Happened to Cargo Cults? | 91

in preserving the social order and those who wanted to change it. Hindered in their opportunities to sustain and expand their personhood through exchange, both young and old would have experienced feelings of frustration and moral injustice. A prime example is the history of Paliau Maloat, who at a relatively young age went to work for money after he was called to pay the colonial head tax (Otto 1998; T. Schwartz 1962). Each time Paliau came back to the village with a box of goods as payment for his work, his adoptive father would take it and distribute the goods among his relatives. While Paliau had to accept this, he simultaneously became very critical of the existing cultural system, which later in life he went on to revolutionize as part of the movement named after him. Paliau’s history also illustrates the other change that probably caused even stronger feelings of hardship. When the white people first arrived, they were— after the initial fright and wonder—considered as equal exchange partners by the Melanesians. However, this original perspective of social equivalence did not last when colonization began in earnest. To Melanesians, white people appeared to have nearly inexhaustible sources of wealth, and the social distance between persons as nodes of exchange took on unknown dimensions, thereby offending Melanesian notions of morality. Melanesians wanted to gain access to the knowledge of these sources of wealth, but they felt that white people did not want to provide it, thus breaking the moral code that allowed the exchange system to work. This theme of the white people keeping central parts of their personhood back from exchange with Melanesians runs through many cults, from the Paliau movement8 to the recent Pomio Kivung, brilliantly filmed by Gary Kildea (Kildea and Simon 2005). In this film, Koriam’s Law—and the Dead Who Govern, the anthropologist Andrew Lattas and the filmmakers—and through them white people in general—are confronted by some of the characters in the film about their unwillingness to share the secret of their wealth. One of the central characters remarks: “White people do not help the black man. They found the way, but hide it from us.” Thus, the moral and political breakdown that in many Melanesian societies has provided the fertile ground on which millenarian thoughts and movements could grow was caused by two major effects of contact with Western colonizers. First, the inflation of value goods resulting from Western import and distribution affected local statuses and inequalities (cf. Brunton 1971), providing strong motivation for change among those who felt unjustly held back by the established relations. Second, the attitude of non-reciprocity expressed by the white people created new political inequalities and hierarchies that humiliated the Melanesian sense of self and agency. Reactions were manifold but often took the form that has been branded ‘cargo cult’. Looking for answers, Melanesians experimented with combinations of their traditional beliefs and imported Christian cosmologies, constructing new myth-dreams to influence reality. Dreams and ritual innovations played an important role in this quest for efficacious knowledge. This experimentation with forms was sometimes considered as work.9 As central guardians and agents in the traditional belief systems—and as those who had created the present world through their acts of exchange in the first place—the ancestors were often given a crucial role in the transformation of

92 | Ton Otto

social relations. They were believed to hold the power to trump the monopoly of white knowledge and to re-establish more fair relations. Those who were able to canalize the emotive energies of frustration and humiliation and to become local prophets and leaders of cults10 were often young men who had special knowledge or experience through their contact with white people and other Melanesian groups. Successful leaders such as Paliau and Yali challenged both the internal political relations and the colonial inequalities, thus causing considerable concern among the administrators. Both Paliau and Yali were jailed more than once. They were especially successful because they were able to use the knowledge that they got from and through the colonizers and to integrate this into their own myth-dream. In addition, they had other capacities that were important for leadership in their own culture, in particular, a talent for rhetoric and organization. A common theme that ran through the myth-dream of many movements— and that was also widespread beyond—was the expectation of unlimited wealth that the ancestors would bring once the key to the right knowledge had been found. The coming of the cargo would put an end to injustice and solve the moral inadequacies, both the internal ones between young and old and the external ones between Melanesians and white people. The expected availability of abundant quantities of goods would dissolve all historical obligations instantly and wipe out the need to follow established exchange paths, because there would be plenty for every person to use and exchange. This would thus free all agents of their historical ‘debts’ for reciprocal return and would therewith collapse time into the present, transforming concrete, established exchange paths into networks of potentially unlimited extension. In the same movement, all inequalities—both internal ones within Melanesian societies and external ones with white people—would be annihilated. This is a clear-cut millenarian dream that marks the end of historical time. Melanesian history was defined and driven by an endless cycle of exchange. In the cargo millennium, the situation of plenty dissolves time as a structuring factor. The end of history had arrived.11 The specificity of the cargo millennium, as compared to movements elsewhere in the world, is the large role attributed to goods, both Western and indigenous. This is the result of a specific “structure of the conjunction” (Sahlins 1981, 1985), in which Melanesian societies with a strong focus on the exchange of valuables as part of their culture were contacted by Western societies with a relative abundance of goods and a strong focus on their production. Cargo cults thus happened at the interface between these different societies with their specific cultural orientations. Could one therefore conclude that there was a resonance of values between Melanesian and Western cultures? At least on a superficial level there was. Cargo cults were a result of Melanesian societies trying to make sense of Western abundance, which they envied, and of Western societies being worried and amused about the Melanesian outbursts of desire to be like them. However, at a more fundamental level, the focus on goods was an expression of very different kinds of sociality, an issue that I will elaborate upon in the next section.

What Happened to Cargo Cults? | 93

Cargo in the West According to some authors, the Western fascination with cargo cults springs from Western cultural premises and values rather than from Melanesian realities. As mentioned above, Lindstrom (1993) sees the extensive Western discourse about cargo cults, which he calls “cargoism,” as an expression of a fundamental cultural theme, namely, the story of endless yearning and unfulfilled love. This view is corroborated by Burridge (1993: 283), who observes that Melanesian cargo cults have received “a disproportionate amount of attention” in comparison to similar types of cults in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. In addition to pointing to the frequency and the strangeness of the phenomena for European observers, Burridge (ibid.) ventures the following explanation: “Or, maybe it is the idea of cargo—the products of work in an industrialized society—being made to appear by magic, without work—despite the fact that Melanesians regard the activities as proper work or wok—that engages one’s interest.” Certainly, it may be mesmerizing to see people at the margins of capitalist society who are conspicuously obsessed with getting hold of industrial products but are using the wrong means to do so. Seen from the Western ideological perspective that was dominant during much of the period of cargoism, the main contrast is between the fundamental conviction that hard physical work is the basis of all wealth and the Melanesian belief that ‘magical’ means and the assistance of the ancestors are necessary to create abundance. For Melanesians, physical work was not so much the issue; they had been working hard on Western plantations without becoming rich. Rather, the issue was access to the sources of true—that is, effective—knowledge. With the advantage of hindsight, one could wonder which worldview would be closer to modern economic understanding.12 Clearly, modern Western societies—like Melanesian ones—have been characterized by a strong interest in material things. According to Louis Dumont (1977: 4–5), Western economic ideology is characterized by two central values: individualism and the primacy of human-thing relationships over relationships between human beings. Dumont has developed his understanding of central Western values through systematic comparison with other ideologies, in particular, that of the Indian caste society, with its emphasis on the social whole. In the West, the epitomization of the individual as the highest value is built upon an assumption about the attainment of the greatest wealth (things) for the greatest number of people (see, e.g., Mandeville 1988). Therefore, Dumont argues, relations between individuals and things take priority over relations between humans as social beings. A similar argument can be found in Macpherson’s (1962) analysis of the Western tradition of political-economic thought, which he names “possessive individualism,” with Hobbes and Locke as key figures. In this tradition, the individual is seen as the natural owner of his or her body and its capacities and of the products of his or her labor. Thus, individuals and their possessions are defined in relation to each other, and society—that is, the state—serves only as a contract between individuals, which they enter into in order to protect their property.

94 | Ton Otto

Although Marshall Sahlins (1976) is critical of the ideological bias of much social theory that has developed from this tradition of thought—a tradition that he calls “praxis theory” or “practical reason” and that includes (neo-)Marxism, materialism, and Malinowskian functionalism—he still observes that economic production has become a dominant theme in Western society: “The uniqueness of bourgeois society consists not in the fact that the economic system escapes symbolic determination, but that the economic symbolism is structurally determining” (ibid.: 211). In other words, the economy has become “the privileged institutional locus of the symbolic process” (ibid.). Thus, Sahlins’s cultural approach also identifies the same central characteristic of modern Western culture—that it is dominated by economic metaphors of production and consumption. Would it make sense then to acknowledge a similarity of value orientation between Western cultures and Melanesian cultures, both of which are often described as materialistic and anthropocentric (Lawrence 1964; Lawrence and Meggitt 1965)? On the surface, it is possible to see a common interest in material goods and a tendency to imagine human relations through the production and/or exchange of things. But there is a strong anthropological tradition that contrasts Melanesian and Western exchange, going back to the work of Marcel Mauss (1925). Continuing this tradition, C. A. Gregory (1982, 1997) has done much conceptual work to define the opposition between commodities, characteristic of (Western) monetary exchange, and gifts, characteristic of (Melanesian) reciprocal exchange. In Gregory’s (1997: 52–53) view, gifts establish relations between non-aliens by means of inalienable things, while commodities establish relations between aliens by means of alienable things. Gregory underlines that this is a logical opposition, not an ethnographic one, as both gifts and commodities occur in Western and Melanesian societies. But in the exchange practices of Melanesians, the gift is dominant, while the reverse is true in the West. In the New Melanesian Ethnography, also strongly inspired by Mauss,13 this contrast of exchange practices is further developed to include a theory of the type of personhood involved in and constituted by the exchanges. Central protagonists of this line of ethnographic explanation include Roy Wagner, Marilyn Strathern, and Mark Mosko. In particular, Strathern’s (1988, 1992) conception of the ‘dividual’ or ‘partible’ person has gained much influence. Very briefly, this type of personhood is constituted through the act of exchange in which material and immaterial things considered as parts of persons move from one dividual to another. Dividuals are thus built up from composite parts of personhood received in exchange with other dividuals, thus emphasizing exchange and mutual constitution. This concept of personhood stands in stark contrast to Western notions of the individual, which is seen as a bounded totality in itself, partly defined by the possessions it owns (cf. Macpherson 1962). Another way to look at the same contrast has been suggested by Neil Maclean (1994), who is inspired by Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money. Maclean constructs an opposition between ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’. The latter concept indicates the sense of self that is rooted in and fixed through local exchange relations, while ‘freedom’ refers to the kind of expansionary self that

What Happened to Cargo Cults? | 95

is made possible by the negation of particular ties to place, people, and things, which is the effect of the universe of value created through money. According to Maclean, Melanesians experience the contradiction between autonomy and freedom as an existential and moral dilemma. Conceptions about ‘cargo’ are one way to deal with this contradiction. In her sensitive book about biographical objects in a Sumbanese society, Janet Hoskins (1998) similarly discusses the contrasts that can be constructed between Western and Sumbanese ways of using objects for defining selves. Sumbanese narratives of things involve concrete production and exchange processes, similar to Melanesian experience, which are put in sharp relief by the depersonalized circulation of objects in modern industrial nations, characterized by a consumptive hunger to satisfy and fill basically “empty selves” (Cushman 1990). However, following Carrier (1990), Hoskins warns us not to draw the contrast too sharply, because in the West things can also shift from being commodities to gifts in the sphere of household transactions and consumption. Carrier suggests using the word ‘possession’ for objects that bear personal identities, thus opening up a more nuanced comparison of the subjective significance of things in Western and non-Western contexts. Arjun Appadurai (2005) elaborates further on the theme of gifts in modern, commodity-dominated societies. Here the purchased gift, however special and singular in its origin, always bears the trace of being a commodity. Taking this ambiguity to its extreme, Appadurai (ibid.: 59) describes the reading of special gift catalogues as part of the “pornography of late capitalism.” These catalogues have become an element of a “prosthetic gift economy” in which people imagine a universe of exchange relations that are never realized in practice. According to Appadurai, this creates a decisive break between gift and reciprocity, between imagined sociality deriving from the projected circulation of gifts on the one hand and real relationships on the other. Again, we see a parallel to images of unfulfilled yearning for love (Lindstrom 1993) and to an insatiable consumptive desire (Cushman 1990), both of which are identified as central themes of our times. But is this motif not reminiscent of Melanesian cargo movements, in which imagined abundance also denotes a redemptive sociality (Burridge 1993)? I would argue, therefore, that in spite of the very different models of sociality that assumedly underlie Melanesian and Western material values, there is still ample scope for productive comparison between cargo cults and certain aspects of capitalism, particularly its millenarian tendencies. Several authors have pointed to the millenarian drive that appears to be inherent in capitalist expansion. Huizer (1992: 109) recognizes a cargo cult–like mentality in the ambition that inspired people like Christopher Columbus to cross the Atlantic Ocean and that continues to motivate some of the most prominent contemporary business leaders. These people often have a strong charisma that helps them transform their social environment, which is equally characterized by highly strung expectations of change.14 Citing Mühlmann (1961) and referring to Fukuyama’s (1992) influential vision, Huizer (1992: 125) points out that views of the “end of history” regularly appear as part of millenarian movements. A recent

96 | Ton Otto

volume (Löfgren and Willim 2005) explores the ways in which the so-called New Economy is closely knitted with concepts of magic and culture and is driven by a widespread irrational belief in the sudden appearance of great riches. Jean and John L. Comaroff (2000: 315) have also used the comparison with cargo cults to characterize aspects of what they call “millennial capitalism” (see also Jean Comaroff, this volume). Capitalism as a millenarian movement presents itself as a gospel of salvation with the capacity to transform the universe of the marginalized and disempowered (J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff 2000: 292). Consumption, not production, is seen as the hallmark of modernity (ibid.: 294; see also du Gay 1996). Interestingly, this value shift in capitalist ideology makes the epistemological contrast that I observe in the period of intense cargoism—the opposition between the Western belief in work as the basis of value as opposed to the Melanesian premise that only proper knowledge engenders value—much less significant. However, there is another contrast that stands out more clearly. In modern cargo cults, the attainment of the millennium appears to be privatized: “[I]n a neoliberal age the chiliastic urge emphasizes a privatized millennium, a personalized rather than a communal sense of rebirth; in this, the messianic meets the magical. At the end of the twentieth century, the cargo, glimpsed in a large part through television, takes the form of huge concentrations of wealth that accrue, legitimately or otherwise, to the rich of the global economy” (J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff 2000: 315). The negative side of this cargo dream is the sense of impossibility and despair that is the fate of those who are left out of the promise of prosperity—those who look at the alluring riches of the global economy only from its margins. It is here that so-called occult economies thrive, “a response to a world gone awry, yet again: a world in which the only way to create real wealth seems to lie in forms of power/knowledge that transgress the conventional, the rational, the moral—thus to multiply available techniques of producing value, fair or foul” (ibid.: 316). Clearly, parallels to classic cargo cults abound, also in the ritualized mimicking of the powerful new means of producing wealth (ibid.: 317).

Conclusion The Comaroffs (2000; Jean Comaroff, this volume) observe a tendency to the sacralization of all aspects of life in the contemporary United States in the shape of certain ‘holistic’ movements that are often organized in economic terms, such as new forms of marketing, for example. Even more fundamentally, they suggest that millenarianism has always been inherent in capitalism (see also Huizer 1992). Basically, capitalism is not secularized but is founded on a dialectic of economy and religion. I find these observations very stimulating and would like to argue that the seemingly disproportionate Western interest in Melanesian cargo cults derives from the same dialectic. I suggest that there is a fundamental contradiction between two central value orientations that can be summarily described as mind versus matter, or spirituality versus materiality, and redemption versus wealth (cf. Otto 1992b). Following Dumont’s (1977) ideas about encompassment

What Happened to Cargo Cults? | 97

of values (see also Robbins 2004a), one can discern a struggle for hierarchy between these values in the history of Western culture. In antiquity and medieval times, the value of economic prosperity and material wealth was encompassed by other values of a spiritual kind (see Otto 2004). The period described by Cohn was already a time of transition, where market forces began to exercise their influence. It was in the seventeenth century, in the work of Locke and his contemporaries, that economic values were explicitly taken out of the encompassment of religion (cf. Dumont 1977). In late capitalism, one could argue, the value of material wealth has become dominant and encompasses spirituality. Secularization has become the ideological face of modernity. However, as many contributors to this volume demonstrate, this modern value hierarchy is far from hegemonic, as there appears to be a global revitalization of religious values and a ‘re-enchantment’ of politics. In addition, within economic institutions and discourses the dominant secular value hierarchy often lies only at the surface and can obscure sacralized or holistic attitudes and practices. But what does this mean? Is the encompassed value of spirituality playing its role in the dialectic of religion and economy? Or should we talk about ‘material religions’, taking the moment of encompassment as part of the definition of religious phenomena? If we accept that cargo cults, in spite of their focus on material wealth, are genuine religious phenomena, then it is not a big step to acknowledge the religiosity of many modern economic arrangements. I suggest that the question is more important than the answer, as the latter very much depends on one’s definition of religion. What is important, though, is how the contradiction between religious and economic values is framed in a conceptual terminology that expands the study of agency to concrete social and political contexts. That is what Cohn has done for millenarian movements at the end of the European Middle Ages, and what I have attempted to do by analyzing the moral and political dilemmas that have given rise to cargo cults in Melanesia. Equally, this is the question we have to put to modern millenarianisms in capitalist societies. What is the moral and political crisis that drives millennial capitalism, with its focus on consumption and perpetual innovation? I expect that the comparison with Melanesian cargo cults will put certain features of modernity in relief. One of the lasting contributions of the comprehensive archive of cargo cult studies is that it gives a solid basis for comparison and culture critique (see Dalton 2004; Jebens 2004b; Otto 2004; Robbins 2004b). I therefore believe that the term ‘cargo cult’ will endure.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to the editors of this book for their detailed and constructive criticism. The argument has gained from the discussions during the “Vital Matters” conference in Bergen in 2006. I also thank Steffen Dalsgaard, Keir Martin, and Anders Emil Rasmussen for useful comments. As always, I wish to express my indebtedness to the people of Baluan Island, Paliau’s place of birth, and I am pleased to be able to

98 | Ton Otto

continue my ongoing exchange relationship with them. Finally, I wish to convey thanks to Professor Jan Pouwer, who, as my teacher in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, kindled my interest in cargo cults and put me on the track of the Paliau movement. His impact on my thinking and motivation for research has been enormous.

Ton Otto is a Professor of Anthropology and Ethnography who is currently a research leader at the Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Australia. He also is affiliated with Aarhus University, Denmark. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, particularly in Manus Province. His research focuses on issues of social and cultural change, including religious conversion, cargo cults, political transformation, warfare, the politics of tradition, identity, and the use of resources. He also writes about methodological and epistemological questions and engages with material and visual culture through exhibitions and films. His recent works include two co-edited volumes, Tradition and Agency: Tracing Cultural Continuity and Invention (2005, with Poul Pedersen) and Warfare and Society: Archaeological and Social Anthropological Perspectives (2006, with Henrik Thrane and Helle Vandkilde), and a co-directed film, Ngat Is Dead: Studying Mortuary Traditions (DEF 2009, with Christian Suhr Nielsen and Steffen Dalsgaard), which was filmed on location in Baluan Island, Manus Province.

Notes 1. See Hillel Schwartz (1987) for an overview of millenarianism. 2. I refer here to those Asian societies with a capitalist organization of their economy, such as Japan, Singapore, and parts of China. In the following, I will use the term ‘Western’ in contrast to ‘Melanesian’ to indicate modern capitalist societies. 3. See Theodore Schwartz (1976: 192). According to Schwartz’s description of factors contributing to the paranoid ethos, many small-scale societies would probably be susceptible to it. 4. Inspired by Sahlins (1992), Joel Robbins (2004a, 2005) has suggested a comparable but different mechanism that he calls “humiliation.” This refers to a situation in which a society, overwhelmed by the imported culture of the colonizers, discards its central values, resulting in the conversion of one set of values into another. The concept of value dominance refers to the continuity of values that leads to feelings of humiliation and frustration because of the experienced superiority of the colonizers. 5. See, among others, Billings (2002), Hermann (1992, 2004), Jebens (2007), Lattas (1998), Otto (1992a, 1992c, 1998), and Tabani (2008). See also the spectacular film about the Pomio Kivung movement by Kildea and Simon (2005). 6. See Otto (1992b), where I attempt a mapping of the semantic field in which the concept of cargo operates. 7. A related issue is that the derogatory use of the term has not prevented those called cargo cultists from continuing their practices. Some have even reversed the value signs, defending cargo cultism as a dignified and genuine philosophy (Lindstrom 1993: 149–150). 8. When J. H. Wootten, a staff member of the Australian School of Pacific Administration, spent five months in Kawaliap, a village in central Manus, in early 1947, he was confronted with similar ideas after the initial distrust toward him had subsided. An old man confided to him the following (Rowley 1965: 166–167): “If only you would not hide your tingting

What Happened to Cargo Cults? | 99

[thoughts, ideas] from us, we could be brothers … You and I and my children would sit down at one table, sleep in one house. We would not have to go away while you eat … If the white man would only open his hand, we would be brothers. But he keeps it tightly shut. He has locked all his knowledge in a box, and where are we to find the key?” 9. Compare with Burridge (1993), who talks about ritual work. 10. Compare with Cohn ([1957] 1970) and his emphasis on the importance of priests/prophets with special knowledge. 11. Compare with Burridge (1993: 287), who describes this situation as similar to religious redemption: “In short, kago evokes a situation in which either all desires are satisfied, or there is no such thing as desire, only bliss. That is, kago refers in at least one aspect not to anything known on this earth but to a state of being which approximates roughly to what Christians call heaven, or ‘saved’ and others call by other names.” 12. Elsewhere (Otto 2004) I have analyzed contrasting concepts of work and knowledge in relation to the production of wealth, both in the Western tradition and in Melanesia. Lattas (2007: 159) has criticized my analysis for neglecting the importance of ritual work in Melanesian societies. I acknowledge that ritual and ceremonial activities often are denoted with words that are translated as ‘work’ (see, e.g., Otto 2004: 215), but the crux of my argument is to identify the type of activities that are seen as producing wealth in Melanesia and the West, and that may or may not be called ‘work’. My conclusion is not that ‘work’ does not matter in Melanesia; it is that the crucial factor for the generation of wealth is the proper execution of the activities, that is, the knowledge on which the ‘work’ is based and which makes it effective. This can be contrasted with the Western tradition of possessive individualism (Macpherson 1962), which identifies ‘work’ as the source of the value creation by an individual and the basis of the individual’s rights to property. 13. See not only Mauss’s essay on the gift (1925), but also his essay on the person (1938). 14. Huizer (1992: 123) characterizes this social context as a “charismatic milieu” that allows the charisma of the business leaders to be effective. It springs from the complexity and unpredictability of the global economy.

References Appadurai, Arjun. 2005. “Materiality in the Future of Anthropology.” Pp. 55–62 in Commodification: Things, Agency, and Identities, ed. Wim van Binsbergen and Peter Geschiere. Münster: LIT Verlag. Billings, Dorothy K. 2002. Cargo Cult as Theater: Political Performance in the Pacific. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Blok, Anton. 1976. Wittgenstein en Elias: Een methodische richtlijn voor de antropologie. Amsterdam: Athenaeum–Polak & Van Gennep. Brunton, Ron. 1971. “Cargo Cults and Systems of Exchange in Melanesia.” Mankind 8: 115–128. Burridge, Kenelm. 1960. Mambu: A Melanesian Millennium. London: Methuen. ______. 1969. New Heaven, New Earth: A Study of Millenarian Activities. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ______. 1993. “Melanesian Cargo Cults.” Pp. 275–288 in Contemporary Pacific Societies: Studies in Development and Change, ed. Victoria S. Lockwood, Thomas G. Harding, and Ben J. Wallace. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Carrier, James. 1990. “The Symbolism of Possession in Commodity Advertising.” Man (n.s.) 25: 693–706. Cohn, Norman. [1957] 1970. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. London: Granada Publishing.

100 | Ton Otto

Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 2000. “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming.” Public Culture 12, no. 2: 291–343. Cushman, Philip. 1990. “Why the Self is Empty: Towards a Historically Situated Psychology.” American Psychologist 45, no. 5: 599–611. Dalton, Douglas. 2004. “Cargo and Cult: The Mimetic Critique of Capitalist Culture.” Pp. 187–208 in Jebens 2004a. du Gay, Paul. 1996. Consumption and Identity at Work. London: Sage. Dumont, Louis. 1977. From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Gregory, C. A. 1982. Gifts and Commodities. London: Academic Press. ______. 1997. Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Hacking, Ian. 1995. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Hermann, Elfriede. 1992. “The Yali Movement in Retrospect: Rewriting History, Redefining ‘Cargo Cult.’” Oceania 63: 55–71. ______. 2004. “Dissolving the Self-Other Dichotomy in Western Cargo ‘Cult’ Constructions.” Pp. 36–58 in Jebens 2004a. Hoskins, Janet. 1998. Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives. New York: Routledge. Huizer, Gerrit. 1992. “Cargo and Charisma: Millenarian Movements in Today’s Global Context.” Canberra Anthropology 15, no. 2: 106–130. Jarvie, Ian C. 1963. “Theories of Cargo Cults: A Critical Analysis.” Oceania 34, nos. 3 and 4: 1–31, 108–136. ______. 1964. The Revolution in Anthropology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Jebens, Holger, ed. 2004a. Cargo, Cult, and Culture Critique. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ______. 2004b. “Introduction: Cargo, Cult, and Cargo Critique.” Pp. 1–13 in Jebens 2004a. ______. 2004c. “‘Vali Did That Too’: On Western and Indigenous Cargo Discourses in West New Britain (Papua New Guinea).” Anthropological Forum 14, no. 2: 117–139. ______. 2007. Kago und Kastom: Zum Verhältnis von kultureller Fremd- und Selbstwarhnehmung in West New Britain (Papua-Neuguinea). Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Kaplan, Martha. 1995. Neither Cargo nor Cult: Ritual Politics and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ______. 2004. “Neither Traditional nor Foreign: Dialogics of Power and Agency in Fijian History.” Pp. 59–78 in Jebens 2004a. Kildea, Gary, and Andrea Simon, directors and producers. 2005. Koriam’s Law—and the Dead Who Govern. Canberra: Australian National University, RSPAS Film-Unit, and New York: Arcadia Pictures. Lattas, Andrew. 1998. Cultures of Secrecy: Reinventing Race in Bush Kaliai Cargo Cults. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ______. 2007. “Cargo Cults and the Politics of Alterity: A Review Article.” Anthropological Forum 17, no. 2: 149–161. Lawrence, Peter. 1964. Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District New Guinea. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lawrence, Peter, and Mervyn J. Meggitt, eds. 1965. Gods Ghosts and Men in Melanesia: Some Religions of Australian New Guinea and the New Hebrides. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Lindstrom, Lamont. 1993. Cargo Cult: Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ______. 2004. “Cargo Cult at the Third Millennium.” Pp. 15–35 in Jebens 2004a. Löfgren, Orvar, and Robert Willim, eds. 2005. Magic, Culture and the New Economy. Oxford: Berg.

What Happened to Cargo Cults? | 101

Maclean, Neil. 1994. “Freedom or Autonomy: A Modern Melanesian Dilemma.” Man (n.s.) 29: 667–688. Macpherson, Crawford B. 1962. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mandeville, Bernard. 1988. The Fable of the Bees: Or Private Vices, Publick Benefits. 2 vols. Ed. F. B. Kaye. Oxford: Liberty Fund. Mauss, Marcel. 1925. “Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques.” Année Sociologique (n.s.) 1: 30–186. ______. 1938. “Une catégorie de l’esprit humain: La notion de personne, celle de ‘moi.’” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 68: 263–281. McDowell, Nancy. 1988. “A Note on Cargo Cults and Cultural Constructions of Change.” Pacific Studies 11, no. 2: 121–134. Mead, Margaret. [1956] 1975. New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation—Manus, 1928– 1953. New York: William Morrow. Mosko, Mark S. 2002. “Totem and Transaction: The Objectification of ‘Tradition’ among North Mekeo.” Oceania 73: 89–109. Mühlmann, Wilhelm, ed. 1961. Chiliasmus und Nativismus. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. Otto, Ton. 1992a. “From Paliau Movement to Makasol: The Politics of Representation.” Canberra Anthropology 15, no. 2: 49–68. ______. 1992b. “Introduction: Imagining Cargo Cults.” Canberra Anthropology 15, no. 2: 1–10. ______. 1992c. “The Paliau Movement in Manus and the Objectification of Tradition.” History and Anthropology 5: 427–454. ______. 1998. “Paliau’s Stories: Autobiography and Automythography of a Melanesian Prophet.” Focaal 32: 71–87. ______. 1999. “Cargo Cults Everywhere?” Review article, Anthropological Forum 9, no. 1: 83–98. ______. 2004. “Work, Wealth and Knowledge: Enigmas of Cargoist Identifications.” Pp. 209–226 in Jebens 2004a. Robbins, Joel. 2004a. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. ______. 2004b. “On the Critique in Cargo and the Cargo in Critique: Toward a Comparative Anthropology of Critical Practice.” Pp. 243–259 in Jebens 2004a. ______. 2005. “Introduction—Humiliation and Transformation: Marshall Sahlins and the Study of Cultural Change in Melanesia.” Pp 3–21 in The Making of Global and Local Modernities in Melanesia, ed. Joel Robbins and Holly Wardlow. Aldershot: Ashgate. Rowley, C. D. 1965. The New Guinea Villager: A Retrospect from 1964. Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire. Sahlins, Marshall. 1976. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ______. 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ______. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ______. 1992. “The Economics of Develop-man in the Pacific.” Res 21: 13–25. Schwartz, Hillel. 1987. “Millenarianism: An Overview.” Pp. 521–532 in The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 9, ed. Mircea Eliade. New York: MacMillan. Schwartz, Theodore. 1962. “The Paliau Movement in the Admiralty Islands, 1946–1954.” Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 49: 207–421. ______. 1976. “The Cargo Cult: A Melanesian Type-Response to Change.” Pp. 157–206 in Responses to Change, ed. George A. DeVos. New York: Van Nostrand. Steinbauer, Friedrich. 1979. Melanesian Cargo Cults: New Salvation Movements in the South Pacific. Trans. Max Wohlwill. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

102 | Ton Otto

______. 1992. “Parts and Wholes: Refiguring Relationships.” Pp. 75–104 in Conceptualizing Society, ed. Adam Kuper. New York: Routledge. Tabani, Marc. 2008. Une piroque pour le Paradis: Le culte de John Frum à Tanna. Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Trompf, G. W., ed. 1990. Cargo Cults and Millenarian Movements: Transoceanic Comparisons of New Religious Movements. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Wagner, Roy. 1991. “The Fractal Person.” Pp. 159–173 in Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia, ed. Maurice Godelier and Marilyn Strathern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Francis E. [1923] 1976. “The Vailala Madness and the Destruction of Native Ceremonies in the Gulf Division.” Pp. 331–384 in Francis Edgar Williams: ‘The Vailala Madness’ and Other Essays, ed. Erik Schwimmer. London: C. Hurst. Worsley, Peter. [1957] 1968. The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of ‘Cargo’ Cults in Melanesia. 2nd ed. New York: Schocken Books.

( Chapter 6

Gold for a Golden Age Sacred Money and Islamic Freedom in a Global Sufi Order Nils Bubandt

[O]nly two Western movements of radical protest claim to be “internationalist” [today]: the anti-globalization movement and the radical Islamists. To convert to Islam today is a way for a European rebel to find a cause; it has little to do with theology. — Olivier Roy, “EuroIslam: The Jihad Within”

This chapter is the outline of an argument that takes issue with the above depiction of contemporary Western rebellion. The case upon which this argument builds is the Murabitun movement, a relatively small but global group of converts to Sufi Islam. The Murabitun movement is a Sufi order with established communities in 21 countries throughout the world. It is a proselytizing, or da’wa, order that consists of converts to Islam from the countries in which it settles, and it is led mainly by European converts. The head of the order is Abdal-Qadir-asSufi, a Scotsman who converted in the late 1960s to become the spiritual leader (shaykh) of a worldwide community of perhaps one thousand Sufi followers.1 Notes for this chapter begin on page 117.

104 | Nils Bubandt

A central and distinguishing feature of the Murabitun movement is that it advocates and actively promotes a return to the gold-based dinar system of the first caliphates of the Arab peninsula. Although small in numbers, the movement has become relatively influential and has succeeded in disseminating its grand design for a new and explicitly non-capitalist financial system to a number of political leaders in the Muslim world. According to the movement’s main proponents, the return to the gold dinar system will create a total economic, moral, and political upheaval, thus spelling the end for late-modern capitalism. This vision of religio-economic renewal on a global scale entails, I believe, a third alternative to the above models of contemporary internationalist dissent. Rather than the dichotomous ‘clash of rebellions’ outlined by Roy (2003), I suggest that the Murabitun movement represents one example of an array of contemporary grassroots rebellions that defy easy classification. This third kind of protest movement challenges Roy’s (ibid.) limited view of global protest as being either “secular” forms of sub-politics or “Islamic terror.” I argue that the political project of this third form of rebellion is one in which theology and politics are somewhat harder to differentiate than Roy appears to suggest.2 The resurgence of the religious into the public sphere is well-established (Casanova 1994; Habermas 2002). With the return to politics of religion in the last three decades, new forms of political critique have become possible, but the diversity of these forms of global political protest remains underexplored. As Roy’s division of current movements suggests, attention to the re-enchantment of political protest within Islam has tended to focus on Islamic fundamentalism, ignoring other forms of protest that combine the economic and the mystical, the pragmatic and the millenarian, in different ways. Certainly, the Murabitun movement is an example of an alternative form of protest that is different from that of radical Islamists but cannot be reduced to an individualized and secular form of sub-politics (Beck 1994). The Murabitun movement (and others like it) therefore forces us to rethink our ability to make a clear division between secular and religious forms of protest. As I shall show, ‘money’, ‘freedom’, and ‘politics’, concepts and institutions that are at the heart of a secular conception of society, become reinterpreted in the Murabitun movement and are brought into an Islamic imaginary model for a religious world transformation. The Murabitun project for a new religious world order is therefore founded on the capturing and reformulation of concepts and institutions that are conventionally held to be essentially secular. In explaining why a seemingly otherworldly brotherhood of mainly European converts to Sufi mysticism would be concerned with money, freedom, and politics, I suggest that the re-establishment of a virtuous and sacred kind of money for the members of the Murabitun order is key to a total social and existential transformation. The dinar system becomes a means to establish the perfect condition for both the outside practice of Islamic worship and the inner experience of God. Being the linchpin for the remaking of the outer as well as inner aspects of virtuous life, money is essential for the formation of a new kind of political society, a new kind of freedom, and a new kind of moral being (within a renewed global ummah, or community). In that sense, the Murabitun movement, it would

Gold for a Golden Age | 105

seem, espouses a paradoxically modern form of “revolutionary millenarianism” (Cohn [1957] 1970). Like the anti-globalization movement, the Murabitun movement sees global capital as the scourge of the current moment and the global ‘banking entity’ as a systemic attempt to repress human freedom. But it frames its notion of freedom and its political vision for an alternative socio-economic order within an Islamic imaginary that is millennial as well as emancipatory, mystically motivated yet economically oriented, religious and global.

The Path of the Murabitun Established around the charismatic leader Shaykh Abdal-Qadir with the initial conversion of four young English men and women in 1969, the Murabitun movement, as it came to be known, is a Sufi branch of the Darqawiyya school (tariqa) that follows the teachings of Abu Hamid al-Arabi ad-Darqawi (1760– 1823) (Trimmingham 1998: 111). The movement, which during the late 1990s abandoned the name Murabitun and discontinued the associated Web site, is a da’wa brotherhood that seeks converts to Islam in the 21 countries in which it claims to have established communities (called ribats).3 The movement follows the Maliki fiqh (Islamic laws) and has translated into English Al-Muwatta, Caliph Malik’s collections of aha¯dı¯th, or oral accounts, about Islamic jurisprudence. The book, which the movement regards as ‘the original blueprint’ for an ideal Muslim social order, is a central aspect of its teachings. In 1976, the first community was set up near Norwich in England. Initially, the idea was that the members of the community should live separately from both the British state system and ‘corrupt’ forms of Islam. The community was thus to live off its own farming produce and to provide for its own educational and health care needs (Ansari 2004: 357; Geaves 2000: 71). This experiment eventually met with failure, however. The community gave up its rural existence and moved into the city of Norwich. According to one current member, the main reason was that most converts were from an urban background and were therefore unable to support themselves by farming. The urban community in Norwich where I conducted exploratory fieldwork in 2006 presently counts about 150 converts from a very mixed background. Some older British members, mostly men, converted back in the 1970s and 1980s, but the members that form the core of the community and the current leadership around the wazir (local leader) are of black Caribbean origin.4 Like all members of the Murabitun brotherhood, the people of the Norwich community are expected to uphold the Five Pillars of Islam,5 to participate in communal study groups, to perform the special Friday prayers, and to take part in the da’wa or outreach activities to seek new members. The movement has a special set of dhikr, or invocations, that are repeated communally to remember the splendor of Allah, and the brotherhood holds annual gatherings (moussems) and regular pilgrimages to the graves (zawiyas) of saints of the order. The members educate their own children and organize extracurricular activities, such as lessons (dars) and sports activities for the children. Young adolescents are circulated between

106 | Nils Bubandt

the communities around the world, where they stay for several months or years in a kind of internal emigration (hijra) that links them into the movement while shielding them from the habits of the morally corrupt (fasihin) who inhabit the late-modern world (see also Sedgwick 2003: 41). For the ordinary members, this means that much work and a great amount of time are devoted to the movement. As one member of the Norwich community commented: It is difficult to hold a job when you are part of the movement, because there are so many tasks: education of the children, mosque activities, da’wa activities, moussem, and other things. The Shaykh has said repeatedly: “If you want to be part of the movement, be prepared to be poor.”

Like other Sufis, members of the Murabitun movement are expected to cultivate a distance between themselves and the material world because it is false and prevents a union with Allah. “It is like the movie The Matrix. Have you seen that?” one member of the Norwich brotherhood asked me, before continuing: In the movie, people walk around in a world that is not real. It is the artificial creation of a computer program called the Matrix, which simulates a reality and human freedom in which people believe without ever questioning it.

The analogy to the movie was a way of suggesting that modernity is based on a similar counterfeit notion of freedom that has enslaved humans to consumerism and a life in the throes of their senses. Behind this fake freedom is the power of global corporate finance that rules the world in a Matrix-like fashion. To this member of the Murabitun movement, the struggle of the protagonists in the Hollywood movie to ‘unplug’ people from the Matrix is similar to the movement’s attempt to reveal the Sufi path to the real freedom that exists beyond the material world. The material world is made to appear more appealing—but therefore also more fake—by the comforts of modern consumerism. This, however, will not last. “Look,” the same man continued, “with all the crises that are happening—the monetary crashes, environmental problems, and pollution—capitalism cannot continue. I predict that within 20 years it is going to break down.” “That long?” one of his companions, a young British man in his early twenties, interjected. “I would say 5 years perhaps.” “Maybe,” the older man answered pensively. “Some people say 5, but I think it’ll be 20 or so. But when it happens, then people are going to wake up and realize that the cocoon they have been living in has been an illusion.” In the movie The Matrix, the sentinels of the fake world are defeated, and humanity is saved by a human messiah called Neo. To this member at least, Shaykh Abdal-Qadir played a similar role in the destruction of the world of modern liberal capitalism. As the members seek to distance themselves from modern consumerism to prepare for the upcoming Day of Judgment, the movement will still provide for their needs. One member phrased it in the following way: “The Shaykh has said: ‘If you are good to the community, Allah will be good to you’, and so far, I have been able to provide for my family and be happy.” Central to this ability to do well without caring—and, indeed, to the movement in general—is the spiritual

Gold for a Golden Age | 107

power (baraka) of Shaykh Abdal-Qadir. “Nothing happens without the directions of the Shaykh,” as the same member put it. Most people describe their meeting with the Shaykh as a truly remarkable experience. “His eyes seemed to see right through you,” one young convert reported. Baraka is related to having a pure heart, and both are essential qualities that people strive for.6 Speaking of Shaykh Abdal-Qadir’s baraka and his ability to recognize it in others, another man said: It is with baraka like someone who knows about diamonds. He is able to distinguish a diamond even in muck, and he is able to tell whether a diamond is fake or real. With baraka it is also like that. To everyone else, telling the qualities of a diamond is impossible, all they see is a shining object … The crux of tassawuf [Sufi mysticism] is the heart: the qualities of the heart and how you manage to put your own self aside.”

The Sufi path is therefore one in which the believers seek to abandon their own selves in order to achieve a unity with the reality that is God (haqiqa). This striving toward the annihilation of the self (fana¯) and a complete orientation toward God (al-nazar ila¯ lla¯h) is said to be different for every person, but the path of Shaykh Abdal-Qadir, the leader of the Murabitun movement, is perhaps more unusual than that of most other Muslims.

The West and the Islamic Renaissance Before his conversion, Abdal-Qadir was a Scottish actor and playwright named Ian Dallas. In the 1960s, he traveled widely and came into contact with Sufi Islam in Morocco. Here he converted to Islam in 1967 under the tutelage of the Moroccan shaykh, Muhammad ibn al‑Habib (Geaves 2000: 70). According to hearsay on the Internet, al-Habib had the vision that the future revival of Islam would come, as he put it, from “the people who pee standing,” that is, from Westerners. Ian Dallas, now Abdal-Qadir, was in 1968 appointed as muqqadim (or regional representative) of the Darqawi school in Britain. For Abdal-Qadir, this appointment was far from arbitrary: it provided him with the task to seek fulfillment of his teacher’s vision. To revive the “irresistible magnetic power of Islam in the West,” a Western shaykh who had taken in the Five Pillars of Islam and savored their meaning was needed (Abdal-Qadir As-Sufi 2002: xi). In all Sufi movements, the truth comes directly from Muhammad and is handed down along a chain of teacher-to-student relationships. Abdal-Qadir thus traces his relation to the Prophet through 63 generations of Sufi teachers. The chain of succession (silsila) included in The Way of Muhammad, Abdal-Qadir’s (2002) introduction to Sufi thought, is adorned by the following quote from the Qur’an: “And there came from the farthest part of the city a man running. He said, ‘O my people, follow those who have been sent’” (ibid.: xi). This man ‘from the farthest part’ of the Islamic realm, it seems, was Abdal-Qadir himself. Like all Sufi shaykhs, Abdal-Qadir is an exemplar of Muhammad, the Perfect Human Being (al-insa¯n al-ka¯mil), who seeks to promote a mystical union with

108 | Nils Bubandt

God through the establishment of the correct practices (wird) (Sedgwick 2003: 29). Abdal-Qadir (2002: 28) himself describes the exemplar in the following, seemingly self-descriptive way: “The Shaykh calls himself Nur-i-Muhammad, the Light of Muhammad, that is, he is the luminous form of that perfection of man, he is the summit of what the human creature is in its potentiality when fully realised.” Attaining this union between man and Allah is always a struggle, but it is particularly difficult for Westerners because it can be reached only by shedding the social and cultural imprinting of modern thinking that is interposed between the self and the reality of God. “[M]odern man must dig deep into himself to see if, after the almost complete conditioning to which he has been submitted, he is able to act at all. The result of a secular liberal education is something akin, socially, to the general paralysis of the insane … The response of the free-acting people of this age will be to obey the order of Allah, glory be to Him, [as it says] in [the] Qur’an: ‘Enter Islam in its totality’ … It can also be translated: ‘Enter Islam all together’” (ibid.: xiv). Provided with a divine task, Shaykh Abdal-Qadir began building a school or tariqa of his own (the Habibiyya-Allawiyya-Darqawi Tariqa), which combined the Darqawi teachings with the guidance of Muhammad al-Fayturi, a Libyan shaykh of the Shadhilli Alawi tariqa (Geaves 2000: 70). Initially, Abdal-Qadir’s teachings had the most success among the British intellectual and artistic jet set. Stories circulating both on the Internet and among his followers claim that Abdal-Qadir played a role in the conversion to Islam of pop star Cat Stevens (later Yusuf Islam) when both of them frequented T. Rex singer Marc Bolan’s house, and that Eric Clapton’s song “Layla” was inspired by a Persian poem that Abdal-Qadir had given to Clapton (Fox 2007). Indeed, accounts like these are taken to be proof of Abdal-Qadir’s divine blessing (baraka). The movement gradually attracted enough followers so that communities, which sought to put into practice Abdal-Qadir’s moral vision for the perfect Islamic society, could be established. During the 1970s, small communities were founded first in Britain and then in Spain. The communities in Cordoba and Granada were especially important, as they were seen as the harbinger of the re-establishment of Al-Andalus, the century-long Muslim rule over Spain (Arigita 2006; Dietz 2004: 1093; Duran 1992). An important step toward realizing this goal was the building in 2003 of a grand mosque in Granada, which remains under the control of the Murabitun (BBC 2003). The movement claims to have a total of 22 communities in Spain and England, while groups with links to the Murabitun movement also exist in Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, and Australia. In the United States, a center of the movement opened in Berkeley, California, in 1977, and other communities were established later in Washington, DC , North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, and Texas (see Hermansen 2000: 170).

Restoring Global Islam in Europe and Africa Spurred on by the fair but still limited success in Europe and the United States, Abdal-Qadir began looking to other possible sites, in particular, Africa and

Gold for a Golden Age | 109

Central America. What began as the Islamic reconquest of the West gradually turned into a much more ambitious project for a global Islamic revolution originating in the West. The movement has thus established communities of indigenous converts in a number of surprising places, including Chechnya, Mexico, and black townships in South Africa (Garvin 2005).7 The global success of the Murabitun movement (if not in terms of numbers, then at least in terms of geographical spread) is no doubt related to the ability of its general theology to speak to a variety of local concerns and identity politics. The movement also appears to cater to a wide variety of “protest conversions” (Roy 2004: 317). In Britain it is part of what Olivier Roy calls a “New Age religiosity” that appeals to the modern disenchantment of white, urban, middle-class individuals by placing them within a new, close community (ibid.: 225). It also appeals to black rights activists from the Caribbean by framing the question of Islam within a discourse of black rights and anti-racism. In Mexico and Africa, the message of the movement is related to a critical engagement with Western economic and epistemic imperialism and addresses local hopes of recovering a pre-colonial identity.8 As an early pamphlet of the movement claims: “We can restore every people to the glorious ways of their ancient prophetic traditions and to the natural splendour of social justice and governance in accordance with the way of Allah” (Abdal-Qadir As-Sufi 1992: 4). In many ways, the idea that a world transformation through Islam is going to come from the West represents a revolutionary reading of the origin and future of Islam, for it contradicts the conventional Arab wisdom that views the West as a place outside the realm of Islam (dar‑ul‑Islam). Instead, the Murabitun movement places the West squarely at the center of Islam. The renewal of Islam that will precede the Day of Judgment, or qiyamah (which many of the movement’s British followers believe is imminent), can therefore only come from outside the Arab world. The Arab world and orthodox Islam have, as Abdal-Qadir puts it, “gone out of the Deen (path of God)” because of their modernist reinterpretations of Islam (Abdal-Qadir As-Sufi 2005: 46). These reinterpretations are signs of the extent to which the Arab world has been colonized mentally and brought utterly within the worldview of what Abdal-Qadir refers to as “the Enlightenment Terror Model” (Abdal-Qadir As-Sufi 2006). Paradoxically, freedom from this model can come only from a combination of the tradition of European critical theory and from the “uncorrupted” forms of Sufi Islam that have survived in Africa, namely, the Shadili-Darqawi sects in northern Africa and the Naqshbandiyya in eastern and southern Africa. In other words, the true origin and glorious future of Islam lie, for Abdal-Qadir and his followers, in Europe, Latin America, and Africa.

A New Kind of Freedom Abdal-Qadir sees himself as the spiritual leader of a different and ‘true’ Islamic protest that promotes a project of global transformation by taking aim not only at humanistic individualism but also at the entire present world system—the

110 | Nils Bubandt

Enlightenment project of democracy and individual liberty. This project, AbdalQadir claims, has itself turned into a ‘terror model’ because it is based on a series of ideals that produce the opposite of what they espouse: “‘[L]iberty’ is doomed to create slavery, ‘fraternity’ is doomed to forge enmity, and ‘equality’ is doomed to create a financial oligarchic elite” (Abdal-Qadir As-Sufi 2006). Modern capitalism has turned into a terror model because it systematically perverts the human freedom that it overtly promotes: “There is a world crisis taking place in our time. It is not what the hegemonic power elite have named ‘terrorism’, although that dreadful activity is a symptom of it. No. The crisis of our time is a more profound matter whose causes must be traced to that greatest lie, the ghastly doctrine of atheist ‘humanism’ which claims that men can determine their social destiny by human willpower and structured legalism” (ibid.). Against the ‘lie’ of the free individual advanced by humanism, Islamists promote what they see as ‘real freedom’. Abdal-Qadir’s favorite philosopher is thus Ernst Jünger, the controversial German existentialist who, according to Abdal-Qadir, saw that we need a new concept of freedom. Jünger is a complex and often ambiguous writer whose critique of the bourgeois subject and whose description of a technological world from which a selfless soldier-worker would emerge have stirred a great deal of philosophical controversy (Nevin 1996). A war hero during World War I and an ardent anti-Nazi during World War II, Jünger saw the war-veteran-turned-revolutionary as the ideal for a new kind of aristocracy that was to rule in a new kind of authoritarian society, where “freedom and obedience would be identical” (ibid.: 130). In Jünger’s critique of the bourgeois idea of individualist freedom, against which he proposed a new kind of ‘freedom in obedience’, Abdal-Qadir finds a strong resonance with the Islamic notion of total submission to Allah through an annihilation of the self.9 In an address at a symposium on Ernst Jünger, held by the movement in 1989, Abdal-Qadir said, “Jünger is … militant in his call to fight for freedom … Freedom is existence, which means that there can be no submission except to the Divine. This is Islam” (Abdal-Qadir As-Sufi 2004: 13). The new kind of emancipation envisaged by Jünger can, Abdal-Qadir maintains, be delivered by Sufi Islam because it provides the guiding principles to a new kind of political rule and to a new kind of human freedom through the abandonment of the self and surrender to Allah. At the heart of modern alienation lies the Enlightenment claim to a monopoly over freedom. This claim hides how freedom has long since been hijacked by finance, while it also, according to the movement, precludes other definitions of freedom. Freedom is to the Murabitun movement the greatest lie of Enlightenment modernity. According to Abdal-Qadir, Sufi Islam is “the culmination” of the European existentialist tradition and its critique of modernity (Abdal-Qadir As-Sufi 2002). There is no ‘clash of civilization’ here between secular modernity and Islamic traditionalism. Instead the secular, critical tradition of European philosophy— what Scott Lash (1999) has called the West’s ‘second modernity’—is transformed into a precursor to Islamic enlightenment. Much of the critique that the Murabitun movement levels at modern society, that is, at Enlightenment ideas of freedom and capitalism, has thus also been described by the European critical

Gold for a Golden Age | 111

philosophy, which Abdal-Qadir, in fact, employs to anchor his overall argument that it is in Islam that European critical philosophy achieves its apotheosis. Although comparisons between Sufism and existentialism are not new (Schimmel 1975: 76), the assertion that they are interwoven in one historical teleology is surprising. This claim is, however, at the basis of the movement’s theology, for it legitimates the central role that a movement of Western, African, and Latin American converts plays in the establishment of a new global Islamic society.

A Modern Islamic Millennium The main tool of the Murabitun movement to combat the false promises of modern capitalism and to bring about a new kind of free society and free human being is to establish the gold dinar as a global currency. A worldwide Islamic economy modeled on the early caliphates will, according to AbdalQadir, undercut the interest-based and inflation-prone capitalist monetary system: “It is a Jihad against the usurious banking entity … [which] is not merely a personnel but a method, a deen. [It is a method with] its Temples, the banks; with its holy places, the Stock Exchanges of the world; and its false scriptures, the data‑banks of figures, these magical millions and billions that hold the world’s poor to ransom for the sake of a small elite of kafir power brokers” (Abdal-Qadir As-Sufi 1991). The concrete way to fight the false religion of modern banking, which long ago hijacked the Enlightenment project, is to pursue an economic jihad by seeking to abolish paper money (deemed haram, or forbidden, in AbdalQadir’s reading of Imam Malik) and replacing it with a gold-based currency. While Shaykh Abdal-Qadir is the religious leader of the Murabitun movement, Umar Vadillo, a Spanish convert, has become its religio-legal expert (a¯lim). This division of labor has allowed the movement to deal with the two concerns of Islam within one vision. Abdal-Qadir handles the inner (ba¯tin) struggle of the converts toward the annihilation of the self, while Vadillo organizes the movement’s attempt to reshape the outer world (dha¯hir) in a moral vision of economic revolution that will allow the selfless human to evolve. Vadillo has accordingly traveled the world, advocating the gold dinar as an alternative to the interest-based economy of capitalism. He has also written a booklet, The Return of the Gold Dinar (1996), that passionately advocates the return to the bimetallic economy of the seventh-century Arab caliphates based on the gold dinar and the silver dirham. According to the movement, the text was presented to Necmittin Erbakan, who led his Islamic Welfare Party to victory in the 1995 general elections in Turkey. Erbakan, who would eventually be elected prime minister in 1996, allegedly declared that the gold dinar would be the national currency in Turkey when he assumed office. However, as members of the movement like to tell each other, before Erbakan could act on his promise, he was forced to resign after being pressured by the military in June 1997. Vadillo was also, according to his own testimony, an adviser to the Malaysian president when he attempted to mint a Malaysian gold dinar, and Vadillo claims to have

112 | Nils Bubandt

had an influence on King Hassan II, the former king of Morocco, and other Middle Eastern leaders. The first gold dinar was minted in November 2001 and was offered for sale in the United Arab Emirates through the Dubai Islamic Bank.10 The overall goal is for all trade and savings to be untied from the control of banks, even the banks that claim to be Islamic. The movement is therefore vehemently opposed to the idea of Islamic banking, proposed by some Muslim economists (see Maurer 2002, 2005). The idea of an Islamic bank is, according to Vadillo, a perversion of true faith and “as absurd as an Islamic brothel” (Vadillo 2004). Nonetheless, some form of institutional control is still necessary, it appears. To promote the dissemination of the dinar idea, Vadillo has founded the Islamic Mint and the Web-based ‘e-dinar’, an electronic extension of the dinar system. He is also the founding president of the World Islamic Trading Organisation (WITO), whose task is to supervise the global gold dinar economy. Prominent members of the movement, such as the Spanish convert Malik Ruiz and the German convert and lawyer Abu Bakr Rieger, are also on the executive board of the newly established European Muslim Union (EMU).11 In a very direct sense, then, the movement is working to establish a modern Islamic alternative to Western secular modernity. In order to do so, it has founded a series of global institutions that mimic the secular multinational organizations of today’s world. By setting up the WITO as an alternative to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the EMU as an alternative to the European Union (EU), and the Islamic Mint as an alternative to national mints, the movement explicitly seeks to shape a new set of global institutions that are compatible with their Islamic social imaginary.12 The basic idea is that gold and silver are to replace state-controlled currencies as a general medium of exchange, investment, and tax payment. The first step to this new and free economy is to convince Muslims to pay their religious alms or taxes (zakat) in gold dinar. Not only would this restore the religious tax, often claimed to be ‘the fallen’ Third Pillar of Islam, to its original glory; it would also, according to Vadillo, flood the market with a new currency beyond the control of states. The move to pay zakat in gold would, in other words, be the beginning of a financial revolution. It would be “the most important political act of the century, opening the path towards the establishment of our own halal, free currency breaking away from the usurious financial system” (Vadillo 1996: 78). The introduction of the gold dinar is the first and necessary step toward an Islamic form of emancipation, a revolution that will set the oppressed free from nationalism, secularism, and capitalism, all in one move (Vadillo 2002): The Islamic model put into practice by the Murabitun throughout the world restores to the common people the economic power hijacked by the banks and the state. The Islamic model is in harmony with the legitimate aspiration of ethnic minorities that yearn for emancipation from the grip of modern, banking‑oriented, artificial states in order to rule their own destinies … The Islamic model removes any form of monopoly, which has reduced everybody to a humble salaried worker, and thus gives a chance of independence to the self‑motivated individual in a “free‑market‑without‑usury.”

Gold for a Golden Age | 113

This ‘coup de banque’ against the dominance of finance capital and its fake Enlightenment will, so Vadillo claims, usher in a new kind of emancipation, a new kind of free subject, and a new kind of free market. Vadillo’s writings about the dinar are thus permeated with references to emancipation, a social freedom that is to provide the outer conditions for Abdal-Qadir’s notion of an inner freedom: “We want freedom to chose [sic] our medium of exchange. We want freedom to make all our payments in gold and silver, freedom to mint, buy, sell, lend, borrow, import or export any quantity of gold and use it in any commercial exchange” (Vadillo 1996: 67). The tone is clearly that of a revolutionary millenarian. The return to gold will mark the beginning of a golden era of freedom, justice, and moral rule— everything that the Enlightenment promises but that, according to the Murabitun movement, it never delivered. Ironically, it takes a religious vision to fulfill the dream of true emancipation. Real freedom can only come with a religious, millennial transformation of the world. “Reading this book,” Abdal-Qadir says in his preface to Vadillo’s (1996: iv) The Return of the Gold Dinar, “I hear the gates of Madinah swing open.” As Werbner (2004) has argued, academic analyses of Islamic millenarianism have tended to focus on the Mahdist tradition, especially within Shia Islam, which expects the return of the twelfth imam, the Mahdi, before the Day of Judgment. This focus has obscured the broader millennial strand within Islamic thinking about the return to a pristine form of Islam that would re-establish a golden age of perfect unity with God (tawhid) (ibid.: 454). The envisioned golden age is an earthly one, and the struggle to achieve it shares many of the characteristics of the modern utopian movements (ibid.: 455; see also Eisenstadt 2000; Gray 2007).13 The millennium of the Murabitun movement is also earthly. However, it is perhaps different from other Islamic utopias in that it entails not just divinely motivated human action but also a specific program of socio-economic restructuring. The dream of the golden age of unity with God (tawhid) appears, in other words, to be an oddly modern one. As a number of authors have pointed out, present-day millenarianism has been transformed into the secular idea of social progress, substituting the dream of a perfect world in a divine realm with the Enlightenment dream of a perfect world on earth (Gray 2007; Tuveson [1949] 1972).14 The modern idea of progress and social engineering is in this reading a secularized form of the religious millennium. If one accepts this notion, then it is fair to say that the Murabitun dream of a future society in complete unity with God but brought about by direct human planning desecularizes the modern millennium. The Murabitun tawhid is a post-secular utopia. It would appear that in the Murabitun movement, the secular dream of modernity that was born from religious millenarianism has been re-enchanted.

Money and Value(s) Growing out of the second modernity of critical philosophy, yet claiming that the emancipatory potential of this philosophy can be realized only through the

114 | Nils Bubandt

path of Sufi mysticism and through a world transformation that is at once the will of Allah and the result of a financial revolution, the Murabitun movement is hard to categorize. Its vision of a perfect society entails emancipation without Enlightenment, modernity without democracy, free market without liberalism, and it is captured by a Sufi eschatology that is simultaneously inward-looking and financially active. This seeming contradiction between mystical world renewal and an interest in finance is, however, superficial. It is in money, I argue, that social revolution and religious renewal fuse into one moral utopia. The mystical path of the Sufi (tariqa) seeks, like all Islam, to reconcile the outer (dha¯hir) world of laws and prohibitions, as set down by Allah in the Sharia, or Islamic religious law, with the inner (ba¯tin) world that seeks to know the ‘Divine Truth of His Being’ (haqiqa). The ultimate goal is to achieve individual salvation by comprehending “the overwhelming truth that there is no deity but Allah” and to re-create at the end of time the primordial covenant that existed between Allah and humanity even before the existence of humankind (Schimmel 1975: 24). In that sense, Sufi mysticism always contains a moral and utopian vision of society (Heck 2006). Sufism is therefore not merely a retreat into the otherworld, an apolitical inwardness (ibid.: 260). On the contrary, it is a political kind of otherworldliness that points directly to the realm of politics and law. As a token of worth that is closely linked to certain values, money is where the inner world of morality meets the outer world of law (Graeber 2001). Money is also a vehicle for a particular kind of society and an accompanying set of notions about freedom (Bauman 1988). Money is a site from where one can politically imagine ‘the good society’. This is because of the ability of money to shape a new society, a new religious person, and a new kind of emancipation—in other words, to act as an agent (along with divine intervention) in the realization of a truly Islamic social imaginary. It is this ability that makes money worth concerted effort. Strikingly, it is through money that this late-modern yet counter-secular protest movement seeks to institute a world transformation. Whether money in itself generates a just and modern kind of society or, conversely, threatens modernity’s dream of emancipation has been a central controversy of Western social theory since Aristotle condemned money for undermining the natural self-sufficiency of human beings (Bloch and Parry 1989: 2). A fundamental ambivalence has been detectable in most central social and moral theories about money ever since. Freedom and moral corruption are thus persistent concerns in both academic and popular discussions about money. For Simmel (1978), for instance, money allowed the peasants freedom but, by introducing a new form of social alienation, also destroyed the moral order of their traditions. The same ambivalence toward money as both alienating and emancipating is found in the writings of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Marcel Mauss (Akin and Robbins 1999; Bloch and Parry 1989; Sayer 1991) and, indeed, in much anthropological literature about money (Gregory 1982, 1997; Taussig 1980). The role that money plays in the vision of the Murabitun movement suggests that it is part of this general debate about the vices and virtues of money. In the

Gold for a Golden Age | 115

Murabitun movement, money is the place where late-modern sub-politics and an Islamic super-politics meet. It is by remaking a sacred kind of money that a radical transformation of both the self and the world becomes possible. The “Islamic politique” of the movement aims at the abolishment of normal politics as determined by the banking system (Abdal-Qadir As-Sufi 2005). The return of the gold dinar, Vadillo (1996) claims, marks “the end of political money.” The globalization of religious money makes possible a new world order and a new form of religious emancipation. It is through money that society, morality, and subjectivity will be transformed. As Bloch and Parry (1989: 3) point out, social theory has had a tendency to credit money “with an intrinsic power to revolutionize society and culture.” This tendency to ascribe an intrinsic agency to money may not be restricted to social scientists, however. In a fascinating and constructive critique of Bloch and Parry, Robbins and Akin (1999: 29), in their introduction to a volume analyzing currencies in Melanesia, note how people throughout the region have “drawn on indigenous models of agency in formulating an understanding of money.” In the same way, the Murabitun movement locates money within a particular Islamic understanding and assigns it a divine form of agency. The gold dinar is, as Abdal-Qadir puts it, “part of the Revelation” (Abdal-Qadir As-Sufi 1996: 103). It is a ‘natural’ currency derived directly from Allah, as opposed to the artificial, man-made currencies of the modern world. Because there is no “perfect human society” (ibid.: 85), it is only by re-creating the society that Allah allowed the Prophet Muhammad to shape that a perfect world can be fashioned. As opposed to most other Muslim groups who share this general vision but have no direct way of realizing it, the Murabitun movement has added a program of immediate redemptive action. Money becomes the most important and, indeed, only viable agent in this endeavor, because in the dinar, a ‘pure’ kind of money, the will of Allah can be combined with millennial action.

Conclusion: Rethinking Freedom, Money, and Politics This chapter has pointed to some of the secular-religious entanglements of the political and religious project of world renewal espoused by the Murabitun movement. It is, I suggest, an example of a protest movement that is simultaneously intellectual and millenarian, religious and modern. The movement illustrates, as perhaps do many of today’s transnational religious movements, that what Appadurai (2006) refers to as “grassroots globalisation” is not restricted to secular, activist NGOs that promote single-cause politics, such as human rights, environmental protection, or gender issues. The Murabitun movement is an example of a different kind of ‘globalization from below’. It is a global theological brotherhood that defies classification in many interesting ways. Let me end by pointing to two of the most important. Firstly, the philosophy of the Murabitun movement is a seemingly idiosyncratic mix of Western critical philosophy and Islamic mysticism. A traditionalist

116 | Nils Bubandt

Sufi movement steeped in North African mysticism, it is also heavily influenced by German existential philosophy. Its critique of Western materialism and modern individualism is very similar to that of many New Age movements, and its condemnation of the hypocrisy of the current political geo-political world order sounds similar to what one could find in many academic journals. Yet in the Murabitun movement, it is Islamic mysticism with its hagiography of saints (wali) that comes to provide the answer to the modern malaise. In the midst of a global ‘war on Islamic terror’, it is paradoxically from a European revival of the true cultural roots of Islam and its divine currency that redemption from the discontent with secular Enlightenment and modern capitalism is to come. The combination of Western auto-critique and Islamic mysticism is therefore not oxymoronic; rather, it intimates a common (and paradoxically modern) vision about the possibility for a truly global world transformation. Secondly, the politics of the Murabitun movement blur conventional distinctions between religion and the political sphere. I argue that the questions of why an otherworldly Sufi brotherhood would be concerned with money and how, through an idiosyncratic fusion of European existential philosophy and Islamic gnosis, it is able to combine the sub-politics of individual salvation with an Islamic politique speak directly to current transformations of political protest and the contemporary re-enchantment of politics. The Murabitun movement is an example of a counter-secular form of protest that attempts to break down the monopoly of secular modernity on treasured concepts such as freedom, money, and politics. It does so by suggesting emancipation as a counter-Enlightenment, Islamic ideal. To achieve the ideal religious society in which real freedom is possible, the movement has launched a program that it hopes will eventually allow ‘natural’ or ‘divine’ money to replace the artificial money that dominates the global markets of secular democracy. These alternative notions about the social and moral implications of freedom and money also entail a new political imaginary. In the millennial vision of the Murabitun movement, the sub-politics of individual salvation is thus coupled with a divinely ordained and mystically foreshadowed super-politics that seeks to abolish the realm of the political itself in favor of a global state in submission to God. It is in the Murabitun movement’s millennial revision of the imaginaries and institutions of freedom, money, and politics that one sees a new version of the “revolutionary millenarianism” described by Norman Cohn ([1957] 1970). The movement’s vision of the caliphate and how it might come about has all the characteristics of Cohn’s millenarian salvation: it is collective, imminent, and total, and it will result in a new kingdom on earth through the will of God (ibid.: 15). Salvation will come at a time of fundamental crisis and social change and will, as evidenced in the movement’s reworking of the central themes of freedom, money and politics, turn ‘the world on its head’. Yet while Cohn felt convinced that the revolutionary millenarian movements of contemporary life would increasingly be secular (ibid.: 286), new religious protest movements like the Murabitun Sufi order suggest that an increasingly important axis of protest in the contemporary world emerges exactly in the interstices of the secular and the religious.

Gold for a Golden Age | 117

Acknowledgments I would like to thank the people from the Sufi community in Norwich for their openness, kindness, and hospitality. If my description is ill-informed or offensive, the fault is entirely mine. I would also like to thank Bruce Kapferer, Kari Telle, Annelin Eriksen, and Social Analysis for their editorial care and the three first for organizing the conference that gave birth to this volume.

Nils Bubandt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Ethnography at the University of Aarhus and is co-editor-in-chief of the journal Ethnos. Apart from exploratory fieldwork with converts to Islam in Britain, he has conducted extensive fieldwork in Indonesia for two decades. He has published widely on globalization, conflict, and millenarianism. Recent articles include “From the Enemy’s Point of View: Violence, Empathy and the Ethnography of Fakes” (2009); “Rumours, Pamphlets and the Politics of Paranoia in Indonesia” (2008); “Sorcery, Corruption and the Dangers of Democracy in Indonesia” (2006).

Notes 1. As the initial result of a recently started research project, this chapter is a first attempt at an analysis of the Murabitun movement and is based mainly on literature and Internetbased research. In addition, I have spent a week in Norwich, England, and have participated in the activities of this the first Murabitun community. I hope in the future to expand research to more communities within the global brotherhood network. So far, I have found the members of the movement to be open, hospitable, and friendly, although, in accordance with the nature of this proselytizing (da’wa) movement, in which people are ‘called’ to join Islam, its members expressed a clear interest in converting me. I have also heard enough of their philosophy and of their antipathy toward Wahabism, Salafism, and violent forms of Islam to convince me that the Murabitun movement is not a ‘radical Islamic’ movement in any conventional sense. Yet the political project envisioned by its members is strongly anti-democratic and entails a return to the political, financial, and moral rules of the first caliphates (as they are now imagined). In addition, in some quarters on the Internet, the movement is accused of having anti-Semitic and Nazi leanings. The paradoxical nature of the movement that I seek to analyze in this chapter therefore also presents a personal and political challenge for me. The personal and methodological challenges of studying people whose politics may stand in a complicated relationship to one’s own (rather than the conventional exotic others who are economic ‘underdogs’ and whose politics are ‘worlds apart’ and therefore do not affect one’s own world) have been discussed by others (Caplan 2003; Marcus 1998). Clearly, one needs to take a moral and political stance at some juncture. Nevertheless, in order to do a proper ethnographic analysis of the theology and politics of movements of radical protest such as the Murabitun, it is also imperative not to slip inadvertently into the morality of contemporary political common sense, since it is this very common sense that these movements seek to challenge. 2. Olivier Roy’s book Globalized Islam (2004) is part of a continuing and very apposite rebuttal of the essentializing culturalist explanations about the rise of political Islam—for

118 | Nils Bubandt











example, those put forward by Huntington (1996) and Lewis (2003)—that have gained currency in recent years. The reasons for Islamic fundamentalism, so Roy (2004) argues, are to be found not in any essential characteristic of Islam as a religion, but in the dynamics of identity politics in a global world (see also Roy 1995). While Roy’s argument is an important counterweight to essentialist approaches, it shares—as others have also pointed out (see Sinanovic 2005)—the same kind of watertight division between culture and politics that the people whom Roy criticizes also maintain. While for Huntington, political Islam ends up being all about culture, for Roy it ends up being all about politics. My argument, then, is not so much aimed against Roy as it is aimed against the theoretical opposition between politics and culture (or religion) within which the debate about ‘political Islam’ operates. The symbolic, ontological, theological, and imaginary aspects of political Islam are, as this chapter will aim to show, much too important and interesting to be left to Huntington and Lewis. 3. The decision to abandon the name was related to the long string of public controversies in which the movement became involved (see more on this below) and from which it now seeks to distance itself in order to focus on its main da’wa tasks of conversion and world renewal. Although its original name is no longer used by the movement, which now prefers to be associated merely with the name of Shaykh Abdal-Qadir (see http:// www.shaykhabdalqadir.com), for the sake of clarity I will use the name Murabitun in this chapter to denote the global community of brotherhoods that pay allegiance to Shaykh Abdal-Qadir. The word murabitun, which in Europe was transliterated as almoravid or marabout, refers to the Berber dynasty that established itself in North Africa in the early eleventh century. Consisting of nomadic groups that were organized in fortified convents (ribat) under the leadership of a religious principal, the Murabitun controlled much of the Saharan region. After the fall of Toledo to Christian forces in 1085, the Murabitun were called upon to help defend the Islamic Al-Andalus in Spain. Between the late eleventh century and the early part of the twelfth century, the Murabitun dynasty ruled much of Muslim Spain before being replaced by another dynasty, the Muwahhidun (Bearman et al. 2006). 4. This group of migrants came to Norwich in the mid-1990s from the London migrant ghetto of Brixton. Like many other Caribbean people in London, they became politically engaged in the black rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Born into Catholicism, they converted to Islam as the true ‘black religion’ in the 1970s and joined other Islamic groups (on the identity politics of black Islam, see Aidi 2005). During the 1990s, they became attracted to the charismatic teachings of Abdal-Qadir, although the idea that black activists were sitting at the feet of a white shaykh created some scandal in the militant migrant communities. According to their own account, this escalated into political tension when many Brixton Muslims turned toward a stricter Wahabi form of Islam. Upon the bidding of Abdal-Qadir, half a dozen families had therefore left Brixton in the late 1990s to take over the leadership of the withering community in Norwich. 5. The Five Pillars or duties of the Muslim believer are (1) the profession of faith (Shahada), (2) the daily prayers (Salah), (3) the giving of alms (Zakat), (4) fasting during the Ramadan (Saum), and (5) the pilgrimage to Mecca (Hajj). 6. Baraka or blessing is a central part of Sufi mysticism (Werbner 2003: 22). Like the light (nur) that emanates from the Prophet, baraka derives directly from God and flows through the shaykh (or wali). It can be traced in the chain of grace (silsila) that connects the living shaykh through a line of previous shaykhs within each school or tariqa back to the Prophet himself, and it resides in the shaykh even after his death (Sedgwick 2003: 32). Ordinary members of a Sufi community may therefore seek out baraka by associating themselves closely with and adhering to the advice of the living shaykh, or by performing pilgrimages to the tombs (zawiya) of deceased shaykhs within their school. 7. In Chiapas, Mexico, for instance, about 300 mainly Tzotzil-speaking Indians have converted to the movement since the mid-1990s, when the community called Mision para el Da’wa was set up in San Cristobal. Initially established by six Sufi families from Spain,

Gold for a Golden Age | 119

the community is now headed by an amir appointed by Abdal-Qadir (Fox 2007). For these converts, the acceptance of Islam is a way to remedy 500 years of Spanish occupation and to recover the originally Islamic roots of Spain. South America was colonized by the ‘wrong’ Spain, so to speak, and now the Spanish Sufis appear to bring a promise to recover a past that the continent was never given. For these and many other Latin American Muslim converts, Islam reclaims a glorious era that was lost in 1492 (Aidi 2005: 38). A similar story of redemption from colonial oppression and recovery of a glorious past is the main appeal behind the Murabitun movement’s success in South Africa, where Abdal-Qadir currently lives (see Abdal-Qadir As-Sufi 2005; Haron 2005). In Cape Town, the movement has established the Dallas College to educate its members in the ways of the tariqa and to teach them about Islam as the true black religion. By converting to Islam, they will regain their own authentic identity as blacks and be able to build a new and unquestionably post-colonial society on the ruins of ‘imperialist capitalism’. 8. In almost every location, the closed and exclusive character of the Murabitun movement, combined with its tendency to denounce other forms of Islam, has landed it in controversy. In Britain, the movement was accused of taking over the Ihsan mosque in Norwich by stealth and excluding other Muslims from praying in it. In the Chiapas, the amir was said to have made contact with the Zapatistas and suggested some form of collaboration in their political struggle. In Granada, the movement was accused of securing financing for the building of its mosque from undisclosed Middle Eastern sources. And in South Africa, a former amir was replaced because of his abuse of power and because he had “interpreted aspects of Islam in an extremely literal manner” (Haron 2005: 274). Despite controversy, however, the Murabitun movement appears firmly established and enjoys some success in attracting new converts in most places. In Britain, for instance, the movement remains one of the most successful Islamic da’wa groups (see Köse 1996; Köse and Loewenthal 2000). 9. In the same way, Abdal-Qadir (2004) sees Jünger’s opposition between the masses and the “new aristocracy,” who have seen “the shape of things to come,” as a mirror of his own opposition between the somnambulist kuffar (infidel) Westerner and those who have converted to true Islam. 10. Apart from influencing political leaders in the Islamic world from Morocco to Malaysia, for whom the gold dinar holds up an enticing political promise of undercutting Western economic dominance, Vadillo has also contacted proponents of other alternative currencies, such as the HOURS project that has established an alternative currency in Ithaca, New York (Maurer 2005: 123). 11. For the Islamic Mint Web site, see http://www.islamicmint.com/. For the e-dinar Web site, see http://www.e-dinar.www.islamicmint.com/. For the European Muslim Union Web site, see http://www.emunion.eu/. 12. Early on, this imaginary captured the interest of people in some unlikely quarters. In 1998, the Murabitun plan for a gold-based economy was the subject of an article in Gold-Eagle, the publication of an international group of politically conservative gold producers, who advocate the return to a gold-based economy. The article compared the Murabitun plan to the Pakistani nuclear program, calling it “another kind of bomb.” This seemingly benign financial bomb posed, according to the article, “an even bigger threat to our existing financial system” than the volatile political situation in South Asia (Taylor 1998; see also Maurer 2005: 123). 13. Vadillo has engaged in a heated Internet debate on the issue of the millennium with members of the Haqqani Naqshbandi school, a competing brotherhood of European converts to Sufism under the leadership of Shaykh Muhammad Nazim (see Geaves 2000). In this debate, Vadillo vehemently rejects the idea of waiting for the Mahdi as being counter to Islam. Instead, the alternative is direct human action (Vadillo 2004). 14. Modernist ideas of the perfect society, whether this perfect society comes in the shape of state socialism or neo-liberal democracy, are heirs to the Fifth Monarchists, who in midseventeenth-century England came close to controlling Parliament. Although the English

120 | Nils Bubandt

Civil War (1642–1651) was a battle for political control between the monarchy and Parliament, a battle that Parliament eventually won under the leadership of Cromwell, it was a period saturated with millenarian ideas. The Fifth Monarchists, some of the more literal millenarians of the time, believed that all earthly institutions needed to be abolished and replaced by a form of political rule based on a biblical model (Hill 1978; Thompson 1996: 91). This was the first time that the idea of a perfect society that could be formed on earth through human labor and political reorganization was explicitly stated. Ironically, then, the English Civil War, conventionally identified with the establishment of modern parliamentary rule and economic nationalism, also introduced millenarianism into political thinking in the shape of the idea of progress (Campion 1994; Gray 2007).

References Abdal-Qadir As-Sufi, S. 1991. Sign of the Sword. London: Black Stone Press. ______. 1992. Murabitun World Movement. Norwich: Madinah Press. ______. 1996. The Return of the Khalifate. Cape Town: Madinah Press. ______. 2002. The Way of Muhammad. London: Madinah Press. ______. 2004. Ernst Jünger Symposium, Bilbao 1989. http://www.ilbolerodiravel.org/ vetriolo/abdalqadir-iunger.pdf (accessed 24 August 2007). ______. 2005. Letter to an African Muslim. Kuala Lumpur: Madinah Press. ______. 2006. Think Again. http://www.shaykhabdalqadir.com/content/articles/Art061_ 30052006.html (accessed 26 September 2006. Aidi, Hisham. 2005. “Let Us Be Moors: Islam, Race, and ‘Connected Histories.’” Souls 7, no. 1: 36–51. Akin, David, and Joel Robbins, eds. 1999. Money and Modernity: State and Local Currencies in Melanesia. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Ansari, Humayun. 2004. The Infidel Within: Muslims in Britain since 1800. London: Hurst. Appadurai, Arjun. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay in the Geography of Anger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Arigita, E. 2006. “Representing Islam in Spain: Muslim Identities and the Contestation of Leadership.” Muslim World 96, no. 4: 563–584. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1988. Freedom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. BBC. 2003. “Mosque Signals Muslims’ Return to Spain.” BBC News, 10 July http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/europe/3055377.stm (accessed 19 August 2007). Bearman, P., T. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs. 2006. Encyclopaedia of Islam Online. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV. Beck, Ulrich. 1994. “The Reinvention of Politics.” Pp. 1–55 in Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition, and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, ed. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bloch, Maurice, and Jonathan Parry. 1989. “Introduction: Money and the Morality of Exchange.” Pp. 1–32 in Money and the Morality of Exchange, ed. Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Campion, Nicholas. 1994. The Great Year: Astrology, Millenarianism and History in the Western Tradition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Caplan, Pat, ed. 2003. The Ethics of Anthropology: Debates and Dilemmas. London: Routledge. Casanova, José. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cohn, Norman. [1957] 1970. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. New York: Oxford University Press. Dietz, Gunther. 2004. “Frontier Hybridisation or Culture Clash? Transnational Migrant Communities and Sub-National Identity Politics in Andalusia, Spain.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30, no. 6: 1087–1112.

Gold for a Golden Age | 121

Duran, Khalid. 1992. “Andalusia’s Nostalgia for Progress and Harmonious Heresy.” Middle East Report 178: 20–23. Eisenstadt, S. N. 2000. Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution: The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fox, Conrad. 2007. “Chiapas Jihad.” Conrad Fox: Radio and Reporting. http://www.angelfire. com/cantina/cwfox/index.html (accessed 19 August 2007). Garvin, Natascha. 2005. “Conversion and Conflict: Muslims in Mexico.” ISIM Review 15: 18–19. Geaves, Ron. 2000. The Sufis of Britain: An Exploration of Muslim Identity. Cardiff: Cardiff Academic Press. Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave. Gray, John. 2007. Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. London: Penguin Group. Gregory, Christopher. 1982. Gifts and Commodities. New York: Academic Press. ______. 1997. Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Habermas, Jürgen. 2002. Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Haron, Muhammed. 2005. “Da’wah Movements and Sufi Tariqahs: Competing for Spiritual Spaces in Contemporary South(ern) Africa.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 25, no. 2: 261–285. Heck, Paul L. 2006. “Mysticism and Morality: The Case of Sufism.” Journal of Religious Ethics 34, no. 2: 253–286. Hermansen, Marcia. 2000. “Hybrid Identity Formations in Muslim American: The Case of American Sufi Movements.” Muslim World 90: 158–197. Hill, Christopher. 1978. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Köse, Ali. 1996. Conversion to Islam: A Study of Native British Converts. London: Kegan Paul. Köse, Ali, and Kate M. Loewenthal. 2000. “Conversion Motifs among British Converts to Islam.” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 10, no. 2: 101–110. Lash, Scott. 1999. Another Modernity, A Different Rationality. Oxford: Blackwell. Lewis, Bernard. 2003. What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East. New York: Perennial. Marcus, George E. 1998. Ethnography through Thick and Thin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Maurer, Bill. 2002. “Chrysography: Substance and Effect.” Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 3, no. 1: 49–74. ______. 2005. Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nevin, Thomas R. 1996. Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914–1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Robbins, Joel, and David Akin. 1999. “An Introduction to Melanesian Currencies: Agency, Identity, and Social Reproduction.” Pp. 1–40 in Akin and Robbins 1999. Roy, Olivier. 1995. The Failure of Political Islam. Trans. Carol Volk. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ______. 2003. “EuroIslam: The Jihad Within?” National Interest (Spring): 63–73. ______. 2004. Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah. London: C. Hurst. Sayer, Derek. 1991. Capitalism and Modernity: An Excursus on Marx and Weber. London: Routledge. Schimmel, Annemarie. 1975. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Sedgwick, Mark J. 2003. Sufism: The Essentials. Cairo: American University.

122 | Nils Bubandt

Simmel, Georg. 1978. The Philosophy of Money. Trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. London: Routledge. Sinanovic, Ermin. 2005. “Post-Islamism: The Failure of Islamic Activism?” International Studies Review 7, no. 3: 433–436. Taussig, Michael T. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Taylor, Jay. 1998. “The Islamic (Gold) Dinar.” Gold-Eagle. http://www.gold-eagle.com/ editorials_ 98/taylor112598.html (accessed 13 September 2007). Thompson, Damian. 1996. The End of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium. London: Minerva. Trimmingham, John S. 1998. The Sufi Orders in Islam. New York: Oxford University Press. Tuveson, Ernest L. [1949] 1972. Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress. Gloucester: Peter Smith. Vadillo, Umar. 1996. The Return of the Gold Dinar. London: Bookworm. ______. 2002. “The Force of the Murabitun: Islamic Trading in the Modern World.” 27 November. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/6588/force.html (accessed 17 August 2007). ______. 2004. Reply to Mr Haddad’s Criticism of the Book “Esoteric Deviation In Islam.” http://mac.abc.se/home/onesr/ez/dc/mnuv_e.html (accessed 17 August 2007). Werbner, Pnina. 2003. Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ______. 2004. “The Predicament of Diaspora and Millennial Islam.” Ethnicities 4, no. 4: 451–476.

( Chapter 7

Sri Lankan Civil Society and Its Fanatics Rohan Bastin

The history of the Crusades is marked by the most astonishing series of directional changes: the firm orientation towards the Holy Land as a center to reach often seems nothing more than a pretext. But it would be wrong to say that the play of self-interest, or economic, commercial, or political factors, diverted the crusade from its pure path. The idea of the crusade in itself implies this variability of directions, broken and changing, and intrinsically possesses all these factors or all these variables from the moment it turns religion into a war machine and simultaneously utilizes and gives rise to the corresponding nomadism. — Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Contemporary Buddhist militancy or fanaticism in Sri Lanka reacts against Christian evangelism and Tamil separatism as it articulates with broader global discourses concerning so-called civil society. It thus reveals features of the Notes for this chapter are located on page 138.

124 | Rohan Bastin

relationship between complicity and resistance in the formation and re-formation of current global singularities. The idea of global singularity will be discussed below, but first I will expand on fanaticism and its connection to civil society. I derive the idea from Dominique Colas (1997), who argues that European history is marked by moments of fanatical iconoclasm—the smashing or destruction of ideal representations of the seemingly ‘natural’ order of the state. These moments are occasioned by the intolerance of politico-religious fanaticism, which demands the reconfiguration of the differences between and identity of civil society and the state. Writing in the circumstances of the aggressive iconoclasm linked to the demise of the Communist states of Eastern Europe, Colas presages the present ‘war on terror’ sparked by the fanatical iconoclasm of the 2001 attack on symbols of the United States and its relation to ‘Empire’ (epitomized by the World Trade Center). As Hardt and Negri (2005) note, the war on terror is a war on an abstraction and thus an element of the current global state of war. With Colas as my point of departure, I recognize how concepts such as ‘civil society’ and ‘governance’—expressed in the new state form, ‘global civil society’—are linked to this global state of war as well as to other conceptual shifts, such as the “withering” of civil society (Hardt 1998) via its displacement into “societies of control” (Deleuze 1998). This is the movement from discipline and governmentality, encased within the dyad of state and civil society, to the displacement of that dyad into a global civil society (and state) of control. Such a displacement entails the encompassment of heterogeneous social formations through “the logic of capitalist production perfected in the factory” entering all forms of social production (Hardt 1998: 31) and doing so with the appearance of freedom and a sense of utopian possibility—“our future” (Deleuze 1998: 18; see also J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff 2000). Deleuze employs the trope of highway construction to describe such a possibility or future. Confinement is reduced as the sense of freedom (to consume) increases and, with that, control is maximized. Hardt and Negri’s (2000) analysis of the globalized class formation they term ‘Empire’ examines the situation in more detail while casting our current moment as an interregnum between discipline and control. Colas (1997: 349) echoes this sense of encompassing possibility when he declares that the new post-Leninist “law-governed state” is civil society. However, his depiction marginalizes the global state of war and its associated fanatical iconoclasm, as he seems to predict an encompassed future whereby the tension is resolved, rather than an encompassing totality that preserves forms of abased ‘bare life’ as ongoing features of an interregnum that is bloody and thus grounded in a teleology more than a state of affairs. This teleology reveals, I suggest, the ongoing power and force of the Crusader nomadism that Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter. Moreover, it demonstrates that this nomadism or capacity to deterritorialize is not restricted to Christians in the current epoch—nor is fanatical iconoclasm, which, I argue, is a powerful expression of nomadism and the war machine as these features are ‘captured’ by contemporary nationstates engaging in the global state of war. Sri Lanka is one such nation-state, and its militant monks are some of its agents.

Sri Lankan Civil Society and Its Fanatics | 125

I wish, then, to draw inspiration from Colas’s thesis concerning civil society and fanaticism without subscribing to his optimism for the law-governed state or to Hardt and Negri’s optimism concerning the future of the interregnum.1 My argument is that Buddhist fanaticism in Sri Lanka is iconoclastic and that it intensifies in tandem with, not simply in reaction to, the intensification by Sri Lankans and non–Sri Lankans of the utopian global civil society (GCS) as the society of control. To demonstrate this, I describe the recent history of Buddhist clerical militancy, which has developed in the conditions of crisis generated by Sri Lanka’s civil war; the nature of political elites and their structures of patronage; examples of iconoclasm, including anti-state sorcery; and the impact of the 2004 Boxing Day (December 26) tsunami. My thesis is that contemporary religious forms both reflect and engage with the process of the developing GCS, but simultaneously provoke antagonism as they marshal the state apparatus in opposition to the decentered and deterritorializing multi-directionality of GCS. The militant or fanatical Buddhists I will sketch here are only a segment of the Sri Lankan context and, as several authors note, they are a disparate and fragmented sector. They reveal the friction as well as the resonance between complicity and resistance in local contexts where reactions to global utopias are both antagonistic and enabling (Ifeka 2004). My argument is not, therefore, a simple refrain of the global versus the local, or an assertion that fanatical monks constitute a reactionary recidivism to the march of history; rather, it is an exploration of a contemporary state form and its apparatus of capture.

Global Singularities and the Global State of War The concept of singularity derives primarily from Deleuze.2 Hardt and Negri (2005: 381n52) use the term to describe the ‘multitude’—a form of global participation that establishes the political subject emergent in the circumstances of Empire to challenge its trajectories and its hegemony. As a global singularity, the multitude is a multiplicity of singular differences. Heterogeneity, conflict, and crisis mark the nature of the multitude; its vibrancy is conditioned in the global state of war and the associated intensification of the technologies of biopower (ibid.: 12ff.). Comprising inter alia the wars on terror, poverty, and drugs, the current global state of war involves wars on abstractions that deliberately transcend the boundaries of nation-states and the political ideologies that led to the previous global wars (ibid.: 37). The global state of war thus begins to realize the formation of the global mass or multitude via the nature of the new and abstract (and thus ubiquitous) enemies. Everywhere and nowhere, terror, poverty, and drugs conflict with and destabilize citizenship and human rights as grounded universals. The utopia with which local imaginaries contend in this discursive field is global civil society. GCS is not simply the powerfully imagined resolution of nationalism—the resolution of the political and the religious in the idea of the nation. It is the imaginary sphere of the global ecumene, the virtual world of the post-national multitude or international organizations with actualities grounded in disasters, logistics and mass

126 | Rohan Bastin

communications, and mobilizations that are taking place in the “third space” or “intermediate milieu” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 435) between the state and the capitalist corporation. The term ‘third space’ abounds in the rapidly expanding literature on GCS that is produced by various participating commentators, mostly new era consultant-academics, who proffer deliberately open-ended and strategically inclusive (or encompassing) definitions, which are thus part of the expanding order of control.3 Globally linked research institutes provide part of the institutional materiality for this encompassing discourse, with many displaying a characteristic ‘third-way’ managerial structure (or governance) that is avowedly neither state-based nor corporate-style (and thus new state). Transparency, which is paramount, is what separates GCS organizations from other global third-way organizations such as al-Qaeda (Wild 2006: 5). As a recent critic (Jaeger 2007) notes, transparency or ‘good governance’ is also at the heart of GCS’s mainstream Western status, its internality. Under the mantle of a supposed depoliticization of the world of nation-states, GCS is thus a reterritorialization of the political. It thrives on the abstractions associated with the global state of war. In a country where the war on terror contains brutal concrete immediacies, Sri Lanka is, nevertheless, increasingly overdetermined by the new GCS imaginary. Indeed, this is so precisely because of its civil war (Bastian 2007; Bastin 2001). Sri Lanka’s articulation with the current world system includes labor migration, remittance and other forms of capital investment, expansion (both numerically and geographically) of the bourgeoisie, and structural adjustment of what was once a heavily centralized, welfare-oriented state. However, it also includes war and natural disasters (especially the 2004 tsunami) and the GCS and other corporate structures that are mobilized therewith. In the following, I shall examine only some of these features with the expectation that the reader is alive to them at least in relation to other contexts. I will detail features of Buddhist revitalization and its links to the Sri Lankan colonial capitalist social formation, and explain how this social formation entails deeply engrained networks of patronage and, linked to them, forms of structural violence that are being reproduced in the post-colonial era. Buddhist clerical militancy and fanaticism emerge in this context, a context marked—indeed, overdetermined—by civil war and an intense global articulation brought on by this war. What I show is how a section of Sri Lankan society—the politicized monks of the Jathika Hela Urumaya (National Heritage Party)—engages in acts of fanatical iconoclasm and thereby participates in a broader global singularity linked to GCS. They do this through an attempt to capture the Sri Lankan state, something that brings them into the domain of the global state or GCS. I use the term ‘State’ here to describe both the institutional form and its discursive or conceptual order, as well as to frame the State in relation to its externality—the ‘war machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). The state and the war machine are modalities of power by which the former captures and is also undone by the potentiality of the latter. Specific nation-states or governments or polities are instances of the state that have captured and mobilized the war machine, or are struggling with it deterritorializing power.4 Thus, in my usage,

Sri Lankan Civil Society and Its Fanatics | 127

GCS is an expression of the state as such an apparatus of capture. At the same time, the imagined rupture in the Sinhalese Buddhist state and the attempt by militant Buddhists to resolve it are also elements in the apparatus of capture. The two attempts are of a different order but are part of a larger singularity.

Buddhist Revitalization and Militancy The broad Buddhist revitalization movement in Sri Lanka comprises diverse elements with roots dating back at least to the eighteenth-century revival of monastic orders and ordination, as well as assertions of Sinhalese ethnicity and Buddhist ritual from the independent and largely land-locked kingdom of Kandy during Dutch colonial rule (1656–1796) (Malalgoda 1976). The movement includes puritanism or fundamentalism and a strong sense of adversity, whereby Buddhism is regarded as being in a state of continual struggle with corrupting and debilitating forces. The essence of the struggle is a sense of rupture between the polity and the order of religion (Wickremeratne 1995). Dated variously to the colonial period, the rupture is sometimes connected to the 1739 accession to the Kandyan throne of the Nayakkar dynasty, whose roots were South Indian (and Hindu) (ibid.: 149), and, more commonly, to the British annexation of Kandy in 1815 (ibid.: 271, 311), when certain nobles rebelled against the last Nayakkar, accusing him inter alia of converting back to (Tamil) Hinduism. The category ‘Tamil Hindu’ is thus, in the Sinhalese Buddhist cosmos, a trope for the sense of rupture and is therefore associated with exteriority to the state (Kapferer 1988; 1997: 287–290). The revitalization movement empowered this trope, making it active within an emerging state form (Bastin 2002: 76). Buddhist revitalization continues, and its sense of hostility toward Tamil Hinduism is conditioned in the circumstances of the ethnic conflict. However, more important is the sense of rupture, of which the Tamil Hindu is only one trope, because the ethnic conflict is not reducible to ethnicity, something that becomes evident when one considers more recent manifestations of Buddhist puritanism. These include the formation of a Buddhist monk political party, the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), which gained 6 percent of the vote or nine seats in Parliament in 2004 (Deegalle 2004, 2006; Frydenlund 2005). The JHU joined the ruling parliamentary coalition of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was elected to the executive presidency in late 2005.5 Also in the coalition was the older and more notorious party, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (People’s Revolutionary Front, JVP) with ten seats. The JVP appears to have shunned the anti-state violence it pursued in two insurrections, one in the early 1970s and another in the late 1980s (Moore 1993). The JHU and the JVP have considerable interconnections, and in some ways they mark a deliberate separation between the ‘robe’ and the ‘plough’ in populist Sinhalese politics.6 This separation more properly indicates an attempt to close or resolve the rupture noted above. It is a difference within an identity, by which both the rupture and the attempted synthesis convey a sense of the apparatus of capture. The

128 | Rohan Bastin

fact that the JVP could be responsible for a bloody insurrection and then, just over a decade later, could be part of the government reflects this dynamism. In a related outcome, the entry of monks into Parliament, which was strongly opposed by other monks and by members of the public, gave official voice to clerical militancy and righteous violence that had been growing for some time (Bartholomeusz 2006; Deegalle 2004, 2006). Both the current JVP and the JHU thus have histories of externality to the state, albeit with very different genealogical connections to these histories: the former is a political party with roots in insurgency, whereas the latter is a party connected to the Buddhist clergy. Notwithstanding these differences, the feature of externality is evident in the respective forms of organization that, to different degrees, resemble the cell-like “holey space” that Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 413ff.) identify with the war machine, noting how it is the constellation of characteristics that defines the nomad and not the other way around (ibid.: 423). Such constellations have been important at different times for both the JVP and the monks of the JHU, indicating their capacity to embrace different modalities of power that are both internal and external to the state. Importantly too, the ‘robe and plough’ union of the JHU and JVP is neither the first nor the only attempt at a synthesis that plays on the profound sense of rupture between Buddhism and the state while contending with certain values such as the Buddhist ideals of detachment, perfect generosity, renunciation, and non-violence (Seneviratne 1999). Such a sense of rupture is emergent within the complex inequalities and divisions in the Sri Lankan social formation.

Structural Violence in the Sri Lankan Social Formation Moore (1990, 1993) emphasizes how Sri Lankan politics is dominated by the Sri Lankan (principally Sinhalese) elite. The roots of this elite formation lie in the history of mercantile capitalism and the development, starting in the sixteenth century, of the European colonial mercantile economy (Jayawardena 2000; Roberts 1982, 1997). Castes that either were or became enmeshed in the colonial economy participated in an increasingly fluid caste order characterized by an incorporative ethnicity that informed the nature of the emerging colonial bourgeoisie. This fluidity included violence, both structural (what inheres to social formations) and manifest, with strong class formations and the dynamism of social reproduction marked by aggressive attempts at exclusion and potent formations of patronage, particularly between the traditional landed elite and the new mercantile elite. The instrumentality of actual or manifest violence was used at different times to shape this dynamic, which also had strong ethnic overtones in relation to minority Tamils and Muslims. Economic liberalization from the late 1970s was aggressively driven by these lines of patronage and itself intensified the use of violence. Critical of the view that economic liberalization was the sole determinant of the growing tide of violence, Moore (1990) stresses that it was the elite articulations of liberalization in the increasingly centrist Sri Lankan polity that generated this impact (see also Abeyratne 1998).

Sri Lankan Civil Society and Its Fanatics | 129

Buddhist revitalization emerged directly in the fluid and often violent context of the unfolding modern Sri Lankan social formation. One of its striking features was the increase in number not only of monks (collectively, the Sangha) but also of different nikaya (orders of monks), as well as less formal assemblages within the orders connected to specific temples (Malalgoda 1976). These internal divisions in the Sangha were created, in part, by clerical ordination sought by nontraditional landowner castes from external sources such as monks in Burma. Ordination is critical in Theravada (or ‘Way of the Elders’) Buddhism, contributing to the sense of rupture when the lineage is broken or modified. The main Siyam Nikaya revitalized the line in 1753 through Thai monks, but it was tied exclusively to the cultivator caste.7 The Amarapura (Burma) Nikaya was formed in 1803 as part of the new network of elite patronage by members of the parvenu who actively embraced Buddhism and an ideology of social welfare and concern for the marginalized, although to different degrees and with varying reaction to Christian missionary influence. These were the new clients in what would become, with the steady granting of universal suffrage throughout the first half of the twentieth century, what I call the new feudal democracy.8 Importantly, its internal contradictions and deeply entrenched inequalities drive a very powerful sense of grievance that is perceived in terms of a rupture between Buddhism and the state. These are the conditions within which Buddhist militancy grows. Since the 1980s, when the research for Moore’s essay was completed, the freedom demonstrated at the elite level by political leaders to shift allegiances has become commonplace. Moore (1990: 347) interpreted its extent at the time as an isolated function of weak internal organization in one political party. Two decades later, shifting allegiances, blatant opportunism, and the mobilization of inducements for political support that penetrates to the local level have become characteristic features of the feudal democracy. While President Rajapaksa is respected by many for being loyal to one party, the same cannot be said for his government, which displays the now common feature of fluid coalitions of the two main parties and the minority parties (Wickramasinghe 2006). The fact that Rajapaksa appointed his three brothers directly to Parliament and thence to his inner cabinet (while his effective outer cabinet contains almost the entire Parliament, defecting opposition members included) reflects his attempt to obviate the labile allegiances of the political elite, while at the same time governing through his own networks. The feudal democracy has thus been made strong and has not been subverted by shifting class and ethnic processes. The JHU-JVP relation and the role of these parties in government, therefore, do not amount to a rock-solid alliance; rather, they describe an ontological relation of rupture and attempted resolution. Class is a factor, with both the JHU and the JVP expressing the interests of different segments of the petty bourgeoisie, while the JVP continues to represent sections of the rural poor (Moore 1993). However, class antagonism also influences the way that these different segments pursue alliances across the social formation and articulate with all political parties. Another part of the mix involves caste and extended kin, but in no way are the alliances limited to caste. They are best thought of as singularities that emerge partly on the basis of networks that link to caste and

130 | Rohan Bastin

family. These networks make up the basic structure of patron-client relations and, as such, arouse hostility without ever occasioning radical reform, since the mobilization of the opposition utilizes similar ties. All of these relations combine to form potent expressions of structural violence that generate different processes of deterritorialization within the fabric of everyday life and that periodically manifest specific instances of threat and/or harm. In the broader polity, therefore, structural violence invests bureaucracy with opportunity and advantage as well as with their denial, and these processes feed the sense of a ruptured state.

Monks and Violence The JHU emerges in the context of a growing clerical militancy and the sense of a ‘just war’ (Bartholomeusz 2006; Deegalle 2006), sharing the JVP’s line on state violence. My argument is that the degree of structural violence in Sri Lanka and its amplification in the conditions of war intensify this stance as well as the monks’ involvement, because the very nature of the modern Sangha—its ‘holey space’ externality—is historically grounded in this structural violence and in an ongoing sense of rupture in the nature of the state. It must be stressed that the JHU represents only one component of clerical militancy and, at that, a more recent one. Tambiah (1992) documents earlier forms, and Seneviratne (1999, 2001) fills out the picture of a history of struggle between radical reformism and conservatism within the Sangha. Without dwelling on the point, Seneviratne (1999: 325) highlights the fissiparous nature of the Sangha and its influence on internal dissent and splintering. These features relate directly, I suggest, to the nature of the social formation and its underlying inequalities connected to capital penetration. They also reflect the ‘holey space’ configuration of the war machine that parallels and sometimes even complements the organization of insurgent groups.9 Finally, the fragmentary nature of the Sangha feeds the profound sense of rupture between Buddhism and the state identified by Wickremeratne (1995) as underlying Buddhist activism. What I stress, therefore, is the way that Buddhist clerical militancy develops within the Sri Lankan social formation and its associated contradictions, inequalities, and violence. Here I differ with Seneviratne and others who view the Sangha as part of a traditional, pre-colonial realm suddenly confronted by modernity. Instead, I argue that clerical militancy must be identified as thoroughly within that modernity.

The Monks ‘Strike Revenge’ on the State The tension between social activism and passive piety for Buddhist monks intensified in the late 1980s when the political scene became dominated by the war against Tamil separatism, Indian government intervention, and growing Sinhalese extremism, mostly connected to the JVP. Seneviratne (1999) describes

Sri Lankan Civil Society and Its Fanatics | 131

how monks were actively involved on both sides of Sinhalese politics. In addition, the middle class grew in the circumstances of extensive global economic articulation associated with, among other things, foreign engagement in areas including military advice and training, hardware, and intelligence and as a result of a proliferation of expatriates, NGOs, and aid—the business of war and of peace (Bastin 2001). These forces persisted through the 1990s and informed the creation of organizations such as Sihala Urumaya (SU) and Jathika Sangha Sabhava (JSS). The JHU sprang from these organizations and shed all but its clerical membership in order to contest the 2004 election.10 For the most part, clerical organizations coordinated protests such as public demonstrations. One of these was an act of mass cursing conducted by some 3,000 monks in 1997 against a cabinet minister in his hometown in the south of the island (Seneviratne 2001: 18–19). Monks smashed coconuts under a Bo tree and recited curses against the minister, who had brusquely dismissed a document that described the effects of Tamil militancy on Buddhism. The cursing was part of an increasingly strident antagonism to the devolution of the power package that was being advanced by the relatively moderate Parliament of the time. The accursed minister subsequently quit the government and became a vocal opponent of the devolution package. The monk movement that later crystallized as the JHU continued its opposition to peace and thus contributed to the downfall of the next moderate government (elected in 2001) through its own electoral success in 2004 and the success of a new hard-line president in 2005. Linked to the public cursing was the more traditional clerical refusal to accept alms, a sanction Seneviratne (2001: 18) likens to an Islamic fatwah. Both acts, I suggest, sever connection and bear a measure of externality to the state, although the sanction of refusing charity, like the fatwah, is more legitimate. The curse, on the other hand, took the form of what is called in Sinhala paligahanava (striking revenge). It became a part of the transmutation of activism into militancy and resulted in the movement of Buddhist monks directly onto the political stage, via both the JHU and more moderate sectors of the Sangha, who were opposed to clerical militancy. The latter had been outraged by the act of cursing, for a key feature of paligahanava is a sense of righteous violence. Deities invoked to strike revenge are entreated to act and thereby gain merit in a Buddhist sense. The smashed coconut symbolizes the victim as well as the perpetrator regenerated by the act (Bastin 1996: 70; Kapferer 1997: 56). The Bo tree is both the tree of the Buddha’s enlightenment (and is therefore sacred to Buddhism as an exemplary center) and the domain of the Naga cobra, the underworld king who protected Buddha during his enlightenment. The cobra hence symbolizes a modality of the state as the potential for righteous violence and is closely associated with the agency of sorcery.11 Paligahanava can thus be deemed to be ‘good’ Buddhism, while also bearing a more nefarious stamp as a violent act. It is normally neither public nor collective nor associated with monks; instead, it is linked to shrines (Buddhist and Hindu), associated with marginal and ambiguous locations, and practiced by individuals. In being performed publicly and collectively by monks, it was thus an act of iconoclasm.

132 | Rohan Bastin

The cursing embraced the tension between attachment and non-attachment, which forms the basis of debate about the appropriate behavior of the Buddhist clergy in politics, and resolutely smashed it. Writing more immediately in the aftermath of the monks’ iconoclasm and before the emergence of the JHU, Seneviratne notes with cautious optimism how many observers applauded the public sorcery for bringing out the real motives of the extremist monks and for consolidating opposition toward them (Seneviratne 2001: 20). He describes as ‘progressives’ the non-extremist monks who wore yellow ribbons and campaigned with members of the public in favor of the devolution package and on behalf of the moderate government that was elected in 2001. However, he was right to be cautious. The iconoclasts have held sway, and they do so from within the more reactionary government that was elected in 2004 with the JHU and JVP in the minority. Linked to the extremist shift has been a mass defection from opposition parties to the government in 2007 and, as described above, the formation of a mass cabinet embracing virtually every pro-government member of Parliament. Electoral politics in Sri Lanka—especially the Westminster vestiges of political parties, the governing majority, and the inner cabinet—were always different due to the lines of political patronage. In the current conditions of feudal democracy, however, they appear to be farcical. And yet, in the logic of Buddhist nationalism and political-religious encompassment, the new alliances make sense because they resonate with the purpose of a larger order within which political expediency is expected. Hindsight enables me to identify, therefore, that Seneviratne’s optimism about the yellow-ribbon ‘progressive’ monks has been dashed. More than this, however, Seneviratne’s (1999) broad characterization of the Sangha in politics—as a largely leaderless grouping confronting colonialism and becoming either progressively moderate or reactionary conservative—is too simple. The mass-sorcery event he describes actualized the singularity of the politicized monks irrespective of their allegiances and was thus an important moment in the rise of clerical militancy. It displays the features of righteous violence tied to the Buddhist practice of paligahanava, and, as such, it is a personally regenerative act. But in this instance it was also an iconoclastic act that smashed the image of the detached, apolitical, and often individuated monk, replacing this perception with that of the organized militant monk engaging in sorcery against a government minister and, indeed, the state itself. Important in my analysis, moreover, is the sense that the Sangha is not simply a traditional organization caught up in the post-colonial dilemmas wrought by the colonial encounter, but rather an assemblage of a shifting, crisis-ridden state caught in the bloody interregnum of the global state of war. Kapferer (1997) draws the connection between sorcery and the war machine, demonstrating the potent relationship in Sri Lanka (and elsewhere) between sorcery and the state. Following Deleuze and Guattari (1987), this state is not a historical outcome but a modality of power tied to human practice that is evident, for example, in so-called stateless societies (or societies against the state), as well as in complex state forms. States deterritorialize and capture the

Sri Lankan Civil Society and Its Fanatics | 133

modalities of power, particularly the nomad power of the war machine, when they take war as their objective. As Kapferer shows, sorcery is a potent force in such a process. Taking inspiration from Colas (1997), I would add iconoclasm to this scheme and recognize it as part of the righteous violence that informs the shift in modalities of power and the attendant formation of singularities. I illustrate this point with two further examples of iconoclasm that informed the development of the JHU.

Identifying the Enemy: Temptation 2004 and Christian Evangelists Temptation 2004 was an international Bollywood concert tour that came to Colombo. A similar tour had aroused anger a year earlier due to its libertine themes, but on this occasion the event coincided with the first anniversary of the death of Ven. Gangodawila Soma, a global campaigner against Christian evangelists who had died suddenly while visiting Russia. For some, the 55year-old monk’s death by heart attack was suspicious, and accusations were made that the monk had been killed by Christian fundamentalists. The irony here of a suspected Christian fundamentalist plot in the ex-Soviet Union is also revealing. It highlights the profound sense felt by militant monks and their supporters that they are struggling against a global conspiracy, albeit not a Communist plot. At the funeral in late December 2003, a small riot took place when the mourners encountered two men distributing leaflets. Members of the All Ceylon Buddhist Congress and Sihala Urumaya successfully demanded a presidential inquiry into Gangodawila Soma’s death. The inquiry found nothing to support the accusations, but as Deegalle (2006) notes, the death of the monk was enormously important. The sense of conspiracy continued, and this fueled the antagonism toward the concert, which happened to coincide with the ritually significant first anniversary. Violent demonstrations between small groups of protesters—including then JHU parliamentarian Ven. Omalpe Sobitha Thera—and the police occurred during the day, but the concert went ahead amid tight security and with the observation of two minutes of silence by its star, Shah Rukh Khan. Near the end of the performance, however, a grenade was thrown that killed two members of the audience in the front-row VIP seats. These seats were some distance from the stage, and it is not known for whom the bomb was intended or who threw it. In my analysis, the attack was a violent assertion over civil or common space resonating with the attempt to block the concert and was thus a powerful act of iconoclasm by an agency acting externally to the state. In addition to opposing Temptation 2004, the JHU has also actively campaigned against Christian missionaries, resulting in increased support among Buddhist monks. Throughout 2004, up to 100 Christian churches were attacked by angry mobs, often led by local monks. The mobs mostly attacked the property (vehicles and buildings) of missionaries from evangelical churches, especially Pentecostals such as the Assembly of God. Typically, the Christians were accused of engaging in ‘unethical conversion’, that is, the provision of money

134 | Rohan Bastin

and/or commodities in return for a profession of faith. These attacks provoked international attention, especially in the United States, where Christian evangelists are directly and indirectly supported by libertarian groups such as the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.12 Most of the attacks occurred in the rapidly urbanizing Western Province, areas that were previously commercial plantations (mainly rubber and coconut, but also low-altitude tea) in a band roughly 10 to 50 kilometers around Colombo. Spreading along the roads and rail links, this region is experiencing the greatest levels of capital investment, growth of population density, and development of manufacturing industries through the sub-division of old plantations (as well as rice paddy lands) in the immediate coastal hinterland. In some areas, linked to these lands were the grand old houses of the indigenous plantation elites (walauwa) and the second generation of these houses, client village communities that were articulated into plantation capitalism, and Buddhist monastic temples with roots in nineteenth-century revitalization. In other words, the area has long been enmeshed in the global economy. However, the economy of plantations, which had been a core source of funding for the post-independence welfare state (Moore 1990), is giving way to manufacturing and construction, as well as to urban employment and the realization of capital to the descendants of the walauwa planters, among others. The Buddhist villages and temples are thus being encroached upon. While their histories are forged in colonial mercantile capitalism and the post-independence welfare state, they are also infused with a potent sense of Sinhalese Buddhist heritage identified as a key element in the national project of the unified Sinhalese Buddhist (and welfare) state. Some of the property buyers are connected to religious organizations, including the Catholic Church, which has channeled foreign donations into land purchases that are then sub-divided and settled by Catholic families from the coast. Others involve new Christian churches that are drawing together converts located in various parts of Colombo where they have no access to land or affordable housing. The rapid urbanization of the Western Province, largely market-driven and deregulated, is thus marked by pockets of order formed by the NGOs so deeply admired by the advocates of global civil society—church groups and other charitable institutions. These pockets are the points that attracted the greatest levels of antagonism and iconoclastic violence, because they are seen as threatening the fabric of the already ruptured and teetering state. To some extent, therefore, the attacks throughout 2004 used the Christian churches as scapegoats, as these were the only clear striations in the otherwise smooth space of active capitalist deterritorialization. The church groups that brought foreign capital into multiple small-scale settlements acted under the umbrella of an intense foreign presence tied to the civil war and its peace process. Like the deregulated urbanization around Colombo, the aid economy was also heavily committed to neo-liberal deterritorialization in the form of structural adjustment to the existing state apparatus (Bastian 2007). Sunil Bastian notes, however, that the 2002–2004 government did not attempt to connect these two strands of reform—peace and structural adjustment (ibid.: 158ff.). It thus provoked opposition as its liberalization agenda,

Sri Lankan Civil Society and Its Fanatics | 135

which included shedding thousands of public-sector jobs, began to affect the intermediate classes that are bound economically and politically to this sector. More than this, however, the sector is shot through by the networks of political patronage that I describe as feudal democracy, and these networks profoundly affect the petite bourgeoisie with strong links to the JHU. As Bastian shows, structural adjustment, which is both directly and indirectly supported by the massive and diverse NGO sector (the vanguard of global civil society) thus contributed powerfully to reinvigorate the conflict between the government and the Tamil Tigers—the very thing that so many segments of the GCS representatives were there to end. The period from 2000 to 2004 was, therefore, a tumultuous time, involving economic downturn, structural adjustment, and new forms of wealth and foreign intervention. A range of new enemies of Sinhalese Buddhism was identified, including Bollywood stars, Christian evangelists, and the brokers of peace. Grenades were lobbed into concert crowds as well as the grounds of the Norwegian embassy. On top of this, churches and church property were attacked. Ultimately, efforts to bring about peace provoked an increasingly virulent opposition, and this is the source of the JHU-JVP nexus and their political success in 2004. The year 2004 ended with the devastating Boxing Day tsunami, which claimed more than 30,000 lives around the country, but especially on the eastern seaboard. Critically, the flood of disaster relief served in large part to intensify to an unprecedented level all of the processes described above. Massive injections of capital, a proliferation of aid and aid donors, a mushrooming of global civil society, and a reinvigorated neo-liberal critique of the state bureaucracy by GCS representatives all clamored for space amid greatly enhanced lines of political patronage within the feudal democracy. The idea of a lasting peace between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers briefly flickered and died, with some of its strongest opponents on the Sinhalese side being the militant monks whose critique of a moderate and accommodating (ruptured) state resonated powerfully with the GCS critique of the centralist and clumsy bureaucratic state. In 2005, after joining the coalition and campaigning for the hard-line pro-Sinhalese Buddhist president, the JHU tabled anti-conversion legislation in Parliament and shortly afterwards demanded to make Buddhism the state religion. The subsequent series of territorial gains by the Sri Lankan army, now directed to pursue a military solution, are heralded as recapturing the Sinhalese Buddhist heritage (urumaya).13 The tsunami thus intensified the Sri Lankan conflict instead of ameliorating it, because it fed the different forces underlying the conflict rather than subordinating them to a higher purpose connected to basic human suffering. Christian Eckert (2005), who rails against the pernicious post-tsunami activities of Christian evangelists and members of the Church of Scientology bearing the gifts of sewing machines, reports seeing a Sinhala-language poster on a wall urging Sinhalese to fight the “religious tsunami.” The Lanka Liberty Web site includes another poster showing a prominent monk and soldiers with the caption “Let’s Defeat the NGO Mafia.”14 These examples highlight the nature of

136 | Rohan Bastin

the tsunami’s aftermath when, in the midst of a critique of the cumbersome Sri Lankan government, the agents of GCS found themselves confronted by intolerant and angry monks (and others) fighting to re-create the ideal state.

Conclusion: Civil Society and the Subaltern Multitude Contemporary Sri Lanka continues to experience varieties of Buddhist militancy that endorse engagement by monks in government. These monks insist that the Sri Lankan state should be Buddhist and not secular. In addition, they support the violent defense of national sovereignty against Tamil (non-Buddhist, non-Sinhala) militancy, and they demand state censure of Christian missionaries and international groups, whom they accuse of being evangelists and Tamil sympathizers. In their campaigns, the monks engage in such iconoclastic acts as the attacks on the Bollywood stage show Temptation 2004 and on the Christian churches that are part of urban expansion and the changing social formation of capitalism in Sri Lanka—the nature of Empire. Critically, though, these icons do not represent Empire but are viewed as a threat to the sovereignty of Sinhalese Buddhism and thus become a nodal point around which the singularity of militancy forms. The 1997 public rite of cursing a politician who questioned the political status of monks (Seneviratne 2001) was highlighted as playing a role in this formation. Following Colas (1997) on the relation between civil society and fanatical iconoclasm, I suggest that the monks are realizing a possibility of civil society as this concept is peddled with growing intensity in global discourse and as acts of fanatical iconoclasm increase in number and intensity. These acts may be doing so in ways antagonistic to the contemporary mainstream Western utopianism espoused by GCS advocates, but they are nevertheless realizing one of its possibilities—the utopian dream of a resolution to the rupture between civil society and the state. This is an attempt at capture, a capture that realizes itself in war and violence. It is thus a part of the bloody interregnum that Hardt and Negri see as the precursor to a new global social form. From the Sri Lankan perspective, however, such an imaginary seems at the very least to be remote. My point of departure was Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987: 384) remark about the “variability of directions” associated with the Crusades and their rejection of the idea that Crusader values were easily abandoned in the pursuit of material gain. Because the Crusades turned religion into the war machine, which champions the multi-directional movement, I wonder whether the Crusades ever ended. Perhaps instead they were transmuted into colonialism and the world system, and now into the utopianism of GCS and the state of governance conditioned in the longue durée of the global state of war—much longer than Hardt and Negri (2005: 12) suggest. The fanatical iconoclasm of Sri Lanka’s militant clerics is thus not simply an expression of resistance to Crusader values; it is a mode of participation in this multi-directional movement of the state (the Empire state, so to speak). This does not mean they do not fight and rail against the agents of GCS, including the Christian evangelists who would

Sri Lankan Civil Society and Its Fanatics | 137

seem the more natural inheritors of the Crusader mantle. That is precisely what they do. But in doing so, they contribute to the global state of war that, in my argument, is the Crusade. For this reason, I see the militant monks in Sri Lanka as subaltern agents of the global moment and, in contrast to Seneviratne (1999), not simply as local state-oriented antagonists of the new state of Empire. I am therefore unwilling to dismiss the militant monks simply as fundamentalists or nationalists or reactionary conservatives. While they seek a resolution between themselves and the state and thus appear to embrace that well-recognized feature of nationalism, they do so even though they regard the legacy of Western democracy to be a failure. This is not simply a critique of Western secularism but a critique of the state that resonates strongly with the ‘third way’ advocates of GCS (the new state). In pursuing their wars against enemies both imagined and terrifyingly real, militant Buddhists articulate notional possibilities of the current crusade to replace governments with governance and the nation-state with the postnational state. That they do so antagonistically to the elite GCS advocates— whose wars are with poverty, disease, corruption, and lack of transparency, rather than national boundaries and ethnic sovereignty—should not obscure the nature of their close relation and the difficulties experienced by subaltern groups caught up in the global state of war.

Acknowledgments I wish to express sincere thanks to the organizers of and fellow participants in the “Vital Matters” conference, especially to Bruce Kapferer, il miglior fabbro when it comes to understanding the Sri Lankan politico-religious situation in particular and anthropology more broadly.

Rohan Bastin heads the anthropology program at Deakin University, Australia. Since 1984 he has been engaged in research on religion and ethnic conflict involving Buddhists, Hindus, and Christians in Sri Lanka. The author of The Domain of Constant Excess: Plural Worship at the Munnesvaram Temples in Sri Lanka (2002), he has most recently conducted research at Kataragama temple complex in the southeast of Sri Lanka and in Kerala, India. He is currently examining the growing antagonism to Christian conversion as well as new Christian movements in both countries.

138 | Rohan Bastin

Notes 1. See Kapferer (2002) for a review of Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000), which critically highlights this optimism. 2. My discussion owes a considerable debt to the work of Bruce Kapferer. See his exegeses on Deleuze in terms of the concept of virtuality (Kapferer 2006), its application by Hardt and Negri in their book Empire (Kapferer 2002), his discussion of global oligarchies (Kapferer 2005), and the idea of cultural singularity (Kapferer 2007). The application of Deleuze and Guattari’s twinned concepts of state and war machine to the Sri Lankan context and to sorcery is also developed by Kapferer (1997). 3. See, for example, the Global Civil Society Yearbooks (Anheier, Glasius, and Kaldor 2001– 2006), which preserve what John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (1999: 25) describe as the “slippery opacity” of the concept ‘civil society’, now rendered as a global telos (see also J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff 2000: 40ff.). 4. For a discussion of this concept in relation to Sri Lanka, see Kapferer (1997: 282–297). 5. Briefly, Sri Lanka governed via a Westminster system with universal suffrage established progressively from 1904 to 1948, at which time independence was achieved. A Gaullist executive presidency and proportional representation were implemented in the early 1980s. The JHU’s success in 2004 is attributed in part to this proportional system (Uyangoda 2004). 6. The metaphor of the robe and the plough derives from Gunawardana (1979). 7. Malalgoda’s (1976) account is unsurpassed. In the Kandyan polity, temples were critical sites for land tenure, and this informed ordination restrictions. Plantation capitalism radically changed this relationship, but the principle of exclusion remained. 8. As Roberts (1994: 73–88) shows, the use of the term ‘feudal’ to describe the traditional polity is problematic. My usage applies to the current polity and is intended to evoke the shifting alliances of the elite as well as the strength of political patronage. 9. Such as when Buddhist temples were used as points of organization for the JVP insurrection in 1987 (Moore 1993: 624). 10. Sihala Urumaya translates as Sinhalese Heritage (Roberts 2001). Jathika Sangha Sammelanaya (or Sabhava) translates as the National Monks’ Conference. The term jathika is nuanced with meanings of group, community, and caste, indicating that it can refer to the Sinhalese ethnicity exclusively. The Jathika Chinthanaya (National Ideology) and related groups, such as the Sinhalye Maha Sammatha Bhoomiputra Pakshaya (Sinhalese Sons of the Soil Party), were also part of the anti-globalization movement framing a discourse concerning the vulnerability of the Sinhalese to global forces, including Tamil militancy. In 2007, the JHU lost its exclusive clerical membership in Parliament when one of its leaders, Ven. Omalpe Sobitha Thero, resigned and was replaced by an ex-JVP militant and Sihala Urumaya founder. 11. Paligahanava (or paligahima) is commonly practiced at sorcery temples such as the Munnesvaram Bhadrakali temple. Buddhist monks occasionally attend this temple, and I have observed them engaging in conventional prayer at the temple’s Bo tree, seemingly oblivious to the fact that certain sorcery acts are performed there (Bastin 2002: 67ff.). 12. The Becket Fund is a good example of a global civil society NGO that is striving to encompass civil society and the state within the terms of a new post-national utopia. In 2005, it established a dedicated Sri Lanka Web site (http://www.lankaliberty.com/) in response to proposed anti-conversion legislation. 13. In May 2009, the Sri Lankan military successfully concluded this strategy by capturing all Tiger-held territories and killing the Tiger leadership. The exact civilian death toll from the fighting and in the internment camps remains unknown. Meanwhile, the JHU’s anticonversion legislation is back in the Parliament, and arguments about Sinhala Buddhist territorial heritage in Tamil areas are stronger than ever. 14. See http://www.lankaliberty.com (accessed 6 December 2007). The Lanka Liberty Web site is sponsored by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

Sri Lankan Civil Society and Its Fanatics | 139

References Abeyratne, Sirimal. 1998. Economic Change and Political Conflict in Developing Countries: With Special Reference to Sri Lanka. Amsterdam: VU University Press. Anheier, Helmut K., Marlies Glasius, and Mary Kaldor, eds. 2001–2006. Global Civil Society Yearbooks. London: Sage. Bartholomeusz, Tessa J. 2006. “In Defense of Dharma: Just-War Ideology in Buddhist Sri Lanka.” Pp. 145–156 in The Ethics of War in Asian Civilizations, ed. Torkel Brekke. London: Routledge. Bastian, Sunil. 2007. The Politics of Foreign Aid in Sri Lanka: Promoting Markets and Supporting Peace. Colombo: International Centre for Ethnic Studies. Bastin, Rohan. 1996. “The Regenerative Power of Kali Worship in Contemporary Sinhala Buddhism.” Social Analysis 40: 59–94. ______. 2001. Globalisation and Conflict. Marga Monograph Series on Ethnic Reconciliation, no. 23. Colombo: Marga Institute Publications. ______. 2002. The Domain of Constant Excess: Plural Worship at the Munnesvaram Temples in Sri Lanka. New York: Berghahn Books. Colas, Dominique. 1997. Civil Society and Fanaticism: Conjoined Histories. Trans. Amy Jacobs. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff, eds. 2000. Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff, eds. 1999. Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa: Critical Perspectives. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Deegalle, Mahinda. 2004. “Politics of the Jathika Hela Urumaya Monks: Buddhism and Ethnicity in Contemporary Sri Lanka.” Contemporary Buddhism 5, no. 2: 83–103. ______. 2006. “JHU Politics for Peace and a Righteous State.” Pp. 233–254 in Buddhism, Conflict and Violence in Modern Sri Lanka, ed. Mahinda Deegalle. London: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1998. “Having an Idea in Cinema (On the Cinema of Straub-Huillet).” Pp. 14–19 in Kaufman and Heller 1998. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eckert, Christian. 2005. “The Next Tsunami Coming to Sri Lanka Will Be a Religious One.” Lanka Academic, 22 May. http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id= 70,1234,0,0,1,0 (accessed 21 August 2007). Frydenlund, Iselin. 2005. The Sangha and Its Relation to the Peace Process in Sri Lanka: A Report for the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Oslo: International Peace Research Institute. Gunawardana, R. A. L. H. 1979. Robe and Plough: Monasticism and Economic Interest in Early Medieval Sri Lanka. Tucson: Arizona University Press. Hardt, Michael. 1998. “The Withering of Civil Society.” Pp. 23–39 in Kaufman and Heller 1998. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ______. 2005. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Books. Ifeka, Caroline. 2004. “Market Forces, Political Violence, and War: The End of Nation-States, the Rise of Ethnic and Global Sovereignties?” Pp. 56–74 in State, Sovereignty, War: Civil Violence in Emerging Global Realities, ed. B. Kapferer. Critical Interventions, no. 5. New York: Berghahn Books. Jaeger, Hans-Martin. 2007. “‘Global Civil Society’ and the Political Depoliticization of Global Governance.” International Political Sociology 1, no. 3: 257–277. Jayawardena, Kumari. 2000. Nobodies to Somebodies: The Rise of the Colonial Bourgeoisie in Sri Lanka. Delhi: Leftword Books. Kapferer, Bruce. 1988. Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

140 | Rohan Bastin

______. 1997. The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ______. 2002. “Foundation and Empire (with apologies to Isaac Asimov): A Consideration of Hardt and Negri’s Empire.” Social Analysis 46, no. 1: 167–179. ______. 2005. “Introduction: Oligarchic Corporations and New State Formations.” Social Analysis 49, no. 1: 163–176. ______. 2006. “Virtuality.” Pp. 671–684 in Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, ed. Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek, and Michael Strausberg. Leiden: Brill. ______. 2007. “Anthropology and the Dialectic of Enlightenment: A Discourse on the Definition and Ideals of a Threatened Discipline.” Australian Journal of Anthropology 18, no. 1: 307–321. Kaufman, Eleanor, and Kevin J. Heller, eds. 1998. Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Malalgoda, Kitsiri. 1976. Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, 1750–1900: A Study of Religious Revival and Change. Berkeley: University of California Press. Moore, Mick. 1990. “Economic Liberalization versus Political Pluralism in Sri Lanka?” Modern Asian Studies 24, no. 2: 341–383. ______. 1993. “Thoroughly Modern Revolutionaries: The JVP in Sri Lanka.” Modern Asian Studies 27, no. 3: 593–642. Roberts, Michael. 1982. Caste Conflict and Elite Formation: The Rise of a Karava Elite in Sri Lanka, 1500–1931. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ______. 1994. Exploring Confrontation: Sri Lanka: Politics, Culture and History. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publications. ______. 1997. “Elite Formation and Elites, 1832—1931.” Pp. 191–266 in Sri Lanka: Collective Identities Revisited, vol. 1, ed. Michael Roberts. Colombo: Marga Institute Publications. ______. 2001. Primordialist Strands in Contemporary Sinhala Nationalism in Sri Lanka: Urumaya as Ur. Marga Monograph Series on Ethnic Reconciliation, no. 20. Colombo: Marga Institute Publications. Seneviratne, H. L. 1999. The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. ______. 2001. “Buddhist Monks and Ethnic Politics: A War Zone in an Island Paradise.” Anthropology Today 17, no. 2: 15–21. Tambiah, Stanley J. 1992. Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Uyangoda, Jayadeva. 2004. “Sri Lanka: A Fractured Mandate.” South Asian Journal 5 (July– September. http://www.southasianmedia.net/Magazine/journal/fractured_mandate.htm (accessed 10 December 2007). Wickramasinghe, Nira. 2006. “Sri Lanka’s Conflict: Culture and Lineages of the Past.” Journal of International Affairs 60, no. 1: 107–124. Wickremeratne, Ananda. 1995. Buddhism and Ethnicity in Sri Lanka: A Historical Analysis. New Delhi: International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Kandy, in association with Vikas Publishing House. Wild, Leni. 2006. “Strengthening Global Civil Society.” Southampton: Institute for Public Policy Research. http://www.ippr.org.uk/publicationsandreports/publication.asp?id=447 (accessed 16 August 2007).

( Chapter 8

Dharma Power Searching for Security in Post–New Order Indonesia Kari Telle

In both its realist and humanist guises, security takes the form and promise of a metaphysical discourse: an overarching political goal and practice that guarantees existence itself, that makes the possibility of the world possible. — Anthony Burke, “Aporias of Security”

Enormously seductive, the metaphysical discourse of security is inherently paradoxical. Anthony Burke argues in “Aporias of Security” (2002: 20) that the “promise” of security “breaks down when we consider that, because ‘security’ is bound into a dependent relation with ‘insecurity’, it can never escape it: it must continue to produce images of ‘insecurity’ in order to retain its meaning.” From this perspective, it is analytically futile to attempt to stabilize security’s ontology.1 Instead, Burke identifies “an urgent need to interrogate the images of self and other that animate (in)secure identities, and to expose the violence and suppression that is so often relied on to police them” (ibid.: 7). In this spirit, this chapter examines how security concerns are infiltrating new aspects of daily life in Indonesia, giving rise to new organizational forms and ways of Notes for this chapter are located on page 154.

142 | Kari Telle

imagining self and society. As I will show, religious ideas and practices inform the discourse on and provision of security, which has slipped beyond the discursive and practical control of the state. My interest in the nexus of religion and security was triggered during my return to the island of Lombok in 2001.2 I was struck by the range of civilian patrol and security groups that had sprung up since the collapse of the authoritarian New Order regime (1966–1998), as Indonesia embarked on a rocky process of democratization and decentralization. Even a passing acquaintance with these sprawling, often violent formations suggests that their members are busy inventing and experimenting with new logics or grammars of security. While these grammars may borrow from the statist idea of ‘security’ that was a key tenet of New Order rule or may draw on the global discourse of ‘human security’, they cannot be reduced to either. These grammars are, to put it simply, animated by particular ontological and religiously inflected notions of power and safety, danger and uncertainty. Emphasizing spiritual training and the harnessing of technologies of invulnerability, these grammars hold out the promise of spiritually sanctioned forms of security, and thus speak to a quest for enhanced agency in the contemporary world. As these observations make clear, security is not an unproblematic universal concept. Rather, my premise is that all notions and practices of security are socially situated and discursively defined products embedded in cherished and often unquestioned value systems.3 While it is important to insist on the cultural shaping of all security discourses (Kent 2006), it is equally important to trace how different security discourses inform and feed off each other. For critical security scholars, “securitization” (Wæver 1995) is a speech act that takes politics beyond established (democratic) rules by framing an issue within a ‘special’ kind of politics. Extending this approach, Bubandt (2005) points out that securitization is a discursive device for community building on various scales. What merits attention are the “complex processes of accommodation, rejection and reformulation [that] take place in the interstices between global, national and local representations of the problem of security” (Bubandt 2005: 276). This chapter explores how members of the Balinese minority on Lombok have responded to a sense of ‘ontological uncertainty’ by forming their own security force.4 Specifically, I will take a look at Dharma Wisesa, a Hindu-oriented quasi-corporate security group, based in Cakranegara, the island’s commercial center. Formed just before the turn of the new millennium—a time of upheaval when apocalyptic expectations were rampant in many parts of Indonesia—its founders envisioned the movement as a vehicle for providing political and cosmological stability by unifying the Lombok Balinese community. While some of these lofty hopes have been dashed, Dharma Wisesa and similar movements are proposing alternative ways of safeguarding self and society than those promoted by state agents and by the proponents of so-called global security (Duffield 2001) governance. Besides having appropriated the magic of the state, Dharma Wisesa has become embedded in a spiritual economy and maintains relations with a ‘spirit army’ that confers supernatural ‘backing’. Fusing different registers of power and authority, Dharma Wisesa attempts to bring

Dharma Power | 143

together domains that the modern state has pulled apart. It is in this totalizing impulse of bridging and fusing spheres that we may locate the current appeal of Dharma Wisesa and similar formations. In creating their own vernacular forms of security, they are remaking the social and religious terrain.

The Politics of (In)Security In their introduction to Spirited Politics, Kenneth George and Andrew Willford (2005: 9) state that religion is “an enduring and increasingly significant precinct of Southeast Asian politics and public life.” Their observation certainly applies to Indonesia, where religious ideas and idioms have returned with a vengeance in public life and politics in the post–New Order period. On Lombok, the return of the religious in public affairs is perhaps most apparent in the rise of faithbased security groups that are dedicated to fighting crime, enforcing justice, and offering ‘protection’. Here, revitalized religions and their symbolic forms assume increasingly violent imaginings. Located just east of Bali, Lombok has an ethnically and religiously diverse population of some 2.5 million people. The Sasak, most of whom are Muslims, compose about 92 percent of the population, with Chinese, Arabs, Javanese, Buginese, and Balinese making up the remainder. The Balinese, numbering approximately 120,000, form the largest ethnic and religious minority. When the idea of establishing a Hindu-oriented security force came up in 1999, the initiative received enthusiastic support from most quarters of the Lombok Balinese community. Prominent members of the provincial chapter of Parisada Hindu Dharma Indonesia (PHDI), the highest national body of Hindu affairs responsible for articulating a new religious orthodoxy, also welcomed the establishment of such a force. Yet why are the Balinese creating new grammars of security? And why is this mobilization couched in religious terms? The answers to these questions are to be found in the new political landscape that emerged as Indonesians began “identifying with freedom” (Day 2007). After 32 years of authoritarian, centralist rule came to an end in 1998, the country entered a hopeful era termed Reformasi. Two interrelated developments are especially relevant: the retraditionalization of Indonesian politics and the reinvention of security. As the Asian monetary crisis deepened in 1997, demands for political reforms grew from resentment against the highly centralist and corrupt regime. For their part, international organizations that were heavily involved in the restructuring of the country, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, subscribed to the neo-liberal doctrine that decentralization would both benefit the economy and foster democracy (Hadiz and Robison 2003). The discourse promoted by such organizations, with ‘participation’ and ‘local ownership’ being key tropes, was embraced by many actors, including those who claimed that local traditions embodied these principles (Avonius 2004; Davidson and Henley 2007; Telle 2009).5 If, under the New Order, local traditions of governance had been emasculated and stigmatized as obstacles to development and progress, now ‘local wisdom’ (kearifan lokal) emerged as a key resource for remaking the social order. This period, in

144 | Kari Telle

which identities and institutions were destabilized, was exceptional and exhilarating. Once again it was possible to imagine a different future, which brings me to the reinvention of security. Long before the role of security became all-encompassing in the post-9/11 world, the New Order regime was a “state of fear” (Barker 1998). Security had become a fundamental societal discourse under the Suharto regime, which accommodated the colonial concept of security inherited from the Dutch and “made ‘safety and order’ (keamanan dan ketertiban) the basis of its high-modernist, neo-patrimonial rule” (Bubandt 2005: 281). As in other military regimes, the armed forces had a dual function: to defend against foreign enemies and to maintain regime stability by guiding the development of society. This implied a focus on surveillance and the routine evocation of threats posed by internal enemies, be they political or criminal (Anderson 2001; Dwyer and Santikarma 2007; Siegel 1998). At the same time, the regime used civilian proxies and gangs to conduct some of its dirty business. Some argue that the state operated in ways analogous to a criminal gang, normalizing violence and extortion as state practice (Lindsey 2001; Schulte Nordholt 2002). With the transition to Reformasi, the police achieved more autonomy, while the military lost its former near-monopoly on the securitization of society. With the shift from state-secured development to liberal democracy, the meaning and organization of security was up for grabs. Lombok is one of many places in Indonesia where the retraditionalization of politics, combined with militant religious politics, has translated into a preoccupation with security. Embodying the participatory spirit of Reformasi, popular initiatives to combat crime and lawlessness were welcomed as “a new form of people’s power” (MacDougall 2007: 287). Most groups began as localized neighborhood watches, but some in central and east Lombok rapidly evolved into supra-local crime-fighting militias (pamswakarsa). Controlled by Islamic leaders and enjoying ties to high-level politicians, these groups soon acquired a reputation for brutal measures in their efforts to ‘clean out’ crime and criminals.6 In the face of the growing influence of Islamic militias and more assertive claims of Sasak ‘majoritarianism’, along with discourses stressing the Sasak’s status as the island’s ‘original’ inhabitants, religious and ethnic minorities have become concerned about their own status as minorities. Within minority circles, a growing sense of disillusionment with the state’s interest and ability to guarantee physical safety and legal rights took hold once it became apparent that the police and the judiciary failed to guarantee the rights of the victims of lethal vigilante actions. Although most Balinese feared and despised the faithbased patrol and crime-fighting groups cropping up around them, in 1999 the ‘obvious’ solution to overcoming their anguished sense of uncertainty was to establish their own Hindu-inspired security force. In doing so, the Balinese took advantage of the new political climate that made it possible to mobilize along ethnic and religious lines. By adopting this solution and embracing the seductive yet utopian promise of modern logics of security, which thrive on fear and violent exclusions (Burke 2002; Der Derian 1995), they may also have fed the increasing spiral of insecurity.

Dharma Power | 145

Dharma Wisesa and Spirit Warriors The most tangible outcome of this mobilization is an organization called Dharma Wisesa, or Dharma Power, whose formation illustrates how socially produced anxieties and a quest for security can serve as a powerful basis for reimagining community and reconfiguring religion. As I will show, Dharma Wisesa draws upon local traditions of engaging supernatural forces in order to confront and negotiate change and uncertainty. This interest in sustaining relations with occult forces is not simply a reinvented traditionalism. Rather, I see it as an expression of a Balinese “alternative modernity” (Taylor 1999) that remains enchanted and for which the ability to transact with spiritual forces is vitally important. Dharma Wisesa’s headquarters is strategically located across from the entrance to Pura Meru, a large and important temple in Cakranegara, the island’s bustling commercial center. For the Lombok Balinese, this city, with its large temples, pleasure garden, and former royal palace (puri), is closely associated with the time of Balinese rule on Lombok. Nowhere else in modern Indonesian history was there a comparable setting in which Muslim subjects were ruled by Hindus (Hägerdal 2001). Between 1740 and 1894, a branch of the Karangasem dynasty originating in East Bali controlled most of the island. Much effort was put into constructing temples and irrigation works, and the king held key roles in state rituals promoting human and agricultural fertility (Gerdin 1982; Harnish 2006). Balinese rule came to a dramatic end in 1894 when rebellious aristocrats from east Lombok joined forces with the Dutch colonial army to defeat the Balinese troops and their Sasak allies. Refusing to accept the humiliation of defeat, some members of the court perished in a ritualized puputan (fight to the end). Wary of the continued influence of the king, the Dutch exiled Anak Agung Ngurah Karangasem and some of his followers to the island of Java. After the defeat, most Balinese remained on Lombok, although this meant being reduced to the status of a minority with little political influence. This history of marginalization helps to explain why the legendary conquest of the island and stories of the heroic fight to the end figure so centrally in the Balinese self-conception, along with a tendency to glorify the time when their forebears held power over Lombok. During the transition to Reformasi, narratives celebrating the time of Balinese rule gained new salience and became wedded to a militant defense of Hindu Balinese culture. Since 2000, the Dharma Wisesa headquarters has been staffed, day and night, by rotating teams of uniformed guards. Seated behind a large desk and calling up fellow pecalang guards using police radio, the guards, in their all-black uniforms, give a striking appearance. Although many cultivate a tough image, sporting sunglasses and large tattoos, most of them were quite approachable, and I soon found myself hanging around the office, which is furnished with bamboo furniture, a color television set, a whiteboard, and a number of prominently displayed spears. From these meetings, I learned that many guards feel themselves to be backed by occult forces described as a ‘spirit battalion’. Collectively known as bale samar, these forces are understood to

146 | Kari Telle

engage in a form of spiritual warfare whenever the collective well-being of the Lombok Balinese community is threatened. Like other spiritual beings, the spirit army ordinarily remains hidden from view, manifesting itself in times of crisis. Even then, these forces are glimpsed only momentarily and only by some; hence, people are left to wonder whether or not these warriors are real. I do not pretend to comprehend fully the nature of this invisible spirit army. Neither do most Balinese. Like me, they learn from hearsay that the spirit battalion has been spotted in action. Lately, such sightings have become more frequent. While this suggests that Lombok Balinese interests are under threat, such sightings are viewed as reassuring signs that supernatural protection is close by. In January 2000, when Lombok became the site of a week-long riot targeting the island’s Christian minority, members of the spirit army were spotted in action. The riot began immediately after an Islamic rally (tabliq akbar) held in Mataram in support of the Muslim victims of the violent conflict raging in the Moluccan Islands in eastern Indonesia. Churches, shops, and houses belonging to Christians—often but not exclusively of Chinese descent—were burned and looted, and thousands of people hastily left the island.7 Although the Balinese Hindus were not directly attacked, they were deeply traumatized by the violence. Most neighborhoods in Cakranegara and Mataram are religiously and ethnically mixed. During the riot, Balinese men guarded the entrances to their neighborhoods and tried to prevent the mobs from setting buildings on fire. Months after the situation had calmed down, rumors to the effect that Islamic vigilante groups were about to take revenge because the Balinese had protected their Christian neighbors during the January riot caused near panic within Balinese circles. Reflecting on the riot, my Balinese acquaintances, both within and outside the ranks of Dharma Wisesa, would often remark on the puzzling incidents that occurred during this frightful time. For instance, they noted that men who were slightly taller than ordinary men had been spotted next to temples (pura). Seconds later, they had vanished without a trace. Another narrative recounted how a group of Sasak Muslims who were about to torch a church in a mixed neighborhood in Cakranegara suddenly turned and, for no apparent reason, fled in panic. Why? Because the spirit army, assuming a wild and ferocious demeanor, had driven them back, thwarting their intentions. During an interview in 2006, Dharma Wisesa’s commander-in-chief, Anak Agung Made Djelantik, lowered his voice and said: “Just imagine if the bale samar had not intervened during those days. I am quite confident that the city of Cakranegara would have been utterly destroyed (hancur total).” He added that the headquarters where our conversation took place now serves as the earthly ‘base’ (pusat) for these troops. The stories celebrating this spirit army reach back to the very origin of Balinese rule on Lombok. According to local oral traditions, these spirits aided the prince from Puri Kelodan in Karangasem in his endeavor to found a dynasty on Lombok.8 The ability to command these potent forces was a gift bestowed by the powerful deity of Mount Agung in East Bali. Sometime earlier, the sister of the prince had borne a child who had been fathered by this deity. When the child, Batara Alit Sakti, was about six months old, he asked his family to carry him toward the

Dharma Power | 147

mountain where he vanished (moksha) and crossed into the ‘invisible realm’. The family built a temple, named Pura Bukit, in his honor. Before leaving for Lombok, the prince visited this temple and asked Batara Alit Sakti for blessings. As the boats left the shores of Bali, they were accompanied by leaves from the kepel trees near Pura Bukit, which later turned into yellow butterflies. Having safely guided the boats to the shore, the butterflies assumed the shape of warriors. With the aid of their remarkable strength and fighting prowess, the prince established his court and extended Karangasem’s domain to the island of Lombok. The stories about these spirits are elements in a cosmology of divine kingship that serves to legitimize the founding of a new political order. But to concentrate solely on how they legitimize political authority would be to miss a key feature of such spiritual beings, that is, their ambiguous and unbounded qualities. Stories about these forces emphasize their capacity to change shape and to transform themselves from one state of being to another. In fact, these spirit forces take form in reaction to the situation and problematics that they address. Describing sorcery practices in Sri Lanka, Bruce Kapferer (2003: 105) has argued that “sorcery has the capacity always to be reinvented as something new.” Similarly, these products of the Balinese religious imagination lend themselves to being deployed in novel circumstances, and popular spirit beliefs and practices have a remarkably creative potential and ability to hybridize. Attuned to contemporary circumstances, members of the spirit battalion may appear as ordinary men, but they are frequently dressed in the white-and-black poleng cloth, which is imbued with protective powers and is used regularly on ceremonial occasions. Today, these forces are propelled into action and infuse the quotidian practice of security with supernatural force.

Dharma Wisesa and the Provision of Security We have seen that Dharma Wisesa is embedded in a spiritual economy and maintains relations with a spirit army that confers protection. In what follows I will elaborate on Dharma Wisesa’s grammar of security, an eclectic fusion of different registers of power and knowledge. Drawing on cosmological forms of knowledge associated with pre-colonial Hindu kingdoms and the authority of the modern state, Dharma Wisesa articulates a notion of security in which ideas of collective safety mingle with more individualistic concerns to acquire invulnerability. A vitally important element in this security grammar is the knowledge of invulnerability, which is perhaps better understood as a technology of power for defensive or offensive purposes (see Wilson forthcoming). Such talismanic knowledge of invulnerability “acts as a source of both cosmic dominance and daily survival, a key to a kind of ‘freedom’ that still makes sense in modern Southeast Asia today” (Day 2002: 165). The vision that inspired the formation of Dharma Wisesa was a bold one: to unify the Balinese by forming an organization with branches in Balinese settlements across Lombok. Just as this goal was nurtured by fear, it was only by communicating this sense of fear to those still ignorant of being in danger that

148 | Kari Telle

the vision could successfully be realized. The handful of men in Cakranegara who took the initiative to bring the Balinese into the protective fold of a revitalized Hindu movement agreed that the best strategy was to contact the heads of neighborhood associations (banjar) that coordinate life-cycle rituals and temple festivals. I am not suggesting that these men were opportunistically exploiting a sense of fear. If anything, they were as equally in the grip of “political paranoia” (Bubandt 2008) as anyone else. But they did have the resources and rhetorical ability to communicate (about) fear in writing. The response to their outreach campaign, which dispatched hundreds of letters using couriers, was overwhelming. In the great assembly (Mahasabha) held in May 2000 to discuss the situation and how to develop the organization further, approximately 350 delegates from different corners of the island took part and drew up a program. Seeking a leader with broad and unifying appeal, the assembly appointed Anak Agung Gedé Biarsah, the grandson of the last Balinese king on Lombok, to head the organization. Part of the rationale for this choice is the assumption that members of the royal family have privileged access to spiritual forces and to potent objects associated with the former kingdom. When I interviewed Agung Biarsah in 2007, he was adamant that monarchy “is a far more peaceful and stable form of government, certainly when compared to the democratic system that we have now. We already have our tradition (adat). So why do we need democracy? That means tradition is being sidelined.” While his political views are controversial, Agung Biarsah has consolidated his family’s role within the organization by appointing his eldest son as the commander-inchief, a task he combines with being a civil servant. This response to overcoming ontological uncertainty bears the distinct imprint of New Order military culture. The headquarters is conceived as the command center (pos komando pusat) that is to coordinate the commanders (komandan), the regiments (regu), and the elite corps (pecalang inti), which some guards compare to Kopassus (Komando Pasukan Khusus), the Army Special Force Command. Despite its admiration for the state’s military might and its military apparatus, Dharma Wisesa is asserting a Hindu Balinese moral superiority in its practice and discourse. This is evident in the efforts to imbue the movement with historical depth through a process of “remythologization” (Kapferer 1997) whereby myths and legends of the past are reinvented as an ideology of coherence to suit the political and economic circumstances of the present. Making their residence, Puri Pamotan, the locus of many Dharma Wisesa activities, the leaders appear to engage in a form of ‘deep play’ whose logic goes back to pre-colonial times, when the king’s ability to mobilize manpower for rituals and war testified to his strength and was taken to reflect a divine mandate to rule (C. Geertz 1989; Wiener 1995).9 Born in a turbulent period, Dharma Wisesa represents a recuperation of tradition in the sense of a recently reimagined and highly militarized tradition. Key here is the deliberate rejection of the conventional, if problematic, distinction between sacred and secular domains. The guards, ranging from their early twenties to their mid-sixties, refer to themselves by the term pecalang. I learned that this is the term for ‘traditional Balinese police’ or ‘palace guards’,

Dharma Power | 149

designations that imbue this new occupation with the authority of tradition (Santikarma 2003). Their main tasks include acting as bodyguards and directing traffic in connection with life-cycle rituals, parades, and the temple festivals that are major social and religious occasions. They also patrol streets and neighborhoods, protecting private and commercial property. A substantial part of Dharma Wisesa’s income derives from money, collected once a month, from Balinese- and Chinese-owned businesses in Cakranegara. In the course of carrying out these tasks, the guards sometimes run into troublemakers and alleged criminals, whom they question, discipline, or pass over to the police. The leaders, accompanied by an entourage of guards, also mediate in conflicts, including those arising in connection with inter-religious marriage. Whatever the task, it is categorized as virtuous religious work (meyadnya) carried out without self-interest to further dharma. In short, Dharma Wisesa claims to provide spiritually sanctioned security as an alternative to the inferior protection offered by the state and commercial security firms. This claim is, I will argue, grounded in ontological assumptions about power and in the belief that Dharma Wisesa mediates relations, not just between people, but also between people and the invisible realm.

The Play of Power The name chosen for this organization tasked with enhancing security conveys a preoccupation with power—a complex abstraction anywhere and certainly in a Balinese context. The notion of dharma, which may be glossed as ‘truth’ or ‘balanced cosmic order’, is a key concept in Hindu Balinese thought. As such, it is the antithesis of adharma, or ‘chaos’ and ‘disorder’. In everyday parlance, dharma implies a sense of virtue and the duty to behave according to religious and social codes. The Balinese term wisesa connotes power or force. I Ketut Namia, a retired teacher who has served on the group’s advisory board, explained the concept as follows: “God, the creator, is all powerful. When human beings possess some of this power (wisesa), this is evidence that they are close to God.” This explanation indicates an affinity with the key concept of sakti, which is usually translated as ‘magical or spiritual power’. It also articulates what most Balinese take for granted: that power results from the generation and maintenance of connections between a person and the invisible world, especially, but not exclusively, the gods. Although only the realm of the visible world (sekala) of social relations can be seen with the naked eye, it is widely assumed that what happens in people’s lives is to a large extent influenced by what takes place in the invisible world (niskala) of spiritual relations. To quote Margaret Wiener (1995: 10): “It is in fact the latter that makes the authority of a person in [the visible world] possible at all.” To this we must add that Balinese talk about power (sakti) tends to be “pervaded with a rhetoric of battle” (H. Geertz 1994: 85), which reflects a conception of the world “as one of a multitude of beings, human and non-human, in competition for control over one another” (ibid.). In such a

150 | Kari Telle

world, much emphasis is placed on cultivating ties to figures who can mediate between the invisible and visible worlds. In times of crisis, there is heightened demand for insight into the ordinarily hidden workings of power. These ontological assumptions informed the founding of Dharma Wisesa, which was designed as a vehicle that would bring the visible and invisible realms closer together and thus invest the practice of security with supernatural force. Like all Dharma Wisesa artifacts, the headquarters is steeped in religious imagery and projects images of power. The converted storefront is embellished with engraved golden plaques, banners, and a flag. Ceremonial parasols flank the entrance to the headquarters, which stands out from the rather drab urban landscape with its brightly painted façade, decorated with red, black, and white stripes. These colors are associated with the gods making up the Hindu trinity: red is the color of Brahma, the creator; black is associated with Visnu, the preserver; and white is the color of Iswara, the god whose weapon is a thunderbolt and who is also known in another manifestation as Siwa, the main deity of the Hindu Balinese pantheon. While usually described as ‘the destroyer’, Siwa is the divinity from whom everything emanates and who contains the qualities of all the other gods.10 This deity, which epitomizes the symbolic ambiguities of Hinduism, was chosen as Dharma Wisesa’s chief guardian. The group’s logo depicts Lord Siwa meditating on a lotus throne inside a ring of fire that is surrounded by the eternally spinning chakra weapons. Facing north, south, east, and west, these weapons intercept and ward off dangers from all directions. This image, which is reproduced on all Dharma Wisesa attributes, evokes Siwa’s awesome power, which is simultaneously protective and destructive. Given the importance attached to the development of a portfolio of material emblems, some comments about how these images are conceived are in order. The Dharma Wisesa logo was designed by Ida Bagus Ketut Yoga, a military retiree who was among the group of men who took the initiative to form a pan-Balinese security force. He admits that his career in the military police has been of great value in developing Dharma Wisesa. Between 2000 and 2004, he headed the ‘repressive section’ (seksi represif) and coordinated the elite corps. A man of many talents, Ida Bagus Ketut Yoga has lately devoted himself to healing and the study of religious texts, fitting occupations for those of Brahmana status. Among his most important assets as a healer is a collection of magical drawings. “Magical drawings,” Angela Hobart (2003: 72) points out, “form an iconographic system of representation,” expressing core assumptions about the universe and its elements. Often referred to as tools or weapons (sikepan), these drawings depicting gods, demons, and a host of other powerful beings may be adapted and transferred to other mediums, including paper, cloth, metal, or bodies. What became the Dharma Wisesa logo was adapted from these jealously guarded drawings. The fact that these drawings are characterized as weapons or tools indicates that their usage is directed toward pragmatic ends; they are elements in an enchanted technology. Conceived as nodes that mediate between the visible and invisible worlds, such drawings are handled with care, since disrespectful treatment is likely to harm the offender. The efficacy of the images depends

Dharma Power | 151

in part on the potency of their creators. Hence, before modifying the drawings, Ida Bagus Ketut Yoga prepares himself through prayer and meditation. Throughout the process of making an image, offerings and incense are kept by his side. When the drawing has been physically completed, the image is purified of negative influences before being made ‘alive’ (urip) through a process of reciting mantras and prayers. Bringing an image or an object to life entails “inviting invisible forces to ‘sit’ in it and make it useful (maguna)” (Wiener 1995: 55–56). This focus on making images come alive underscores how they are effectively conceived as social agents (Gell 1998). Such images are not so much repositories of power as they are intersections in expansive spatio-temporal fields comprising humans and non-human entities. Combining the ritual technology of rendering images alive with the mechanical power of reproduction, Dharma Wisesa images are made to act as talismans of invulnerability. Most guards will also carry their own personal talismans of invulnerability (bebadong), often in the form of miniature weapons.11 By constituting itself through an assortment of ritually forged yet massproduced identity tokens, Dharma Wisesa appears to have adopted the commercial logic of branding, which is intended to gain recognition and inspire confidence or ‘faith’ in a particular product. From the start, much attention was paid to developing a collection of Dharma Wisesa emblems, including stickers, banners, flags, T-shirts, and different sets of uniforms. These items are known by the Indonesian term atribut. Even the motorcycles purchased to facilitate patrols have been modified to be recognized easily as Dharma Wisesa assets. Apart from stickers, the saddle is covered in the checked white-and-black cloth (kain poleng) that has become something of a trademark among pecalang guards on both Lombok and Bali. This emphasis on projecting visually distinct tokens of Hindu Balinese religious imagery into the public realm and the tendency of Dharma Wisesa to treat these images as its own exclusive property testify to the central role of trademarks in Indonesia. The fact that trademarks have currency, both as culture and as private property, creates “generative conditions for struggles over significance; they are simultaneously shared in a commons of signification and jealously guarded in exclusive estates” (Coombe 1996: 202). Seeking to establish itself as the supreme provider of security for the Lombok Balinese, Dharma Wisesa claimed aspects of Hindu Balinese aesthetic heritage as its own, a process that seems inclusive but which also has inspired defensive measures to guard its exclusive rights to these images. Although they could not ensure legal protection of its logo and other images, the Dharma Wisesa leadership soon grew concerned that other Balinese might copy or steal its signature attributes. To enhance the group’s visibility and credibility, and possibly to guard against infringement, the Dharma Wisesa leadership decided to issue personalized membership cards. Except for the surfeit of Hindu imagery, the laminated card is almost identical to the state-issued identity cards that Indonesian citizens are obliged to carry. By expanding its portfolio of identity tokens to include membership cards, Dharma Wisesa appropriated the “logic and languages of stateness” (Hansen and Stepputat 2001). The move to issue identity cards should not

152 | Kari Telle

be taken to imply a rejection of the state’s authority. Rather, it is more about “creating a sort of authority for oneself” (Siegel 1998: 14). The authority of the Indonesian state is partly defined through its ability to issue official papers and rests on an extensive set of bureaucratic artifacts, such as seals, stamps, and signatures. Possessing the right documents is of utmost importance, as they facilitate movement within the country. Returning from a trip to Bali in 2006, one of my companions noted that his Dharma Wisesa membership card had been “far more useful” than the state-issued identity card. The Dharma Wisesa card, Made Pasek Gel Gel explained, had facilitated his smooth entry to Bali and ensured respectful treatment from the immigration authorities, the police, and ordinary Balinese. That the Dharma Wisesa card was felt to command respect even among agents of the state is illustrative of the importance of the insignia of authority in Indonesia, where the blurred boundary between the official and the counterfeit has given rise to the neologism aspal (asli tapi palsu), meaning ‘original but false’. By creating its own official documents, Dharma Wisesa made itself ‘legible’ to the state. According to James Scott (1998: 101), “legibility is a condition for manipulation,” as it is only through the invention of units that are visible that states can effectively intervene in society. For Dharma Wisesa, legibility is a strategy for accessing and obtaining state recognition. Only by becoming state-like can a group like Dharma Wisesa gain governmental recognition as an ‘official’ security group. Minimally, the process involves paying a lawyer to approve the group’s program and its ethical code of conduct, but it may also involve lobbying. Despite the care that goes into producing neatly printed documents, nobody assumes that they accurately reflect the realities of such groups. Nonetheless, the ability to convey a façade of respectability through a command of the bureaucratic jargon is required. Having secured official recognition, an organization is in a position to solicit funds from officials in municipal, district, or regional government, who, over the past decade, have been quite eager to support civilian enterprises carried out in the name of enhancing security, especially when such initiatives are taken by so-called traditional or religious leaders (Telle 2009, 2010).

Conclusion I have emphasized how Dharma Wisesa constituted itself by drawing on various registers of authority, including state, commercial, and religious forms. Fusing different types of power, Dharma Wisesa established itself as a sovereign body with the bold aim to bring the entire Lombok Balinese community under its sphere of protection. Formations of this sort, be they civilian security groups, vigilante groups, gangs, or protection rackets, have been described as “shadow states” (Reno 2000) and “twilight institutions” (Lund 2001), terms that convey the double sense that they operate in the blurred zone between state and society and that they thrive on and exploit the unclear boundary between the licit and the illicit. Many observers are concerned that the state, under current

Dharma Power | 153

neo-liberal conditions, is being hollowed out through outsourcing or is being appropriated by a range of sovereigns beyond the state. However, in the context of Indonesia, it should be remembered that the state never had a monopoly on the legitimate use of force (Anderson 2001; Siegel 1998), much less controlled valued forms of knowledge, such as the knowledge of invulnerability, which is highly prized across much of Southeast Asia. In his important study of state formation in Southeast Asia, Tony Day (2002) makes the case that violence and aesthetics ought to be studied together, and gives many examples of how “violence is both the source and guarantor of the state’s magical ‘beauty’” (ibid.: 292). Highlighting the dynamic transformation between the violent and benevolent faces of Southeast Asian states, Day observes that states in the region, however dominant or coercive, have never been able fully to control local knowledge, especially that of invulnerability. Notwithstanding the secrecy that often governs access to such knowledge, the knowledge of invulnerability is not exclusive property to a certain class but rather is potentially available to anyone. “Such powerful knowledge,” Day (ibid.: 160) points out, “also attracts adherents who form communities of the ‘protected’. It is a state-forming kind of knowledge.” Far from being obsolete, invulnerability practices are increasingly prominent throughout Indonesia (Wilson forthcoming). In my view, Dharma Wisesa is a modern-day avatar of what Day (2002) calls a “culture of security” centered around invulnerability practices that serve to bring the bearer and those who seek the same form of knowledge into a protected ‘state’ of well-being. While this is associated with being impervious to outside influence, I have stressed how Dharma Wisesa has sought to align itself with and draw upon diverse forms of authority. This suggests that it is only by aligning oneself with higher forms of authority that this state of well-being—epitomized in the celebrated and seemingly impenetrable (kebal) body—may temporarily be achieved.

Kari Telle is a social anthropologist who works as a Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) in Bergen, Norway, where she also coordinates the “Politics of Faith” research program. She is presently engaged in a threeyear research project that explores the intersection between religious mobilization, security politics, and decentralization in Indonesia. Her recent publications include “Swearing Innocence: Performing Justice and ‘Reconciliation’ in Post– New Order Lombok” (2009), “Entangled Biographies: Rebuilding a Sasak House” (2007), “Nurturance and the Spectre of Neglect: Sasak Ways of Dealing with the Dead” (2007), and “The Smell of Death: Theft, Disgust and Ritual Practice in Central Lombok, Indonesia” (2003).

154 | Kari Telle

Notes 1. While security has emerged as a key trope in the post-9/11 world, the fertility of the concept lies in its definitional vagueness and polyvalence. As Burke (2002: 7) puts it: “Security’s power lies in the very slipperiness of its signification.” 2. This chapter is based on 7 months of fieldwork carried out between 2001 and 2008. I have previously conducted 13 months of fieldwork in Sasak villages in Jonggat, Central Lombok. 3. Der Derian (1995: 25) argues that “within the [Western] concept of security lurks the entire history of western metaphysics.” 4. I follow Bubandt’s (2005: 277) definition of ontological uncertainty as the “socially constructed anxiety that shapes pertinent kinds of danger, fears and concerns for a particular community at a particular time.” 5. For a good account of cultural and religious policies since Indonesia’s independence, see Ramstedt (2004). 6. The organization linked to most violent incidents is Amphibi, a vigilante-style crimefighting group. In 1999, just four months after its formation, it boasted of having more than 200,000 paying members (MacDougall 2007; Telle 2010). 7. Official records report that 7 people died and 54 were severely injured. For insightful accounts of the riot and its aftermath, see Avonius (2004) and Sidel (2006). 8. For different and more elaborate versions of this myth, see Harnish (2006). 9. In 2004, several members who had played key roles in developing Dharma Wisesa withdrew from the organization over disagreements related to issues of leadership. They claimed that they wanted the movement to be more “democratic” and “transparent” and objected to what they describe as a “feudal” consolidation of power. These men, along with their followers, quickly established competing security groups, notably Bayu Mandala and Sikep Cakra Yudha. Consequently, Dharma Wisesa can no longer claim to represent the entire Lombok Balinese community. 10. This understanding is expressed in texts describing the nine-fold division of the cosmos (nawa sanga) in which Siwa is placed in the center. According to this cosmic map, each deity is associated with a particular direction, weapon, color, syllable, and bodily organ (see Hobart 2003). 11. These ritually forged talismans are intended to make the body impenetrable (kebal) to weapons and bullets. Other talismans protect the body’s integrity by aborting the enemy’s desire to attack.

References Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. 2001. “Introduction.” Pp. 9–19 in Violence and the State in Suharto’s Indonesia, ed. B. R. O’G. Anderson. Ithaca, NY: SEAP Publications. Avonius, Leena. 2004. “Reforming Wetu Telu: Islam, Adat and the Promises of Regionalism in Post–New Order Lombok.” PhD diss., University of Leiden. Barker, Joshua. 1998. “State of Fear: Controlling the Criminal Contagion in Suharto’s New Order.” Indonesia 66: 7–42. Bubandt, Nils. 2005. “Vernacular Security: The Politics of Feeling Safe in Global, National and Local Worlds.” Security Dialogue 36, no. 3: 275–296. ______. 2008. “Rumours, Pamphlets, and the Politics of Paranoia in Indonesia.” Journal of Asian Studies 67, no. 3: 789–817. Burke, Anthony. 2002. “Aporias of Security.” Alternatives 27: 1–27. Coombe, Rosemary J. 1996. “Embodied Trademarks: Mimesis and Alterity on American Commercial Frontiers.” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 2: 202–224.

Dharma Power | 155

Davidson, Jamie S., and David Henley, eds. 2007. The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics: The Deployment of Adat from Colonialism to Indigenism. London: Routledge. Day, Tony. 2002. Fluid Iron: State Formation in Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ______. 2007. “Introduction: Identifying with Freedom.” Pp. 1–18 in Identifying with Freedom: Indonesia after Suharto, Critical Interventions, vol. 9, ed. Tony Day. New York: Berghahn Books. Der Derian, James. 1995. “The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard.” Pp. 24–45 in Lipschutz 1995. Duffield, Mark. 2001. Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security. London: Zed Book. Dwyer, Leslie, and Degung Santikarma. 2007. “Speaking from the Shadows: Memory and Mass Violence in Bali.” Pp. 190–214 in After Mass Crime: Rebuilding States and Communities, ed. Beatrice Pouligny, Simon Chesterman, and Albrecht Schnabel. New York: United Nations University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1989. Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Geertz, Hildred. 1994. Images of Power: Balinese Paintings Made for Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. George, Kenneth M., and Andrew C. Willford. 2005. “Introduction: Religion, the Nation, and the Predicaments of Public Life in Southeast Asia.” Pp. 9–22 in Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia, ed. Andrew C. Willford and Kenneth M. George. Ithaca, NY: SEAP Publications. Gerdin, Ingela. 1982. The Unknown Balinese: Land, Labour and Inequality in Lombok. Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothenburgensis. Hadiz, Vedi R., and Richard Robison. 2003. “Neo-liberal Reforms and Illiberal Consolidations: The Indonesian Paradox.” Southeast Asia Research Centre, Working Paper Series 52. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong. Hägerdal, Hans. 2001. Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Lombok and Bali in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Bangkok: White Lotus Press. Hansen, Thomas Blom, and Finn Stepputat. 2001. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–38 in States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, ed. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harnish, David D. 2006. Bridges to the Ancestors: Music, Myth, and Cultural Politics at an Indonesian Festival. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Hobart, Angela. 2003. Healing Performances of Bali: Between Darkness and Light. New York: Berghahn Books. Kapferer, Bruce. 1997. “Remythologizing Discourses: State and Insurrectionary Violence in Sri Lanka.” Pp. 159–187 in The Legitimization of Violence, ed. David E. Apter. London: MacMillan Press. ______. 2003. “Sorcery, Modernity and the Constitutive Imaginary: Hybridising Continuities.” Pp. 105–128 in Beyond Rationalism: Rethinking Magic, Witchcraft and Sorcery, ed. Bruce Kapferer. New York: Berghahn Press. Kent, Alexandra. 2006. “Reconfiguring Security: Buddhism and Moral Legitimacy in Cambodia.” Security Dialogue 37, no. 3: 343–361. Lindsey, Tim. 2001. “The Criminal State: Premanisme and the New Indonesia.” Pp. 283–297 in Indonesia Today: Challenges of History, ed. Grayson J. Lloyd and Shannon L. Smith. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Lipschutz, Ronnie D., ed. 1995. On Security. New York: University of Columbia Press. Lund, Christian. 2001. “Precarious Democratization and Local Dynamics in Niger: Micropolitics in Zinder.” Development and Change 32, no. 5: 845–869.

156 | Kari Telle

MacDougall, John M. 2007. “Criminality and the Political Economy of Security in Lombok.” Pp. 281–306 in Renegotiating Boundaries: Local Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia, ed. Henk Schulte Nordholt and Gerry van Klinken. Leiden: KITLV Press. Ramstedt, Martin. 2004. “Introduction: Negotiating Identities—Indonesian ‘Hindus’ between Local, National, and Global Interests.” Pp. 1–44 in Hinduism in Modern Indonesia: A Minority Religion between Local, National, and Global Interests, ed. Martin Ramstedt. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Reno, William. 2000. “Clandestine Economies, Violence and States in Africa.” Journal of International Affairs 53, no. 2: 433–459. Santikarma, Degung. 2003. “A New Security Force Cloaked in Tradition.” Indonesia Today (January/March): 73. Schulte Nordholt, Henk. 2002. “A Genealogy of Violence.” Pp. 33–61 in Roots of Violence in Indonesia, ed. Freek Colombijn and J. Thomas Lindblad. Leiden: KITLV Press. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sidel, John T. 2006. Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Siegel, James T. 1998. A New Criminal Type in Jakarta: Counter-Revolution Today. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1999. “Two Theories of Modernity.” Public Culture 11, no. 1: 153–174. Telle, Kari. 2009. “Swearing Innocence: Performing Justice and ‘Reconciliation’ in Post–New Order Lombok.” Pp. 57–76 in Reconciling Indonesia: Grassroots Agency for Peace, ed. Birgit Bräuchler. London: Routledge. ______. 2010. “Seduced by Security: The Politics of (In)Security on Lombok, Indonesia.” In Development and Security: Hearts and Minds, Critical Interventions, ed. J. McNeisch and J. H. Sande-Lie. New York: Berghahn Books. Forthcoming. Wæver, Ole. 1995. “Securitization and Desecuritization.” Pp. 46–86 in Lipschutz 1995. Wiener, Margaret J. 1995. Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, Lee. Forthcoming. “Beyond the Exemplary Centre: The Practicalities of Power and Knowledge in Indonesia.” In Spirited Modernities: Popular Religion, Power, and Prosperity in Contemporary Southeast Asia, ed. Kirsten Endres and Andrea Lauser. New York: Berghahn Books.

( Chapter 9

An Ancient Case of Interrogation and Torture Bruce Lincoln

I. Occasionally, past and present can be made to collide so that old, obscure events modify our understanding of contemporary circumstances, and vice versa. The extreme case is that which Walter Benjamin described in his much-cited sixth thesis “On the Concept of History”: “Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it the way it really was. It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger” (Benjamin [1940] 2003: 391; emphasis in original). With this in mind, I want to begin by narrating an incident from ancient Persia: a struggle for imperial succession in the Achaemenian empire between two sons of Darius II (r. 423–404 bce). The elder, who took the throne Notes for this chapter begin on page 167.

158 | Bruce Lincoln

in 404 as Artaxerxes II, was generally regarded as something of a lightweight— lazy, undistinguished, and not particularly bright. In contrast, his brother, Cyrus the Younger, who was his mother’s favorite, was full of energy, ambition, and charisma. Given a provincial governorship in the rich provinces of western Asia as something of a consolation prize, Cyrus proceeded to make it his power base. Within a few years, he had built up a personal army, including crack Greek mercenary troops, and in 401 he rose up in rebellion. At first, the smart money was on Cyrus, but the king rallied under pressure, showing unexpected resolve. In a fierce touch-and-go battle fought at Cunaxa (3 September 401), Artaxerxes’ troops managed to prevail, and Cyrus was killed in the process.1 This is where our story, preserved in Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes, begins. Apparently, the king decided to embellish his military record by taking credit for having fought Cyrus mano a mano and claimed to have slain the rebel himself. The story line developed by his handlers not only made Artaxerxes a bold man of war but also portrayed the battle as the definitive triumph of order over chaos, benevolent and righteous authority over dangerous insurgents, and—to put it in the religiously charged idiom that the Achaemenians preferred—Truth over ‘the Lie’. There was, however, one problem. Apparently, Artaxerxes had done nothing of the sort. Based on the eyewitness testimony of Ctesias, the Greek physician to the Persian court (and something of an inveterate gossip), Plutarch reports that a Persian soldier named Mithridates dispatched the rebel while Artaxerxes was hors de combat.2 Public relations experts—and, like all kings, Artaxerxes had his—know how to handle such inconveniences: with a mixture of bribery and spin. Accordingly, Mithridates was given a sizable payment and public honors for loyal service and heroism. Nothing was said about his responsibility for Cyrus’s death, however, and Mithridates was expected to maintain similar discretion—which he did, for a while (Plutarch, Life of Artaxerxes 14.3–4). One night, however, at a banquet celebrating the victory, the official line was repeated once too often. Resentful at being erased from the story, and also slightly tipsy, Mithridates said too much, and the rest of the company recoiled (Plutarch, Life of Artaxerxes 15.1–5). When word reached Artaxerxes, he had the man arrested and treated as follows: Taking two troughs that have been made to fit closely together, they laid Mithridates inside one of them. Then they fit the other on top, so the man’s head, hands, and feet stuck out, while it covered the rest of his body. They gave him food, pricking his eye when he resisted. They also poured milk mixed with honey into his mouth, and they poured it over his face. Then they turned his eyes constantly toward the sun and a multitude of flies settled down, covering his face. Meanwhile, inside, the man did what people must do when they have drunk and eaten. Worms and maggots boiled up from the decay and putrefaction of his excrement, and these ate away his body, boring into his interior. When he was dead and the top removed, people saw that his flesh had all been eaten away, and there were swarms of vermin around his vital organs, eating them and leeching at them. Thus Mithridates was gradually destroyed over seventeen days, until he finally died. (Plutarch, Life of Artaxerxes 16.2–4)3

An Ancient Case of Interrogation and Torture | 159

II. Both Ctesias and Plutarch treated this episode as a theater of cruelty, noteworthy for its sadistic excess. There is probably something to be said for this view, but Greek stereotypes could be harsh, and their understanding of Persian culture was relatively superficial (Briant 1989; Cantarella 1965; Georges 1994; Hall 1989). It is thus possible to regard the account as exaggerated and tendentious: an early entry in the long dossier of Western Orientalism (Said 1978). However, it is also possible that real Persian practices lay behind the Greek accounts, however distorted the latter might be. Unfortunately, the Achaemenians left relatively little evidence to help us understand how they treated, represented, and understood those whom they viewed as enemies of the realm. The most important testimony appears in the inscription of Darius the Great (r. 522–486) at Bisitun (for recent translations of which, see Lecoq 1997: 187–217; Schmitt 1991). More than 10 times the length of any other Achaemenian inscription, and the only one that treats historic events in any detail, this text was designed to justify Darius’s seizure and consolidation of power.4 Accordingly, it defined him as God’s chosen hero, while depicting his defeated rivals as instruments of ‘the Lie’, that is, the demonic force responsible for all conflict, distrust, and contention, a power antithetical to—and corrosive of—the cosmic, moral, and socio-political order (Ahn 1992: 278–281, 293–297; Boyce 1982: 120–123; Pongratz-Leisten 2002; Skjærvø 2003). At Bisitun, one finds blunt acknowledgment that a king may have dangerous enemies of this sort, whom he treats in ways less than gentle. Sometimes concrete descriptions are given, as in the case of Fravarti, who proclaimed himself heir to the Median throne and led a rebellion that Darius put down only after eight major battles and casualties in excess of 50,000.5 With victory, however, Darius won the right to represent Fravarti as a demonically inspired agent of ‘the Lie’ and thus a danger to humanity and an affront to the Wise Lord (Ahura Mazda¯, creator and chief of the pantheon). Whatever may have been the truth of the matter, Fravarti’s fate was the same: “Proclaims Darius the King … I sent the army after him. Fravarti was captured. He was led before me. I cut off his nose, his ears, and his tongue, and I put out one of his eyes. He was held bound at my gate. All the people saw him. Then I impaled him in Ecbatana, and the men who were his foremost followers I hung in Ecbatana” (Darius at Bisitun [= DB] §32). As in the case of Mithridates, Fravarti’s ordeal culminated in a moment of display, in which imperial power made his body into a sign for the public to read. This took place before the rebel’s death, when he was placed at the gate of Ecbatana (the Median capital), where he was seen by all the people. In contrast, the body of Mithridates was concealed inside the apparatus of the troughs until his torment was complete, at which point his corpse was exhibited. Clearly, each of these bodies bore a message that was intelligible to the spectators. On a superficial level, they announced, “This is how the king treats his enemies.” Beyond that blunt warning, however, they indelibly established how the nature of the king’s enemies was to be understood and why they deserved such treatment. Thus, several episodes in Herodotus’s Histories make

160 | Bruce Lincoln

clear that cutting off a man’s ears and nose was a conventional punishment for lying. Accordingly, the liar’s disfigured face let one see the nature of ‘the Lie’ as a deforming, corrupting power that renders its victims incapable of proper perception and communication by depriving them of their ears in all cases and of their eyes, tongue, and nose on occasion.6 Although inclusion of the nose may seem anomalous at first, it holds considerable importance, and this detail helps us understand how the treatment of Mithridates was similar to that of Fravarti, as we shall see in the fourth section below. But first, a bit of philology.

III. The Old Persian verb fra0¯-, which describes what the king did to liars, occurs five times in the corpus of Achaemenian inscriptions (DB §§8, 55, 63, 64; DNb §8c). Without exception, translators have rendered this word as ‘to punish’, as in Roland Kent’s version of a passage in which Darius gave advice to his successors: “Thou who shalt be king hereafter, protect thyself vigorously from the Lie; the man who shall be a Lie-follower, him do thou punish well, if thou shalt think: ‘May my country be secure’” (DB §55; Kent 1953: 131; cf. Asmussen 1960: 62; Lecoq 1997: 208; Schmitt 1991: 69). Notwithstanding apparent agreement on this point, there is reason to believe that the translation is wrong. All three dictionaries of Old Persian acknowledge that the original meaning of the verb was ‘to ask, examine, investigate’, imagining that ‘to punish’ was a later extension of its sense (Brandenstein and Mayrhofer 1964: 119; Kent 1953: 198; Meillet and Benveniste 1931: 52, 67, 115). If so, such a development was unique to Old Persian, for cognate terms in all other Indo-European languages denote either the act of posing a question or a highly marked variant on this practice, such as offering a proposal of marriage.7 This same general sense is also apparent in Old Persian pati-fra0¯-, a compound verb that means ‘to read’—that is, to learn via a process of inquiry focused on a text and not on a person.8 The translations of Darius’s inscriptions into Akkadian and Elamite confirm that questioning, not punishing, is also the sense of Old Persian fra0¯-. Thus, in Akkadian, the word used in place of fra0¯- is šâlu, which means ‘to investigate thoroughly, vigorously prosecute’.9 For its part, the Elamite translation uses the phrase miul-e hapi, ‘to squeeze out the sap’, which is elsewhere used for the act of pressing oil from sesame seeds.10 When one realizes that this is an idiom or metaphor, its sense become clear, for it describes the application of heavy pressure to extract the innermost essence from an object, thus making that inner core available for consumption in the case of a seed and for inspection in the case of a person.11 The metaphor thus describes a process of strenuous interrogation or judiciary ordeal that is intended to make liars reveal the truth.12 Most important, of course, is the truth that they are liars, which can be ‘ex-pressed’ physically as well as verbally. This is what happened in the case of Fravarti, whose body was transformed by a forceful ‘interrogation’ to show what he really was: devoid of sense, deceptive in speech, a source of danger and horror to all righteous people.

An Ancient Case of Interrogation and Torture | 161

IV. Much the same is true in the case of Mithridates, with the exception that his interrogation yielded evidence of his innermost nature that was both olfactory and visual in nature. To appreciate this, one must work backward from what spectators saw—and smelled—when the troughs were opened, and ask how they understood the worms and maggots swarming over his body, as well as the piles of excrement that had issued from it. Like many other peoples throughout the globe, the ancient Persians took worms, maggots, and flies as signs—and instruments—of bodily corruption. Further, they understood corruption as a process that was simultaneously physical and moral, most dramatically evidenced by the decomposition of a corpse. Thus, moral failings result from the presence of demonic beings—personified abstractions such as Anger, Envy, ‘the Lie’, etc. (on which see Christensen 1941)—inside a person. These demons, moreover, produce weaknesses in the body, making it vulnerable to attack by other demons and noxious creatures. As the process accelerates, sickness, frailty, aging, and bodily deterioration follow, with death, decay, and putrefaction as the ultimate results.13 Vermin are thus theorized as monstrously destructive forces; however, if people had no moral failings—that is, no demonic presence—within themselves, vermin would be powerless against them. As a corollary, one can infer that the greater number of vermin swarming on a given person (or corpse), the more vulnerable that person must have been. The degree of his (or her) physical corruption indexes a corresponding degree of moral corruption and demonic presence. Such evidence as we have for the Achaemenian period comes mostly from Greek historians, who reported that Persian priests waged ceaseless war against verminous species, including flies, ants, serpents, worms, and rats, as part of their campaign to rid the world of corruption.14 More theoretical discussions of the subject come from Zoroastrian works of a later period, like the following text, which treats the creation of verminous species: “The Foul Spirit fabricated his creatures from the dark matter of his own body, in the form of black, ashen, darkness-worthy, lying creatures, like the most sin-introducing vermin. And from the matter produced by his masturbation, he fabricated evil Lust, which has no form, for Lust is necessary. First, he created the essence of the demons, which is evil behavior, and that spirit is his stench, from which the stench of the Wise Lord’s creatures comes into being” (Greater Bundahišn 1.47–49).15 Although one could say a great deal about this text, four points will suffice for our purposes. First, vermin and demons are both products of the Evil Spirit and are thus antithetical to all the good creatures of the Wise Lord. Second, the Evil Spirit is here called by one of his alternative names, Ganna¯g Me¯no¯g, which means ‘Foul (literally, ‘stinking’) Spirit’. An olfactory code is thus made a primary index of his nature, such that stench is the aesthetic complement (and index) of the most extreme immorality. Together, they mark all that is antithetical to the flourishing of life in all its good forms, and it is the stink that makes this repugnant. Third, the Foul Spirit—or ‘the Lie’, to give him one of his other

162 | Bruce Lincoln

names—creates demons and vermin from his own bodily matter, which is disgusting but is all he has to work with. Lust, fittingly enough, comes from his masturbatory ejaculations, literally, ‘the material form of his self-indulgence’ (ge¯tı¯g xwad-do¯šagı¯h), while vermin come from ‘the dark matter of his own body’ (ge¯tı¯g ta¯rı¯gı¯h a¯n xwe¯š tan). Although the latter phrase is not explicated, it would seem to include at least two components: the arch-demon’s bodily filth and his excrement. This is why such creatures are dark in color and why they are attracted to rotting, stinking substances such as corpses and feces.16 Finally, the text states that all the world’s stench originates with the Foul Spirit, who transmits it to his demons and vermin. It is these monsters who convey the stench to the Wise Lord’s creations, elsewhere described as having been wondrously fragrant until they fell victim to this corruption. No living creature preserves the pristine perfection of origins. All are contaminated in some measure by moral-cum-physical corruption, which gives rise not only to mortality itself, but to foul bodily odors in life and putrefaction after death. But all are not contaminated in equal measure, and the extent to which a body—or corpse—stinks is, once more, a primary index of its corruption.17 All this has relevance for Mithridates, the stench of whose copious excrement and vermin-eaten body was conjured up as irrefutable proof that he—and not the king whose heroic deeds he questioned—was guilty, corrupt, and infested with demons, presumably ‘the Lie’ above all. The troughs in which Mithridates suffered are not to be understood as punishment for one found guilty; rather, these are the instruments of extreme interrogation, the mechanism through which his guilt was determined and demonstrated. Working with such implements, the Persian state conducted an inquiry—indeed, a graphic experiment—consistent with its best understanding of cosmology and ethics. Thus, Persian soldiers fed Mithridates the purest of foods: milk and honey, substances bright in color, sweet in flavor, connoting innocence, since they nourish infants and are obtained without causing the death of any plant or animal.18 In doing this, they did the accused no direct injury but maintained the fiction of showing him perfect kindness. That his body transformed those innocuous substances into stench, filth, vermin, and death was constituted as tangible proof of his guilt. Only one without a nose could miss the point. Here, as elsewhere, the primary goal of interrogation was not to extract information, however much the interrogators may have believed otherwise (cf. DuBois 1991; Lazreg 2008). Going far beyond such narrowly utilitarian goals, the ordeal of the troughs served to reassert a set of core beliefs in a moment that these had been seriously challenged. If the imperial order rested on the understanding of the Persian king as God’s chosen leader against ‘the Lie’, any suspicion concerning Artaxerxes’ claims of military valor was destabilizing in the extreme. To vindicate the king and preserve the empire’s view of itself, Mithridates had to be found guilty. This is what the troughs accomplished, rendering the conventional verities—the king is good, his enemies demonically corrupt—so vivid, palpable, and smellable even that they seemed utterly confirmed, not just in this case, but as the very foundation of reality (see further Lincoln 2007, forthcoming).

An Ancient Case of Interrogation and Torture | 163

V. In place of the tale told by apologists of torture, which construes pain as a useful, if regrettable, instrument of truth that helps embattled regimes extract vital information from their mortal enemies, most critics advance quite a different line of analysis, according to which torturers are less interested in hearing truth told by others than in writing their own preferred truths on the bodies of captives and victims. Given its most haunting articulation by Kafka (1919), this perspective has been developed by Michel Foucault (1975), Elaine Scarry (1985), Allen Feldman (1991), and others. To cite but one formulation, Scarry (1985: 27) reasons: “In the very processes it uses to produce pain within the body of the prisoner, [torture] bestows visibility on the structure and enormity of what is usually private and incommunicable, contained within the boundaries of the sufferer’s body. It then goes on to deny, to falsify, the reality of the very thing it has itself objectified by a perceptual shift which converts the vision of suffering into the wholly illusory but, to the torturers and the regime they represent, wholly convincing spectacle of power.” What Scarry describes is a semiotics of substitution, whereby the victim’s body as signifier ultimately gives way to the regime’s power as signified. This, however, is only part of the story, for neither side in the dyadic relation of torture is ever fully effaced by the other. Rather, as the process of their transaction unfolds, both sides are recoded, as is the nature of the relation itself. A fuller analysis ought to note how Mithridates’s body was not just revealed and then destroyed, but was gradually transformed, rewritten, and definitively read as corrupt, perfidious, and demon-infested, while Artaxerxes’ power—which made possible these revelations and obviated the dangers they revealed—was correspondingly represented as divine in its origin, just in its exercise, and salvific in its results. The ordeal further scripted the relation of king and critic as a drama that moved from an initial moment of hidden danger, through a gradual unveiling of evil, to a satisfying dénouement, with proper order restored. Not just an emphatic reassertion of power, torture was in this case a sustained, complex, self-validating practice that ultimately served to sanctify the regime and demonize its opponents. Such a line of analysis has contemporary resonance, offering novel perspectives on such data as the notorious photographs from Abu Ghraib. In attempting to account for these shocking images and the events they so gleefully record, commentators have offered any number of simplistic explanations, including boredom, sadism, and the desire to ‘soften up’ prisoners for interrogation. The pictures themselves have been compared to pornography, tourist souvenirs, lynching photographs, and ‘trophy shots’ taken by hunters.19 Notwithstanding the notoriety of those photographs, few have paused to look at them long and hard (exceptions include Baudrillard 2005; Eisenman 2007; Mitchell 2005), and to do so takes a strong stomach. Perhaps the bestknown picture (fig. 1)20 shows a hooded prisoner, whose spectral garb makes him a figure of mixed angst and jest, insofar as the man beneath these dark, sinister robes is made to embody all manner of amorphous fears, providing a

164 | Bruce Lincoln

somewhat parodic image of ‘the Terrorist’. The joke is made better still by the knowledge that this figure of dread had been immobilized: made to stand on a box in a ludicrous pose and told that he would receive strong electric shocks if he tried to move (the wires, in fact, were unconnected). A later, less publicized photograph (fig. 2) shows how effective this treatment had been, confirming the adequacy of American ingenuity and power to master whatever evils were represented in that now-exhausted, now-impotent figure. Other pictures explore the relation of captors and captives, making use of the same binary oppositions that figured in the ordeal of the troughs. The clothed and the naked, the high and the low, the clean and the filthy, the vertical and the horizontal, the strong and the weak are systematically contrasted, implicitly associating these with more abstract categories: the just and the guilty, the virtuous and the depraved, those who ask questions and those whose silence will surely be broken, Civilized and Barbarian (Culture and Nature), Christians and Muslims, God’s chosen and God’s abandoned (figs. 3, 4, 5). Other photographs introduce a third term into the image and the equation: the dogs, who mediate between guards and prisoners, implying a hierarchic ontology that begins with God in his heaven and descends through the Americans to the dogs, then to the naked Iraqis, cowering beneath the bestial (fig. 6). Another much-reproduced photograph works issues of gender into this system, with an American woman now playing the role of lord and master, while an Iraqi male is made to assume the role of her dog (fig. 7).

Figure 1 Abu Ghraib prison, 5 November 2003

Figure 2 Abu Ghraib prison, morning of 6 November 2003

Figure 3 Abu Ghraib prison, late October or early November 2003 (above) Figure 4 Abu Ghraib prison, 8 November 2003 (right) Figure 5 Abu Ghraib prison, 18 November 2003 (below)

166 | Bruce Lincoln

Figure 6 Abu Ghraib prison, 12 December 2003 (above) Figure 7 Abu Ghraib prison, 23 October 2003 (right)

Although such elements and intentions were surely present, the practices recorded in the Abu Ghraib photographs were not meant simply to display the victor’s power, nor to degrade the vanquished. Rather, the guards at Abu Ghraib and their comrades elsewhere enacted a more complex narrative through the details of their actions, which repeatedly and emphatically reasserted prior characterizations of American power as pure and noble, its enemies as alwaysalready degraded, and the use of such power against such contemptible, dangerous objects as just, even divine. In these photographs—and, more importantly, in the spectacles they record—a group of ordinary GIs sought to impose a set of conventional beliefs on a situation whose harsh realities contradicted them at their core. Toward that end, they obsessively deployed the limited means and less limited power at their disposal to place their bodies and those of their captives into relation in such a way as to confirm the arguments, beliefs, and presuppositions that the official American discourse and general, if manipulated, public opinion were using to justify the war.21

An Ancient Case of Interrogation and Torture | 167

Just as the Persians used the ordeal of the troughs to persuade themselves that Mithridates was a liar and that their king was God’s champion of Truth (all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding), so the soldiers at Abu Ghraib persuaded—and obsessively re-persuaded—themselves that they fought Terror on behalf of Freedom. The heartbreaking irony in both cases is that when worried empires reassert their traditional and conventional, but now embattled and problematic, legitimating beliefs in extremis, the practices and signs they employ toward that end are so crude, so desperate, and so transparently self-serving as to contradict all the values that the actors claim they are fighting to preserve.

Bruce Lincoln is the Caroline E. Haskell Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, with affiliations to the Departments of Anthropology, Classics, Medieval Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies. He is particularly interested in issues of discourse, practice, power, conflict, and the violent reconstruction of social borders. His research tends to focus on the religions of pre-Christian Europe and pre-Islamic Iran. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Siena, Uppsala, Copenhagen, and Novosibirsk and at the Collège de France. He is the author of numerous books, including most recently Religion, Empire, and Torture: The Case of Achaemenian Persia (2007) and Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (2003).

Notes 1. On these events, see Bigwood (1983), Briant (1996: 274–285, 634–653), Dandamaev (1989: 274–285), Rahe (1980), and Wylie (1992). 2. Plutarch preserves several variant accounts of Cyrus’s death. The one that most reflects Artaxerxes’ propaganda is taken from the lost history of Deinon (Plutarch, Artaxerxes 10.1–3). Other versions, more critical of the king are mentioned at 10.3 and Ctesias’s version (presumably taken from his lost Persica) is discussed at some length in 11.1–13.4. Ctesias’s version was also quoted by Xenophon, Anabasis 1.8.26–27. On Ctesias’s biases and reliability, see Bigwood (1978), Lenfant (1996), Momigliano (1969), and SancisiWeerdenburg (1987). What survives of his work may be found in Auberger (1991), along with a useful introduction. 3. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Greek, Old Persian, and Pahlavi are my own. 4. The highly irregular circumstances of Darius’s accession have been much discussed. See, inter alia, Balcer (1987), Briant (1996: 119–127), and Dandamaev (1976; 1989: 103–113). 5. The description of Fravarti’s rebellion is found at §§24–32 of the Bisitun inscription (conventionally abbreviated as DB). As this text was meant to be disseminated throughout the empire, it was translated into several languages. On the rock face of Bisitun, Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian versions are found. A version in Aramaic has been recovered elsewhere, and it seems likely that versions in Greek and other languages also circulated. Casualty figures are not included in all versions, but they do appear in the Babylonian text (Malbran-Labat 1994: 110–118; Voigtlander 1978: 56–58). 6. At 3.118, mutilation of the sense organs is explicitly said to be a punishment for “telling lies” (pseudea legein), while at 3.69 this is implicit. At 3.154, the situation is more

168 | Bruce Lincoln

complex, since mutilation is part of a ruse. To carry out the ruse, however, the man thus disfigured has to tell lies about how and why the mutilation was practiced, so that, ironically, it becomes a punishment performed in anticipation of the crime. One also should note that a second rebel discussed in the Bisitun inscription, Tritantaxma, suffered the same fate as Fravarti, although this is clear only from the Akkadian text, since the Old Persian and Elamite versions omit the fact that his tongue was cut out. The data are as follows. Name

Source

Crime

Ears

Nose Tongue Eye

King’s attendants

Herodotus 3.118

Suspected of lying

Cut off

Cut off

Displayed Driven through city

(Pseudo-) Herodotus Unspecified, Cut Smerdis 3.69 but later off identtified as a liar, imposter, and usurper

Having usurped the throne, Smerdis disguised his mutilation to erase signs of his past crimes and punishment

Zopyrus Herodotus 3.154

Deceitfully misrepresented his mutilations to the Babylonians as evidence of Darius’s injustice

Lies to the Cut Cut Babylonians off off in order to gain their trust and betray their city

Fravarti DB §32 Lying, Cut Cut Cut rebellion off off out

One put out

At gates of Ecbatana before execution

Tritantaxma DB §33 Lying, Cut Cut Cut rebellion off off out

One put out

At gates of Arbela before execution

7. Cognates include Avestan pərəsaiti ‘he asks’, frašna ‘question’; Sanskrit pr ccháti ‘he ˚ asks’, pras´ná ‘question’; Armenian e-harç ‘he has asked’; Latin precor ‘I ask’, Umbrian pesklu ‘supplication’; Old High German fergo¯n, Old Norse fregna, Anglo-Saxon frignan, and Gothic fraíhnan ‘to ask’ (cf. German fragen); Old High German forsca, Old High German fra¯ga ‘question’; Lithuanian prašau¯ ‘I demand’, peršù ‘I seek in marriage’; Old Church Slavonic prositi ‘to ask’; Tocharian B preksa ‘to ask’. For the details, see Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1995: 206), Mayrhofer (1956–1976: 2/329, 369), and Pokorny (1959: 821–822). 8. The verb pati-fra0¯- occurs at DB §§56, 58, and 70. As regards its meaning, see Brandenstein and Mayrhofer (1964: 139), Kent (1953: 198), and Meillet and Benveniste (1931: 144). 9. Akkadian šâlu occurs in place of Old Persian fra0¯- in the Babylonian version of the Bisitun inscription §§8, 44, 51 (Malbran-Labat 1994; Voigtlander 1978). Malbran-Labat (1994: 158) gives the meanings ‘interroger, pourchasser’ for this verb, but the latter sense is unattested elsewhere. Cf. the fuller discussion of Reiner (1989: 274–282), which gives a primary sense, ‘to ask, to question, interrogate, to inquire, investigate’. Also relevant may be the second definition listed, ‘to hold responsible, to call to account’. 10. Elamite miul-e hapi translates Old Persian fra0¯- in the Elamite version of the Bisitun text §§8, 44, and 51. For its meaning, see Grillot-Susini, Herrenschmidt, and Malbran-Labat (1993: 41n103), Hallock (1969: 39–40), and Hinz and Koch (1987: 619, 941). For the use of this expression in the context of oil pressing, see Persepolis Fortification Text 1242, 1243, 1248 (in Hallock 1969: 355, 356). 11. English employs the same metaphor as a reflexive rather than a transitive verb when it describes the act of ‘ex-pressing’ oneself.

An Ancient Case of Interrogation and Torture | 169

12. For some indication of the importance of ordeals in ancient Iranian legal practice, see the rather rudimentary discussion of Tarapore (1954). 13. Consider, for instance, the following passages from Zoroastrian literature in Pahlavi: When, as a result of inattention to their duty, people commit mortal sins, their bodies become as good as dead, given their uselessness, and their souls become hellish in their foulness. (De¯nkard 3.361; Madan 1911: 345.1–3) ud o¯zadagı¯h ge¯ha¯n arz a¯n ¯ı ka pad axwe¯ška¯rı¯h marga¯rza¯n bawe¯nd u-ša¯n tan pad anabe¯da¯nı¯h azı¯ndag ud ruwa¯n pad pa¯dagı¯h dušo¯xı¯g bawe¯d. Pollution is entirely demonic; it all comes from demons. The more one’s body is inhabited by demons, the more pollution there is. When the body is dead, the death-making demon, the author of powerlessness, the defeater of the soul, comes to it triumphantly. He seizes it and brings his brothers to the body, to inhabit its every place of life. These are the stench-makers, creators of foulness, and other demons who make the body useless and who drive off the opponents antithetical to themselves, like sweet fragrance, purity, good conduct, beauty and others that are necessary. Residing in the body, they increase, so there are more of them all together in the body, so that they breathe corpse-pollution and all illnesses. One can say, without dispute, that the residence of demons is in that pollution. (De¯nkard 5.24.119–9a; Madan 1911: 463.6–16) ud re¯manı¯h hama¯g de¯wı¯h az de¯wa¯n harw ku¯ de¯w me¯hma¯ntar re¯manı¯h we¯š ud tan ka murd abarwe¯zı¯ha¯ madan +margı¯hkarda¯r ud aga¯re¯nida¯r Astwiha¯d sto¯we¯nida¯r ¯ı gya¯n u-š aba¯z grift i-š gya¯g gya¯g ¯ı zindagı¯h ud pad mehma¯nı¯h andar burdan i-š bra¯dara¯n gande¯nida¯ra¯n +pudage¯nida¯ra¯n aba¯rı¯g a¯n-abe¯da¯n kardara¯n de¯wa¯n o¯ tan +a¯na¯ftan i-ša¯n jud judxwe¯š hambadı¯g ciyo¯n hubo¯yı¯h pa¯kı¯h huburdı¯h hucihrı¯h ud aba¯rı¯g ¯ı aba¯yišnı¯g az tan mehma¯nı¯ha¯ wa¯lı¯dan i-ša¯n andar ham tan owo¯n fra¯yı¯ha¯ ku¯ o¯-iz be¯ nasuš wisp we¯ma¯rı¯h +dame¯nd ud a¯no¯h ku¯ de¯wa¯n me¯hma¯nı¯h pad a¯n ewe¯nag re¯manı¯h guftan abe¯pahika¯r spe¯d bawe¯d. 14. The oldest and most important source is Herodotus 1.140, but see also (Pseudo-)Aristotle, De Mirabilibus Ausculationibus 27.832a (which speaks of Achaemenian royal practices), Plutarch, Moralia 370c, 537b, 670d, and Agathias, Histories 2.24. A good discussion of these materials is available in de Jong (1997: 338–342). 15. The best manuscript of this text, conventionally referred to as TD2, is found in T. Ankle­ saria (1908: 11.10–12.1). I transliterate the Pahlavi as follows: “Ganna¯g Me¯no¯g az ge¯tı¯g ta¯rı¯gı¯h a¯n xwe¯š tan da¯m fra¯z kirre¯nı¯d. pad a¯n kirb ¯ı sya¯ ¯ı adu¯re¯star ¯ı tom arza¯nı¯g druwand ciyo¯n +bazagı¯htar xrafstar. u-š az ge¯tı¯g xwad-do¯šagı¯h waran ¯ı wad +ne¯st kirb fra¯z kirre¯nı¯d ciyo¯n waran aba¯ye¯d. u-š nazdist de¯wa¯n xwadı¯h da¯d dušrawišnı¯h a¯n me¯no¯g ¯ı -š ganna¯gı¯h ¯ı da¯ma¯n ¯ı o¯hrmazd +az-ı¯š bu¯d.” Other translations of the passage (which differ in some significant ways) include B. Anklesaria (1956: 15), Cereti and MacKenzie (2003: 39), and Zaehner (1955: 316, with transliteration at p. 281 and notes at pp. 302–303). 16. A subtle analysis of the bodily color of verminous species occurs at Greater Bundahišn 22.4–5 (TD2 MS. 142.12–143.2), which treats the light of their eyes and the breath of their spirit as originating with the Wise Lord, reflecting the continued (if minimal) presence of his goodness. Other aspects of their existence, however—including their dark color, poison, aggressive nature, and propensity for destruction and decay—originate with and reflect the ongoing influence of the Evil Spirit. 17. Again, this is most thoroughly explicated in the Pahlavi literature. One finds indications, however, that similar ideas were operative in the Achaemenian period in details gleaned from Greek descriptions of the Persians, such as accounts of their extreme disquiet regarding bodily products like vomit and urine (Herodotus 1.133, 138, Xenophon, Cyropaedia 1.2.16, Strabo 15.3.16, Pliny, Natural History 28.6.64 and 30.16) and the extent to which they viewed corpses as corrupt and polluting (Herodotus 1.140, 3.16; Strabo 15.3.14; Agathias, Histories 2.22–23 and 2.31). See further de Jong (1997: 417–419, 432–444).

170 | Bruce Lincoln

18. On milk and honey, see such texts as Jaafari-Dehaghi (1998: 27.2, 30.13); De¯nkard 3.374; Selections of Za¯d Spram 6.1, 10.11, 16.3, 30.58, 34.40; Greater Bundahišn 14.17– 19, 22.29, and 34.1; Pahlavi Rivayat Accompanying the Da¯desta¯n ¯ı De¯nı¯g 23.17. 19. Official reports on events at Abu Ghraib are available in Strasser (2004), US Army (2004), and US Senate Committee on Armed Services (2005. Critical discussions include Danner (2004), Greenberg and Dratel (2005), Hersh (2004), McKelvey (2007), and Rajiva (2005). 20. The author sought copyright permission for the following photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, but final ownership could not be determined. 21. Compare, for example, the concluding passage of the speech delivered by President George W. Bush to mark the end of “major combat operations in Iraq” (1 May 2003, on board the USS Abraham Lincoln): “All of you—all in this generation of our military—have taken up the highest calling of history. You’re defending your country, and protecting the innocent from harm. And wherever you go, you carry a message of hope—a message that is ancient and ever new. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘To the captives, “come out”—and to those in darkness, “be free.”’ Thank you for serving our country and our cause. May God bless you all, and may God continue to bless America” (Bush 2003).

References Ahn, Gregor. 1992. Religiöse Herrscherlegitimation im Achaemenidischen Iran: Die Voraus­ setzungen und die Struktur ibhrer Argumentation. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Anklesaria, Behramgore T., ed. and trans. 1956. Zand-Akasih: Iranian or Greater Bundahišn. Bombay: Rahnumae Mazdayasnan Sabha. Anklesaria, Tehmuras D., ed. 1908. The Bundahišn: Being a Facsimile of the TD Manuscript No. 2 Brought from Persia by Dastur Tîrandâz and Now Preserved in the Late Ervad Tahmuras’ Library. Bombay: British India Press. Asmussen, Jes. 1960. Historiske tekster fra Achæmenide tiden. Copenhagen: Munksgaard. Auberger, Janick, trans. 1991. Ctésias: Histoires de l’Orient. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Balcer, Jack M. 1987. Herodotus and Bisotun. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag. Baudrillard, Jean. 2005. “War Porn.” Trans. Paul A. Taylor. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 2, no. 1. http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_1/taylor.htm. Benjamin, Walter. [1940] 2003. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–1940. Trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bigwood, Joan M. 1978. “Ctesias as Historian of the Persian Wars.” Phoenix 32, no. 1: 19–41. ______. 1983. “The Ancient Accounts of the Battle of Cunaxa.” American Journal of Philology 104, no. 4: 340–357. Boyce, Mary. 1982. A History of Zoroastrianism. Vol. 2: Under the Achaemenids. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Brandenstein, Wilhelm, and Manfred Mayrhofer. 1964. Handbuch des Altpersischen. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. Briant, Pierre. 1989. “Histoire et idéologie: Les Grecs et la ‘Décadence perse.’” Pp. 33–47 in Mélanges Pierre Lévêque, Vol. 2: Anthropologie et société, ed. Marie-Madeleine Mactoux and Evelyne Geny. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. ______. 1996. Histoire de l’empire perse de Cyrus à Alexandre. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard. Bush, George W. 2003. “Remarks by the President from the USS Abraham Lincoln at Sea off the Coast of San Diego, California.” http://www.c-span.org/executive/endiraqwar.asp. Cantarella, Raffaele. 1965. “La Persia nella letteratura greca.” Pp. 489–504 in Atti del Convegno sul tema: La Persia e il mondo Greco-romano. Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Cereti, Carlo G., and David N. MacKenzie. 2003. “Except by Battle: Zoroastrian Cosmogony in the 1st Chapter of the Greater Bundahišn.” Pp. 31–59 in Religious Themes and Texts of Pre-Islamic Iran and Central Asia: Studies in Honour of Professor Gherardo Gnoli, ed. Carlo G. Cereti, M. Maggi, and Elio Provasi. Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert Verrlag.

An Ancient Case of Interrogation and Torture | 171

Christensen, Arthur. 1941. Essai sur la démonologie iranienne. Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab. Dandamaev, Muhammad A. 1976. Persien unter den ersten Achämeniden. Trans. HeinzDieter Pohl. Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert. ______. 1989. A Political History of the Achaemenid Empire. Trans. Willem J. Vogelsang. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Danner, Mark. 2004. Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror. New York: New York Review Books. de Jong, Albert. 1997. Traditions of the Magi: Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin Literature. Leiden: E.J. Brill. DuBois, Page. 1991. Torture and Truth. New York: Routledge. Eisenman, Stephen F. 2007. The Abu Ghraib Effect. London: Reaktion Books. Feldman, Allen. 1991. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1975. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard. Gamkrelidze, Thomas V., and Vjaceslav V. Ivanov 1995. Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans. Trans. Johanna Nichols. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Georges, Pericles. 1994. Barbarian Asia and the Greek Experience. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Greenberg, Karen J., and Joshua L. Dratel, eds. 2005. The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib. New York: Cambridge University Press. Grillot-Susini, Françoise, Clarisse Herrenschmidt, and Florence Malbran-Labat. 1993. “La version Élamite de la trilingue de Behistun: Une nouvelle lecture.” Journal asiatique 281: 19–59. Hall, Edith. 1989. Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hallock, Richard T. 1969. Persepolis Fortification Tablets. Chicago, IL: Oriental Institute Publications. Hersh, Seymour M. 2004. Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. New York: HarperCollins. Hinz, Walther, and Heidemarie Koch 1987. Elamisches Wörterbuch. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer. Jaafari-Dehaghi, Mahmoud, ed. and trans. 1998. Da¯desta¯n ¯ı De¯nı¯g: Part One. Paris: Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes. Kafka, Franz. 1919. In der Strafkolonie. Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag. Kent, Roland G. 1953. Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon. 2d ed. New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society. Lazreg, Marnia. 2008. Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lecoq, Pierre. 1997. Les inscriptions de la Perse achéménide. Paris: Gallimard. Lenfant, Dominique. 1996. “Ctésias et Hérodote, ou les réécritures de l’histoire dans la Perse acheménide.” Revue des études grecques 109: 348–380. Lincoln, Bruce. 2007. Religion, Empire, and Torture: The Case of Achaemenian Persia. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ______. Forthcoming. La politique du paradis perse. Paris: Editions Harmattan. Madan, Dhanjishah M., ed. 1911. The Complete Text of the Pahlavi Dinkard. Bombay: Society for the Promotion of Researches into the Zoroastrian Religion. Malbran-Labat, Florence. 1994. La version akkadienne de l’inscription trilingue de Darius à Behistun. Rome: Gruppo Editoriale Internazionale. Mayrhofer, Manfred. 1956–1976. Kurzgefasstes etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindisches. 3 vols. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag. McKelvey, Tara. 2007. Monstering: Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War. New York: Carroll & Graf. Meillet, Antoine, and Emile Benveniste. 1931. Grammaire du vieux perse. Paris: Honoré Champion.

172 | Bruce Lincoln

Mitchell, William J. T. 2005. “The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable: Word and Image in a Time of Terror.” English Literary History 72, no. 2: 291–308. Momigliano, Arnaldo. 1969. “Tradizione e invenzione in Ctesia.” Pp. 181–212 in Quarto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico. Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura. Pokorny, Julius. 1959. Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Vol. 1. Bern: Francke Verlag. Pongratz-Leisten, Beate. 2002. “‘Lying King’ and ‘False Prophet’: The Intercultural Transfer of a Rhetorical Device within Ancient Near Eastern Ideologies.” Pp. 215–243 in Ideologies as Intercultural Phenomena, ed. Antonio Panaino and Giovanni Pettinato. Milan: University of Bologna. Rahe, Paul. 1980. “The Military Situation in Western Asia on the Eve of Cunaxa.” American Journal of Philology 101: 79–96. Rajiva, Lila. 2005. The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media. New York: Monthly Review Press. Reiner, Erica, ed. 1989. The Assyrian Dictionary, Vol. 17: Š Part 1. Chicago, IL: Oriental Institute Publications. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Sancisi-Weerdenburg, Heleen. 1987. “Decadence in the Empire or Decadence in the Sources? From Source to Synthesis: Ctesias.” Achaemenid History 1: 33–45. Schmitt, Riidiger, ed. and trans. 1991. The Bisitun Inscriptions of Darius the Great: Old Persian Text. London: Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum. Skjærvø, Prods O. 2003. “Truth and Deception in Ancient Iran.” Pp. 383–434 in Jamshid Soroush Sorouschian Commemorative Volume, Vol. 2: Ataš-e Dorun: The Fire Within, ed. C. G. Cereti and F. Vajifdar. N.p.: Mehrborzin Soroushian. Strasser, Steven, ed. 2004. The Abu Ghraib Investigations: The Official Reports of the Independent Panel and Pentagon on the Shocking Prisoner Abuse in Iraq. New York: Public Affairs. Tarapore, J. C. 1954. “Trial by Ordeal in Ancient Iran.” Pp. 187–198 in Prof. Jackson Memorial Volume: Papers on Iranian Subjects. Bombay: K.R. Cama Oriental Institute. US Army. 2004. AR 15-6 Investigation of the Abu Ghraib Prison and 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. Washington, DC: US Army Public Affairs. US Senate Committee on Armed Services. 2005. Review of Department of Defense Detention and Interrogation Operations: Hearings before the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, One Hundred Eighth Congress, second session, May 7, 11, 19, July 22, September 9, 2004. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Voigtlander, Elizabeth N. von, ed. and trans. 1978. The Bisitun Inscription of Darius the Great: Babylonian Version. London: Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum. Wylie, Graham. 1992. “Cunaxa and Xenophon.” L’Antiquité classique 61: 119–131. Zaehner, Robert C. 1955. Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

( Chapter 10

The Terrorist as Humanitarian Faisal Devji

On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, a jihadist Web site posted a long interview with Osama bin Laden’s lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in which he described Muslim militancy as offering an opportunity for all the world’s oppressed, whether or not they converted to Islam: Interviewer: Speaking of the plunder of resources, grievances, and the oppressed ones in the world, in recent statements by Al-Qa’ida of Jihad calls for supporting the oppressed in the world have been repeated. Is this a new Al-Qa’ida approach? Al-Zawahiri: No, this is a confirmed jurisprudence-based law. God, the exalted, said in [a] Hadith Qudsi: “O my servants, I have forbidden oppression for myself, and forbidden it for you, so do not oppress each other” … I invite all of America’s victims to Islam, the religion which rejects injustice and treachery. If they don’t convert to Islam, then they should at least take advantage of Muslims’ defensive campaign to repel America’s aggression against them and overcome them, each under his own banner, and with whatever is at his disposal.1

This is a novel interpretation of Islam’s universality, one that has transformed the language of religious conversion itself. The American convert Adam Gadahn, Notes for this chapter begin on page 191.

174 | Faisal Devji

for example, whose name within al-Qaeda circles is Azzam al-Amriki or Azzam the American, invites his compatriots to accept Islam in a videotape released in 2006 by the terror network’s media arm. Prefaced by a testimonial from Zawahiri, Gadahn’s performance is dedicated to giving proselytism a radically new meaning: We invite all Americans and other unbelievers to Islam, wherever they are and whatever their role and status in Bush and Blair’s world order. And we send a special invitation to all of you fighting Bush’s Crusader pipe dream in Afghanistan, Iraq, and wherever else ‘Dubya’ has sent you to … Finally, some will ask how we expect to attract converts to Islam after having spilled so much non-Muslim blood, albeit in defense of our religion, liberty and lives. We might ask the same question to those who kill Muslims by the millions for the crime of being Muslim, and then foolishly hope to win their hearts and minds. But we will suffice by pointing to the sharp spike [in] conversions to Islam after September eleventh, which, as we’ve mentioned, is giving the enemy many a sleepless night.2 Echoing bin Laden’s comments in the aftermath of 9/11, Gadahn points out that these attacks on US soil had led to a sudden rise in global interest about Islam, as well as a spike in conversions to the religion. Personal forms of missionary activity intended to attract converts to a particular religious tradition, in other words, were being replaced by an impersonal and in fact inadvertent proselytism involving spectacular events whose purposes might have been altogether different. Moreover, the Islam to which such converts were being led is completely open as far as sect, school, or tradition is concerned, these particulars being left to the discretion of the converts themselves.3 Gadahn’s invitation to Islam discounts doctrine and practice for something so generic as to be human in nature. The examples he gives of American soldiers who become Muslim rely not upon the soldiers’ discovery of Islamic scripture so much as their identification with the suffering, endurance, and sacrifice of America’s Muslim victims. Thus, Gadahn reproaches critics of the ‘war on terror’, such as the British Member of Parliament George Galloway and the journalist Robert Fisk, for not taking the final step to accept Islam. For Gadahn, conversion has become a sign chiefly of identification with victims in general, who, whether or not they happen to be Muslim, are represented at this historical juncture by Islam. This is why al-Qaeda’s spokesmen can deploy the language of identification in secular as well as religious ways. Non-Muslims who identify with Muslim victims become human and Muslim at the same time, even if their conversion remains in the realm of potentiality, since the criteria for both humanity and Islam are the same. The breadth of Islam’s humanity is such that even its greatest enemies, according to Gadahn, could be forgiven and treated as brothers if only they would repent of their actions. Unlike the rhetoric used in the war on terror, which is determined to punish Islamic militants for crimes they have committed, that used in al-Qaeda’s jihad would forgive US President Bush and Britain’s Prime Minister Blair

The Terrorist as Humanitarian | 175

for crimes just as great—if they were to repent. However preposterous, it is clear that al-Qaeda’s rhetoric is more Christian than that of its Western enemies.

lslam and Humanitarianism Given that militants today routinely invoke the plight of suffering Muslims in exactly the same way that humanitarians do of victims in general, the identification of Islam with humanitarianism is hardly surprising. Indeed, humanitarian actions even serve as the model for militant interventions in the contemporary rhetoric of jihad, so that Ayman al-Zawahiri recommended attacks upon infidels in the same breath as he counseled assistance to those hurt and displaced by the devastating earthquake that hit Pakistan in 2005. Zawahiri not only identified the earthquake’s victims as martyrs, as if, like al-Qaeda’s militants, they had died for their faith. He also accused the United States of making war against Islamic charitable work, thus very deliberately conflating militant with humanitarian action. We have sadly received the news of the disaster that befell the Pakistani Muslim people following the earthquake that struck the region … We ask Allah to grant those killed in the earthquake the positions of martyrs and pious people. My brothers and myself wish to be among you, our dear brothers, on this day. However, agents of America are standing in our way to help our Muslim brothers in their distress. Today, I call on Muslims in general, and on Islamic relief organizations in particular, to go to Pakistan and help their Pakistani brothers and withstand the troubles and harm they face for this purpose. We all know the raging American war against Islamic charitable work.4

Such identifications are even less surprising when we realize that one of the great themes of contemporary Islam, which is meant to characterize liberals as well as fundamentalists, pacifists as well as militants, has to do with its supposed naturalness. Islam is justified as the ‘natural’ religion of humanity, one that a Robinson Crusoe might well discover on a desert island by purely rational means. Its history therefore serves as an outer cover for Islam’s essentially human nature, rather than providing believers with doctrinal truths as in Christianity. Believers today have reworked traditional notions, like that of Islam as humankind’s original faith, one that Muhammad simply cleansed of time’s corruption, by predicating them on humanity’s modern manifestation in biological as well as juridical terms. Thus, a tradition describing Islam as the religion of all children, who are only subsequently turned by their parents into Jews or Christians, has led to the development of novel terms such as ‘reverts’ for Englishspeaking converts. This modernization of the Muslim experience has its roots in the nineteenth century, when medieval notions that depicted nature as being inherent in good as much as in evil were transformed to make Islam ‘natural’ in the positive and even romantic sense of being authentic and universal. How does Islam come to represent humanity and why? The answer lies in globalization, which has redefined the place that Islam occupies in the world.

176 | Faisal Devji

If humanity in its biological and legal forms came to be embodied by individuals at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with globalization it became a collective reality well before that century was concluded. For humanity is the globe’s only subject, being the true agent as well as the victim of crises such as global warming and nuclear warfare. The worldwide Muslim community or ummah has become a global cause on the same pattern as a humanity threatened by global warming or nuclear war. In fact, the Islamic community literally takes the place of humanity in modern times. It does so by claiming the status of global victim, the purity of whose suffering serves as an equivalent of its pure humanity. While it has earlier precedents in colonialism, this idea of a victimized Islam can be dated to World War I, during which the Ottoman Empire was dismembered and its emperor, who claimed also to be the caliph or successor to the Prophet’s worldly authority, was deposed. Osama bin Laden refers frequently to this event as precisely the origin of Islam’s victimization as a global phenomenon. In times past, the Muslim ummah was viewed not as a body of people existing in the historical present, but as a transhistorical community made up of the dead, the living, and the yet unborn—which meant that it could not be conceived of as a body of victims in any modern sense. By the time Osama bin Laden made the following statement to a conference of Pakistani divines in 2001, however, this community had come to represent nothing but human life itself under attack: “Honorable scholars, I write these lines to you at a time when every single inch of our umma’s body is being stabbed by a spear, struck by a sword, or pierced by an arrow” (Lawrence 2005: 96). It is only when the Islamic community becomes a contemporary reality that it can become a political one—either as an agent or as a victim. Yet today, all global figures, the environment and humanity included, exist in rhetoric and reality as victims—which is to say that they exist as the potential subjects of politics. The task of militancy is to fulfill this potential and make them into actors. But for the moment, there is no such thing as a global politics properly speaking, although it is possible that the militants and their enemies will bring it into being by their combined efforts. Until that happens, global movements of an environmentalist, pacifist, and religious bent will continue to pose certain limits for traditionally conceived politics. But such limits arise from humanity itself as a reality bereft of reality. It was this humanity that Hannah Arendt (1993: 131), writing in the aftermath of World War II, described as a reality made possible by the very shame of its absence: “For many years now we have met Germans who declare that they are ashamed of being German. I have often felt tempted to answer that I am ashamed of being human. This elemental shame, which many people of the most various nationalities share with one another today, is what finally is left of our sense of international solidarity; and it has not yet found an adequate political expression.” Is it too much to say that the negative humanity Arendt defined by the word ‘shame’ provides the starting point for Muslim militants today? Insofar as these militants claim to participate in a universal struggle and not a specifically Muslim one, such a conception of humanity does inform their actions, for in their view Islam has come to represent this humanity in its status as global victim.

The Terrorist as Humanitarian | 177

Yet the Nazi attempt to eliminate European Jewry, which epitomizes humanity’s victimization in the political and juridical culture of the West, merits practically no mention among Muslim militants. Unlike those who express anti-Semitism either to deny the Jewish Holocaust or to claim an equivalent victimhood for themselves, al-Qaeda’s votaries mostly remain silent about it. While this silence is no doubt anti-Semitic as well, it ends up rejecting the final identification of humanity with victimhood and discounting the apocalyptic language of genocide for Muslims themselves. In this sense, militancy is faithful to the idea of Islam’s victorious and immortal future, being concerned not with the victimization of humanity so much as with its transformation into a global agent. What then are the implications of identifying Muslims with humanity as far as militant acts are concerned? Arendt (1993: 131) suggests that “the terror of the idea of humanity” resides in the universal responsibility it implies: “For the idea of humanity, when purged of all sentimentality, has the very serious consequence that in one form or another men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by men and that all nations share the onus of evil committed by all others. Shame at being a human being is the purely individual and still non-political expression of this insight” (ibid.). In what remains of this chapter, I want to explore the implications of identifying Islam with humanity by focusing precisely on the universal responsibility that its militants so loudly proclaim in suicidal attacks on civilian populations the world over. My thesis is that the search for humanity—or rather, the attempt to realize it—lies at the heart of militant action. While al-Qaeda’s terrorists, therefore, may begin by identifying Muslims with the passive victims who embody humanity in the discourse of human rights and crimes against humanity, their aim is in fact to transform this humanity from the inside, not least because their sacrificial practices end up denying the possibility of any position external to humanity. These militants are not interested in saving Muslim victims through humanitarian missions. Rather, they seek to remake humanity itself by abandoning the technical language of humanitarianism and human rights, which is invoked in their rhetoric only to be condemned as hypocritical.

From Humiliation’s Heart Arendt’s term ‘shame’ has been transformed by Islamic militants into ‘humiliation’, which is broadcasted about by one militant after another. And while this language of humiliation has not gone unnoticed by those studying movements like al-Qaeda, its importance is generally stated more than it is examined. At most, shame and humiliation are seen as providing the psychological determinants of militancy. The point I want to make, however, is that humiliation exists here as a moral category pertaining to communities rather than a psychological one confined to individuals. Indeed, as a rhetorical category humiliation is by definition social in nature, more concept than feeling, as its central place in the argumentation of militancy makes clear. Zawahiri describes the humiliation of a humanity unachieved in the following passage from a video posted on

178 | Faisal Devji

the Internet on 23 December 2006, in which he goes so far as to compare the Muslim victims of Western domination to animals: O my Muslim Ummah, you must choose between two choices: the first is to live on the margins of the New World Order and international law and under the control of the enemies of Islam, dishonoured, humiliated, plundered and occupied, with them meddling in your beliefs and true religion, sticking their noses in all your domestic and foreign affairs, and you living the life of a vassal, lowly, disgraced and defiled. And the second choice is that you rely on your Lord, renew your Tawheed [worship of the one God], rise up with your true faith, follow the revealed religion of Allah, and stand with it in the face of the arrogant criminals, as your truthful and trustworthy Prophet (peace be upon him), his righteous companions, and his purified family (Allah was pleased with them all) stood in the face of the world, inviting, giving the good news, warning and performing Jihad in order that Allah’s Word be made the highest and the word of the infidels the lowest. And there is no third choice. The Crusaders and Jews will only be pleased with the Muslim Ummah if it is satisfied with vassalage, humiliation and repression. If, however, the Ummah sets about repelling the aggression which has been committed against it for centuries, it gets nothing but bombing, destruction, torture, occupation, abuse and infringement, because in that case it is not eligible for human rights, due to it being a species of animal which has attacked its Western masters.5

Not one militant has attributed his radicalization to any personal humiliation, whether arising out of foreign domination, racism, or discrimination of some other kind, although to do so would not compromise his motives in the least. On the contrary, these men explicitly reject such motives, which remain nevertheless the stock in trade of ‘expert’ analyses regarding their militancy. It is not their own humiliation but rather that of others that shames these men, whose acts are therefore committed out of pity for the plight of others. This is the same abstract and vicarious emotion that characterizes the actions of pacifists and human rights campaigners, and, as we have seen, Zawahiri himself attributes the humiliation of Muslims to being deprived of human rights. Taken together, these expressions of pity belong to the language of humanitarianism and therefore to humanity itself. That such a language need not be non-violent is demonstrated by its common use in al-Qaeda suicide bombings as much as in the air strikes of humanitarian intervention. Arendt was perhaps the first to identify pity as an emotion born from the womb of humanity and characteristic of a violent humanitarianism in modern phenomena like revolutions. She argues that unlike charity in its Christian form, or compassion more generally, pity presupposes a vast gulf separating those who give and receive it, not least because it moves beyond the limited circle of people whom we know and applies itself to an abstract and unknowable humanity. Rather than choosing to share in the suffering of others, pity seeks to destroy this suffering, together with the unbearable shame it produces among its possessors, through revolutionary acts and other forms of violence (see Arendt 1990: 59–114).

The Terrorist as Humanitarian | 179

Osama bin Laden is probably the most eloquent orator of Muslim humiliation today, his rhetoric setting the standard for militant expositions of shame more broadly. But for bin Laden, shame and humiliation are by no means the expression of Islam’s defeat or oppression by the West, as has generally been assumed. Such an inference would indeed be an odd one to make about someone who glories in the wholesale martyrdom of Muslims. Whether death leads to the victory of the martyr’s cause is neither here nor there, as far as his elevated status is concerned. In the case of the Prophet’s grandson Husayn, who provides the archetype of Muslim martyrdom, victory was most emphatically not the outcome of his death. Or as bin Laden, referring to alQaeda’s martyrs, puts it in a video broadcast by Al-Jazeera on 26 December 2001 (Lawrence 2005: 154): “No Muslim would ever possibly ask: what did they benefit? The fact is that they were killed—but this is total ignorance. They were victorious, with the blessings of God Almighty, and with the immortal heavens that God promised them. Victory is not material gain; it is about sticking to your principles.” If martyrdom represents a victory in its own right, one that transcends defeat on the political plane, then humiliation, too, becomes a category transcending politics. Osama bin Laden’s sermons of shame have little if anything to do with the political, economic, or religious subordination of the Muslim world to the West. Instead, they address the duties of courage and sacrifice that Muslims neglect and whose absence can be seen in defeat and oppression. However, far from being negative phenomena, defeat and oppression are viewed positively, as heaven-sent opportunities to make humanity manifest. They serve as counterparts to the biblical trials imposed by God upon an Abraham or a Job. Martyrdom, therefore, is noble not because it will result in the political, economic, or religious triumph of Islam so much as because it allows Muslims to exhibit the fundamentally human virtues of courage and sacrifice, thus doing their duty to represent humanity itself as a global agent rather than a victim. And while there might not seem to be much religious character in such a notion of martyrdom, its elevation in the rhetoric of militancy is so pronounced that the martyr becomes the very embodiment of religious truth, his physical body being mysteriously perfumed and incorruptible even as he assumes a spiritual presence in the dreams of his surviving companions. This coming together of the traditional virtues of martyrdom with modern conceptions of humanity is manifest in bin Laden’s rhetoric, for example, in the following extract from his 2001 message to a gathering of Pakistani divines (Lawrence 2005: 96): I write these lines to you at a time when even the blood of children and innocents has been deemed fair game, when the holy places of Islam have been violated in more than one place, under the supervision of the new world order and under the auspices of the United Nations, which has clearly become a tool with which the plans of global unbelief against Muslims are implemented. This is an organization that is overseeing with all its capabilities the annihilation and blockade of millions of Muslims under the sanctions, and yet still is not ashamed to talk about human rights!

180 | Faisal Devji

In this passage, the link forged between Islam and modern conceptions of humanity is far from arbitrary. For one thing, Islam’s victimization is seen as a properly global phenomenon and is put in the context of human rights violations. For another, the virtues of courage and sacrifice, as well as the aims of peace and security that militant acts such as suicide bombings supposedly uphold, are human in their generality and cannot be limited to Muslims. Indeed, specifically Islamic virtues like honoring the Prophet or attesting to the unity of God are remarkable by their absence from the rhetoric of martyrdom, although Muslim authorities are certainly invoked to support the sanctities of a wider humanity. But theological justifications apart, Islam has come to represent humanity by the sheer extent of its apparent victimization. Not only bin Laden and his acolytes but also the liberal or fundamentalist Muslims who oppose al-Qaeda need only count up the victims of global conflicts to obtain an overwhelmingly Muslim majority in countries including Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia, and more. This reaffirms the importance of such lists to the narrative of militancy. Whether it is accurate or not, such counting is in fact used to make the connection between Islam and the victimized humanity it has come to represent. It is as if the very size and dispersal of the Muslim ummah are enough to guarantee the stability of this connection, regardless of who is responsible for the victimization that brings Islam and humanity together. Strictly speaking, such causes are secondary to the identification of Muslims as human beings, although their seeming diversity poses a problem for militants, who must subsume them all under increasingly abstract labels such as the ‘Crusader-Zionist axis’. The enemy of Islam and humanity, in other words, is a constantly morphing presence that can be joined or abandoned at will. For the moment, Israel and the United States account for two of this hydra’s heads, but not so long ago the Soviet Union and Serbia were far more important. The main point is that this enemy’s abstraction permits militants to move past politics and establish themselves in a moral arena proper to humanity. This is why Osama bin Laden, in his videotaped statement of 4 January 2004, regards jihad as something providential and not simply an unfortunate necessity (Lawrence 2005: 217): “This confrontation and conflict will go on because the conflict between right and falsehood will continue until Judgment Day. Such a confrontation is good for both the countries and peoples. God says: ‘If God did not drive some back by means of others, the earth would be completely corrupt.’” Similarly in a video posted on the Internet on 22 January 2007, Zawahiri welcomed President Bush’s move to send some 20,000 additional troops to Iraq, even asking him to send the entire US army, so that it might vie with the militants in virtue as much as vice. Seen as part of a providential design, the battle between faith and infidelity makes these enemies into partners, both striving to exhibit the truth of their own cause and destroy its evil. But this means that there is nothing apocalyptic in their competition, since the task of either partner is only to demonstrate his virtue in the span of time given him by God. Neither the militant nor his enemy, in other words, can lengthen or shorten this apportioned time by his deeds; indeed, bin Laden, Zawahiri and

The Terrorist as Humanitarian | 181

those they inspire appear to have no interest at all in millenarianism. The first words blazoned on Zawahiri’s videotape, in English, are the following: “So send your entire army to be annihilated at the hands of the Mujahideen, to free the world from your evil and theirs.”6 Militant acts serve to make humanity manifest by transmuting the shame of its negative existence into the pride of an identity obtained as if in some alchemical precipitation. Such an achievement is properly human because it has little to do with defeat or victory in a political sense, constituting rather the display of universal virtues by individuals and groups of all descriptions. The only victory on this battlefield is that of courage and the only defeat that of cowardice. To this end, an enemy is necessary while being at the same time quite incidental. In vogue with the dispersed networks of Sunni militancy, as well as among the hierarchies of Shiite radicalism, this conception of struggle differs markedly from the collective ideals that serve as traditional military goals. Whether fighting for his freedom, his country, or even his material interests, the conventional soldier anticipates a result whose attainment lies beyond his powers in an undefined future. Any self-realization that he achieves in battle never becomes part of the struggle and is relegated to his letters and anecdotes, his memories and his dreams. The militant, however, fights for self-realization of the most immediate kind, one whose individuality is at the same time a realization of humanity itself. Such acts of militancy, moreover, reach out to humanize their enemy in the moment of violence, for only in this way can the humanity claimed by Islam fulfill its universal destiny. It is no longer the universality of conversion that militant Islam seeks, but an identification that puts everyone—Muslim and non-Muslim, friend and foe—in the quintessentially human position of global victim. This might seem a far-fetched argument to make, but it is borne out by the character of militant activity. For example, it is clear from Osama bin Laden’s statements that he considers acts of terror necessary so that the West might experience the equivalent of Muslim suffering. But far from being a form of revenge, such equivalence is meant to permit both sets of victims to identify with and indeed speak to each other, as expressed in the following statement of bin Laden’s, which was broadcast on Al-Jazeera on 12 November 2002 (Lawrence 2005: 175): “If it pains you to see your victims and your allies’ victims in Tunisia, Karachi, Failaka, and Oman, then remember that our children are murdered daily in Palestine and Iraq. Remember our victims in the mosques of Khost, and the deliberate murder of our people at weddings in Afghanistan. If it pains you to see your victims in Moscow, then remember ours in Chechnya.” In statement after statement, al-Qaeda’s soldiers describe their attacks as a ‘language’, in fact, as the only language that America or the West understands. In other words, these men define violence as a mode of conversation and persuasion, the common language they share with their enemies. Murder has therefore become a medium of exchange for Islam’s global militants, representing in this way the intimate relationship between themselves and the infidel. However, its true purpose is pedagogical—to school these unbelievers in the forgotten language of ethics and principles, which is to say in the language of

182 | Faisal Devji

humanity itself. This is how Ayman al-Zawahiri puts it in an interview released on the Internet on 11 September 2006: “The materialistic Crusader western civilization knows not the language of ethics and principles but understands the language of punishment and retribution. So, if they taste some of what they are inflicting on our women and children, then they will start giving up their arrogance, stubbornness, and greed and will seek to solve the problem between them and the Muslims.”7 The language of violence, then, belongs to the infidel as much as it does to the faithful, allowing one’s vice to compete with the other’s virtue in such a way as to bring the ethics and principles of humanity back to political life in the most spectacular of ways.

Blood Brothers Osama bin Laden’s rhetoric has consistently voiced a desire for global equality, in this case, between Muslims and Christians, or between the Islamic world and the West. Having accused the United States of hypocrisy as far as its advancement of this equality is concerned, bin Laden has turned his attention to the only form in which he thinks such freedom is possible: the equality of death. This is why he has repeatedly emphasized the need for an equivalence of terror between the Muslim world and America, as if this is the only form in which the two might come together and even communicate with each other. For al-Qaeda, terror is the only form in which global freedom and equality are now available. It is therefore seen to function as the dark side of America’s own democracy, as inseparable from it as an evil twin. Equality demands that security should be enjoyed by all or by none. In the aftermath of the 2005 Madrid bombings, bin Laden issued a statement in which he defined terrorism as an effort to universalize security as a human right, if only by refusing to accept its monopolization by the West (Lawrence 2005: 234): “It is well known that security is a vital necessity for every human being. We will not let you monopolize it for yourselves.” In all this, bin Laden has done nothing more than recognize the unity of a globe in which no man can be separated from any other: each must be held responsible for his fellows, with whose suffering he must identify. Such is the humanitarian logic that also characterizes global movements like environmentalism and pacifism. But for bin Laden, this unity is made manifest by violence, which builds a bridge between enemies by demonstrating that all men are equal if in death alone. It is as if this macabre equivalence has replaced the ideal of equality that is supposed to exist between people and unite them as part of a single humanity. The militants’ violence, then, ironically links the world together in a web of mutual obligation and responsibility. It is this web of universal complicity, after all, that allows American or British civilians to be killed in recompense for the killing of Muslims in Iraq. The worldwide web of war spun by al-Qaeda exists as a kind of specter of our global inter-relatedness, one that has as yet no specific political form of its own. The militants’ obsessive demands for equal treatment within this world, even if it is only in the form of a reciprocity of violence, represent the

The Terrorist as Humanitarian | 183

dark side of humanity’s global brotherhood, whose reality is the product of our increasingly interconnected universe. But this means that the same web of responsibilities and obligations that links the holy war to its enemies also links them together as a community—even as a community of brothers. For are not al-Qaeda’s victims said to be merely the counterparts of innocent Muslims killed elsewhere? The militants’ victims are therefore in some perverse way brothers at one remove, made even more like brothers by dying alongside suicide bombers, their blood mingling. In the global perspective adopted by militant Islam, the peoples of the world are bound together in a web of mutual relations and complicities. For the moment, this intimacy expresses itself in the most murderous way, although even here it represents what I have referred to as the dark side of another, more benign kind of relationship, like that of universal brotherhood. Indeed, alQaeda’s actions and rhetoric continuously invoke the specter of a global community that has as yet no formal existence of its own, and this is what allows its war to draw upon the forms and even the vocabulary of other global movements such as environmental and pacifist ones, all of which are concerned with the fate of humanity as a whole. In his more ironical moments, Osama bin Laden takes this language of global community so far as to put al-Qaeda and its American enemy on the same side of their mutual war, saying in a 2004 video that the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq for power and profits contributed to the terror network’s own aims (Lawrence 2005: 242): “To some analysts and diplomats, it seems as if we and the White House are on the same team shooting at the United States’ own goal, despite our different intentions … It truly shows that al-Qaeda has made gains, but on the other hand it also shows that the Bush administration has likewise profited.” I have been arguing that Islamic militants exhibit a perverse humanity by addressing their victims in the language of intimacy, reciprocity, and equivalence. That this is not a merely rhetorical gesture becomes evident when we consider that this militancy, unlike all previous forms of terrorist or insurgent action, refuses to set up an alternative utopia for itself, something that even anarchists are not immune to. Unlike the members of religious cults or fringe political groups, few of al-Qaeda’s killers display signs of entering a closed ideological world by cutting themselves off from their families or everyday life. This suggests that the Islam they seek to defend is not conceived as an ideology at all, because it does not provide a complete or alternative vision of the world into which the would-be bomber can retreat as into a fortress. Thus, bin Laden defines his own militancy merely as the obverse of the violence he attributes to the West. His refusal to claim autonomy for jihad makes for a curious identity between Muslims and their enemies (Lawrence 2005: 234): “Since we have reacted in kind, your description of us as terrorists and of our actions as terrorism necessarily means that you and your actions must be defined likewise.” Apart from strictly operational agreements, there is little unity of doctrine among the militants, even between Osama bin Laden and his lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The religion they follow possesses no established tradition, being made up of fragments snatched from differing Islamic authorities.

184 | Faisal Devji

There are at most very general patterns of thought that are neither codified nor propagated in any systematic way, so that instead of being recruited to a welldefined movement, the jihad’s disparate soldiers franchise al-Qaeda’s expertise and brand name for a variety of equally disparate causes that exist comfortably within the structures of everyday life. Rather than offering an alternative to the world as it exists, these militants would transform it by a kind of internal convulsion, bringing forth its latent humanity by their acts of sacrifice. Earlier movements of resistance or terror had formulated critiques of existing politico-social conditions, such as capitalism or imperialism, and offered alternatives to them. This was the case with communists and anarchists as well as nationalists and fundamentalists. Like the more pacific global movements that are its peers, al-Qaeda offers no real criticism of existing conditions and promotes no alternative to take their place. Deprived of the political and ideological unity available to regional or national movements, these latter-day militants live scattered among their enemies, whom they accuse only of heedlessness and hypocrisy. Americans are accused not so much of believing in the wrong religion or ideology, but of being heedless and hypocritical about the beliefs they do hold. Global movements like al-Qaeda do not seek an alternative to America but rather the fulfillment of America’s promise of freedom for all. Indeed, by dying alongside their victims, Islam’s militants demonstrate that they exist in the same world as the latter and are members of the same humanity.

Murder Most Equivocal Militant rhetoric is marked most forcefully by the logic of equivalence: you kill our civilians, so we kill yours; because we suffer, so must you. This logic is so rigorous that it turns equivalence into the touchstone of humanity itself. Yet the logic of equivalence comes apart at its rhetorical heart—the suicide bombing, otherwise known as a martyrdom operation. The propagandistic power of a suicide bombing, its heroism as much as its horror, derives from the fact that the killer is willing to die alongside his victims. I have already pointed out the relations of intimacy and reciprocity that this willingness creates between militants and their enemies, although it is increasingly obvious that the suicidal portion of the bombing is not equivalent to its murderous part. The militant’s sacrifice, in other words, carries so much of the bombing’s power that his victim’s death is reduced to relative insignificance. It is this breakdown in the logic of terrorist equivalence that I want to explore, because I think it represents a shift from a statistical to an existential conception of humanity. Gandhi’s name is not one to be uttered alongside that of Osama bin Laden, although he, too, spoke of the necessity of bloody sacrifice in the cause of justice. In doing so, the Mahatma was, in the early days of his career, responding to the Indian terrorists whose arguments, as he recounted them, bear a remarkable similarity to those that ‘experts’ of all kinds attribute to the jihad movements of our own time: “At first, we will assassinate a few Englishmen and strike terror; then, a few men who will have been armed will fight openly. We

The Terrorist as Humanitarian | 185

may have to lose a quarter of a million men, more or less, but we will regain our land. We will undertake guerrilla warfare, and defeat the English” (Gandhi 1997: 77). To this political argument Gandhi offers the following religious response, which to my mind is far closer to the response that suicide bombing offers us today: “That is to say, you want to make the holy land of India unholy. Do you not tremble to think of freeing India by assassination? What we need to do is to kill ourselves” (ibid.). If the Mahatma so frequently advocated killing oneself for a just cause, this was not because he thought it an effective and ethical way of achieving some end, but rather because sacrificing one’s life could not in fact be an instrumental act and was thus thrown back upon itself to become not so much a means as an end unto itself. Choosing death therefore transformed political acts into religious ones by demonstrating their unworldly and disinterested nature. Gandhi was quite clear that the terrorists of his day partook of sacrifice in its religious form, although they did so in a perverted way. Referring to one such suicidal assassin, Gandhi (1997: 78) wrote: “Dhingra was a patriot, but his love was blind. He gave his body in a wrong way; its ultimate result can only be mischievous.” By the time that Gandhi’s non-violence movement had achieved maturity, the mutual violence between Indians had far outstripped their combined violence against the British. But this made the Mahatma only more determined on the matter of sacrifice. Although he did not advocate the killing even of noisome insects, he was willing to countenance the voluntary sacrifice of a million human lives for righteous ends. Indeed, toward the end of his own life, Gandhi longed for as many such Hindu and Muslim deaths as possible, so that these rival communities might cement their unity in blood. As it turns out, Gandhi, who was assassinated by a Hindu militant, ended up shedding his own blood to mix the cement of this unity. Gandhi’s ideas of sacrifice, therefore, were meant to retrieve another sense of the human from the idea of humanity that informed terrorist as much as humanitarian acts. After all, it was no accident that the Mahatma’s assassin, Nathuram Godse (1998), described his own act of violence as a ‘humanitarian’ one, since he had already identified Hinduism with a statistical conception of humanity well before Islam came to occupy its place: “For, is it not true that to secure the freedom and to safeguard the just interests of some thirty crores [three hundred million] of Hindus constituted the freedom and the well-being of one-fifth of [the] human race?” (ibid.: 26). Faced with the increasingly murderous enmity between Hindus and Muslims in India in the 1940s, the Mahatma determined to transform this violence, not by futile pleas for harmony, but by turning it inward in acts of sacrifice that would invite, if not compel, a different kind of response from those spoiling for a fight. The purpose of this sacrifice, which Gandhi had also used against the British rulers of India, was to lay claim to the noblest of human virtues, such as courage and fearlessness, and so provoke the collapse or conversion of those who were bent on violence. All this was to be achieved not by prating about non-existent ideals, but instead by separating the already existing

186 | Faisal Devji

practice of sacrifice from that of murder, emphasizing it to such a degree that the courage and fearlessness of sacrifice would become ends in their own right. If the Mahatma’s extraordinary career demonstrated the truth of his methods, however temporary or partial it might have been, the amplification of a language of martyrdom and sacrifice in militant Islam suggests that such a truth is yet possible. It is not difficult to imagine a suicide bombing—for instance, against infrastructure such as buildings or transport networks—that does not kill anyone other than the militant himself. Indeed, a great many attacks aim precisely at this kind of infrastructure and the people associated with it, so that it is unclear which of the two is considered the primary target. While such a Gandhian act of sacrifice might seem inconceivable among the members of movements like al-Qaeda, it is certainly true that the victim is becoming more and more a symbolic presence in the practice of militancy. After all, suicide bombers generally do not choose to detonate themselves in places where they are likely to kill the most people—places that are in fact easier to infiltrate and operate within than many of their usual targets. Why choose difficult targets like aircraft, with their limited number of passengers, instead of easily accessible markets, as terrorists dedicated to old-fashioned political causes like nationalism have been doing for decades now? As if mimicking the symbolic character of such terrorism, the new measures of security adopted by counter-terrorism are equally symbolic in nature, although no doubt for very different reasons. As an example, we can look at the ruinously costly, disruptive, and, it must be added from the anecdotal evidence I have gathered, ineffectual security measures that were put into place at British airports following the discovery of an alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airliners in July 2006. These checks and restrictions were not matched by anything even remotely similar on trains or buses, despite the fact that the only successful Islamic attacks in Britain had in fact occurred on ground transportation. That such blanket security was obviously impossible meant that the measures taken at airports were all the more symbolic, and even these were so unsustainable that they soon had to be relaxed. Perhaps, inevitably, the wouldbe intentions of both terrorist and counter-terrorist acts have become incidental to the complex economy of global speculation and risk management in which states, companies, and individuals are all involved, and in which image is often more important than substance. The highly symbolic character of terrorist attacks is coupled with the fact that suicide bombings in places like Afghanistan seem to be targeting eversmaller numbers of people when they might kill many more. This is true even of attacks like those of 2005 in London, when one of the bombers blew up a bus sitting on its upper deck and in the back, as if to minimize casualties. While this is most unlikely to have been his intention, this militant, like his colleagues elsewhere, appears to have discounted the logic of equivalence that would make the number of victims into the most important consideration of his attack. It is as if these victims were important only to showcase the enormity of the militant’s sacrifice, his narcissism thus being concealed in the quest

The Terrorist as Humanitarian | 187

for a common humanity. Of course, the attention militants pay to symbolic targets is not itself symbolic; rather, it is calculated to produce very precise effects, although I argue that the taking of lives is becoming incidental among these. Earlier forms of terrorism, such as hijacking, hostage taking, and assassination, were concerned with threats to life in particular, while its more recent forms, like suicide bombing, are fixated on the infrastructure that makes life in general possible. For humanity becomes manifest in a form such as a crowd or a people, a mass or a nation, in the public spaces and conveyances made possible by infrastructure. The people attacked in such places, after all, are victimized as anonymous human beings rather than as the adherents of a particular religion, the residents of a particular neighborhood, or even the citizens of a particular state. Commuters are attacked because they provide a statistically random sample of humanity, and trains are targeted because they do not belong to any locality but are quite literally the vehicles of this humanity. Violence against infrastructure thus targets life in the abstract, its victims having lost the capacity to become personalities both in their own right and as the individual representatives of particular nations or religious groups, quite unlike the hostages of old. Indeed, militants and their victims seem even to have changed places, with the latter drifting into generic anonymity while the former achieve a posthumous celebrity as victims of their own devising. Of course, the two forms of terror I have been describing do not always occur in isolation from one other, but if anything, their mixture tells us that there has been a sea change not only in the organization, methods, and motives of terrorism, but in its existential dimension as well.

The Infrastructure of Humanity What does it mean to attack infrastructure? Apart from the rationality of such attacks, which we are told are meant to cause the maximum amount of death, injury, panic, cost, and disruption, they possess an existential dimension that is independent of terrorist intentions. These intentions are the least obvious factors of such attacks, since terrorists are not constituted to profit from the disruption and injury they cause in any military, economic, or even political sense. In addition, attacks on the al-Qaeda model offer support only to the most global of political demands and none at all to political parties with which governments can negotiate. This older model of terrorist politics, which had characterized groups like the PLO and the IRA, has been replaced by one in which it is no longer necessary even to claim responsibility for attacks. At most, such attacks participate in political life by creating panic, thus forcing some very general and often unpredictable reaction from citizens and their governments, of which the terrorists can take little or no advantage. But to create panic, militants need not attack infrastructure as if it were a military or economic target; they might succeed far more by attacking private quarters instead. After all, what could be more panic-inducing than the random and practically uncontrollable targeting of domestic spaces? Is this not in fact

188 | Faisal Devji

what traditionally organized armies and militias do all the time? It is even possible to say that the exercise of force by legitimate armies, as well as by their illegitimate copies, is increasingly being extended to private life, while terrorism quite irrationally confines itself to the public spaces created by infrastructure. In this regard, terrorism appears to sanctify private spaces and reinforce domestic life as zones of security and comfort. Maybe terrorists are attacking the idea of the public, of a people, even of the humanity they represent. Certainly, the economic and other costs incurred by attacks on infrastructure are of little or no profit to these militants, being as abstract in this respect as the idea of humanity, although far less significant. Whatever their motives, the men who target infrastructure must, out of necessity, perceive and approach their victims in a particular way. The anthropologist Vyjayanthi Rao (2007: 567–592) has explored the particularity of such terror in a fine essay on the militant practice of multiple bombings in the city of Mumbai. Distinguishing the novelty of such attacks from the oldfashioned religious riot, which emerged out of local conditions and disputes to spread across the city, Rao points out that the serial bombing of Mumbai’s infrastructure targets the city in its entirety to redress grievances that are themselves global and abstract. There exists therefore no locality of grievance or epicenter of violence in Mumbai’s serial blasts, of which there have been three instances since 1993. In order to attack infrastructure like railway stations, commuter trains, road transport systems, stock markets, airline offices, and hotels, a targeted city must be seen as urban planners and military tacticians see it, which is to say from above and in the abstract form of a map. In such a view, and from such a height, the people who are meant to use this infrastructure, or be attacked within it, can be seen only as a set of statistics, certainly not as individual victims. Setting off multiple and simultaneous blasts across the city, moreover, replaces the time by which individuals live, as well as the time it takes for them to move from place to place, with the abstract and synchronous time by which urban or military planning operates. In other words, attacks on transportation networks, like those of Mumbai in 2006, London in 2005, or Madrid in 2004, are conducted according to the very procedures that permit such infrastructure to function in the first place. Whether or not they were carried out by suicide bombers, then, such attacks can be seen as ‘suicidal’ because infrastructure is being destroyed by its own hand. The fact that terrorists who attack infrastructure must adopt the very procedures by which it operates provides yet another example of the intimacy that is entailed in such violence. Like the suicide bomber who dies alongside his victims and, by sharing blood with them, brings to light a common humanity, if only in death, the bomber who attacks infrastructure discovers a kind of humanity in its destruction, too. Indeed, his violence seems to break through the generic and statistical definition of humanity that infrastructure makes possible, in the form of passengers or pedestrians, to reach the human being inside. By destroying infrastructure, the militant brings to a halt its task of constituting humanity as mass or volume, as the infinite flow of numbers eternally

The Terrorist as Humanitarian | 189

in motion, as a people, nation, or public displaying itself in the streets, trains, and cinema halls of a city. Of course, the destruction of infrastructure does not cease to produce life in the abstract—in this case, the statistics of those who have been killed and injured—but it obviates the kind of humanity made possible by road, rail, or recreation. The dead and injured are no longer manifestations of a people or a nation because they are no longer a crowd of passengers, pedestrians, or onlookers. In fact, terrorism’s temporary suspension of humanity, at least in its public and collective forms, leaves private persons as its only survivors. And while we cannot attribute to terrorists the aim of retrieving a more authentic humanity from the masses and volumes that infrastructure makes of people, their inadvertent achievement of this end is not without its irony. Gandhi, for example, had attacked modern infrastructure, and the railways in particular, precisely because it brought into being a new kind of humanity that he considered false and malign. Railways have provided the infrastructure of an abstract humanity for much of India’s modern history. From the well-known story of Gandhi being subjected to racial attack and thrown off a moving train in South Africa to the many accounts of trains arriving in Pakistan or India with all their passengers massacred during the Subcontinent’s partition in 1947, railways have made possible the abstraction of people into Indians and Pakistanis or Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. In 2002, for example, the setting alight of a train carrying Hindu pilgrims led to large-scale massacres of Muslims in the state of Gujarat, and in 2007 a Pakistan-bound train, this time filled with Muslims, was set alight in a very similar way, killing some 66 passengers. The train massacre has therefore become a stereotyped way of mobilizing masses and volumes of people. Although he wrote before the train massacres of 1947, the Mahatma nevertheless began his excoriation against railways by pointing out the inhuman implications of infrastructure (Gandhi 1997: 47): It must be manifest to you that, but for the railways, the English could not have such a hold on India as they have. The railways, too, have spread the bubonic plague. Without them, the masses could not move from place to place. They are the carriers of plague germs. Formerly we had natural segregation. Railways have also increased the frequency of famines, because, owing to facility of means of locomotion, people sell out their grain, and it is sent to the dearest markets. People become careless, and so the pressure of famine increases. They accentuate the evil nature of man. Bad men fulfil their evil designs with greater rapidity. The holy places of India have become unholy. Formerly, people went to these places with very great difficulty. Generally, therefore, only the real devotees visited such places. Nowadays, rogues visit them in order to practise their roguery.

To the argument that infrastructure can promote good as much as it does evil, Gandhi (1997: 47–48) responded in the following way: Good travels at a snail’s pace—it can, therefore, have little to do with the railways. Those who want to do good are not selfish, they are not in a hurry, they

190 | Faisal Devji

know that to impregnate people with good requires a long time. But evil has wings. To build a house takes time. Its destruction takes none. So the railways can become a distributing agency for the evil one only. It may be a debatable matter whether railways spread famines, but it is beyond dispute that they propagate evil.

As for the statistical forms of humanity and of humanitarianism that infrastructure makes possible, they met only with criticism from the apostle of non-violence (ibid.: 51): I am so constructed that I can only serve my immediate neighbours, but, in my conceit, I pretend to have discovered that I must with my body serve every individual in the Universe. In thus attempting the impossible, man comes in contact with different natures, different religions, and is utterly confounded. According to this reasoning, it must be apparent to you that railways are a most dangerous institution.

Gandhi took a dim view even of the sense of national, and we might today also say global, unity that is the product of modern infrastructure, claiming that it sought to smooth out differences that were of its own creation (ibid.: 49): Only you and I and others who consider ourselves civilised and superior persons imagine that we are many nations. It was after the advent of railways that we began to believe in distinctions, and you are at liberty now to say that it is through the railways that we are beginning to abolish those distinctions. An opium-eater may argue the advantage of opium-eating from the fact that he began to understand the evil of the opium habit after having eaten it.

One need neither be a Luddite, nor favor retreating into a commune, to recognize a certain justice in Gandhi’s arguments. If I have dwelt on them at length, it is to show that the use made of infrastructure has unintended consequences for the idea as well as the experience of humanity. The Mahatma’s homespun philosophy, moreover, tells us how such consequences can be made available for popular thought as much as action. Without betraying any consciousness of this philosophy, militant attacks on infrastructure nevertheless bring about a Gandhian resolution to the problem posed by an abstract humanity. It goes without saying that such a resolution is far from non-violent and would not have met with the Mahatma’s approval, but it is also evident that these attacks participate in his enterprise of reducing an abstract humanity to a multiplicity of concrete individuals. In a suicide bombing, an abstracted humanity is destroyed at the same time as the infrastructure that makes it possible. It is the very form of this humanity that commits suicide in the blast, which joins terrorists and victims in a death from which only individuals can escape. The militant desire to fulfill the promises of a statistical humanity by making the whole world responsible for Muslim suffering, as well as by turning the equality of life into the equivalence of death, ends in the production of its opposite. After all, the martyr produced

The Terrorist as Humanitarian | 191

by the suicide bombing is human precisely in his non-equivalence. This is so because his humanity no longer resides in biology or jurisprudence, but rather in the virtues of courage and sacrifice that he manifests, existential virtues whose production completely overpowers the statistical logic of equivalence that the militant had initially espoused. These are the very virtues that Gandhi himself lauded, especially in the traditional figure of the soldier, who, unlike the doctors and lawyers whom the Mahatma famously castigated, was unable to turn his vocation into an instrumental quest for money and power because he was obliged to risk his life in its prosecution. Doctors and lawyers, who stood behind the biological and juridical definitions of humanity, in fact deprived their clients of humanity as an existential fact by assuming control over it in a purely technical way. So while he did not of course approve of war, Gandhi saw soldiering as one of the few professions in which virtues like courage, honor, and sacrifice had managed to survive for their own sake, and this because it put the individual’s life at risk. These very virtues also make the militant human, if only posthumously, which is to say only when he has dispensed with the physical and juridical body that had once tied him to the statistical form of humanity characteristic of humanitarianism and human rights.

Faisal Devji holds the position of Reader in Modern South Asian History at Oxford University. He has held faculty positions at the New School, Yale, and the University of Chicago, where he received his PhD in Intellectual History. His specific interests include the political thought of modern Islam as well as the transformation of liberal categories and democratic practices in South Asia. His broader concerns are with ethics and violence in a globalized world. He is the author of Landscapes of the Jihad (2005) and The Terrorist in Search of Humanity (2008).

Notes 1. “Al-Zawahiri Calls on Muslims to Wage ‘War of Jihad’, Reject UN Resolutions,” United States Central Command, http://www.centcom.mil/ (site accessed in 2008). 2. “Al-Qaeda Operative Adam Gadahn, aka ‘Azzam the American’: ‘The Truth of Islam is Sweeping Across America and Constitutes a Fearsome Challenge to the Security, Identity, and Survival of the Crusader State [America]’; Time is Running Out to Convert to Islam,” Middle East Media Research Institute special dispatch series, no. 1281, 6 September 2006, http://memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archives&ID=SP128106 (accessed in 2008). 3. For the religious pluralism of these militants, see Devji (2005). 4. “Al-Zawahiri Urges Pakistan Quake Aid,” Al-Jazeera.net, 23 October 2005, http://english. aljazeera.net/archive/2005/10/200841014315693538.html (accessed in 2008). 5. “Website Posts Latest Video of Al-Zawahiri, English Text,” United States Central Command, http://www.centcom.mil/ (site accessed in 2008).

192 | Faisal Devji

6. “Al-Zawahiri Video on Bush’s Iraq Security Plan,” United States Central Command, http://www.centcom.mil/ (site accessed in 2008). 7. “Al-Zawahiri Calls on Muslims to Wage ‘War of Jihad’, Reject UN Resolutions,” United States Central Command, http://www.centcom.mil/ (site accessed in 2008).

References Arendt, Hannah. 1990. “The Social Question.” Pp. 59–114 in On Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ______. 1993. “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility.” Pp. 121–132 in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954. New York: Harcourt Brace. Devji, Faisal. 2005. Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity. London: Hurst. Gandhi, Mahatma K. 1997. ‘Hind Swaraj’ and Other Writings. Ed. Anthony J. Parei. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Godse, Nathuram. 1998. Why I Assassinated Mahatma Gandhi. Delhi: Surya Bharti Prakashan. Lawrence, Bruce, ed. 2005. Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden. Trans. James Howarth. London: Verso. Rao, Vyjayanthi. 2007. “How to Read a Bomb: Scenes From Bombay’s Black Friday.” Public Culture 19, no. 3: 567–592.

( Chapter 11

Reflections on the Rise of Legal Theology Law and Religion in the Twenty-First Century John L. Comaroff

The natural law is promulgated by the very fact that God instilled it into man’s mind to as to be known by him naturally. — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Law

I. Looking ahead toward the third millennium, Jubilaeum A.D. 2000, an or­gan of the Va­ti­can, carried an essay by Giuseppe Dal­la Torre (1998), a leading Catholic intellectual. Entitled “A Strong Moral Con­s­ci­en­­ce for a Cul­ture of Lega­li­ty,”1 ­­it was an ex­ten­de­ d reflection, from a theological perspective, on the law—specifically, on its gro­wi­ng he­ge­mony. Dalla Torre’s argu­ment need not detain us here: he Notes for this chapter begin on page 211.

194 | John L. Comaroff

makes a rather conventional case for jus­ti­ce over the jural, for collective duty over in­di­vi­dual rights, for the recog­ni­tion of social responsibility. Noteworthy, how­ever, ­was what he had to say ab­out the views of the pa­pacy on jurisprudence, tout cou­rt­­­­, at the dawn of the new cen­tu­ry. John Paul II, by his ac­count, was deeply concer­n­ed to “underline the ur­gen­cy of a culture of legality,” high­ lighting how “neces­sa­ry [it is] abo­ve all to develop a sensi­ti­vi­ty and a prac­ ticality” toward the law. Why? Be­cause a new “chap­ter of ju­dicial ex­pe­ri­ence has been open­ed”—the translation from Italian, alas, is clumsy—a chapter in which hu­ma­ n beings “cla­mor” for “emancipation [through] rights,” notably the “rights of desire.” Ours is an age, intima­t­ed Dalla Tor­re, in which hu­ma­nity knows itself increasingly by virtue of those rights. Take note that Dalla Tor­re is not referring to ‘rites’, as we might expect from the heart of global Catho­li­cism, but ‘rights’. In fact, this age appears to be one in which the two, rites and right, conjoin in parallel significance as never before. Faith and the law, ar­gu­ably, are the twin fi­x­a­­tions of this-world­ly being all over the place­­­nowa­days, some­times unex­pec­­­t­edly so. For In­di­ans in Trinidad, according to Aisha Khan (2007: 142f.), the con­s­truc­tion of a South Asian “diasporic sensibility”—more ge­nerally, of a viable social iden­tity—has de­p­ended on es­­tablishing “the propriety and authenticity of religious prac­­tice” by means of a poli­tics of recognition “that translate[s] into rights.” In other words, here, as in many other con­texts, “the discourse of rites is elemental to the dis­course of rights” (ibid.: 144), and vice versa. Ours may not yet be an epoch of fully realized theoc­ra­cy, ­­­al­though there are plen­ty who would pre­fer that it were, plenty who seek to make it so, plenty of theocratic enclaves emerging across the global map. But it is one of theo-legality.2 Pace Carl Schmitt, it is not just ab­out po­lit­ical theo­lo­gy that we ought to be ve­x­ing ourselves­­. It is also about le­gal theo­lo­gy. No wonder, then, that the ‘historic’ process by means of which South Afri­ca marked its pas­­­s­a­ge from the apartheid past to the post-­co­lonial present, by which it en­ac­ted its re-Ge­nesis­­, was a Truth and Reconci­lia­tion Commission that fused the ri­tual prac­ti­ces of reli­gion and law, the confession and the confessional (cf. Bozzoli 1998; Wilson 2000: 80)—or, more accu­ra­te­ly, their si­mu­­la­cra. By those means, the pro­fa­ni­ties­ per­pe­­trated by the ancien ré­gi­me were re­com­ missioned to sacra­lize a new national ima­g­i­ning, a new de­mos, a new so­ver­eign future—a new moment of Constitution, in all senses of the term. Dalla Torre’s (1998) faith-based reflection on the “culture of legality” gestures toward a very general phenomenon: the rising salience of the law—at once as ideology, as spe­­cies of practice, as utopic cure-all, as landscape of political struggle, as instru­m­ent of governmentality—with chan­­­ges in the global order of things that are oft­en loosely glos­sed under the label ‘neo-liberalism’. Elsewhere, Jean Comaroff and I (2006, 2009a), like oth­ers, have sought to make sense of its symptoms, which include the following: (1) the tidal wave of na­tional constitu­ tions (re)writ­ten since 1989, with their stress on the rule of law and on poli­ti­cal, eco­no­mic, social, even cultural rights; (2) the emergence of new, ex­pan­sive forms of “trans­­na­tional le­gality” and of legally oriented NGOs (Schneider­man 2006: 387f.; ­­cf. De­zalay and Garth 1996, 2006­­­­); (3) the rapid growth of a global intellectual property regime that greatly extends re­ceived forms of copyright and

Reflections on the Rise of Legal Theology | 195

re­­cognizes the en­titlement of indi­genous peo­ples to pro­­fit from their ver­nacular know­led­ge (Coom­be 1998, 1999); (4) the ju­dicia­liza­tion of poli­tics (cf. Cha­n­ock 2000: 34), its rendering into ‘law­fare’; (5) the rising, wor­ldwide “hege­mony of hu­m­an rights” (Klug 2005: 85) and every­day “legal cons­cious­ness” (Ewick and Silbey 1998), not least among recent social movements (McCann 2006); and, most of all, (6) the re­sort to liti­ga­tion to deal with an ever broader spec­t­rum of everyday mat­­­ters, such as the vio­lation of bodies and inti­ma­cies, the dispo­sition of commo­di­­ties and imple­mentation of public po­licy, and the determination of life and dea­­th. In­deed, in many pla­c­es, including those where it is brok­en with impu­ni­ty, its spi­rit bru­ta­li­zed­, its means and ends misap­p­ro­­pria­t­ed, the law app­ ears more and more as a fet­ish—an abstraction made real, ascri­b­­ed a life force of its own, and attri­bu­t­ed the my­th­ic, nu­­minous capaci­ty to con­­fi­gure re­la­­tions and tran­sactions ­­ in its own im­a­ge. In 2000, for ex­ample, soon after the Pu­tin ad­mi­­ nis­t­ra­­tion rose to power in Rus­sia, it de­c­lar­ed it­self a ‘dicta­tor­ship of law’, os­ten­ si­b­ly to counter the chaos­­of the Yelt­sin years. The na­­­ture of that dic­­ta­tor­ship is the subject ­of contro­ver­sy, lar­gely be­cause, like other re­gimes from A to Z (Am­e­ rica to Zim­bab­we), it is erect­ed on a sys­tematic ord­er of ‘lega­li­z­ed illegali­ties’.3 But the use of the phrase itself be­sp ­ eaks a po­li­ti­cal semiosis, not to men­­tion an extrac­tive eco­nomy, founded on the fe­tishism of the jural (cf. Rigi n.d.). It goes without saying that modern secular law, born of the separation of lex na­tu­­rae from lex dei, has always had the quality of a fetish and, as Saint Thomas Aqui­na­ s (n.d.) noted of all ‘natural law’,4 sacral underpinnings: vide Benja­min’s (1978) critique of the ­­divine violence at its originary core, or Derrida’s (2002) ana­ly­sis of the mys­­tical foundation of its authority in his Acts of Reli­ gion, or Ag­amben’s (1998) con­cern to find the key to power in the trian­gulation of sovereignty, the sacrifi­cial, and the juridi­cal—although all three of them apprehend ‘the law’ in narrow terms, eli­ding it with go­ver­nance in general and enforcement in particular. Its enchantment in the here and now also takes less dramatic, more ca­­pillary forms. When, for instance, Bruce Ackerman (1997: 2, 5) speaks of “faith” in constitutions “sweeping the wor­ld” (cf. Klug 2000), his choice of term is apt. Patent in many places is an al­most mil­len­nial be­lief, a be­lief of theological proportions, in their capacity to con­jure up equitable poli­ ties, to make habitable societies, to secure the foundations of mor­al, material, mortal being; a “belief in the im­pos­­si­ble,” as Danilyn Rutherford (n.d.) puts it, speaking of secular en­chantments elsewhere. During the 1990s, in the rural North West Province of South Africa, poc­ket ver­sions of the Bill of Rights— print­ed, Mao-like, as a lit­tle red book—were to be found in many homes, often shel­v­ed along­side the Bible. Although lar­ge­ly ba­bel, its Setswana trans­la­tion poor to the point of impenetrabili­ty, it had ta­ken on a sal­vi­fic ­­quality, a Book of Re­ve­lations for after-the-re­vo­­lu­­tion. Across the glo­­bal South, in fact, constitutions and con­s­titution­a­lism sa­tu­rate many domains of daily life. Numerous chur­­ches and NGOs have their own ver­­sions,5 as do tribes and chief­doms, ethnic cor­po­rations, voluntary asso­cia­tions, even vi­gilante organi­za­­tions, taxi drivers, and street gangs (J. L. Comaroff and J. Co­ma­roff 2006: 22–34). Just as constitutionalism has taken on numinous proportions in many places, so, reciprocally, do twenty-first-century national constitutions tend, if

196 | John L. Comaroff

by implication, to recognize the growing salience of faith­. In contrast to the past practice of erecting a Jef­fersonian ‘wall of separation’ between chur­ch and state, barring any ma­ni­festation of religion in the real­ms of govern­ment, many now offer equal protection to all creeds, allowing them full access to the public do­main—provided that they are not coercive or openly exclusion­ar­ y.6 All this un­der­scores yet more deeply the counterpoint of rites and rights and its in­s­ cription at the very core of national imaginaries. Even in America, the home of constitutional fundamental­ism, there have been populist efforts to undermine the Jeffersonian wall. The administration of George W. Bush deliberately did so, a point to which we shall re­turn. And when he ran as a De­m­o­cratic vicepresidential can­di­date in 2000, Joseph Lieberman, a Jew, argued that the US Bill of Rights ­­­can and shou­ld be read to gua­­ran­tee­ freedom of religion, not free­do ­ m from reli­gion, and that therefore all bar­riers between faith and the functions of go­ver­n­ance ought to be torn down forthwith.7 Lieberman’s argument re­­sonated widely with public opinion. That the judiciary is best staffed by citi­zens of de­­mon­s­trated con­­­viction— spiritual conviction, that is, not criminal convictions, ones born of penitence not borne in a penitentiary—has become common cause ac­ross much of America.8 Re­call the notoriously­troubling case of Ter­ri Schiavo, a car­di­ac-arrest pa­tient who fell into ­­a per­sis­t­ent vegetative state in 1990 and was kept alive by fee­d­ing tube until March 2005 (see J. Comaroff, this volume). In 1998, eight years after the onset of her condi­tion, Schiavo’s husband Michael peti­tio­ned successfully to have her life sup­port ter­minat­ed, an ac­­tion bit­terly con­tes­ted by her Catholic parents. The dispute, itself compli­ca­ted by financial interests on all sides, went through repeated law suits and app­eals, all the way up to the US Supreme Court. The Repub­lican-domi­na­ted State of Florida and the US Con­gress passed legislation in ef­f­orts to pre­vent the re­m­o­val of the tube, but to no eff­ect. More than 20 hearings found in favor of Mich­ael Schi­­a­vo, des­pi­te the shrill, mus­­­­cu­ lar demands of pro-life activists and politicians. Even the pope got in­­vol­v­ed. When, in the end, Schiavo­­ died, evan­ge­li­cal ­Christians ­­spoke darkly of im­­ pea­ch­­­ing the jud­ges who had sanctioned­ her ‘kill­ing’. Tom De­Lay, the senior Re­pub­li­can in the House of Represen­ta­tives, threatened them in terms dis­tinctly theo-legal: “The time will come for the men re­spon­sible for this to an­sw ­ er for their beha­vior.” It was broadly intimat­ed that the jud­ges would be replaced by men of true faith. Not long be­fore, DeLay had told a group of con­servatives that “God had giv­en Schi­­­avo to America to highlight the need to fight for a ‘cul­ture of life.’”9 ­The ‘spirit of the law’, os­ten­sibly the ultimate ex­pres­sion of secu­lar mo­dernist reason, has been subjec­t­ed to sus­­­tai­n­ed ef­f­orts to infuse it with a spi­rit of an al­to­gether different, less secular, less ration­a­list sort.

II. But I am getting ahead of myself. Among the many manifestations of the growing feti­shism of the law, one is par­ti­cu­larly sig­ni­ficant for present purposes: the ten­dency of populations de­fi­n­ed by, among other things, faith, culture,

Reflections on the Rise of Legal Theology | 197

gender, se­xu­al pre­­fe­r­en­ce, race, residen­ce, and hab­its of con­sump­tion ­to turn to jural ways and means in order to construct and represent themselves as ‘communities’. In doing so, they strive to protect their physical, intellec­tual, and other property; to regu­late their in­ter­nal af­f­airs; to police ­­their boun­­da­ ries; to claim recognition and redress; and to mana­ge their re­­la­tions with the wor­ld out­side. In sum, they seek to constitute their being-in-the-world—in the hyphenated socio-legal sense of the term ‘constitution’—under the vernacular sign of ‘identity’. This, Jean Comaroff and I have ar­gued (e.g., see J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff 2003), is in large­part a corollary­of the­un­folding history of the na­tion-state, more precisely, of two of its con­tem­po­r­a­ry features, working in tandem with each other. The first is a palpable shift in populist conceptions of nationhood from one founded on cultural homogeneity and “horizontal fraternity” (Anderson 1983), itself always more an imaginative fiction than a palpable fact, to one that recognizes its own heterogeneity, if often for pragmatic rather than ethical reasons. If often, also, reluctantly. That hete­rogeneity has been exacerbated greatly by the global circulation of labor, the con­t­ra-­flow of post-colonial populations to the metropole, the transnationali­za­tion of cultural commodities and practices, and other cognate processes. And it has inserted itself into the implosive politics of difference that has gained momentum stea­dily since the late ­twentieth century—a po­litics that fre­quently leads to more or less ag­g­res­sive, more or less comprehensive claims to sover­eign­ty in the name of identities of various sorts; by ‘sovereignty’, I refer to the assertion of con­tr­ ol over the con­di­tions of ex­is­­­­­tence, even the lives and deaths, of those who fall wi­th­in its pur­­view and the ex­ten­sion over them of the juris­dic­tion of a nor­ma­tive order of one kind or another (cf. Han­­sen and Steppu­tat 2005; J. L. Co­ma­roff and J. Comaroff 2006). Ideology (the -ology of the idea) has given way as a basis of mobilization to ‘ID-ology’ (the -ology of iden­tity) as the primary ba­si­s of poli­tical subjectivity—and, with it, to a species of ‘fractal’ citizenship in which na­tion­hood is not so much repudiated as relativized (J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff 2003). The second contemporary feature of the nation-state is closely related. It derives from the out­sourcing of many of the ope­rations of go­vernance with the rise of the neo-liberal state. ­Most of those ope­ra­tions have been fran­chised ­to firms in the private sector­, but many have also been de­re­gulated and displaced into that amorphous socio-scape, ‘the community’, including those very ‘communities’—the scare quo­­tes are meant to convey the fact that this ab­­­stract noun covers a distinctly polymorphous so­ciolo­gy—that seek to provide their subjects with an alter­native ­citizenship, a parallel rule of law, and a secure, orderly so­cial eco­lo­gy. With neo-­liber­al nation­hood having to admit ever increas­ing hetero­do­­xy, ontological other­ness­is widely in­voked these days to make ­claims to sovereign self-regulation, all the more so where post-1989 constitutions give explicit recognition to di­versity. For their part, states tend to re­gard such so­ver­eign­ties with ambivalence. Those that contend in the economy of vio­l­en­­ce or spill over in­to polite, proper­tied society are likely to be cri­mi­­na­liz­ed—or re­com­­mis­sio­n­ed—by go­vernment, if it has the capa­city to do so. Others may be tolera­ted, particularly if they limit themsel­ves to the

198 | John L. Comaroff

‘private’ sphere, which, ac­cor­ding to libe­ral modernist po­li­tical theory­, is the domain in which dif­feren­ce ought to express itself. For exam­p­le, according to Fernanda Pi­rie (2006: 78–79, 93), Ti­be­­tan pasto­ra­lists are fiercely pro­­tec­tive of the divinity of their ances­tors and the au­tonomy of their cul­­tu­ral patch when it comes to mana­g­ing in­ter­nal affairs, ­­but they defer volun­ta­rily to the Chi­nese au­th­o­rities in matters of criminal violence. It is an arrange­ment with which both sides appear to live comfort­a­b­ly. But the appeal to the autarky­­­­of faith or cul­ture against govern­ment does not always stop at this felicitous border, at the border of disorder.

III. In re­cent times, the kinds of ‘community’ that have become most assertive of sovereignty are arguably those ba­s­­ed on religious and/or cul­tu­ral difference: the kinds that refuse altoge­ther the an­ti­nomy bet­ween the pri­­vate and the public; that in­voke in­t­ran­sitive, often intransi­g­ent, ontologies of being-in-the-world; that are based, existen­ti­al­ly, on transcendent truths and sacredly sanctioned life-ways of their own; that demand some measure of self-governance­­­—the kinds, therefore, that have tend­ed to show the greatest alacrity in looking to legal theology and theo-legality on which to found them­ sel­ves and their futures. This, perhaps, is why Pope John Paul II was so keen to embrace a ‘culture’ of rights jurisprudence—and why faith seems to be taking more and more to the law. Keebet and Franz von Benda-Beckmann (2008: 86) refer to this pro­cess as the “juridification” of religion, by which faith aims to remake the world in its own image. Not eve­ry­­where, nor always in the same way, but palpably.10 Those creeds that bear the capitalized adjec­ti­ves ‘Great’ or ‘Wor­ld’ have deep juridical roots­­: the founding tes­ta­ments and texts, theo­­­­ logies and iconographies, prophets and patriarchs of Ju­daism, Christianity, and Is­lam are all heav­i­ly inscribed in legalities.­­11 For organiz­ed reli­gion, in fact, con­vic­tion has long been measur­ed by compliance with proscription and pres­c­rip­­tion; sig­ni­fi­cantly, among the first acts of establishment on the part of many ear­ly Afri­can Inde­pen­­­dent Chur­ches ­­was to ­write a ‘Constitu­tion’, capitalized, since this is how mission Pro­­tes­t­an­t­ism presented itself to co­lonized peoples (J. Co­ma­roff 1986).12 This had local resonances: ver­na­cular faiths in Africa were also groun­d­ed in le­ga­li­ty, albeit in an­ces­trally sourced cus­to­mary law; customary law, that is, in the techno-jural, not the colo­nially bastardized, sense of the term. What app­ears dif­ferent nowa­days is the degree to which all faiths are resorting to lawfare to pro­tect their sove­r­eignty, to ex­tend their imperium, and, not infrequently, to challenge liber­al reason—albeit often by libe­ral means (cf. J. Comaroff, this volume). Potentially, as we shall see, with world-historical conse­quen­ces. Take orthodox Islam. In the predominantly Muslim nation-states of the world, re­cent political battles over their ideological character have been conducted largely in terms of competing species of Islamic constitutionalism, which has a long and excep­tio­n­al­ly complex history dating back to the second

Reflections on the Rise of Legal Theology | 199

half of the nineteenth century. In the twenty-first century, Arjomand (2007: 136–137, passim) explains, a constitutionalism bas­ed on Sharia, in which go­vern­ment exists primarily to implement divine law (typically asso­ci­a­ted with nation-states such as Iran, Pa­kistan, and the Sudan), faces a “post-ideological” con­sti­tu­tionalism (typified by Egypt) in which Sharia is just one source of a jurispru­den­ce that “ac­cepts demo­c­racy and … legal modernization­­” as well as “other consti­tutio­na­ l prin­­ciples” (cf. also Agrama 2005, n.d.).13 The struggle for the fu­ture of the nations of the Islam­ic world, a struggle hardened in recent times by “Islamic resurgence … and the per­sis­ten­ce of authoritarian regimes,” Arjomand (ibid.) suggests, depen­ds on this legally mandat­ed dif­fer­ ence; in short, on different and opposed cultures of legality. Even in Egypt, where Sharia is subordinated to a secular jurisprudence, “the law has become a fundamental site of Islamic argumentation and practice,” to the ex­tent that “contem­po­ra­ry attempts by Egyptians to reassess the role of Islam in their lives, both personal and political, cannot avoid taking legal conditions into account” (Ag­rama 2005: 51). According to a recent mass-me­diated account (Feldman 2008b),14 a great number of Egyptians—66 percent, like 60 percent of Pa­kis­tanis and 54 percent of Jor­danians—“say that Sha­ri­a ought to be the only source of legis­la­­tion in their [country],” a country in which the Mus­lim Brotherhood, whose credo opens “Allah is our objective, the Qur’an is our constitu­ tion,” is the largest opposition bloc in Parliament. ­“For many Muslims today,” Feld­man (ibid.) notes, “the call for Sharia is [a call] for an Islamic version of what the West consi­d­ers its most prized principle of political jus­ti­ce: the rule of law.” Even in Turkey, with its long history of Kemalist secularism, “new Islamic move­ments”—themselves increasing­ly popular, increasingly pious—have been said for a while to harbor “a secret agen­da to take over the state and enforce Shariah” (Walton n.d.: chap. 1; cf. Esposito 1996; Ya­v­uz 2003).15 There are signs pointing in this direction: in July 2008, the ruling Islamist AK Party, along with the prime minister, the president, and 69 other leading figures, stood accu­ s­ed before the country’s Constitutional Court on charges of having subverted the law of the land by fostering anti-secularist activities.16 This occurred after the Court had enacted legislation to lift a ban against wearing headscarves on university campuses. It is no wonder, then, that efforts to ex­tend the dominion of both the faith and the faithful in nations currently not governed primarily by Sharia law— like those of the Sa­lafiy­ya move­­­ment in rural Morocco—­would pro­pa­gate a “return to the roots of leg­al Islam and de­mand the re­organization of social life according to [its] core prin­cip­les” (Tur­ner 2006: 115–116; see also Turner n.d.). This is tendered as an alternative not merely to the more secu­lar vision of the Moroccan government, but also to the “pagan neoliberal develop­ment agenda” on offer from the West.17 “Islamist concerns” here “are expressed in legal discourse,” their “ultim­ate aim [being] the establishment of the rule of Islamic law” (Turner n.d.: 3) in a chal­len­ge to the secular state. Even battles over women’s rights are being conducted in these terms, pitting the female branch of the Justice Spirituality Movement, an Islamist group, against secular feminists (see, e.g., Williams 2008). It is no wonder, either, that the capture of

200 | John L. Comaroff

regions within non-Mus­lim countries by or­thodox Islam—northern Nigeria and Aceh being ce­le­brated cases—has ex­pressed itself in the enthusiastic application of Sharia law to the re­gu­lation of all real­ms of existence.18 The centrality of Sharia in the lives of Muslim populations out­side of Is­la­m­­ic na­tion-states was drama­ti­cal­ly affirmed ­in ear­ly 2008 when, of all peo­­ple, the arch­­bi­shop of Canter­bu­ry, Dr. Row­an Williams, sug­ges­t­ed that some mea­sure of of­fic­ ial re­cognition be given to it by the Bri­tish state for pur­pos­es of everyday go­vernan­ce in pre­dominantly Muslim communities. This may be the first time that a reli­gi­ous leader of Williams’s stature has called for the ac­ceptance of ev­en partial sovereignty for an­other fai­th. Pre­­dictably, the statement sparked a bit­ter con­t­ro­ver­sy. Said his pre­­de­ces­sor, Lord Ca­rey, “There can be no exceptions to the laws of our land.”19 Williams appears to have anticipated such a response. “[A]s a mat­ter of fact,” he noted, “certain pro­­visions of Sharia are already recognised in our so­ci­et­y and under our law”—as they are in India and Egypt—to the extent that their adop­tion had become “un­avoidable.”20 He is probab­ly correct: a Muslim culture of legality, itself a fusion of religion and juris­prudence with deep roots, is asserting itself ever more vigo­r­ous­ly wherever Islamists live— often abetted by NGOs, such as Islamic Relief Worldwide, that ex­tend Islam’s humanitarian reach.21 Perhaps this is why, as Susan Hirsch (2006: 165–166) has ob­served, socio-le­gal scholarship on the topic has seen a noticeable rise in re­ce­nt times, albeit one whose di­rec­tion was chan­g­ed by 9/11. A conse­quen­ce of that mo­mentous moment, she adds, was to ensure that “the future of Islamic law”—itself a “mo­­d­ern construction,” always “locally specific, in­tensely political, and richly varied” (Hus­­sin 2008)22—“would be more highly politicized than previous­ly” (Hirsch 2006: 166), not least because of its deep interpellation in Islamic faith and its pro­pagation. Rites and rights, again. But it is not only the governance of everyday life that has caused Muslim theo-legality to be evoked in assertions of sovereignty. The reli­gion itself is being refram­ed in these terms. A dramatic instance is to be found in Pakistan. It began in the mid-1970s, when the ulema, or­thodox ­­religious authorities, sought and won an injunction ­against the Ah­ma­dis, a move­ment they declared to be heretical, ­to prevent this “sect” from using any of the Sha’ir (signs) of Islam. These signs, they said, belonged solely to “pro­per” Muslims (Ah­med 2006: 19–24, 40–45). ­When the Ahma­dis appealed to the La­hore High Court in 1978,23 coun­sel for the ulema again ar­gued “that Mus­lim-ness [is] the exclu­si­ve pro­per­ty of Mus­­lims alone, that cer­­t­ain Muslim ter­minology [is] analogous to co­py­­right and trade­­­marks,” and that their im­pro­pe­ r use is, therefore, “an infr­ in­ge­ment of the rights” of the faith­ful (ibid.: 21). On this occasion, the ­jud­ge found ag­ainst the religious authorities on the tech­­ni­ca­l ground that they could not show that a ma­te­rial loss had been in­cur­red (ibid.: 41). But 15 years later, ­­­­­in 1993, in a Pakistan Su­p­reme Court case24 that address­ed the con­sti­tu­­tio­nal bases of Muslim identity, the same argument was accepted by a ma­jo­ri­ty of the jus­tices.­They argued that certain signs were not just distinc­tive cha­rac­teristics and prac­ti­ces but “the exclusive proper­ty of Is­lam” (ibid.: 41–42). Thus was the faith transformed “in­to property, something that could be own­ed, possess­ed and bounded off from others” (ibid.), something whose true nature was vested

Reflections on the Rise of Legal Theology | 201

in the law. ­In some contexts, as has been ob­served elsewhere (J. L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff 2009a, 2009b), divinities may them­­sel­ves have a jural iden­tity. In 1986, when the Indian govern­ment sued for the re­turn of a twelfth-century bron­ze Shiva that had ­been looted from a village in Pathur, “it did so on behalf of the offended god him­self,” who was the “named … plain­tiff in the case” (Keefe 2007: 60–61; emphasis ad­d­ed). Thus does a deity, and the faith for which it stands, be­come a legal per­son. The juridification of religion, to return to the von Benda-Beckmanns’ felicitous phrase, has many faces. Contemporary Christianity is also interpellating itself into the law—and, in doing so, into governance—in an effort to extend the reach of faith-based sovereignty. This, too, has precedents: Protestant and Catholic missions have, through­out their history, sought to create more or less closed, more or less sovereign commu­ni­ties, thereby to exercise over their citizens an authori­ty at once institutional and capillary. And the chur­ch, in its va­ri­ous de­no­minational guises, has always taken pains to exert in­f­lu­en­ce on political so­ci­e­ty and the state. But we appear to be seeing an acce­le­ra­tion, and an ac­cretion, of this tendency—a tendency against which Nietzsche ([1973] 1990: 87) warned: “[I] t costs dear and terribly,” he said, “when religions hold sway … in their own right and as sove­r­eign, when they thems­elves want to be final ends and not means” (original em­phasis). That desire is making itself manifest ­both in small Christian move­ments and in large ev­an­ge­lical awa­k­e­n­ings across the planet.25 Henning Mankell, the noted crime novelist and or­ga­nic anthro­po­­lo­gist of Swe­ den, writes of such movements in One Step Be­hind (2003), a fiction foun­d­ed on an acute sociological reading of contempo­ra­ry Eu­rope. “No longer [are they] simply cha­ris­matic,” he observes. “They are cor­po­r­ate fran­chises run by lawyers and accoun­t­ants” (ibid.: 351), legal persons that strive to change the world by means of le­gal ploys. The ex­tent to which this is true has been brought to light in the US on an unpre­ce­den­ted scale since the turn of the new century. Re­miniscent of the rise of Chris­tian Po­li­ti­cal Economy (CPE) (see J. Comaroff, this volume) at the dawn of the modern age of capital (Wa­ter­­man 1991), con­ ser­va­tive Pro­tes­tantism would render social, mor­al, and material life ac­cording to the dicta­tes of faith—al­though, in its second com­ing, CPE seems much more anxious to in­si­nuate itself directly into the workings of the state. Witness, in this respect, the spread of so-called dominionism, whose “global ‘king­dom’ agenda” is founded on the belief ­­that Jesus will not return “until the Church has tak­en … ­con­­trol of the earth’s governmental and social institutions” (Leslie 2008: 2, 3), includ­ing the market and the courts. Its “3-legged stool” subsumes the state, busi­ness, and civil socie­ty (ibid.: 6). Even among American Christians who do not ex­plicitly see them­selves as part of the movement, there is support for the effort to entrench “godly dominion over our neighbor­ hoods, our schools, our go­vern­ment, our literature and arts, our sports are­nas, our … me­dia, our scientific endeavors—in short, over every aspect and institu­ tion of hum­an socie­ty.”26 For some, the longer-term ob­jectives are to make the country over into a theocracy, thereby reversing the course of history, and to put an end to the hegemony of secular reas­on. The ideology of the religious right results in stands that are now very fa­mi­liar: its assaying of ‘family values’

202 | John L. Comaroff

and laissez-faire; its antipa­thy to ab­or­tion, homosex­uality, welfare, and stemcell research; its hard-nosed positions on po­ver­ty, the en­vi­ron­ment, theological and cul­­­tural relativism, immigration, ‘just’ wars, and the like. In pursuing its imperial ends, con­­ser­va­tive Christianity has been quick to resort to the means of lawfare.27 Recall ­the disturbing and controversial do­cu­men­­tary ­­Jesus Camp (2006; directed by Ra­ch­el Grady and Hei­­di Ew­ing) about the in­doc­trination of very young peo­pl­e, who spend their sum­mers ­­learning to “seize back” the US for Christ. The film may seem extreme in its choice of subject matter and in the matter of its subjects’ choices, but it captures a rising tide in modern America. Oth­er than footage of a Christian leader claiming to have open access to the White House and its decision-making processes, the film’s most potent­ mo­­­t­if is a life-size cardboard effigy of George W. Bush, the ultimate ‘Ameri­can Idol’: pra­y­ers are said for him, urg­ing that he install “righteous judges”—the youths chant the mantra “right­eous judges” over and over—who would conjure into being a truly Chris­­tian common­weal­th­. The fight for domi­nion, in short, gives yet further impetus to the fe­tishism of the law and, with it, the ju­dicialization of politics. Legality is the se­cular in­stru­ment by which civil society is to be re­made in the image of the sac­red. Also uncivil society. Over the past decade or so, penitentiaries ­have become a ma­jor target of Christian movements in many countries (Burnside et al. 2005)­­. In the US, this ini­ti­a­tive is associated primarily with the conservative Prison Fel­­ low­ship Minis­tries (PFM), which was foun­d­ed in 1976 by Char­les W. Col­son, an ex-Watergate con­spirator and an alumnus of an Ala­­ba­ma correctional facility. Neither Durkheim nor Fouc­ault would have been surprised, of course, given their grasp of the constitutive relationship between the pri­so ­ n and the wor­ld, the disgraced and the disc­ip ­ ­­lined. The PFM’s “cultur­al com­mis­sion” is to assist the church in evangelizing inmates, to pro­mote “bib­li­cal stand­ards of jus­tice in the cri­mi­nal justice sys­­tem,” and, more broad­ly, “to cultivate righteous­ness in soci­et­y, streng­­the­n­ing the work of God’s king­dom.”28 In its Utopia, the Lord’s Levia­than—about which Hob­­­­­bes (1986: pt. 3) himself wou­ld have felt distinctly qu­ea­sy, given his belief that reli­gi­ous power ought al­ways to be sub­ordinate to civil au­th­o­rity—would be ruled by a seam­less fusion of the laws of Levi­ti­cus and the laws of the land. Again, the Protes­ta­ nt pre­­sence in prisons has a deep his­tory. In his monumental novel Sac­red Hunger, Bar­ry Un­sworth (1992: 158) reminds us that in the late eigh­teenth cen­tury, the bi­sh­op of Nor­wi­ch owned one of Eng­land’s more no­to­rious hou­se­ s of detention. In the US, the Pennsylvania penitentia­ry model of similar vintage occupied prisoners “with labor and Bible study” (Mauer 1999: 3). But there was less con­cern then for the promiscuous embroilment of the chur­­ch into what were to become the functions of the state. Ironi­cal­ly, when he was gover­nor of Tex­as, Geor­ge W. Bush was sued by a con­vict for vio­la­ting the US Cons­ti­tu­tion by franchising out ­­the pastoral care of the pe­­ni­tentiary to PF­­­­M, thus giving an ad­van­t­age to ev­an­­ge­lical Christianity over other faiths or no faith at all.29 PFM has had to answer to the law on its own account as well. Its InnerChange Freedom Initia­tive (IFI), par­tly fun­ded by the executive under Presi­dent Bush’s Faith-Based Community Ini­tia­ti­ves Pro­g­ ram, was the ob­ject of an action filed in Iowa in 2003 by Americans United for

Reflections on the Rise of Legal Theology | 203

the Separa­tion of Church and State. It “is uncons­cion­a­ble” said the plaintiffs, “­­to give pre­ferential treat­ment to prisoners bas­ed solely on their willingness to under­go re­li­gious conversion and indoc­tri­nation.” The real controversy here, argued Minis­try­Watch, a Chris­­tian orga­ni­zation sym­pa­the­tic to PFM and IFI, is about whether “our na­tion’s ba­sic app­roach to sol­­ving social prob­lems [is] secular humanism powered by big go­vern­ment and void of trans­cendent values [or] real and lasting social change … effected by ‘armies of com­pas­sion’ … wor­k­ing for true jus­­tice based upon unchanging principles.”30 Critics of PFM, by contrast, ac­cuse it of religious coercion—indeed, of theologico-lawfare. They point out that the evangelical Christian Ministry, which is deeply committed to do­minion­ism, has persua­d­ed several states to make its prog­ rams, paid for by tax dollars, a requirement of parole and to give better carceral treat­ment to those who sign on.31 As it turned out, the Iowa suit was successful. Both the low­er courts and a federal ap­p­eals court, the second in late 2007, found that IFI did violate the constitutional sepa­ra­­tion of church and state. Al­thou­gh the plaintiffs took the ruling to be “a major setback for the White House’s ‘faithbased initiative,’” IFI was banned only if it conti­nued to ope­r­ate with govern­ ment funds.32 In other words, as long as it is privately fi­nanced, it may have access to prisons and be free to press its convictions on con­victs. At the time of writing, PFM was consider­ing an approach to the ideologically stacked Supreme Court—in res­pect of whose com­po­sition George Bush did answer the prayers of the Jesus Cam­pers—to per­su­ade the highest levels of the judiciary that govern­ ment should pay for its work. And that the con­stitutional wall ­­between church and state, the sacred and the se­cular, ought to be realigned. A luta con­tinua, the struggle continues. There are a number of organizations in the US devoted specifically to protecting the separation of church and state. Liberal opponents of creeping religiosity con­tinue to engage in insurgent lawfare and to run up against evangeli­cal counter-in­sur­­gency.33 In February 2007, for example, the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) ap­peared before ­the US Su­­­preme Court to defend a claim in support of the right of tax­pay­ers to challen­ge Presi­dent Bush’s crea­tion, by executive order, of the ­Office of FaithBased Initiatives—the same office that funded IFI and was thereby implicated in the Iowa litigation—and other cognate offices.34 Both the FFRF and the White House had their protagonists, many of whom filed amici briefs. The FFRF was backed by the Am­e­­rican Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Baptist Joint Com­mit­tee for Religious Freedom, People for the American Way Foun­­dation, the Anti-Defamation League, the Center for Free Inquiry, the American Jewish Congress, American Atheists, and a number of legal histo­ri­ans and law scho­lars. The administration was supported by ­­the Foundation for Moral Law, the American Center for Law and Justice—note the legal framing of these conservative Christian as­socia­tions—and eleven states of the Uni­on. Earlier, before the Seventh Circuit Court of App­eals, the FFRF had argued that be­cau­se those faith-based offices were created spe­cifically to help Christian organi­za­­tions win go­vernment funding, they violated the es­tab­lish­ ment clause. Accepting ­­­the broad va­li­di­ty of this argument, the appellate ben­ch had found in the FFRF’s favor, which in turn led the di­rector of the Office of

204 | John L. Comaroff

Faith-Bas­ed Ini­tiatives, on behalf of the Bush admi­ni­s­tration, to take the case to the Supreme Court. Its jurists, those ‘righteous judges’ ag­ain, decided ag­ainst the FFRF case and overturned the decision of the Appellate Court on a nar­row tech­nical ground—that be­cause the fun­­ding for the faith-based initiatives had come from the executive branch and not from a budget passed by Congress, which represents taxpayers, a challenge by the FFRF in the name of those taxpayers had no legal stand­ing. The small matter of principle—the principled separation of church and state at the core of American liberal democracy—was submerged in judicial niceties. It is not only the executive that has been implicated in the battle over re­li­ gion. So has the US military. This emerged with particular clarity in March 2008, when a sol­dier, Jere­my Hall, filed a federal lawsuit against the Depart­ ment of Defense and its se­cr­ e­ta­ry. Hall al­leged that his constitutional right to free­­d­om of faith had been violated, that he had been ­overlooked for pro­mo­tion on acc­ount of being an atheist, and that his life had been put at risk. Not sur­ pri­s­ing­ly, his claim met with stri­dent official de­nials. But as a CNN report by Randi Kaye (2008) revealed, the mat­ter is not so straight­forward. The dispute brought to light the fact that there does ap­pear to have been a perva­si­ve Chris­ tianization within the military. Michael Weinstein, a retired senior air force offi­cer who establish­ed the Military Religious Freedom Founda­tion and joined Hall’s legal ac­tion, speaks in that CNN report of a pro­mo­tional video featur­ing uniformed generals that was made inside the Pentagon (Wein­stein insists on calling it “the Pentacostalgon”) by Chris­tian Embassy, an evangelical organization affiliated with Campus Crusade for Christ. Ano­ther religious as­sociation, the Of­fi­cers’ Chris­tian Fellowship, al­so according to CNN, “has re­p­resenta­ti­ves on near­ly all army ba­s­es worldwide. Its vi­sion … [is] ‘a spiritually trans­for­ med milita­ry, with am­bas­­sa­dors for Christ in uniform em­power­ed by the Holy Spirit.’” Adds Weinstein, “their pur­po­se is to have Christian officers exer­cise biblical lea­dership to raise up a Godly ar­my” (see Kaye 2008). Mean­while, the US govern­ment has tried to have the suit dismissed, again on procedu­r­al grounds. Jeremy Hall and the Military Re­ligious Freedom Foundation, it says­, shou­ld have complained not through the civil courts but through “the chain of com­mand.” Add­ed the brief filed for the state: “Ju­di­cial review would significantly inter­fere with Army op­e­rations and intrude on discip­li­na­ry and personnel decisions entrusted to military judg­­ment.” In asking the civi­lian judicia­ry to pass the case back to the military, the army petitioned to be allowed to act as jud­ge and jury in a suit in which it is the defendant before a tribunal from which there is no external appeal.35 And it had every reason to be­lieve that it would succeed, having bested Michael Weinstein in the courts before: in 2006, a jud­ge in New Mexico threw out as “baseless” a complaint against the Air Force Academy—to the “app­lause” of conser­va­tive Pro­tes­tants and mili­ta­ry person­nel—in which it was ac­cu­­sed by Wein­stein and other cadets of fostering religious discri­mi­na­tion and favoring ev­an­gelical Chris­­tianity, even of abetting dominionism. Said an attor­ney for the defen­se: “[S]ince the former ca­dets who filed the suit were no longer at the aca­de­my, the legal action served no pur­pose” (Winn 2006)—as if only a personal aff­ront, now out of date, was at issue.36

Reflections on the Rise of Legal Theology | 205

The infusion of the sacred into governance is not confined to the United States, of course. In Rus­sia, where there is a similar constitutional separation between church and state, the two “reinforce each other intimately” (Benovska-Sabkova et al. 2008: 51–52). Not on­ly does Rus­sian Orthodoxy receive “significant financial support” from the nation­al trea­sury­­­, but it has also “become a central actor in Russian politics and society” (ibid.). During To­ny Blair’s premiership in the United Kingdom, the invocation of faith as justification for political decisions became part of the ordinary discourse of public life. The same applies in other parts of Europe, Asia, and the Americas, even when, as in Fran­ce, it hides itself in laïcité, a sacralized secularism that is more often invoked to police ­difference than it is to contain the ­­Christian orthodoxy that silently suf­fuses the regulation of every­day being. In South Africa, where the consti­tu­­­tional pro­­­tection for reli­gi­on is much great­er than it is in the US, and where the sub­stance of liberal democracy is a deeply debated question, there is on­going argu­ment ab­­out the place of reli­gi­on in civil so­ciety, pub­lic institutions, pedagogy, policing, and go­ver­­nment­­. Here, too, ­efforts have been made by organiza­tions founded on faith to de­ploy the courts­to extend their sove­reignty.37 Nor, I stress, are such eff­orts restricted to Islam and Christianity. Similar things might be written about other faiths in other places, be it the Mansions of Rastafari in Ja­mai­ca or Hinduism in In­do­nesia (K. von Benda-Beckmann and F. von Benda-Beckmann 2008) or fundamentalist Judaism, the popularity of which has spread stri­k­ing­ly over the past few decades. In Is­rael, the role in go­v­ern­ment of the religious parties—in par­ti­cular, their con­trol over fa­mi­ly law—has long po­sed a problem for the full accom­plish­ment of a se­cu­­lar libe­r­al de­mo­c­ra­cy. With the oc­­cupation of Palestine and the expan­sion of settle­ments domi­n­a­ted by or­tho­­dox Jews, the West Bank has become an archi­pelago of faith-based sove­ r­eign com­mu­­ni­ties no­to­r­ious for their aggressive self-asser­tion. Outside Israel, throughout the Jew­ish diaspora, ultra-con­servative congregations have also ten­ ded to be highly protective of their integrity, clo­­s­ing themselves off to the world and its in­­terventions, settling dis­pu­tes, enact­ing so­ci­ality, ma­naging their public finances, and negotiating their own moral eco­no­mies, with rab­bi­ni­cal courts as the arbiters of order and propriety. Some time back, Cha­n­nel 4 in the UK pre­ sented a television pro­g­ram en­titled “Jewish Law” in its se­ries Faith and Be­­lief.38 Focusing on just such a ­“self-contain­ed” com­munity in Man­ches­ter, it show­ed sce­nes of religious authorities “enforc­ing an ar­ray of intricate regulations ‘gover­ n­ed by bibli­cal texts,’” rules that embrace “every ele­ment” of people’s lives and deaths. The deg­ree to which ultra-conservative Jews seek sovereign autono­my is of course variable. So, too, is the degree to which they are likely to suc­ceed in attaining it. But that is a matter for the history of the future to determine.

IV. I suggested earlier that the kinds of community most assertive of sovereignty nowadays, and ­most given to theo-legality, are those founded ­­­on religious and/or cul­tu­ral difference. Thus far, I have focus­ed entirely on the former,

206 | John L. Comaroff

on communi­ties of faith as­­sociated with the ‘Great’ religions—religions, so to speak, in the upper case. Those rooted in cultural difference, especially culture ins­cri­be­ d in indigeneity, autochtho­ny, and common biogenetic substance, may also lay claim to distinctive ­­­­­­on­tologies, dis­tinc­­tive deities, distinctive ID-ologies—in other words, to religion in the lower case, at least in the sense that it cannot be neatly ex­cised from the total cultural context in which it is historically embedded or from the way of life that it indexes. Jean Coma­roff and I (2003) have argued that ID-ology under the sign of culture and shared es­s­en­ce (“life itself”), when transla­te­ d in­to a will to sove­reignty, yields poli-cultu­ra­lism. The prefix ‘poli-’ denotes both plu­ra­lity and a po­litical claim to the ex­er­cise of go­v­ ernan­ce over, well, ev­e­ry­thing, via the in­stru­men­­tation of a law under­written by sac­red au­th­ori­­ ­­ ty. In South Africa, for example, it as­­serts it­self most ar­ti­culately in ­the right of Zu­­lu, Xho­sa, Tswa­na, and others ­­to rule and be ruled accor­d­ing to their own ways and means under the tutelage of their own deities­. Here, the politics of policulturalism has been most feverishly fought out— unsurprisingly, gi­v­­­en the fetishism of legalities—on the terrain of the South Af­ri­can Con­­­s­titu­tion. The pri­ma­ry protagonist is the Con­g­ress of Traditional Lead­ers of South Africa (Con­tra­le­sa). For more than a de­­cade, Contralesa has sought ­to change the founding law of the land to give greater recognition to ­­vernacular life-ways, including those taken to fall with­in the purview of African religion. Indigenous beliefs are in fact protected by the Constitution, but they are sub­ject to the limitations of the Bill of Rights and the dictates of uni­versal citizenship—to which, save in exceptional circumstances, all cultural difference is subor­dinated.39 Con­tra­­lesa rails against these limitations and has pushed for a constitutional amend­ment to remove them. Thus far it has not succeeded, although the government re­pea­t­ed­ly makes conciliatory gestures in respon­se to its demands and has passed laws that au­tho­rize ver­­na­cular prac­tices, in­c­lu­d­ing some that had pre­­viously been dee­­­m­­ed repugnant.­­­­­­­40 The state has al­so shown tolerance toward ‘tradi­tio­nal’ religious rituals, such as initiation and ani­mal sacri­fice, that tack close to, and often trans­gress, the boundaries of the licit; this in a cli­mate of cultural populism that, at present, encourages asser­tions of Africanity ag­ainst the per­­­­ceived Eurocen­tricities of liberal de­mocracy. As has been widely reported, South Africa’s re­­cent­ly elected presi­dent, Ja­co ­ b Zu­­ma, is a po­ly­gam­ist with a professed be­lief in the power ­­ of the Zulu ancestors. In fact, the struggle over sovereign indigeneity seems to be spreading ac­ross the legal landscape ­of South Africa, as it is in some other nation-states. Usually fought out in terms of a right to difference based on the sacred­essence of so­cial being, it is phra­­sed either in the narrow lexicon of religion or in the more encompassing lang­ua­ ge of culture—or both. A few dramatic instan­ces have become ico­­nic of this strug­gle. Some have pitt­ed indigenous peoples directly against the government, while others manifest them­selves in bat­tles of belief within Afri­can polities, although, even then, their ultimate res­pon­­­dent is the state itself. One instance of the latter, a cause célèbre in the 1990s,41 cast Kedi­ bo­ne Tu­­ma­ne, a member of Je­hovah’s Wit­nesses, against Chief Nyalala Pilane of the Kgat­la, un­der whose ju­ris­diction in the North West Province she then lived. For rea­so ­ ns of faith, Tu­ma­ne had violated a rule that confines recently

Reflections on the Rise of Legal Theology | 207

widowed women to their homes and re­quires­ that, ­­­­when going ab­road, they sprinkle a herb (moga­ga) on their paths. Not doing so is to risk spreading pollu­ tion ­with poten­ti­al­ly le­th­al conse­quen­ces. When Tu­ma­ne left her residence and refused to broad­cast mo­ga­ga, she was arrested ­­by the tri­bal au­tho­ri­ty. Reacting with a mix­of fear and fury, many Kgatla call­ed for her ba­nish­­ment. With the support of the South African Hu­man Rights Com­mis­­sion (SAHRC), Tumane took Chief Pilane to the High Court of South Africa.42 Her con­sti­­tu­ tio­n­al ­­­rights had been violated, she argued. Having been put under “house ar­rest,” ­­­she had been forced to “live … [as] an out­cast.”43 In an affidavit sworn prior to the case, Tumane claimed that in June 1998, Pilane had agreed to call a mass gathering and had promised to ann­oun­ce the end of her confinement. But he had not done so. Pilane replied ­that he could not “release” her at the meeting in question, since his people had taken a unani­mous deci­sion there to the contrary. He added that Tumane was “confin­ed” not by the tribal au­th­o­rity, but “by her own custom,” which could not be altered save by the “con­­­sent of the Kgatla na­tion,” of which she herself was a member. Her rights had been res­pec­ t­ed, he said, ex­cept where they were in tension with Section 36 of the Consti­ tu­tion, which ack­now­­led­ge­ s that some limita­tions on individual freedoms are ­­justifiable. For Kgatla, preventing the violation of a ritual taboo—one that ­endangered lives in their community—was just such a jus­tifi­cation. What is more, this had been determined at an open, de­mocrati­cal­ly constituted public forum.44 The com­plai­n­ant, in turn, an­s­wer­e­d that while an indigenous people is entitled to pro­m­ote its culture and reli­gion, it has to do so within the compass of the Bill of Rights, which pla­ce­ s indivi­dual free­d­oms above all things. Her argument won, at least in the short run: in July 1998, the cou­rt announced ­that compulsory confinement and the performance of mo­gaga breached the Consti­tu­tion. An in­ter­im order in­structed the chief to free Tu­ma­­ne forthwith. Nothing happened. Political pressure from the state mounted. Coun­­­terpressure came from the House of Traditional Leaders, which challenged the government to explain why the Constitution places individual legal rights above collective cultural rights—es­pecially, it might have added, when both pertain to religion, albeit one in the upper case, the other in the lower. For its part, Pilane’s defense fused a truism of British functionalist anthropology with a concept of sovereignty that might have come from Agamben: “Tradition is the glue that holds the tribe to­ge­ther, gives it pur­pose, sus­tains its iden­ti­ty.”45 Virtually all Kgatla ob­ser­­ve mogaga, it went on. The trans­gression of mourning rituals puts social life at risk, which is why “the nation” (mo­ra­fe), following de­­mo­cratic pro­cedure, had de­ci­ded to sacrifice Tuma­ne’s “freedom” and con­ demn her to social dea­th­. This was their sovereign will. As the dispute came to a climax, Pilane deployed a stra­ta­gem that seem­ed to re­ver­se his ear­lier line of argu­ment. Mo­gaga, he stated, is a ritual that is voluntarily fol­lo­w­­ed by Kgatla; there­fore, hav­ing elec­ted to live among them by her own choice, Tumane had not suf­fer­ed any compulsion. Repeating the ruler’s statement that the burial taboos were a mat­ter of ­­volition, and ig­no­ring earlier evidence to the contrary, the ben­ch, at its final hea­r­ing, dismissed the suit. It clearly did not want to en­ter deep con­s­­ti­­tu­tio­n­al wat­ers by ­out­lawing an indigenous religious

208 | John L. Comaroff

prac­ti­ce.46 In any case, Tuma­ne’s mour­ni­ng pe­ri­od had ended. Chief Pilane’s tactic had worked. In their own eyes, Kgatla had safeguar­d­ed­­ the sovereignty of their ancestral rites—and, more generally, of their life-ways—by means of effective lawfare. They had done so, significantly, not merely by re­writing their own cultural jurisprudence into the thoroughly contemporary language of con­stitutional­ism. They had also conjured with the foun­dational logic of liberalism, drawing up­on and rup­turing received distinc­tions be­tween the public and the private, individual and collective entitlement, freedom and constraint, sovereignty and democ­ra­cy, the sa­c­ral and the se­cu­lar. Rites and rights. Similar things are occurring in other ­­­contexts as well. Courts ac­ross the country are having to deal with out­lawed or unrecognized ritual prac­tices that are integ­ral to the ­lives of much of the population. Nor only in the courts. The sovereignty of African re­li­gious belief—and ­of the cultural worlds of which they are an elemental part—is being proclaimed­­­ in everyday situations as well, sometimes quietly, sometimes provo­ca­tively. What is more, this ­is being exacerbated by the growing commodification of faith, cul­ture, and identity, the sort of thing ex­em­­plified by initiation rites among the Pedi in Lim­po­po, now a high-priced item in a regional ritual economy in which youths from all over cla­mor to participate. It is also to be seen in the rendering of Islam into in­tellec­tu­al property, of Native American sacred sym­­bols in­to co­py­righted ob­jects, of Balinese temple dances into shows for fee-paying tourists. It is the sort of thing, too, that has in­ter­­pel­lated neo-Pentecosta­l Christianity so dee­ply into neo-libe­ral capita­lism (J. Coma­roff, this volume)—the sort of thing, more generally, that may be des­cri­bed as Religiosity, Inc., Eth­nicity, Inc., and the like (J. L. Co­maroff and J. Coma­roff 2009b). But it is not the mate­rial dimen­ sion of these things with which I am concerned here, except as a contributory element to a more en­com­passing process. Assertions of so­v­er­eign­ty under the sign of R/reli­gion, upper or low­er case—and especially the resort to theo-le­ ga­lity in its name—could well have world-altering repercus­sions for the future ­of the liberal nation-state. This applies not only in South Af­ri­ca, to which I have turn­ed for illus­tra­tion be­cau­se I know it best, but al­most everywhere, if in different mea­­sure.

V. Why? Why world-altering? What are the repercussions for the modernist nation-state? The broad outlines of an answer should be clear by now. 47 Faith-based com­munities that strive either to claim sovereign autonomy for them­selves or to extend the dominion of R/re­­­ligion seek to overturn three root principles of li­be­ral orthodoxy, each of them fundamental to its socio-juridical scaffolding. Moreover—and this is critical here—they do so by recourse to a theo-legality that rede­pl­oys­­ liberal jurisprudence against itself in order to transform it. The first of the three prin­ciples is the antinomy between the public and the private, whose erasure wou­ld put paid to the exis­tence of constitutionally inviolable

Reflections on the Rise of Legal Theology | 209

spaces of personal belief and practice, spaces beyond re­gu­la­tory oversight. The se­cond is the separation of the sacred from the temporal. With its dis­­ so­lu­tion—or ra­ther, with the collapse of the latter into the former—goes the de­mise of uni­ver­­sal citi­zen­ship, of any form of political or legal sub­jec­ti­vity out­side the reach of godly go­ver­n­an­ce, of the right to dissent or difference, of the distinc­tion bet­ween church and state, of civil de­m­o­c­ra­cy, of politics sui generis—each, self-evi­den­tly, an inexorable step toward theo­cra­cy. The third is the te­los of mo­dernity it­­self, bas­ed on the per­fec­t­ibi­lity of life by the ap­pli­ ca­tion of secular rationality to the pro­duc­tion of new know­­l­edge, new truths, new technologies of being, which is to be re­p­la­ced by a relian­ce on di­­vine inspi­ration, divine veracities, di­vine eth­ics. In the pro­cess, the En­ligh­t­en­­ment ep­is­teme of em­pirical reas­on gives way to an epis­teme of convic­tion, one that sup­p­lants the search for forensic explanation ­­with the di­vi­­na­tion of good and evil; that sub­stitutes the logic of the law with the Schmit­­tian cal­cu­­­lus of friend and foe; that de­nies any re­cog­nition to relativism; that calls for unmitigated puni­ti­ve­ness as the pro­per treat­ment for trans­gres­sion; that sa­crifi­ces social accoun­ta­bi­li­ty­to the axi­om that indivi­duals before God are the au­th­ors of their own predica­ments. Some of these things seem omi­n­ou­sly reminis­cent ­of Isaiah Berlin’s (1980) counter-Enligh­t­enment. Whether or not this is so, one thing is clear. God is not dead. Pace Nietzsche, God has se­cu­r­ed a new, en­larged niche, one in which the spirit of the law bows to the hege­mo­ny of the holy. Un­der the administration of Geor­­ge W. Bush, the United States gave forewarning to the world of what a turn to this epis­teme could mean for humanity at large. All this, I have argued, grows out of the simultaneous fetishism of the law and the assertive rise of religiosity in the age of neo-liberalism. Why that double, interlocking pro­­cess­ has occur­r­ed at all is a much more general ­problem, one at which I have on­ly been able to gesture. In theory, it may be approached from a number of per­s­­­pec­tives. One, for example, might attribute it to ­the post-Durkheimean character of the contemporary mo­m­ent. For Durkheim, God was society worshiping itself, and so­ciety was a mo­r­al order supported by a sys­tem of legal sanc­tions. With the alleged death of the so­cial, the polity be­comes a le­g­­al order governed by moral sanc­­tion, bac­k­ed by a pu­tatively asocial God. Another might ascribe it­ to the ma­tu­­ration of neo-li­b­e­ral ca­pi­t­a­l­ism, its triumphal conquest of the globe, arguing that this has brought in its wake Ad­am Smith’s nightmare, a ‘society of strangers’, to which the only anti­do­te is a universe rul­ed by the absolutist certainties of faith and law. Yet an­o­th­er might suggest that the emergence of the ‘risk so­ci­e­ty’, of a world­ of fear and inse­cu­rity—itself occasioned by a me­ta­morphosis in the na­ture of go­v­ernance and its re­la­tionship to the market—has conduced to make conviction and le­gal sanction, two ax­es of se­cu­rity, the ­answer to the me­ta­physic of dis­or­der with which we live. Still another would have it that the corol­lary of the death of politics and the end of ideo­lo­gy, often seen as twin signs of the time, has been the displacement of the first by ju­ris­­pru­­dence and the se­cond by be­lief, thus yiel­­­d­ing the dia­lectic of religiosity and lega­li­ty with which I have been concerned here. Bear in mind, in this respect, Marx’s observa­tion that religion is not just an opi­ate but also the spirit of a spiritless age. Perhaps it is in the spirit

210 | John L. Comaroff

of the law—in theo-legality—that the bat­tle to redeem that spiritlessness is ta­k­ing place. But these are theoretical speculations bet­ter addressed else­where. For now, my objective is more modest. It is simply to open up to scru­tiny the unfolding coun­ter­point of law and religion in the history of the present—in particular, the sacrali­za­tion of the former, the juridifi­ca­tion of the latter, and the connection between the two. Patently, the struggle over the place of faith in society is far from played out. In some nation-states, as we have seen­, efforts to oppose assertions of R/religi­ous sovereignty have been quite de­ter­mined and have been backed by counter-law­fare. Hence, for example, the legal action ag­ain­st the Islamist ruling party in Turkey on behalf of its secular state; the exertions of more or less liberal regimes elsewhere in the Muslim world to constrain the reach of Sharia; the suit joined by the South Afri­can Hu­­man Rights Com­mission against Chief Pilane’s ca­mpaign to establish the sover­eign autono­my of Kgatla belief and practice in the face of the national constitu­tion. Conversely, in the United States, from 2000 to 2008, it was the execu­tive branch of the federal government that sought to use lawfare to erode the Jef­fer­sonian wall between church and state, thus to further faith-based agendas and the cause of religion—only to run up ag­ainst re­pr­ e­sen­tatives of civil society who have taken to insurgent legalities to protect Ame­rica from dominionism. As I have said, a luta continua. The point, though, is that wherever it is being engag­ed, the battle itself is changing both faith and the law: faith, ­by infusing its imaginations and identities and exertions with a contemporary culture of legality; the law, by com­pel­ling it to come to terms with sovereign dif­ fe­rence as never before and to adapt itself accordingly. To wit, as a result of the lawfare conducted in the name of R/religion—as a result, more ge­nerally, of the rise of policulturalism—cour­ts everywhere are having to deal with the concrete fact of theo-legality. This, after all, is what the arch­bi­sh­op of Canter­bu­ry meant when he observed that Sharia had beco­me a living reality in the UK, that some of its pro­­­visions “are already recognised in our so­ci­e­ty and under our law.” It is what the Pa­kistani judiciary authorized when it recog­ni­zed Islam as intel­lec­tual property. It is what the South African state has legitimized in en­­ac­ting into law pre­viously repug­nant cul­tu­r­al ‘traditions’ and what some of its ­judges have accepted, citing constitutio­n­al exception, in giving priority ­­­to ‘customary practi­ces’ over those sanctioned by the Bill of Rights. The examples are endless. They merely reiterate what was noted earlier about the insinuation of difference into the twenty-first-century nation-state and its judicial scaffolding, what we have seen to occur with the fetishism of the law and the rising tide of heterodoxy under the sign of R/religion in the post-millennial world, what we shall continue to see as the unruly dialectic of faith and legality works itself out. The process is less likely to yield winners or losers or clear outcomes than a myriad of uneasy, unstable compromises, the stuff of a politics of the long run. An eternity, maybe.

Reflections on the Rise of Legal Theology | 211

John L. Comaroff is the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, and Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. He is also a former president of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology in the United States. His current research in post-apartheid South Africa is on crime, policing, and the workings of the state; on democracy and difference; and on the nature of post-colonial politics and law. Recent books include, with Jean Comaroff, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (2000), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (2007), and Ethnicity, Inc. (2009). Another volume, Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa, is in advanced preparation.

Notes 1. In accessing the online version of Dalla Torre’s essay, note that it is to be found under the title “The Holy Spirit Is the Breath of Life,” not under its own. The URL in the reference list is correct, how­ever . Jean Comaroff and I have cited this essay before (J. L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff 2006: 25). 2. There are, of course, parts of the contemporary world ruled by theocracies. I shall return later to this topic and to ongoing efforts to extend theocratic governance into the heart of the global North. 3. I owe the phrase ‘legalized illegalities’ to Henry Giroux (2008), who uses it—to powerful effect—in describing neo-li­be­r­al gover­n­ance in the con­tem­porary United States. 4. Aqui­n­as said this in the thirteenth century, long before the separation of lex naturae from lex dei, yet the statement has directly modernist foreshadowings. 5. In point of fact, as I note in the text below, African Independent Churches in South Africa have written constitutions for them­selves since the early twentieth century, a process encouraged by their desire for govern­ment recognition and its be­nefits—which few ever actually achieved (Sundkler 1961). Twenty-first-century constitutionalism, patently, is grounded in very different historical circumstances. 6. On the example of the post-apartheid South African Constitution and its dif­fe­r­ences in this respect from that of the US Constitution, see Davis and Le Roux (2008). Davis is a High Court judge in South Africa, and Le Roux is a member of the Johannesburg Bar. 7. For just one very acute account, see Grey (2000). 8. In the course of his election campaign in 2008, John McCain, the Republican pre­sidential candidate, “promised to appoint only conservative judges to the Supreme Court,” the clear implication being that they would be practicing Christians. See Pilkington (2008). 9. Thousands of accounts of the case were published in the US media, especially in 2004– 2005. Tom DeLay’s threat to the judiciary is quoted from Harper (2005). 10. A briefer, amended version of this section and the next is published in J. L. Comaroff and J. Coma­roff (2009a). 11. Interestingly, the root of the word medina, which names the most sacred city in Islam, is din, whose con­no­tations in Qur’anic Arabic include several that implicate the jural: sovereignty, domi­nion, law, con­s­titution, govern­ment. In modern Hebrew, din is usually rendered as ‘judgment’, legal or rab­bi­ni­cal; it is the root, also, of medina, which denotes ‘state’ but had a wider fan of referents in biblical vernacu­lar. 12. Note, in this respect, Keebet and Franz von Benda-Beckmann’s (2008: 86) observation that “[in] Christian charismatic communities in Africa remarkable processes of juridification seem to be taking place.”

212 | John L. Comaroff

13. Although Arjomand (2007) does not say as much, these are ideal-types. If we take, for instance, Turner’s (2006: 110, passim) description of Morocco, it fits with the second model— but not entirely. There are other nation-states that also resist easy classification; however, this is not to say that Islamic constitutionalism does not figure centrally in their politics of state. 14. Feldman, a professor at Har­vard Univer­sity who specializes in constitutional law, law and religion, and Islamic studies, has recently published The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (2008a). 15. There is no pagination for this quote as it is taken, with permission, from a draft of Walton’s doctoral disserta­tion. Walton (n.d.) goes on to note that in the case of the Nur Cemaati religious community, formed around the teachings of Said Nursi, adherents “adamantly deny any involvement in politics.” 16. I learned of the case from a Reuters report syndicated in South Africa (De Bendern 2008). 17. Turner (n.d.: 2) notes that the movement, which arose in the Souss in 1999, “did not derive from Moroccan Islam itself … [I]ts ideology was propagated by non-Moroccan teachers.” 18. The co-existence of Islamic law with other legal regimes is a parallel topic beyond my present scope. It has its own fairly large literature: on Indonesia, for example, see John Bowen (2003), and Franz and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann (2006). 19. See “Carey Weighs into Sharia Law Row,” BBC News, 10 February 2008, http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7236849.stm (accessed 14 March 2008). 20. See “Archbishop Defends Sharia Remarks,” BBC News, 9 February 2008, http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7236174.stm (accessed 13 March 2008) and “Sharia Law in the UK Is ‘Unavoidable,’” BBC News, 7 Febru­a­ry 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ uk_news/7232661.stm (accessed 14 March 2008). 21. I was made aware of this by the activities of Islamic Relief Worldwide in South Africa. The or­ga­nization provided food to homeless families that, after a bitter legal battle, had been evicted from a hou­s­ing project in Cape Town in which they had squatted. See Chance (2008). 22. There is no pagination for this quoted text. It is taken from the abstract of Hussin’s (2008) doctoral disser­ta­tion. 23. Abdur Rehman Mubashir v. Syed Amir Ali Shah, PLD 1978 Lahore 113. 24. Zaheeruddin v. The State (1993; Supreme Court Monthly Review: 1718); again, see Ahmed (2006: 40–41). 25. A few years back, Fogel (2000) argued that a “Fourth Great Awakening” had occurred in the United States dur­ing the 1960s and 1970s. Skeptics argue that this fourth awakening was not as ‘great’ as the previous three; in­deed, they claim that it was not sub­s­tantial enough to warrant the adjective ‘great’ at all. Such things, of course, are hard to read from close up in history. 26. This statement by the late Pastor D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries is quoted from “The Rise of the Religious Right in the Republican Party,” Theocracy Watch, http:// www.theocracywatch.org (accessed 14 March 2008). 27. So, of course, have liberal Christians in their struggles against injustice and inequality, not least during the civil rights movement. They, too, have become ever more adept at deploying the law. But that is beyond my pre­sent scope. 28. See “Prison Fellowship Ministries/PFM/Chuck Colson,” MinistryWatch, 22 February 2008, http://www.ministrywatch.com/mw2.1/F_SumRpt.asp?EIN=620988294 (accessed 18 March 2008). 29. “Lawsuits against Prisons: Texas Prisoners’ Religious Rights Violated,” North Coast Xpress, http://www.sonic.net/~doretk/Issues/01-03-SPR/lawsuits.html (accessed 9 August 2005). 30. See “Prison Fellowship Ministries/PFM/Chuck Colson,” MinistryWatch, 22 February 2008, http://www.ministrywatch.com/mw2.1/F_SumRpt.asp?EIN=620988294 (accessed 18 March 2008). All quoted words and phrases in this passage are drawn from this source. 31. For an acute, detailed critique of PFM in the public domain, see “Court Rules against ‘Faith Based Coercion’ Programs” by Dogemperor, Talk To Action, 5 June 2006, http:// www.talk2action.org/story/2006/6/5/0566/59215 (accessed 10 March 2008).

Reflections on the Rise of Legal Theology | 213

32. The quote is from Blum (2008). This is one of a very large number of me­dia analyses of the case pub­lished soon after the appellate decision. 33. In the wake of the 2006 elections in the United States, several commentators on religion in politics shared the view of the editor of Religionlink.com, who stated that the “Democratic takeover of Congress heralds a new dynamic in the long-stan­ding tug-of-war” bet­ ween them and Republicans who “have projected their agenda … which tend­ed to mir­ror the stands of Christian con­ser­vatives.” See “Elections 2006: The Out­look for Religion in Politics,” Religionlink.com, 8 November 2006, http://www. religionlink.com/tip_061108. php (accessed 14 March 2008). While it is true that evangelical Christians may find it more difficult in the short run to give political expression to that agenda, the role of faith in American public life is not determined primarily by shifts in partisan politics. 34. See Hein, Director, White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, et al. v. Free­dom From Religion Foundation, Inc., Supreme Court of the United States, No. 06157. The FFRF was represented by the Yale Law School Supreme Court Advocacy Clinic. For its own account, see http://www.ffrf.org/legal/hein_supremecourt07/ (accessed 7 May 2008). The case was argued on 28 February 2007 and decided on 25 June 2007. My summary is drawn primarily from the Syllabus of the Supreme Court record. See http:// www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/06pdf/06-157.pdf (accessed 11 July 2008). 35. For an account of the effort of the US military to have the case dismissed, see “US Government Wants Atheist Soldier’s Lawsuit Dismissed,” Associated Press, International Herald Tribune, 11 July 2008, http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/07/10/america/ NA-US-Military-Religion-Lawsuit.php (accessed 11 July 2008). It is from this report that the quotes in the previous two sentences are drawn. 36. Michael Weinstein was also heavily involved in this widely reported case. For a relatively detailed account, see Winn (2006). 37. See the Mail & Guardian’s special edition on religion, 20–27 March 2008, in parti­cular, the article by Davis and Le Roux (2008: 12–13). 38. See http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/can_you_believe_it/debates/ jewishlaw.html and http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/can_you_believe_ it/debates/jewishlaw3.html (both accessed 24 March 2008). 39. Section 36 of the Constitution allows­­­­ that some constraints ­on the universal rights of citizens are “jus­ti­fia­ble in an open and demo­c­ratic society.” But it adds that any such constraint­ is to re­main bound by the Bill of Rights. As we shall see, pro­tagonists of the sover­eign­ty of tradition ­­have invoked ­­this “justifi­ab ­ ­le” li­mitation in their struggles against the state. 40. The ­Cus­­tomary Marria­ges Act (No. 120 of 1998), for example, allows polygamy, this notwithstanding the fact that it had long been treat­ed by South African law, and by ‘native administration’, as ‘repug­nant’ to civilization. The Act also raises ques­tions of gender equality, to which the Constitution and statutory law give a great deal of at­tention. 41. See “Clash of Custom, Constitution,” The Mail (Mafikeng), 31 July 1998, 17. Jean Comaroff and I have also analyzed the case in extenso (J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff 2003). 42. High Court of South Afri­ca (Bophuthatswana Provincial Division), Case No. 618/98. 43. Ibid., ­Foun­ding Affidavit, 3. 44. Ibid., Answering Affidavit, 13 November 1998, 7–10. 45. Ibid. All the quoted phrases in this paragraph are from the same passage in the Answering Affidavit. 46. The SAHRC regretted Pilane’s pronouncement that mo­gaga was a voluntary practice, an ambiguity that left un­clear whether he meant it as a statement of existing practice or a change of rules. It sought to contest chief­ly authority, not by criminalizing tradition, but, more subtly, by pre­venting indigenous rulers from interfering with the free­dom of movement and other fundamental rights of their sub­jects (J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff 2003). 47. Note that I am spe­cifi­cally concerned here with the juridical as­pects of these questions. Elsewhere in this volume, Jean Comaroff addresses them in more wide-ranging terms.

214 | John L. Comaroff

References Ackerman, Bruce. 1997. “The Rise of World Constitutionalism.” Yale Law School Occasional Papers, 2nd Series, No. 3. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel HellerRoazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agrama, Hussein. 2005. “Law Courts and Fatwa Councils in Modern Egypt: An Ethnography of Islamic Legal Practice.” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University. ______. n.d. “Justice between Islamic Sharia and Western Legal Traditions: Remarks on the Egyptian Context. Unpublished manuscript. Ahmed, Asad. 2006. “Adjudicating Muslims: Law, Religion, and the State in Colonial India and Post-Colonial Pakistan.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Aquinas, Thomas. n.d. Treatise on Law (Summa Theologica, Questions 90–97). Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of National­ism. London: Verso. Arjomand, Saïd Amir. 2007. “Islamic Constitutionalism.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 3: 115–140. Benda-Beckmann, Franz von, and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann. 2006. “Changing One is Changing All: Dynamics in the Adat-Islam-State Triangle.” Journal of Legal Pluralism 53/54: 239–270. Benda-Beckmann, Keebet von, and Franz von Benda-Beckmann. 2008. “Religion in Disputes: Religious Belief, Law, and Authority in Dispute Management.” Pp. 84–89 in Report 2006–7, Halle/Saale. Halle/Saale: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Benjamin, Walter. 1978. “Critique of Violence.” Pp. 277–300 in Reflections: Essays, Apho­ risms, Autobiogra­phi­cal Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott; ed. Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken Books. Benovska-Sabkova, Milena, Tobias Köllner, Tünde Komáromi, Agata Ładykowska, Detelina Tocheva, and Jarrett Zigon. 2008. “Religion and Morality in European Russia.” Pp. 51–54 in Report 2006–7, Halle/Saale. Halle/Saale: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Berlin, Sir Isaiah. 1980. Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas. Ed. Henry Hardy. New York: Viking Press. Blum, Debra E. 2008. “Appeals Court Rules in Religious-Charity Prison Case.” The Chronicle of Philanthropy, 4 December. http://www.philanthropy.com/news/updates/3564/ appeals-court-rules-in-religious-charity-prison-case (accessed 14 March 2008). Bowen, John R. 2003. Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Rea­ son. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bozzoli, Belinda. 1998. “Public Ritual and Private Transition: The Truth Commission in Alexandra Township, South Africa, 1996.” African Studies 57, no. 2: 167–195. Burnside, Jonathan, with Joanna Adler, Nancy Loukes, and Gerry Rose. 2005. My Brother’s Keeper: Faith-Based Units in Prisons. Cullompton, UK: Willan Publishing. Chance, Kerry. 2008. “Housing and Evictions at the N2 Gateway Pro­ject in Delft.” Abahlali baseMjondolo, 8 May. http://abahlali.org/node/3581 (ac­ces­se­ d 25 May 2008). Chanock, Martin. 2000. “‘Culture’ and Human Rights: Orientalising, Occidentalising and Authentici­ty.” Pp. 15–35 in Beyond Rights Talk and Culture Talk: Compara­tive Essays on the Politics of Rights and Culture, ed. Mahmood Mamdani. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Comaroff, Jean. 1986. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 2003. “Reflections on Liberalism, Policulturalism, and ID-ology: Citizenship and Difference in South Africa.” Social Identities 9, no. 4: 445–474. Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 2006. “Law and Disorder in the Postcolony: An Introduction.” Pp. 1–56 in Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, ed. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Reflections on the Rise of Legal Theology | 215

______. 2009a. “Reflections on the Anthropology of Law, Governance, and Sovereignty.” Pp. 31–59 in Rules of Law and Laws of Ruling, ed. Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, and Julia Eckert. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. ______. 2009b. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Coombe, Rosemary J. 1998. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Author­ship, Appro­ priation and the Law. Dur­ham, NC: Duke University Press. ______. 1999. “Intellectual Property, Human Rights, and Sovereignty: New Dilemmas in International Law Posed by the Recognition of Indigenous Knowledge and the Conservation of Biodiversity.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 6, no. 1: 59–116. Dalla Torre, Giuseppe. 1998. “A Strong Moral Conscience for a Culture of Legality.” Jubi­ laeum A.D. 2000, “Tertium Millennium,” No. 1, February. http//www.vatican.va/ jubilee_2000/magazine/documents/ju_mag_01021998_p-8_en.html. Davis, Dennis, and Michelle Le Roux. 2008. “My Rights versus Your Beliefs.” Mail & Guard­ ian, 20–27 March, 12–13. De Bendern, Paul. 2008. “Turkey’s Ruling Par­ty Fights for Its Life in Critical Court Case.” Cape Times, 1 July, 2. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. “Force of Law.” In Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar. New York: Routled­ge. Dezalay, Yves, and Bryant Garth. 1996. Dealing in Virtue: International Commercial Arbi­ tration and the Construction of a Transnational Legal Order. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ______. 2006. “From the Cold War to Kosovo: The Rise and Renewal of the Field of International Human Rights.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 2: 231–255. Esposito, John L. 1996. Islam and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. Ewick, Patricia, and Susan S. Silbey. 1998. The Common Place of Law: Stories From Everyday Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Feldman, Noah. 2008a. The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ______. 2008b. “Why Sharia?” New York Times Magazine, 16 March. http://www.nytimes. com/2008/03/16/magazine/16Sharia-t.html (accessed 18 March 2008). Fogel, Robert W. 2000. The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Giroux, Henry. 2008. “Beyond the Biopolitics of Disposability: Rethinking Neoliberalism in the New Gilded Age.” Social Identities 14, no. 5: 587–620. Grey, Barry. 2000. “The US Elections: Lieberman’s Holy War against the Bill of Rights.” World Socialist Web Site, 1 September. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/sep2000/ lieb-s01.shtml (accessed 11 May 2008). Hansen, Thomas Blom, and Finn Stepputat. 2005. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–36 in Sov­ereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolo­nial Wor­ld, ed. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Harper, Tim. 2005. “Re­pub­li­can Lea­der Warns Judges: You Will Answer for This,” News Center, CommonDreams.Org, 1 April. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/ 0401-04.htm (accessed 8 May 2008). Hirsch, Susan F. 2006. “Islamic Law and Society Post-9/11.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 2: 165–186. Hobbes, Thomas. 1986. Leviathan. Ed. C.B. Macpherson. London: Penguin. Hussin, Iza R. 2008. “The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority and the Making of the Muslim State.” PhD diss., University of Washington. Kaye, Randi. 2008. “Atheist Soldier Sues Army for ‘Unconstitutional’ Discrimination.” CNN. com, 8 July. http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/08/atheist.soldier/index.html (accessed 9 July 2008). Keefe, Patrick Radden. 2007. “Letter from Jaipur: The Idol Thief.” New Yorker, 7 May, 58–67. Khan, Aisha. 2007. “Rites and Rights of Passage: Seeking a Diasporic Consciousness.” Cul­ tural Dynamics 19, no. 2/3: 141–164.

216 | John L. Comaroff

Klug, Heinz. 2000. “Model and Anti-Model: The United States Constitution and the ‘Rise of World Constitutionalism.’” Wisconsin Law Review 2000, no. 3: 597–616. ______. 2005. “Transnational Human Rights: Exploring the Persistence and Globalization of Human Rights.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 1: 81–103. Leslie, Sarah. 2008. “Dominionism and the Rise of Christian Imperialism.” Morel Ministries. http://www.moriel.org/articles/discernment/church_issues/dominionism_rise_of_ christian _ imperialism.htm (accessed 18 March 2008). Mankell, Henning. 2003. One Step Behind. London: Vintage Books. Mauer, Marc. 1999. Race to Incarcerate. New York: New Press. McCann, Michael. 2006. “Law and Social Movements: Contemporary Perspectives.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 2: 17–38. Nietzsche, Friedrich. [1973] 1990. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books. Pilkington, Ed. 2008. “Will the Real John McCain Stand Up?” The Guardian, G2, 5 June, 13. Pirie, Fernanda. 2006. “Legal Complexity on the Tibetan Plateau.” Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 53/54: 77–99. Rigi, Jakob. n.d. “The Coercive State and the Spectacle of Law in Russia.” Unpublished manuscript. Rutherford, Danilyn. n.d. “The Enchantments of Secular Belief.” Unpublished manuscript. Schneiderman, David. 2006. “Transnational Legality and the Immobilization of Local Agency.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 2: 387–408. Sundkler, Bengt. 1961. Bantu Prophets in South Africa. London: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute. Turner, Bertram. 2006. “Competing Global Players in Rural Morocco: Upgrading Legal Arenas.” Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 53/54: 101–139. ______. n.d. “Salafiyya Activism in the Moroccan Souss: Legal Framing, Demand for Justice and Social Integration of an Islamic Movement.” In The Governance of Legal Pluralism: Empirical Studies from Africa and Asia, ed. Markus Weilenmann and Werner Zips. Münster: Lit Verlag/Transaction Publishers. In press. Unsworth, Barry. 1992. Sacred Hunger. New York: Norton. Walton, Jeremy. n.d. “Civil Religion, Secular Dispensation: Islam and Civil Society in Contemporary Turkey.” PhD diss. draft, University of Chicago. Waterman, Anthony Michael C. 1991. Revolution, Economics and Religion: Christian Political Economy, 1798–1833. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Daniel. 2008. “Feminism and Islam: Can They Be Reconciled?” International Her­ ald Tribune, 11 June, 2. Wilson, Richard A. 2000. “Reconciliation and Revenge in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Rethinking Legal Pluralism and Human Rights.” Current Anthropology 41, no. 1: 75–98. Winn, Pete. 2006. “Judge Dismisses Lawsuit against Air Force Academy.” Citi­zen­Link.Org, 31 Octo­ber. http://www.citizenlink.org/CLtopstories/A000002788.cfm (accessed 9 July 2008). Yavuz, M. Hakan. 2003. Islamic Political Identity in Turkey. New York: Oxford University Press.

Index

Abdal-Qadir-as-Sufi, 103, 105–116 Abu Ghraib prison, 13–14, 163–167 Achaemenian period (Persia), 157–162 Ackerman, Bruce, 195 Africa, mass media in, 21–22 Albrecht, Daniel, 58, 59, 62 al-Qaeda, 2, 14, 173–184 al-Zawahiri, Ayman, 173, 175, 177–178, 180–182 Amma, 6–8 Amphibi, 154n6 Anderson, Benedict, 1 Appadurai, Arjun, 95, 115 Aquinas, Thomas, 195 Arendt, Hannah, 14, 176–177, 178 Arjomand, Saïd Amir, 199 Aron (Healing Ministry pastor), 71–74 Artaxerxes II, 158, 163 Australia, Pentecostalism in, 4 awakenings, religious, 19, 201, 212n25 Badiou, Alain, 29, 34n14 Balinese community, Lombok, 13, 143–153 baraka (spiritual power), 107, 118n6 Bates, Marian, 47 Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, 134, 138n12 Benda-Beckmann, Keebet von and Franz von, 198, 211n12 Benedict XVI, Pope, 19, 21 Benjamin, Walter, 157 Berlin, Isaiah, 209 Biarsah, Agung Gedé, 148 Bible advocacy, 10–11, 39–53 Bible Church (Vanuatu), 74 Bible Society of England and Wales, 10–11, 39–53, 53n1, 53–54n3 bin Laden, Osama, 173–174, 176, 179–184

Compiled by Margaret Binns

Bird, Norris Mervyn, 86 Blair, Tony, 174–175, 205 Blumhofer, Edith, 62 Brazil, Pentecostalism in, 57 British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), 53n1 Buddhism, Sri Lanka militancy, 12–13, 123–137 buildings, religious, 8 Bun cargo cult, 87 Burke, Anthony, 141 Burridge, Kenelm, 85–86, 93 Bush, George W., 170n21, 174–175, 183, 196, 202–203, 209 Cakranegara, Lombok, 145–149 campaigning, Christian, 10–11, 39–53 capitalism and cargo cults, 12, 93–96 and Islam, 12, 106, 111–116 millenarian, 3, 12, 31–32, 96–97 and religion, 3, 10, 18, 26–27, 30–33 CARE, 5 cargo cults, 11–12, 68–70, 79, 82–97 common features, 89–90 terminology, 86–89 cargoism, 88, 93 Catford, James, 45–46 Catholicism, resurgence of, 4 Chicago, Virgin Mary image in, 17–18 China, religious revival in, 4 Cho, Paul (David) Yonggi, 26 Christianity campaigning, 10–11, 39–53 sovereignty, 201–205 in Sri Lanka, 133–135 See also Pentecostalism Christian Political Economy, 18, 30, 201

218 | Index

civil society fanaticism, 124 rise of, 5 See also global civil society (GCS) Clapton, Eric, 108 Cohn, Norman, 8–9, 12, 83, 116 Colas, Dominique, 124, 136 Collins, Randall, 60–62, 64, 65n4 colonialism Melanesia, 68–70 Vanuatu, 70–73 Colson, Charles W., 202 Comaroff, Jean, 96 commodification of faith, 32, 208 Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (Contralesa), 206 constitutionalism Islamic, 198–201 and religion, 195–196 corruption, ancient Persian, 13–14, 161–162 Cotton, Rob, 47 creationism, 2, 18 Crusades, 123, 124, 136–137 ‘Culture-facing’ advocacy of Bible Society, 44–45 currency (gold dinar), 12, 104, 111–113, 115, 119n10, 119n12 Cyrus the Younger, 158 Dallas, Ian. See Abdal-Qadir-as-Sufi Dalla Torre, Giuseppe, 193–194 Darius the Great, 159–160 da’wa (proselytizing Islamic order), 103, 105, 118n3 Dawkins, Richard, 2 Day, Tony, 153 de Fiore, Joachim, 8 Deleuze, Gilles, 123, 124, 125 Dennett, Daniel, 2 Dharma Wisesa, 13, 141–153 leadership, 148, 154n9 logo, 150–151 power, 149–152 security provision, 147–149 spiritual forces, 145–147 dominionism, 201 drawings, magical, 150–151 Dubai Ports World, 23, 34n10 Dumont, Louis, 93 Durkheim, Emile, 60, 64, 209 Eastenders (television show), 10, 39–40, 47–50 economy cargo cults, 93–96

Islamic, 111–116 Egypt, Sharia law in, 199 end of history, 19, 30, 92, 95–96 End Times, 30, 74 English Civil War, 119–120n14 Enlightenment, the and Christianity, 27 counter-Enlightenment (I. Berlin), 209 and Islam, 12, 110–116 Erbakan, Necmittin, 111 ethnography, Melanesian, 90–92 European Muslim Union (EMU), 112 exchange, social system of, 90–96 existentialism, 110–111 Falwell, Jerry, 30 fanaticism and civil society, 124 fee-for-service faiths, 10, 31, 35n17 fetishism of the law, 14–15, 195, 196–197, 202 finance, 103–116 Five Pillars of Islam, 105, 107, 118n5 Foucault, Michel, 28 Fourth Great Awakening, 19, 212n25 Fravarti, 159, 167n5 freedom, concept of, 110 Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), 203–204 free market and religion, 22, 26–28, 30–32 fundamentalism, 63 Gadahn, Adam, 173–174 Gandhi, Mahatma, 14, 184–186, 189–191 George, Kenneth, 143 Gladwell, Malcolm, 51–52 global civil society (GCS), 125–127, 136 globalization and Pentecostalism, 55–64 and religion, 1–9 gold dinar, 12, 104, 111–113, 115, 119n10, 119n12 Gregory, C. A., 94 Guattari, Félix, 123, 136 Hall, Jeremy, 204 Harding, Susan, 30 Hardt, Michael, 124, 125 Healing Ministry (Vanuatu), 71, 73, 74, 79 healing practices (Vanuatu), 77–79 Hermann, Elfriede, 88 Hillsong (Pentecostal movement), 4 Hirsch, Susan, 200 Hobart, Angela, 150 Holt, Ann, 43, 45, 50, 51–52

Index | 219

Hoskins, Janet, 95 humanism, 110 humanitarianism in Islam, 14, 175–177, 200 humiliation, 98n4 Huntington, Samuel P., 117–118n2 iconoclasm, Sri Lankan, 13, 124, 131–133 India, terrorism in, 184–186 individuals, possession of, 93–95 Indonesia, 13, 141–153 infrastructure, attacks on, 187–191 institutions, Pentecostal, 11, 55–64 interaction ritual, 11, 58–64 interrogation techniques, ancient Persian, 13–14, 158–162 Iraq Abu Ghraib prison, 13–14, 163–167 US invasion of, 183 Islam constitutionalism, 198–201 conversions, 108–109, 118–119n7, 174 economy, 111–116 humanitarianism, 14, 175–177, 200 humiliation, 177–182 militancy, 173–175, 182–184 Murabitan movement, 12, 103–116, 117n1 political, 117–118n2 Sharia law, 199–200 Islamic Relief Worldwide, 200, 212n21 Israel, law and religion in, 205 Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), 12, 127–137 Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), 12, 127–137 Jathika Sangha Sabhava (JSS), 131, 138n10 Jesus Camp (documentary film), 202 John Frum cargo cult, 69, 79 John Paul II, Pope, 4, 194, 198 Jones, Mary, 42 Judaism and law, 205 Jünger, Ernst, 110 Kaliai cargo cults, 69, 79 Kaplan, Martha, 89 Khan, Aisha, 194 Kildea, Gary, 91 klevas (people with special abilities), 71–72, 80n1 KSBR (marketing consultancy), 40–42, 50 LaHaye, Tim, 19, 28, 30 law and religion, 14–15, 193–210 Lawrence, Peter, 85

Lewis, Bernard, 117–118n2 liberal humanism, 17–33 Lieberman, Joseph, 196 Lindstrom, Lamont, 86, 88, 93 Living Water Church (Vanuatu), 75–76 Lombok security issues, 13, 141–153 ‘spirit army’, 146–147 London terrorist attacks (2005), 186, 188 Lord’s Gym, 18 Maclean, Neil, 94–95 Madrid bombings (2005), 182, 188 Make Poverty History campaign, 42 Mambu cargo cult, 69, 85 Mankell, Henning, 201 martyrdom, 14, 179–180 mass media, 21–22 Mata Amritanandamayi movement, 6–8 materialism, 93–96 Matrix, The (film), 106 McCain, John, 211n8 McDowell, Nancy, 87 Mead, Margaret, 84 medina (holy site of Islam), 211n11 Melanesia cargo cults, 11–12, 68–70, 82–97 ethnography, 90–92 Pentecostalism, 11, 67–79 Mexico, Murabitun movement in, 118–119n7 Military Religious Freedom Foundation, 204 millenarianism, 30–32 cargo cults, 12, 68–70, 82–97 Islamic, 12, 104–105, 113, 116 Middle Ages, 12, 83, 84, 97 Milne, Peter, 71–72 missionaries (Vanuatu), 71–73 Mithridates, 158, 161, 162, 163 mogaga (herb), 207–208, 213n46 money and society, 113–115, 116 Moore, Mick, 129 Morocco, Islamic law in, 199 Moses, Fred, 76 Mumbai bombings, 188 Murabitun movement, 12, 103–116, 117n1 controversy surrounding, 119n8 global communities, 108–109, 118–119n7 name of, 105, 118n3 myth-dream of cargo cults, 85, 90, 91–92 Nagriamel movement (Vanuatu), 74–76 Naked Cult, 69 nationalism, religiosity in, 1–2 nationhood, 197–198

220 | Index

Negri, Antonio, 124, 125 neo-liberalism, 17–33, 55–56, 197–198 New Age religiosity, 109 New Christian Revolution, 21–22 New Guinea, Pentecostalism in, 67–68, 73–74 New Melanesian Ethnography, 90–92, 94 Nguna Island (Vanuatu), 71–73, 74 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 201 Nigeria, Pentecostalism in, 10, 25 9/11 attacks, 29, 124, 174, 200 Norwich (UK), Murabitun movement in, 105–116, 118n4 Nottingham (UK), Christian campaigning in, 39–40, 45–52 ontology, 8–9, 142 outsourcing of prayers, 30–31 Pakistan, Islam in, 200–201 Paliau Maloat, 91, 92 Paliau movement, 84, 86, 91, 92 paligahanava (striking revenge), 131, 132, 138n11 Papua New Guinea cargo cults, 85–86 Pentecostalism, 67–68 Parisada Hindu Dharma Indonesia (PHDI), 143 Pentecostalism cell-group structure, 10, 26 corporate culture, 5–6 emerging movements, 4–5, 20–21 fragmentation, 74–77 healing practices, 77–79 institution building, 11, 56–58 revival, 17–33 ritual, 11, 58–64 in Vanuatu, 67–79 Pilane, Nyalala, 206–208 Pirie, Fernanda, 198 Plutarch, 158–159, 167n2 policulturalism, 206, 210 politics and religion, 104, 117–118n2 Pomio Kivung, 91 Poole, Philip, 43 possessive individualism, 93 praxis theory, 94 Presbyterian missionaries (Vanuatu), 71–73 Prison Fellowship Ministries (PFM), 202–203 Protestantism, 32 protest movements, Islamic, 104, 109–111 punishments, ancient Persian, 13–14, 157– 162, 167–168n6

railways, attacks on, 189 Rajapaska, Mahinda, 127, 129 Rao, Vyjayanthi, 188 relative deprivation, 85 Renewal Church (Vanuatu), 74–77 revelation, 17–33 Rhema (Pentecostal movement), 4 Rieger, Abu Bakr, 112 ritual and law, 206–208 and Pentecostalism, 11, 58–64 Robbins, Joel, 98n4 Roy, Olivier, 104, 109, 117–118n2 Ruiz, Malik, 112 Russia, church and state in, 205 Russian Orthodox Church, 4 Rutherford, Danilyn, 195 Sahlins, Marshall, 94 Santo Island (Vanuatu), 74–75 Scarry, Elaine, 163 Schiavo, Terri, 18, 33–34n5, 196 Schwartz, Theodore, 84–85, 90, 98n3 Second Coming, 30, 63, 67–68 secularism, 2–3, 17–33, 39–53 security issues, Indonesian, 13, 141–153 Seneviratne, H. L., 130 September 11 attacks. See 9/11 attacks Sharia law, 199–201 Sihala Urumaya (SU), 131, 133, 138n10 singularity, global, 125–127 Smith, Adam, 209 social movements, 67–81 social productivity and Pentecostalism, 55–64 society and money, 113–115 Soma, Ven. Gangodawila, 133 South Africa law and religion, 194, 195, 205, 206–208, 210, 211n5 ‘Miracle 2000’, 22 Murabitun movement, 118–119n7 policulturalism, 206, 210 Universal Church, 10, 31 Zionist church, 57 sovereignty, religious, 5, 193–210 Spain, Murabitun movement in, 108 ‘spirit army’, Indonesian, 146–147 Spriggs, David, 50 Sri Lanka Buddhist militancy, 12–13, 123–137 Christian fundamentalism, 133–134 politics, 127–128, 138n5 structural violence, 128–130 tsunami (2004), 135–136

Index | 221

Starbucks, 18 Steinbauer, Friedrich, 87 Stevens, Cat (Yusuf Islam), 108 Strathern, Marilyn, 94 Sufism (Murabitun movement), 12, 103–116, 117n1 suicide bombers, 184–187, 190–191 Survival Church (Vanuatu), 77–78 Taiwan, roadside shrines in, 31 Taliban, 2 Tamil Hinduism, Sri Lankan, 13, 127 Temptation 2004 (Bollywood concert tour), 133, 136 terrorism in India, 184–187 infrastructure attacks, 187–191 Islamic, 14, 173–184 9/11 attacks, 29, 124, 174, 200 suicide bombers, 184–187, 190–191 theo-legality, 14–15, 193–210 theologico-politics, 17–33 ‘third way’, 126, 137 Tibet, authority in, 198 torture Abu Ghraib, 163–167 analysis of, 13–14, 163 Persian, 157–162 Trompf, G. W., 89 tsunami (2004), Sri Lankan, 135–136 Tuka movement, 89 Tumane, Kedibone, 206–208 Turkey currency, 111 law and religion, 199, 210 United Kingdom Christian campaigning, 39–53 church and state, 205 Islamic law, 34n9, 200, 210

United States Iraq invasion, 183 law and religion, 196, 202–205, 210, 213n33 religious revival, 17–19 Universal Church, South Africa, 10, 31 Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, 4–5 Unsworth, Barry, 202 Vadillo, Umar, 111–113, 115, 119n10, 119n13 value dominance, 84, 98n4 Vanuatu, Pentecostalism in, 11, 67–79 Virgin Mary, images of, 17–18 war, global, 124, 125–127 ‘war on terror’, 124, 125, 174–175 wealth, production of, 23, 84–96, 99n12 Weber, Max, 3, 7, 9, 10, 32 Weinstein, Michael, 204 Wiener, Margaret, 149 Willford, Andrew, 143 Williams, Rowan, 200 Win Neisen, 86 Wootten, J. H., 98–99n8 work, concepts of, 93, 99n12 World Islamic Trading Organisation (WITO), 112 World Trade Center attacks. See 9/11 attacks World Vision, 5 Worsley, Peter, 83–84, 86 Wright, N. T., 54n6 Yali movement, 85, 92 Yoga, Ida Bagus Ketut, 150–151